Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, there against the Rules listeners. This is Catherine Girardou.
Speaker 1: I'm one of the producers on the show. We're still
Speaker 1: working on our next season, coming out this fall. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, we'd like to share a conversation between Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis and journalist author Geraldine Brooks about Michael's new book,
Speaker 1: The Premonition. It's all about the experts who saw the
Speaker 1: pandemic coming and did their best to stop it. In
Speaker 1: case you missed it, check your feed. Michael read the
Speaker 1: first chapter here. A few weeks back. Geraldine Brooks covered
Speaker 1: crises in the Mid East, Africa, and the Balkans as
Speaker 1: a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She also
Speaker 1: wrote the two thousand and six Pulitzer Prize winning novel March. Here,
Speaker 1: recorded as part of the Live Talk Los Angeles series,
Speaker 1: is her conversation with Michael. Michael, your wonderful nude book.
Speaker 1: On the back cover has just one quote, and it
Speaker 1: says I would read an eight hundred page history of
Speaker 1: the Stapler if he wrote it. John Williams, New York
Speaker 1: Times book Review, Pretty pretty great quote. You haven't yet
Speaker 1: given us the saga of the Stapler, but you have
Speaker 1: had a protean range in your work, from money to politics,
Speaker 1: to sport, to fatherhood to science and data analytics and
Speaker 1: now the pandemic. But all of your other books have
Speaker 1: been looking at events that have already occurred, and this
Speaker 1: is the first time that you've written a book where
Speaker 1: the events were crashing down around us as you wrote.
Speaker 1: What was that like? Fun? Like totally extrating? And I
Speaker 1: know I'm not supposed to say that, but let me
Speaker 1: just say that it required it. The only reason I
Speaker 1: did it is I found it. I took it just
Speaker 1: a different approach than I usually take. And the only
Speaker 1: reason I took a different approach than I usually take
Speaker 1: is I was ready to write a book with a
Speaker 1: different approach when the pandemic happened. And the approach was
Speaker 1: I have this character. He happens to be a college
Speaker 1: football coach, but it doesn't matter. And I haven't written
Speaker 1: the book, but I have this character that I'm so
Speaker 1: interested in. I don't care what happens, that whatever happens happens,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to write a very character driven work
Speaker 1: of nonfiction narrative and let the story is sort of
Speaker 1: unfolds as it happens and whatever it is it is,
Speaker 1: and just trust the character. So the pandemic happens just
Speaker 1: as I'm getting going on that, and I wasn't thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: just port that approach onto this, but I was thinking that,
Speaker 1: like I wrote this book about how the Trump administration
Speaker 1: is going to muck up any kind of management problem
Speaker 1: they have because they don't care about the federal government
Speaker 1: as a management tool. This is the bad thing that happened.
Speaker 1: They have to imagine maybe I should look into it
Speaker 1: and like into my lap drop, I think three of
Speaker 1: the best characters I've ever had. So I thought, and
Speaker 1: that thought that I can just follow these characters and
Speaker 1: let the characters just take me wherever they go, followed
Speaker 1: by another one that the characters have already given me
Speaker 1: my ending. And that was because because around June they
Speaker 1: basically said, it's over here that you know this thing
Speaker 1: is now we failed, and the story of the beginning
Speaker 1: of the pandemic was in a way the story of
Speaker 1: the pandemic for them, and that the end of the
Speaker 1: story for them was there's another one coming. This is one,
Speaker 1: but there's another one coming. So when I had that
Speaker 1: kind of stake in the distance to navigate too and
Speaker 1: I knew that the characters what was going to happen
Speaker 1: from kind of June July on. With the characters, who's
Speaker 1: going to be of kind of peripheral importance to the story.
Speaker 1: It was a matter of some indifference the details, the
Speaker 1: details that followed. How did they drop into a lap?
Speaker 1: Charity Deane, for example, absolutely marvelous character. And you haven't
Speaker 1: often sented a book on a female character. It was
Speaker 1: really interesting to see you do it in this case.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me how you came upon her? So
Speaker 1: before I do, I gotta ask you, Geraldine, can I
Speaker 1: write a woman? Certainly write this one? All right? So
Speaker 1: Charity is the last bit of the story did fall
Speaker 1: into place. When I meet Charity, I know I have
Speaker 1: a book. The other two are very important, are the
Speaker 1: two main characters, and they came in the following order.
