WEBVTT - We're All Doomed!! (ok, not really). Niall Ferguson Talks to A&G 0:00:00.120 --> 0:00:04.200 We're all doomed. It's Armstrong and Getty extra large, because 0:00:04.240 --> 0:00:09.080 four hours simply isn't enough. This is Armstrong and Getty 0:00:09.200 --> 0:00:15.600 extra Large. Doom is actually the title of the new 0:00:15.640 --> 0:00:19.959 book from Neil Ferguson, Doomed, The Politics of Catastrophe. In 0:00:19.960 --> 0:00:22.520 the opening of his book references a sitcom that I 0:00:22.560 --> 0:00:25.280 don't know as an American, in which one of the characters, apparently, 0:00:25.320 --> 0:00:27.840 no matter what happened, would we say we're all doomed, 0:00:28.160 --> 0:00:32.040 which is alert. I was laughing quietly as you alluded 0:00:32.120 --> 0:00:36.720 to Dad's army. We're doomed. It's a very Scottish thing 0:00:36.760 --> 0:00:39.040 to say, which is part of the reason that I 0:00:39.080 --> 0:00:42.479 gave the book the title doom. But but actually we're 0:00:42.520 --> 0:00:44.760 doomed as a Star Wars line. I hadn't realized this 0:00:44.880 --> 0:00:49.159 until I started researching. We're doomed in popular culture, and 0:00:49.200 --> 0:00:52.080 I think it's a common response when anything goes wrong there. 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:55.400 There there are those people who think when disaster strikes 0:00:55.600 --> 0:00:57.600 that it's the end of the world, and then there 0:00:57.600 --> 0:01:00.200 are those people who win disaster strikes are like the 0:01:00.200 --> 0:01:02.760 guy on the jacket of the book who's carrying on 0:01:03.080 --> 0:01:07.760 sinking his part as the wildfire rages behind him, And 0:01:07.800 --> 0:01:10.600 I think part part of our problem with with disasters 0:01:10.680 --> 0:01:12.880 is that that we kind of divide into the people 0:01:12.880 --> 0:01:17.200 who who freak out and the people who go into denial. Well, 0:01:17.200 --> 0:01:19.960 we're always pleased when people we admire agree with us. 0:01:20.000 --> 0:01:22.880 It makes us feel better about ourselves. And you seem 0:01:22.959 --> 0:01:26.040 to share our belief that the fixation on the chief 0:01:26.040 --> 0:01:29.080 executive president of the United States, for instance, as as 0:01:29.120 --> 0:01:32.399 some sort of godhead who can ensued fix all problems 0:01:32.680 --> 0:01:38.640 is pretty misplaced, right. Paul Stoy in Warren Peace makes 0:01:38.680 --> 0:01:41.480 fun of the idea that Napoleon was in command of 0:01:41.520 --> 0:01:45.160 the destinies of all Europeans, And as in a Storian, 0:01:45.160 --> 0:01:48.120 I've tended to be skeptical of the idea that it's 0:01:48.160 --> 0:01:52.880 all about one or two great or wicked men. That's 0:01:52.880 --> 0:01:55.200 not because I'm a Marxist his Storian. On the contrary, 0:01:55.240 --> 0:01:58.560 I just think that in truth, the history's complex process, 0:01:58.720 --> 0:02:01.440 and very rarely is the man at the top, and 0:02:01.480 --> 0:02:05.560 it's usually a man in sole charge, especially when disaster strikes. 0:02:05.600 --> 0:02:08.720 So what happened last year was that all those people 0:02:08.760 --> 0:02:11.680 who've had it in for Trump already were given the 0:02:11.680 --> 0:02:15.200 perfect opportunity to say that it was all his fault. 