Speaker 1: Five years ago I wrote Flashboys, and a San Francisco
Speaker 1: money manager asked me to go to dinner, and I
Speaker 1: thought it was to talk about Flashboys, and because he
Speaker 1: was a friend of the friend, I went and when
Speaker 1: I got there, he kind of grabbed me by the
Speaker 1: dollar and said, I have a character you were going
Speaker 1: to write a book about, which, of course I thought,
Speaker 1: these are false pretenses, and he says, isn't. His name
Speaker 1: is Joe Dici, and Joe Ici is a biochemist and
Speaker 1: kind of like badass virus hunter at UCSF, And so
Speaker 1: he wouldn't let me leave until I said, I'd go
Speaker 1: have a sandwich with Joe Dici. And I went and
Speaker 1: at a sandwich with Joe Dici, and I said, oh
Speaker 1: my god, he is a character. I'd love to write
Speaker 1: about him, but I got a d in biology my
Speaker 1: sophomore year in high school. I have no chops for
Speaker 1: this subject. There's no real connection with anything I've done.
Speaker 1: I would I don't even know how to do it.
Speaker 1: But we started a relationship, and so he would come
Speaker 1: back to him, but he was there already, and he
Speaker 1: ends up being very important. The second thing that happened
Speaker 1: was when our kids got tossed out of school, and
Speaker 1: I realized, this is like something I need to pay
Speaker 1: attention to. I called my jungle guide for the previous book.
Speaker 1: The fifth risk, his name's Max Styre and he should
Speaker 1: be the most famous man in America. But he has
Speaker 1: eight hundred and thirty two Twitter followers, and I can't
Speaker 1: I can't figure it out. But he is engaged in
Speaker 1: this quixotic, passionate quest to fix the federal government from
Speaker 1: outside the federal government. And as a result of this quest,
Speaker 1: he has gotten to know more about the federal government
Speaker 1: than anyone on the planet. And I called him and
Speaker 1: he said, if you're going to write about this, you
Speaker 1: got to talk to my uncle. Who's your uncle. His
Speaker 1: name is Richard Danzig. He was a former US Navy secretary.
Speaker 1: He said, my uncle's just passionate on this subject of pandemics,
Speaker 1: and he knows more about it than anybody. So I
Speaker 1: called him, and Richard Danzig says, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not me you need to talk to You need
Speaker 1: to meet the Wolverines. Who the hell are the Wolverines.
Speaker 1: And the Wolverines turn out to be this like secret
Speaker 1: group of seven doctors who've known each other for fifteen years,
Speaker 1: who worked in the White House and are positioned all
Speaker 1: over American Medical society, who turned out to be like
Speaker 1: the single best group of people whose eyes to watch
Speaker 1: the event through. So that gets me to Carter Mesher,
Speaker 1: who's the kind of the Savonne in the Wolverines group.
Speaker 1: And here at this point, it's sort of like maybe
Speaker 1: this is a book like I've got Wolverines, I've got
Speaker 1: Joe Ici, I've got a backstory about how pandemic preparedness
Speaker 1: came about. All this stuff. They all Joe Ici, three wolverines,
Speaker 1: and a former member of the Obama administration who I
Speaker 1: was talking to too, who is helping Gavin Newsom build
Speaker 1: a computer model to analyze what was going on in California.
Speaker 1: All said, you gotta meet this woman named Charity Dean
Speaker 1: because she's she's like, she's the one who knows in
Speaker 1: the whole state of California. So I sent an email
Speaker 1: to the California state government and they wrote back and said,
Speaker 1: Charity Deane has no interest in talking to you. And
Speaker 1: I took that at face value for about three weeks,
Speaker 1: and I thought, like, why wouldn't she want to talk
Speaker 1: to me? You know, that's odd. So I got her
Speaker 1: cell phone number and she's I got on the phone,
Speaker 1: she said, who said, I don't want to talk to you?
Speaker 1: And that that was the beginning of a of a relationship.
Speaker 1: So that's how the characters fell into my lap. And
Speaker 1: then the fact that they all kind of come together
Speaker 1: in some way that was that was Lanya. I didn't
Speaker 1: plan on that, I must say. When I got to
Speaker 1: the Wolverines in the book, I was reminded of Mark Twain,
Speaker 1: who said fiction must be plausible. Truth needn't be that's
Speaker 1: the advantage. That's why I can't write fiction, because I'm
Speaker 1: much better with things that seem Why would you? Why
Speaker 1: would you? Why? You don't need to make it up.
Speaker 1: But tell us a little bit about Charity Deane and
Speaker 1: her struggles. So Charity Dean first, the character first, the
Speaker 1: person she grows up. She's the Taro Westover story, and
Speaker 1: that she grows up in a evangelical rural community that
Speaker 1: raises girls to breed children and nothing else. She's pulled
Speaker 1: out a science classes whenever like evolution comes up. She
Speaker 1: is told she shouldn't go to college by the church elders.
Speaker 1: The church runs the family life. She lives in fear
Speaker 1: of them at the same time, from a very early age,
Speaker 1: partly because of the biblical passages about the plague, partly
Speaker 1: because missionaries come from Africa and talk about diseases in Africa,
Speaker 1: partly just her own curiosity. From like the age at ten,
Speaker 1: she starts to get obsessed with disease, with communicable disease
Speaker 1: on her own, like for fun, reading books about the
Speaker 1: bubonic plague, making like styrofoam models of viruses, and hanging
Speaker 1: in from her ceiling. She's like on a collision course
Speaker 1: with an education in microbiology and has to fight to
Speaker 1: get it. She gets a lot of grief for going
Speaker 1: to college. She finds a scholarship, She grows with real poverty.