0:02:15.720 --> 0:02:18.519 Jim Fallows wrote a piece in the Atlantic that said, 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:22.240 when I fly my light aircraft, I'm in charge, so 0:02:22.280 --> 0:02:24.639 if something goes wrong, it's my fault, and the president 0:02:25.120 --> 0:02:28.600 is in the analogous situation. Now, being the president United 0:02:28.639 --> 0:02:31.799 States is not like flying a light aircraft. It really 0:02:31.880 --> 0:02:34.840 is not, because you're in charge of a vast number 0:02:34.840 --> 0:02:37.720 of different agencies and you can't possibly keep an eye 0:02:38.040 --> 0:02:40.880 on every threat the nation faces. In practice, in every 0:02:40.880 --> 0:02:44.160 country when there's a pandemic, there is a bunch of 0:02:44.160 --> 0:02:47.400 people whose job that is. In the US, there's the 0:02:47.400 --> 0:02:50.079 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there's the Department of 0:02:50.120 --> 0:02:52.960 Health and Human Services. They even have a Deputy Secretary 0:02:53.480 --> 0:02:57.919 for preparedness. And the idea that it's the president's job 0:02:58.040 --> 0:03:01.760 to sit there and make calls about making tests available 0:03:01.800 --> 0:03:05.240 for a new coronavirus is is a cartoon version of 0:03:05.240 --> 0:03:08.400 how government works. And I think if we draw the conclusion, 0:03:08.440 --> 0:03:10.519 and I'm afraid that many, many, many people have, we 0:03:10.600 --> 0:03:13.440 draw the conclusion that this was all Sump's fault, that 0:03:13.480 --> 0:03:16.480 we wouldn't have had half a million plus dead if 0:03:16.639 --> 0:03:19.720 it had been Joe Biden, who somehow magically got elected 0:03:19.760 --> 0:03:22.040 a year early. Then we are not going to learn 0:03:22.080 --> 0:03:25.200 anything from this experience, and the next disaster will be 0:03:25.280 --> 0:03:28.240 just as big as the battle. So but I believe 0:03:28.280 --> 0:03:30.360 we talked to you right at the beginning of the 0:03:30.400 --> 0:03:34.240 pandemic and um, and we're talking about how it looks 0:03:34.280 --> 0:03:35.960 like this is going to shape up to be, you know, 0:03:36.040 --> 0:03:38.200 the sort of thing that makes history books for centuries 0:03:38.200 --> 0:03:40.000 to come. Like it's that big of a deal. What 0:03:40.080 --> 0:03:43.680 do you give the world for a grade on reacting 0:03:44.000 --> 0:03:46.560 to this, this this horrible thing that that struck us 0:03:46.600 --> 0:03:50.800 a year ago. Yeah, I'd have to say that the 0:03:51.080 --> 0:03:54.240 f it comes to mind at this point. And uh, 0:03:54.760 --> 0:03:56.560 you know you don't need to take it from me, 0:03:56.680 --> 0:03:59.840 because there's a new report that's just come out the 0:04:00.000 --> 0:04:05.720 Independent Panel, which has I think arrived at somewhat similar 0:04:05.760 --> 0:04:08.760 conclusions to my own, namely that this was an avoidable 0:04:08.800 --> 0:04:12.320 disaster if we had acted the way say the Taiwanese 0:04:12.320 --> 0:04:16.479 and the South Koreans did early, quickly ramping up testing 0:04:16.560 --> 0:04:20.520 and creating contact tracing, isolating people who were infected, we 0:04:20.640 --> 0:04:23.520 did not need to have a global pandemic. And indeed 0:04:23.560 --> 0:04:27.560 Taiwan did not have significant excess mortality at all. I 0:04:27.560 --> 0:04:29.840 think twelve people have died of COVID in Taiwan, and 0:04:29.839 --> 0:04:32.680 they're right next to China. So we know that this 0:04:32.839 --> 0:04:35.040 did not have to be this way. We know that 0:04:35.120 --> 0:04:37.200 we did not have to have more than half a 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:41.479 million Americans die premature ly. But the problem, I think 0:04:41.640 --> 0:04:45.720 is that that we are seeking simplistic narratives about the 0:04:46.000 --> 0:04:49.279 story which are going to lead us to miss what 0:04:49.480 --> 0:04:53.040 is really amiss, what is really wrong. After all, this 0:04:53.120 --> 0:04:55.960 is not the only disaster that we have handled badly 0:04:56.160 --> 0:04:59.080 in recent times. I don't think you could claim that 0:04:59.400 --> 0:05:03.400 we handle nine eleven brilliantly. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, 0:05:03.440 --> 0:05:07.200 Invading Iraq doesn't seem like the best possible reaction to 0:05:07.279 --> 0:05:11.640 that crisis. Financial crisis, well, on paper, we were prepared. 0:05:11.800 --> 0:05:14.840 We had all kinds of regulations in place, but that 0:05:14.920 --> 0:05:17.680 was a pretty big debacle. And then on paper we 0:05:17.680 --> 0:05:20.119 were prepared for a pandemic. It was just that maybe 0:05:20.120 --> 0:05:22.120 we've got the wrong sort of pandemic. I don't know 0:05:22.120 --> 0:05:24.400 what the excuse would be, but I think there's a 0:05:24.440 --> 0:05:28.040 pattern here of failure, and I don't think it's always 0:05:28.040 --> 0:05:32.440 been this way, because we have great scientific knowledge. We 0:05:32.440 --> 0:05:35.840 we understand a lot about the disasters that we are 0:05:35.920 --> 0:05:38.560 likely to encounter, but it feels to me as if 0:05:38.680 --> 0:05:44.599 our response has become less competent compared, let's say, with 0:05:44.839 --> 0:05:48.280 the nineteen fifties, when in the face of the so 0:05:48.360 --> 0:05:51.880 called Asian Flu of nineteen fifty seven, the Eisenhower administration 0:05:52.560 --> 0:05:56.040 was able to cope with the challenge and deal with 0:05:56.080 --> 0:06:00.479 the disruption of excess mortality without shutting the economy me down, 0:06:00.680 --> 0:06:05.120 without letting the deficit explode, without creating all the kinds 0:06:05.160 --> 0:06:10.279 of I think avoidable and costly mistakes that were made 0:06:10.279 --> 0:06:13.800 in I know one of the themes of the book 0:06:13.839 --> 0:06:16.039 is that you you believe we have a what you 0:06:16.120 --> 0:06:20.160 call a middle management problem, a bloated complex bureaucracy problem. 0:06:20.839 --> 0:06:24.160 Tell us more about that. Well, it's, as we were 0:06:24.200 --> 0:06:27.000 saying earlier, very easy just to say this was all 0:06:27.040 --> 0:06:30.440 down to Trump, and I think we've got to avoid 0:06:31.320 --> 0:06:34.080 drawing that conclusion. Not that he didn't make many, many mistakes, 0:06:34.120 --> 0:06:37.640 But in truth, it wasn't because of Trump that CDC 0:06:37.920 --> 0:06:41.320 completely failed to make testing available early in the in 0:06:41.360 --> 0:06:45.159 the pandemic. The c d C folks, first they stopped 0:06:45.160 --> 0:06:48.640 anybody else from developing tests, and then they produced a 0:06:48.680 --> 0:06:51.520 test of their own that didn't work. And I'd love 0:06:51.560 --> 0:06:55.200 to believe the President United States is is busily monitoring 0:06:55.200 --> 0:06:58.120 the activities of laboratories at c d C. But let's 0:06:58.120 --> 0:07:01.760 face it, that's not how this job works. I learned 0:07:01.800 --> 0:07:05.800 a very important lesson from studying another disaster. It was 0:07:05.839 --> 0:07:08.800 actually a smaller disaster in terms of death, but a 0:07:08.839 --> 0:07:13.240 pretty spectacular one in terms of its impact on American imaginations. 