Speaker 1: She gets basically excommunicated from the church when she does
Speaker 1: so well in medical school that the husband that the
Speaker 1: church has wanted her to marry says he's not getting
Speaker 1: enough of her attention. So she leaves the husband and
Speaker 1: she continues with the medical degree, and it walks the walk.
Speaker 1: She goes to Africa and gets malaria while she's treating people,
Speaker 1: so she ends up in Santa Barbara in her during
Speaker 1: her residency and discovers this role called the local public
Speaker 1: health officer, which she didn't actually know existed, and neither
Speaker 1: did I, but there was. There's this person who has
Speaker 1: this job to, among other things like you know, making
Speaker 1: sure we don't get sick in restaurants or in swimming pools,
Speaker 1: also control communicable disease, and from that moment she's collided
Speaker 1: with like the things she was put on earth to do.
Speaker 1: And what interested me about her as a character, Like
Speaker 1: what kind of like instantly riveted me was when you
Speaker 1: went to her house, the walls were all decorated with
Speaker 1: various signs, all trying to remind her of basically who
Speaker 1: she needed to be, and all of them one way
Speaker 1: or another. We're telling her you need to be brave person.
Speaker 1: Now that was a message that she had internalized from
Speaker 1: time she was very young. But she has to relearn
Speaker 1: the lesson when she becomes a local public health officer
Speaker 1: because she's constantly in the position of doing things that
Speaker 1: cause controversy political or social, that put her job on
Speaker 1: the line, and she has no backup. The CDC is
Speaker 1: not there to help. In fact, their CDC is often
Speaker 1: there to obstruct. Local politicians got their fingers in the wind.
Speaker 1: And as she said, after a couple of years of
Speaker 1: doing this job, her model, her mantra became no one's
Speaker 1: coming to save me. So but at the character thing
Speaker 1: that was so great and like runs through the book,
Speaker 1: is that it's not that she's fearless. She's full of fear.
Speaker 1: Like she has more fear than eight people put together.
Speaker 1: She fights the fear. It's sort of like this willed bravery.
Speaker 1: She sees this thing as like bravery, as an acquired trait,
Speaker 1: and practices it in disease control. The act of having
Speaker 1: practice it for some long period of time builds these
Speaker 1: muscle memories and these six senses about what to do when. So,
Speaker 1: in a way, at a very local level, is being
Speaker 1: created the kind of character you would want fighting a pandemic.
Speaker 1: But she's she's the low person on the totem pole.
Speaker 1: She says, no status, no one recognizes her. So I
Speaker 1: could kind of go on and on. Why don't I
Speaker 1: hit a pause button right there? On Charity Deane, Right,
Speaker 1: I think you've given us exactly the right level of
Speaker 1: introduction to be intrigued by her that I do want
Speaker 1: you to do the same for Joe DREESI, And I'm
Speaker 1: going to point you at what I would like you
Speaker 1: to tell. Oh, All right, coming back to Jodoreesi. He
Speaker 1: hunts viruses wherever they appear, not just in people, and
Speaker 1: he's been so effective at it. He gets very weird call.
Speaker 1: He calls his phone, the red phone. It says, like
Speaker 1: when there's some problem in the world and someone has
Speaker 1: that no one's figured it out. They usually called the
Speaker 1: red phone, and the call to the Red phone in
Speaker 1: this case took the form of a letter he received
Speaker 1: from a woman who was kind of scantily clad apparently,
Speaker 1: and had a boa constrictor around her neck. And she
Speaker 1: said that Joe Ici that her boa constrictor was named
Speaker 1: mister Larry, and she was now terrified for the life
Speaker 1: of mister Larry because boas everywhere we're dying of some
Speaker 1: strange disease. It's a tribute to jod Erici that he
Speaker 1: didn't just throw the letter away, but it sat on
Speaker 1: his desk for like six months because he thought it
Speaker 1: was so strange. And then finally, like one day when
Speaker 1: he had a moment, he called someone who might know
Speaker 1: is like a veterinarian or so he knew, and said,
Speaker 1: is it true that these boas are dying? And he said, yeah,
Speaker 1: zoos are having problems all over the place. And so
Speaker 1: thus begins Joe Jice's quest to figure out this snake pandemic.
Speaker 1: You can take whatever that what I'm about to do
Speaker 1: say and just poured it right onto human pandemics. But
Speaker 1: he's created a technology which is now evolved since he
Speaker 1: created it to take the genetic material from any living creature,
Speaker 1: separate out what belongs in that creature, its own DNA
Speaker 1: from whatever happened else happens to be inside, like a virus.
Speaker 1: To do this, of course, you need to know the
Speaker 1: genome of the animal. So there is the human genome
Speaker 1: project that's happened, right, The snake genome project actually never happened,
Speaker 1: so he had to create this first. He starts by
Speaker 1: creating the Snake Genome Project and sequencing the genome of
Speaker 1: snakes so he knows what their genetic material is. Then
Speaker 1: he goes to the San Francisco Aquarium and gets some
Speaker 1: boas and some pythons and extracts DNA and then he
Speaker 1: pulls out he puts it on his chip and he finds,
Speaker 1: oh lo, and behold, oh my god, these boas have
Speaker 1: this other thing in them. They both have this other
Speaker 1: thing in them that quite possibly be causing an incredible illness.
Speaker 1: It's an adenovirus. My biology is shaky, but it's a
Speaker 1: virus that he said. It's an ancestor of ebola. It's
Speaker 1: got Ebola in it. It's kind of a curious thing,
Speaker 1: he said. It's actually been detected in dinosaurs, so that
Speaker 1: it's that old a virus, So then he has to
Speaker 1: prove that this is what's killing the boas. And the
Speaker 1: way you prove that a virus as there is creating
Speaker 1: the disease is you get a healthy animal and you
Speaker 1: inject it with the virus. So he distills the virus
Speaker 1: and he goes with three post docs into the San
Speaker 1: Francisco is getting absurd, I know, but this is it
Speaker 1: gets better. Did the San Francisco aquarium When you tell
Speaker 1: the story, sis, do you know how you inject a
Speaker 1: snake with a virus? And I know? He says, well,
Speaker 1: you have to inject them in the heart because the
Speaker 1: veins either don't exist or they're hard to find. And
Speaker 1: the heart. The problem with the snake's heart is it
Speaker 1: moves up and down the body, so you need a
Speaker 1: Doppler radar. You need one post doc holding the Doppler radar,
Speaker 1: other ones holding the snake, which isn't happy, and someone
Speaker 1: else to plunge the needle into the snake's heart. So
Speaker 1: they do this with pythons and with boas, and sure enough,
Speaker 1: the boas get ill and die, just as they're doing
Speaker 1: around the world. But the pythons survive even though they've
Speaker 1: got signs of the virus in them when he first
Speaker 1: tests them. Well, that's where it gets really interesting because
Speaker 1: he can now tell zoo directors when you get a
Speaker 1: new boa, you've got to isolate him and test him
Speaker 1: for this virus. But the question is why are these
Speaker 1: pythons surviving. They're an older species, and he has the
Speaker 1: idea that, oh my god, they're surviving this thing that's
Speaker 1: very like ebola. We've never found the reservoir species of
Speaker 1: ebola in the way that the like covid has a
Speaker 1: reservoir species of bats, and the reservour species of species
Speaker 1: in which the thing replicates it doesn't kill, so it
Speaker 1: happily survives. He says. They've they've they've exported, you know,
Speaker 1: zoos of animals out of Africa and tested them for
Speaker 1: a Bola to see if they can find this species
Speaker 1: that's harboring abola. He says, maybe it's pythons. So any
Speaker 1: other human being would have left their research at the
Speaker 1: point where they find the virus and identify the pandemic.
Speaker 1: Joe like takes it always tastes it like eight steps further,
Speaker 1: he calls the Maximum Security US Army Lab in Maryland
Speaker 1: and says, I want to inject pythons with the live
Speaker 1: ebola virus and see if they survive and then if
Speaker 1: the virus then replicates inside them, because I think maybe
Speaker 1: we've found the reservoir species. And he said, what came back?
Speaker 1: It was like a bizarre request, but it was from
Speaker 1: a MacArthur Genius Award winning person at UCSF, so they
Speaker 1: have to listen to it. They say it takes like
Speaker 1: months for them to get through all their checklist about
Speaker 1: what might go wrong, and he says, like on the checklist,
Speaker 1: it's like what happens is after you have injected the
Speaker 1: snake with the ebolavirus, if you leave the room and
Speaker 1: come back and the cage is open and the snake
Speaker 1: is gone, just says you run like hell, you know
Speaker 1: it's but they finally do it. They finally do it.