0:07:13.240 --> 0:07:17.360 And that was the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger 0:07:17.560 --> 0:07:21.120 shortly after its launch, and a brilliant manner physicist named 0:07:21.200 --> 0:07:24.200 Richard Feynman wrote a book about that. He was involved 0:07:24.200 --> 0:07:26.640 in the inquiry, and in the book he observes that 0:07:26.680 --> 0:07:28.840 the initial impulse of the media was to try and 0:07:28.880 --> 0:07:32.040 pin it on Roll Reagan, to to try to claim that, oh, 0:07:32.240 --> 0:07:35.080 that the Shuffle launch had been rushed because Reagan wanted 0:07:35.120 --> 0:07:37.040 to reference it in a speech, And this was all 0:07:37.120 --> 0:07:41.880 completely made up. The reality was that at NASA, the 0:07:42.080 --> 0:07:45.280 engineers knew that this thing had a one percent, one 0:07:45.280 --> 0:07:47.720 and a hundred chance of blowing up. They knew there 0:07:47.760 --> 0:07:52.000 was a problem, especially at low temperatures. But the bureaucrats 0:07:52.040 --> 0:07:54.800 at NASA decided to change that one and a hundred 0:07:54.880 --> 0:07:58.480 chance to one in a hundred thousand in order not 0:07:58.640 --> 0:08:01.840 to reveal to the people who were backing the Space 0:08:01.840 --> 0:08:05.440 Shuttle program, namely Congress, that there was a significant risk 0:08:05.440 --> 0:08:09.040 of a disaster. Now, I think throughout history we find 0:08:09.280 --> 0:08:14.360 that guy in middle management again and again, inserting the 0:08:14.400 --> 0:08:18.160 point of failure into the chain of command. But we 0:08:18.200 --> 0:08:19.840 always want to blame the person at the top. So 0:08:19.880 --> 0:08:23.520 the Titanic sinks, and it's the owner of the shipping 0:08:23.600 --> 0:08:30.480 line who gets the maximum blame and opprobrium heaped upon him, 0:08:30.520 --> 0:08:33.600 But that is not really the key to the losses 0:08:34.360 --> 0:08:37.480 on the Titanic. And I think in the same way, 0:08:37.559 --> 0:08:39.760 you kind of go through the disasters and you start 0:08:39.840 --> 0:08:43.920 to realize that it's it's rarely the person who's really 0:08:43.960 --> 0:08:47.000 at fault who gets the blame and a disaster, we 0:08:47.000 --> 0:08:50.040 we tend to want to pin the blame on whoever's 0:08:50.040 --> 0:08:52.840 at the top of the chain of command, But disasters 0:08:53.040 --> 0:08:57.520 generally don't really unfold because of major errors at the top. 0:08:57.559 --> 0:09:00.320 I mean, it wasn't just to give another random exact ample, 0:09:00.559 --> 0:09:03.679 it wasn't Winston Churchill's fault that the defense of Singapore 0:09:03.800 --> 0:09:07.960 was completely bungled in World War Two. We can certainly say, 0:09:08.000 --> 0:09:11.959 with Harry Trueman, the buck stops here. Responsibility ultimately lies 0:09:12.000 --> 0:09:15.000 with the president of the prime minister. Sure, but let's 0:09:15.040 --> 0:09:18.080 not tell ourselves a fairy story that if only we'd 0:09:18.120 --> 0:09:20.599 had a different president last year, that had all have 0:09:20.720 --> 0:09:23.120 been fine, because that that seems to me like a 0:09:23.120 --> 0:09:26.240 complete fairy story. Yeah, the example you gave fits with 0:09:26.360 --> 0:09:28.240 the story of the day yesterday when the New York 0:09:28.240 --> 0:09:31.680 Times let us know that the c d C saying 0:09:32.200 --> 0:09:36.840 less than ten percent of transmissions were outdoors when the 0:09:36.880 --> 0:09:40.400 real number was point zero one percent or whatever. It's 0:09:40.440 --> 0:09:43.560 the same sort of thing, crazy crazy, And you know, 0:09:44.000 --> 0:09:47.040 that's a very good example of what was going wrong 0:09:47.320 --> 0:09:50.160 and is still going wrong. It was obvious a year 0:09:50.200 --> 0:09:52.800 ago if you were paying attention to the research that 0:09:52.880 --> 0:09:55.360 was coming out of China and then North ficially where 0:09:55.360 --> 0:09:59.880 the disease first really struck, that it wasn't being transmitted outdoors. 