Speaker 1: Some incredibly intrepid researcher in Maryland gets live ebola, like
Speaker 1: if he scratches himself, he's a garner, injects it into
Speaker 1: the heart of a live python, and sure enough the
Speaker 1: snake lives, and they're just at the moment they have
Speaker 1: to ask the last question in that snake is the
Speaker 1: bowl of virus replicating, and at just that moment, the
Speaker 1: CDC shut down the research project because they said the
Speaker 1: lab was engaging in unsafe practices, so they never got
Speaker 1: the final answer. And it bothers Joe immensely. And that
Speaker 1: it bothers Joe Emsley tells you a lot about what
Speaker 1: you need to know about Joe. Well, that is the
Speaker 1: perfect segue from the here I love the way your
Speaker 1: mind works to the villains of the piece. We'll get
Speaker 1: back to those villains right after this. Okay, back to
Speaker 1: the interview. Geraldine just asked Michael about the villains in
Speaker 1: the book, and there was one line that I don't
Speaker 1: use highlighter on books. I'm just not that kind of
Speaker 1: a girl. But if I did, I would have run
Speaker 1: a highlighter over it. And that was Lisa Coonan at
Speaker 1: the CDC when she says it had to be so right,
Speaker 1: it was not wrong. Yeah, this leads us into the
Speaker 1: failures of the CDC. Can you talk about that. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: Lisa Coonan is a lifelong CDC employee. She's now moved
Speaker 1: on and has got her own consulting firm, but she
Speaker 1: was devoted to the institution. So this is this is
Speaker 1: not a CDC critic who's saying this is just like
Speaker 1: someone who is observed her colleagues. And what I think
Speaker 1: all of my characters find just in the course of
Speaker 1: their leading their lives, is that the institution, whatever it
Speaker 1: once was, has evolved into something that is not equipped
Speaker 1: to fight a disease, to control a disease, because controlling
Speaker 1: a disease is controversial and political, and it also requires
Speaker 1: a kind of clairvoyance that if you wait until the
Speaker 1: first person in the United States has died of COVID
Speaker 1: to announce that COVID's a problem in the United States,
Speaker 1: in that time, the virus has replicated exponentially and it's
Speaker 1: all over the place. You need to act before the
Speaker 1: anybody sees the danger. And that's controversial and requires a
Speaker 1: kind of leadership. And what Charity Deane first and foremost
Speaker 1: discovered was whenever she was in a hot situation where
Speaker 1: there was a decision needed to be made and lives
Speaker 1: were on the line, and it happened over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. The CDC is meant to be her backup.
Speaker 1: They're there to support the three thousand local health officers
Speaker 1: in the country, but the CDC would come on the
Speaker 1: line and basically say in so many words, you're fired
Speaker 1: if this goes wrong. No, no one's ever closed a
Speaker 1: doctor's clinic because they suspect the needles are dirty. And
Speaker 1: that's why everybody in Santa Barbara has HEPC. You know, no, no,
Speaker 1: we won't authorize changes on the campus of UCSB after
Speaker 1: one kid gets meningitis, even though he's about to lose
Speaker 1: his legs, because there's no evidence that what you're proposing works,
Speaker 1: even though it makes a lot of sense. So when
Speaker 1: she said no one's coming to save me, she met
Speaker 1: the CDC and she got to the point with them organically,
Speaker 1: I mean organically, and I said that because when she
Speaker 1: starts her career, the CDC are kind of like gods
Speaker 1: to her. She thinks that that maybe her lifetime ambition
Speaker 1: is to be the head of the Sea DC. But
Speaker 1: over and over she has these encounters that leader to
Speaker 1: the position that she has to ban the CDC from
Speaker 1: her investigations in order to save lives and push their life.
Speaker 1: She says about the CDC, she said, I was just
Speaker 1: so disappointed that the man behind the curtain turned out
Speaker 1: to be such a pansy, and that she just felt
Speaker 1: they were cowardly when they were dealing with these situations.
Speaker 1: It's really tragic because I think if you if you
Speaker 1: look around the wall to where did this go right?
Speaker 1: You look, I look at Australia being Australian, and you
Speaker 1: know there's essentially no COVID in Australia and why because
Speaker 1: the dude who was in charge was trained at the CDC, yes,
Speaker 1: twenty years ago. He goes he comes back to Australia
Speaker 1: and he has a pandemic plan that he learned at
Speaker 1: the CDC, and he jumps into action and he's supported
Speaker 1: by the political leadership to do it, contact tracing, massive testing,
Speaker 1: and they shut the disease down in this ja. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: So the ironies get richer and thicker the more the
Speaker 1: more of this story. You know, America eventually especially invented
Speaker 1: the strategies being used around the world, and the CDC
Speaker 1: exported them and then didn't embrace them itself. To finish
Speaker 1: the punchline on almost all of Charity Deane's local health
Speaker 1: officers stories is that a year after she does all
Speaker 1: the things she ends up doing to shut down a
Speaker 1: meningitis outbreak on the UCSB campus, she gets a call
Speaker 1: from a college health officer in another state saying, we
Speaker 1: are having an Vanegitius outbreak, and the CDC said to
Speaker 1: call you because you know what to do. And the
Speaker 1: problem was that clearly the institution had changed in a direction,
Speaker 1: and the direction was, let's avoid political controversy. We're on
Speaker 1: a short leash with the White House, and let's stake
Speaker 1: our reputation on the quality of our academic work. So
Speaker 1: everything has to be right. So the problem is is
Speaker 1: that that's good for academic work, but if you were
Speaker 1: fighting and disease in real time, you can't wait for
Speaker 1: the data. If you wait for the data, it's over.
Speaker 1: And so that cover of we're perfect, we don't make
Speaker 1: mistakes ends up being excused not to do anything. And
Speaker 1: what happened in this country was one of my main characters.
Speaker 1: Carter Mesher on Deane January the twentieth establishes to the
Speaker 1: satisfaction of experts, and he's probably not the only one,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of amazing he did it that the
Speaker 1: transmissibility and the lethality of this virus in Wuhan, with
Speaker 1: its implications for the United States population. But it's not
Speaker 1: till a month later on February twenty third, that the
Speaker 1: CDC acknowledges it, and in those five weeks a lot
Speaker 1: of lives were lost down the road because of that inaction,
Speaker 1: that inability to stand up and start to explain to
Speaker 1: the people what's going on. So it's a messy story
Speaker 1: because you got the CDC's natural inclinations compounded by Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: It's not just you know that they do have a
Speaker 1: bit of an excuse, but it's not it's not a
Speaker 1: good enough excuse. One of the most jaw dropping examples
Speaker 1: is the people who were evacuated from Moohan. The Americans
Speaker 1: who are evacuated some unbeliefs. Unbelievable, right, I mean, and
Speaker 1: I left out stuff, and it's also damning. So it's
Speaker 1: so Americans are repatriated. They're repatriated to Omaha, Nebraska, which
Speaker 1: sounds strange, except there's this federal medical facility that specializes
Speaker 1: in handling weird and terrifying illness. So if you get
Speaker 1: a bowl, there's a fair chance that's where you land.
Speaker 1: So there, I don't have any of them, adia of
Speaker 1: them or whatever it was. They were a bunch of them,
Speaker 1: and they're housed in the National Guard barracks near this facility.
Speaker 1: The man who runs this facility is a wolverine, is
Speaker 1: one of the wolverines. His name is James Lawler, and
Speaker 1: Lawler reasonably wants to test these people for COVID. He says,
Speaker 1: there's like no chance there's not COVID in there, and
Speaker 1: reasonably all of these Americans want to be tested for COVID.
Speaker 1: But Lawler has to ask the CDC. CDC has the test,
Speaker 1: the test that they're going to distribute far and wide
Speaker 1: is doesn't work. But you could send samples to Atlanta
Speaker 1: and they could give you an answer. So he asked
Speaker 1: the nearest CDC guy, who bounces it all the way
Speaker 1: up the chain of command. This request to Robert Redfield himself,
Speaker 1: director of the CDC, who apparently goes ballistic and says,
Speaker 1: under no circumstances are they to test those people? And
Speaker 1: Lawler says, what do you mean, like why? And the
Speaker 1: answer he gets is, if you test them, it would
Speaker 1: be performing an experiment on imprisoned persons. Now, that's clearly
Speaker 1: not the reason they didn't test them. There were clearly
Speaker 1: must have been other motives and whether it was uncertainty
Speaker 1: about their test, a desire not to find the disease,
Speaker 1: because if you found it, it it would just alarm people
Speaker 1: who knows, like why. But the fact they don't do
Speaker 1: it is of a piece with the rest of the strategy.
Speaker 1: I mean people flying in from China back from other
Speaker 1: parts of China to a whole bunch of other airports.
Speaker 1: And these were just eighty people. These were thousands of
Speaker 1: people go through Lax and Atlanta or Chicago or wherever
Speaker 1: they land, and they're supposed to be checked up on, followed,
Speaker 1: tested and traced when the local public health officials go
Speaker 1: to the cd the CDC's managing the events at the airport.
Speaker 1: When they go to the CDC to ask like, where's
Speaker 1: Joe Smith, you know who just left Lax they have
Speaker 1: listed as his residents Lax, they can't find any of
Speaker 1: these people. So it was I'm not sure how differently
Speaker 1: you would behave if you were trying secretly to spread
Speaker 1: the disease in the country. Then the CDC actually behaved,
Speaker 1: Which is not to say that's what they were doing,
Speaker 1: but you kind of do something like this, you'd say,
Speaker 1: all we have a test for it, and nobody else
Speaker 1: can test even though we've got the most microbiology labs
Speaker 1: that can spin up into COVID testing centers in three days. No,
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to do that. You have to use
Speaker 1: our test. It's coming, it's coming. Oops, it's broken. Nope,
Speaker 1: we're gonna fix it up. It's coming, it's coming up.
Speaker 1: It's broken again. Don't wear masks. Yeah. Meanwhile, don't wear masks,
Speaker 1: but really clean all those surfaces. It's like someone from
Speaker 1: the various cleaning products companies went to them said, man,
Speaker 1: let's make sure that that everybody knows it's scary to
Speaker 1: touch the counter that fomites, but which turned out to
Speaker 1: be not a thing. So it's it's the bad news bears.