0:10:00.000 --> 0:10:02.959 I mean there were literally no cases out of Wuhan 0:10:03.240 --> 0:10:06.000 of outdoor transmission. And I remember reading this and thinking, oh, 0:10:06.080 --> 0:10:11.000 that's interesting, And so we ignored that for a year 0:10:11.559 --> 0:10:16.720 and introduced a whole range of totally stupid restrictions, of 0:10:16.760 --> 0:10:21.800 which my personal bugbear were the closures of parks and beaches. 0:10:21.880 --> 0:10:25.520 California shut down its public spaces, so not only locked 0:10:25.520 --> 0:10:27.880 people in their homes, but they then prevented them from 0:10:27.960 --> 0:10:30.680 going outdoors. And then, of course you have the mask 0:10:30.760 --> 0:10:34.760 wearing outdoors, which is actually entirely pointless. And this was 0:10:34.840 --> 0:10:37.360 not It's not like we just figured this out. This 0:10:37.440 --> 0:10:41.600 was obvious. It was obviously in March of last year, 0:10:41.760 --> 0:10:46.840 because nobody was getting this virus in outdoor settings. You 0:10:46.880 --> 0:10:50.880 could see already in the spring the super spreader effect 0:10:51.040 --> 0:10:55.240 that basically twent of infected people did, of the spreading, 0:10:55.559 --> 0:10:59.000 you could see already over a year ago that this 0:10:59.000 --> 0:11:01.880 thing disproportionately killed people over the age of sixty five. 0:11:01.960 --> 0:11:04.640 And you could see the places that it's spread. They 0:11:04.640 --> 0:11:08.560 were indoor settings where large numbers of people were fairly 0:11:08.600 --> 0:11:12.000 close together yelling or singing, and so the places that 0:11:12.080 --> 0:11:14.280 you should shut down in a situation like that of 0:11:14.360 --> 0:11:17.000 the restaurants and the bars, and you should certainly not 0:11:17.040 --> 0:11:19.200 be having people go to church. But that stuff was 0:11:19.559 --> 0:11:23.000 that was not difficult to see. I'm not a virologist 0:11:23.040 --> 0:11:25.680 or an epidemiologist. I'm a historian, but I was reading 0:11:25.679 --> 0:11:27.480 the literature as it was coming out because it was 0:11:27.679 --> 0:11:30.560 pretty fascinated by by the fact that we were in 0:11:30.559 --> 0:11:33.720 the midst of an obviously historic disaster. And it is 0:11:33.800 --> 0:11:36.920 mystifying to me that so many public officials whose job 0:11:37.000 --> 0:11:40.920 this was got things as basic as that wrong and 0:11:40.960 --> 0:11:44.080 imposed a set of restrictions in the population that were 0:11:44.200 --> 0:11:48.040 ultimately harmful. It must have been harmful to stop people 0:11:48.080 --> 0:11:52.240 getting outdoors and to confine them indoors when the virus 0:11:52.360 --> 0:11:56.520 is something that spreads indoors. Well, what makes us insane, 0:11:56.520 --> 0:11:58.400 and perhaps you can help us tease out what's going 0:11:58.440 --> 0:12:01.520 on here, is that so many of the the protective 0:12:01.520 --> 0:12:04.520 methods to policies that have been disproved months and months 0:12:04.559 --> 0:12:08.840 ago remain like the masks outdoors. Is that just? Is 0:12:08.840 --> 0:12:13.360 that a fixation on COVID? Is that bureaucracy is not 0:12:13.600 --> 0:12:16.559 at work? Is that bias in favor of the status quo? 0:12:16.720 --> 0:12:20.160 What's going on with that? I think