Speaker 1: So theyre great irony about all this and that institution,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure is filled with great people. Right, it's
Speaker 1: a case of institutions screwing up. But is that they
Speaker 1: were so obsessed with preserving their reputation that they lost
Speaker 1: their reputation. We'll be back right after this break. So
Speaker 1: first of all, I want to ask you how did
Speaker 1: that conversation go when you called up for an interview
Speaker 1: with the CDC. So it went this way. So here
Speaker 1: we are two things that happened. First, I had I
Speaker 1: had a dry run of this with the other federal
Speaker 1: institutions under Trump. Because I wrote the fifth risk and
Speaker 1: so I was in I was in a peculiar position
Speaker 1: because I found that what happened before is if I
Speaker 1: called and asked just the Trump communication person in the place,
Speaker 1: they obstructed me. They made it harder for me to
Speaker 1: get to who I needed to talk to. So I
Speaker 1: had a mole who was in the CDC, who was
Speaker 1: at direct connections to the leadership. So instead of going
Speaker 1: to the Trump communication person, I went to the mole,
Speaker 1: and the moles the mole guided me to a few
Speaker 1: off the record conversations which proved extremely useful in a
Speaker 1: couple of ways. One with especially with old timers. They
Speaker 1: could they led me back to the diagnosis of the
Speaker 1: problem of the CDC that that story back in the
Speaker 1: eighties where the institution changes, but also led me to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that all these people are ashamed. They're all
Speaker 1: embarrassed that the individually they are not happy with their institution.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, basically they were shut down.
Speaker 1: The only person I ever got the right to talk
Speaker 1: to and I did actually, and then they had to
Speaker 1: go through the official channels to talk to me. Was
Speaker 1: and this is apropos what you just said about Australia.
Speaker 1: The CDC director in Cambodia, it took four months for
Speaker 1: him to get approval. But I had noticed the same
Speaker 1: thing as Cambodia, as Australia, that they had contained the
Speaker 1: virus because they had this brilliant CDC guy on the
Speaker 1: ground there doing what the CDC knew how to do,
Speaker 1: but not they weren't doing. They were doing outside gotting
Speaker 1: Michael Kinser and I eventually, you know, way too late,
Speaker 1: like weeks before the book was going to the publisher,
Speaker 1: got a chance to talk to him, but only after
Speaker 1: Trump was out in Biden was in. So I think
Speaker 1: this all points to like a bigger thing that if
Speaker 1: the federal government is ever going to reposition itself in
Speaker 1: the minds of ordinary Americans, the communication strategy needs to change.
Speaker 1: It needs to be much more open. Because it was
Speaker 1: virtually I was trying to tell in the end a
Speaker 1: nice story about what they were doing in Cambodia, and
Speaker 1: they wouldn't even really let me do that much less
Speaker 1: get to the guy ahead of the flu division in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: So it was just it was a story of sneaky
Speaker 1: reporting and obstruction. So when you were a portioning blame,
Speaker 1: I saw that you gave thirty seven and a half.
Speaker 1: Actually it was thirty seven point six. Thirty seven point six, right,
Speaker 1: And I was just, you know, I don't think what
Speaker 1: I think is all that interesting on this subject. I
Speaker 1: think that what my characters think is very interesting. And
Speaker 1: they led me away from the story that I thought
Speaker 1: I was going to tell. If my theory of the
Speaker 1: case was the you could lay this all at the
Speaker 1: feet of the Trump administration, and even you know, good
Speaker 1: liberals who were in the middle of disease warfare were
Speaker 1: saying to me, you'd be an idiot to do that,
Speaker 1: because if you just look at what we were, where
Speaker 1: we were before Trump, there has been institutional rot and
Speaker 1: institutional structure that had made it very difficult to deal
Speaker 1: with this. It would have been better. You know, you
Speaker 1: can like maybe two hundred thousand lives belonged to Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: our deaths, but it's it's not the whole thing, and
Speaker 1: it's not that if you're going to go about trying
Speaker 1: to fix it permanently, it's almost a distraction. I mean,
Speaker 1: let put this. This is how much my mind changed
Speaker 1: before I even wrote the fifth risk, which was about
Speaker 1: you know this the mouthfieves so the Trump administration. Partly,
Speaker 1: I thought, no book is going to make any difference, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to bother writing the book. I need
Speaker 1: to find some creative way to get across how threatened
Speaker 1: we are by this approach to government. And I talked
Speaker 1: Time Styre, him and his brother Jim, great guys quite
Speaker 1: like them. They were willing to fund something I was
Speaker 1: going to call the Trump Death Clock. That was going
Speaker 1: to be a billboard in Times Square that would scroll
Speaker 1: the number of deaths that could be attributed to Donald
Speaker 1: Trump by his mismanagement of the risks that the federal
Speaker 1: government manages. And this was in twenty seventeen. So my
Speaker 1: brain was wired to think this is all Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: and my experience ended up telling me no, my brain
Speaker 1: is wrong. This is actually much more complicated than Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: So when asked how much he is to blame, I
Speaker 1: think that's about the right number. Well, that leads me
Speaker 1: to the question of was this bad enough to teach
Speaker 1: us the lessons that we needed to learn. Before I
Speaker 1: answer it, you answered, I don't think it was. Because
Speaker 1: of the the nature of this society needs to change.