there are two things. One, 0:12:20.240 --> 0:12:24.800 we have a bureaucratic mentality which regards all risk can, 0:12:24.880 --> 0:12:30.319 no matter what the probability is, as unacceptable. And the 0:12:30.320 --> 0:12:32.440 fun of that, if you're a bureaucrat is that you 0:12:32.480 --> 0:12:35.559 can generate endless regulations and then let people get off 0:12:35.600 --> 0:12:37.640 on that to an extent that I think some of 0:12:37.720 --> 0:12:40.520 us find hard to comprehend. But I see this not 0:12:40.640 --> 0:12:43.360 only at the state level, but at the local level, 0:12:43.400 --> 0:12:45.600 the county level, at the campus level, just the kind 0:12:45.640 --> 0:12:48.880 of desire to create regulations for their own sake. I'll 0:12:48.880 --> 0:12:51.200 give you a great example. The swimming pool where I 0:12:51.200 --> 0:12:53.840 take my kids has all kinds of precautions in place, 0:12:53.880 --> 0:12:56.480 and my favorite is the buffer lane. There is a 0:12:56.720 --> 0:13:00.400 lane that is left empty between where kids can swim 0:13:00.559 --> 0:13:03.640 and adults can do lap swimming because of course the 0:13:03.640 --> 0:13:07.880 stars Coby too virus loves to swim in chlorinated water. 0:13:08.040 --> 0:13:11.240 But it really can't swim across. It can only swim it. 0:13:12.400 --> 0:13:15.559 Come on, guys, and my credit to my nine year old. 0:13:15.600 --> 0:13:18.760 He's like, he's nine, he knows as his bullshit, and 0:13:18.760 --> 0:13:21.120 it's like, so he swims into the buffer lane to 0:13:21.280 --> 0:13:24.920 provoke what he calls the COVID police, and the COVID police, 0:13:24.960 --> 0:13:27.080 the poor people who have to enforce these regulations. We 0:13:27.160 --> 0:13:29.960 really come over and tell him to go back into 0:13:30.400 --> 0:13:33.320 into his lane, and they must know it's it's it's 0:13:33.440 --> 0:13:36.720 crap too. So We have a curious phenomenon, which is 0:13:36.760 --> 0:13:39.520 that there are some people who just love regulation and 0:13:39.559 --> 0:13:42.240 they love to control people's lives and it gets them 0:13:42.240 --> 0:13:44.440 out of bed in the morning. And this was their 0:13:44.480 --> 0:13:50.080 permission to regulate our every activity, no matter what the 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:52.679 sign said. I don't think they paid the slightest attention 0:13:52.720 --> 0:13:55.040 to the signs. It was just like, oh, great, now 0:13:55.080 --> 0:13:57.800 we can create a lane where nobody can swim. The 0:13:57.840 --> 0:14:00.720 other thing that's going on, which I mean, this makes 0:14:00.720 --> 0:14:03.520 me crazy, um, but the other thing that's going on 0:14:03.640 --> 0:14:05.680 is that that we've developed a habit which was not 0:14:05.760 --> 0:14:08.080 always there in the United States and making everything a 0:14:08.120 --> 0:14:11.559 partisan issue and so which wasn't true. Like in the 0:14:12.920 --> 0:14:15.760 vaccines were like, great, we have the vaccine. We we 0:14:15.760 --> 0:14:17.720 were very proud of the facts in the fifties that 0:14:17.760 --> 0:14:20.960 the US was better at developing vaccines and faster at 0:14:21.000 --> 0:14:24.000 making them than anybody else, and was like everybody was 0:14:24.040 --> 0:14:27.080 like into that, and there was no partisan division on 0:14:27.080 --> 0:14:30.440 this issue. We we've allowed public health to become a 0:14:30.520 --> 0:14:37.000 partisan domain, and therefore mask wearing has become a symbol 0:14:37.040 --> 0:14:41.360 of political affiliation. And the masks here in California are 0:14:41.400 --> 0:14:46.160 going to be worn long after we have huge percentages 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:48.360 of vaccine, and we're going to have a huge percentage 0:14:48.400 --> 0:14:51.600 of people vaccinated around where I live. We probably already do. 0:14:51.640 --> 0:14:55.280 I was told the other day it's actually over in 0:14:55.360 --> 0:14:58.920 my neighborhood and we're going to carry on wearing masks 0:14:59.680 --> 0:15:04.000 point leslie. Not really because we think we have to 0:15:04.080 --> 0:15:07.440 stay protected from a virus that is no longer really around, 0:15:07.440 --> 0:15:10.040 but but because it's a badge. And somebody says to 0:15:10.080 --> 0:15:11.440 me the other day, Oh, I'm wearing the mask because 0:15:11.440 --> 0:15:15.920 I don't want people to think I'm a conservative. Wow. Right, 0:15:16.880 --> 0:15:19.640 A strange times. I know that when I'm not. When 0:15:19.680 --> 0:15:21.680 I go out of the campus without the mask, I 0:15:21.760 --> 0:15:24.160 know that I'm getting the dirty looks. It's like I'm 0:15:24.160 --> 0:15:29.120 wearing a mega exactly. That that makes me depressed because 0:15:29.160 --> 0:15:32.640 it means that we've totally decoupled what we do in 0:15:32.720 --> 0:15:35.960 public health from science. And often it's the people who 0:15:36.000 --> 0:15:40.440 say the science, follow the science who are least interested 0:15:40.680 --> 0:15:44.920 in actual science. Neil Ferguson, it's always a great pleasure. 0:15:44.960 --> 0:15:46.760 We appreciate the time very much, and we hope we 0:15:46.800 --> 0:15:50.040 can talk again soon. I love that, Thanks so much, guys, 0:15:50.520 --> 0:15:55.840 Thank you, he reminded me um uh, we we did 0:15:55.920 --> 0:15:59.840 know going way back that it doesn't transmit outdoors. Remember 0:15:59.840 --> 0:16:03.120 that footage of the beaches around Los Angeles where the 0:16:03.840 --> 0:16:06.240 COVID cops were waiting on the beach for the kayakers 0:16:06.280 --> 0:16:10.320 to come in. Oh, that's right, people alone out at sea. 0:16:10.400 --> 0:16:13.560 We're being arrested, waiting on the beach to arrest him 0:16:13.600 --> 0:16:16.920 when they got there, because you couldn't. Just absolutely ridiculous. 0:16:17.000 --> 0:16:20.800 I like the fact that Neil Ferguson, who's a smart guy, 0:16:21.480 --> 0:16:26.000 gives the world an f in its response to this. Yeah. Absolutely, 0:16:26.480 --> 0:16:29.560 And and the fact that he attributes it. I've been 0:16:29.600 --> 0:16:31.400 reading some of the summaries of the book and the 0:16:31.480 --> 0:16:33.920 chapter headings and that sort of thing. He attributes it 0:16:33.960 --> 0:16:41.600 to essentially bureaucrat ease, the disease of of bureaucratitis, where 0:16:41.720 --> 0:16:45.720 there are just too many small people in small minds 0:16:45.760 --> 0:16:48.800 and egos and protecting the bureaucrat for all policy to 0:16:48.840 --> 0:16:51.720 pass through, and it just it can't. It's like a 0:16:51.720 --> 0:16:55.040 filter that the openings are too small for the particles 0:16:55.040 --> 0:16:59.600 that need to get through, and you just can't have good, effective, 0:16:59.680 --> 0:17:03.440 tie only policy in the system we have. So the 0:17:03.480 --> 0:17:06.159 book we're talking about is doomed the politics of catastrophe. 0:17:06.240 --> 0:17:08.840 You can grab any book the Neil Ferguson's ever written, 0:17:09.240 --> 0:17:11.439 and you'll be better for having picked it up and 0:17:11.480 --> 0:17:13.320 read it. So yeah, here, we're here.