Speaker 1: I mean, Charity Deane doing her level best couldn't even
Speaker 1: keep one tubercular guy in quarantine. So I think we
Speaker 1: you know, I think we need re education camps. Basically,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of with you, and I have an idea
Speaker 1: of what they might look like. They're gonna have to
Speaker 1: be kind of four star re education camps. They don't
Speaker 1: have to be comfortable. But it's I thought. Weirdly, I
Speaker 1: was asked right before the pandemic by a reporter, so
Speaker 1: it's in print what I thought it would take for
Speaker 1: the society to change its attitudes, And weirdly, I said,
Speaker 1: a pandemic in which the rich work exposed equally, where
Speaker 1: rich and powerful people saw their children die just like
Speaker 1: poor people, and that it would take that kind of
Speaker 1: existential threat where people who actually have, you know, some
Speaker 1: say in how the society is organized, realize the doom
Speaker 1: they've signed up for if they keep going the way
Speaker 1: they're going. So this thing happens, and it rhymes with
Speaker 1: what I said, but it's not the same thing because
Speaker 1: the rich got to take a basically a pass, not everybody.
Speaker 1: But it was not terrifying all that terrifying if you
Speaker 1: could hold up in your mansion and let poor people
Speaker 1: go to their jobs and expose themselves. It was had
Speaker 1: it been threatening to children, that might that might have
Speaker 1: done it right. Yes, it's different. It's easier for people
Speaker 1: to tell themselves a story that happens to other people.
Speaker 1: If you had a disease like nineteen eighteen, where it's
Speaker 1: sweeping through the population and everybody's exposed and young people
Speaker 1: are dying, I think you get a different response out
Speaker 1: of the society. This is not the ending you would
Speaker 1: wish for. But I think it's true that I think
Speaker 1: two things at once are true. One, it wasn't quite
Speaker 1: what you would need to change the society. It wasn't
Speaker 1: quite the trauma. On the other hand, it was sufficiently
Speaker 1: traumatic that I do see some change. I think enough
Speaker 1: people have had a brush with tragedy that there is
Speaker 1: a different foot feeling in the air, and you're seeing
Speaker 1: it in the way Biden's it's the way bow Biden's
Speaker 1: able to move through the world in the sort of
Speaker 1: the nature of the resistance on the other side feels
Speaker 1: a little different to me than it did during the
Speaker 1: Obama administration. Do you think it's the end of the
Speaker 1: grovenoquist shrink government to the size that you can drown
Speaker 1: it in a bathtub era. I do. I do think that.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's going to play anymore. I think
Speaker 1: enough people had this like a lesson about that. But
Speaker 1: I think you're right. We're not going to have a
Speaker 1: clean solution, and there is a kind of re education
Speaker 1: that needs to occur. I mean it starts with like
Speaker 1: reintroducing civics into the classroom. I mean it's hypocritical because
Speaker 1: I didn't go through it, but if we did it,
Speaker 1: I'd be willing to do my two years of service.
Speaker 1: I think we ought to have two years of national
Speaker 1: service and young people just do it where they get
Speaker 1: to meet and work with people from different social classes,
Speaker 1: get to go work cleaning up nuclear waste for the
Speaker 1: Department of Energy, so they know they know something about
Speaker 1: what their government is doing, and they know there's valuable
Speaker 1: and they have a visceral kind of connection to it.
Speaker 1: I think those things are necessary before the society who
Speaker 1: starts to really change and stop putting political appointees at
Speaker 1: the head of the CDC, or put it another way,
Speaker 1: if you're going to leave them as political appointees, all right,
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, you can't change that. We're gonna have
Speaker 1: four thousand and something presidential appointees running the government. How
Speaker 1: about you change it so that they their terms are
Speaker 1: ten to fifteen years. General Accounting Office. Oddly, the head
Speaker 1: of that is a presidential appointee. The term is fifteen years.
Speaker 1: The surveys of the employees of that operation routinely our
Speaker 1: returned saying I have extremely high job satisfaction. My work
Speaker 1: is purposeful, our place is well run. That if you
Speaker 1: have kind of homeowners rather than home renters at the
Speaker 1: top of these organizations, you get a different kind of
Speaker 1: incentive for the leaders. Instead of managing for whatever the
Speaker 1: crisis might political crisis might be for the next two years,
Speaker 1: you're managing for the long run, and you get you
Speaker 1: get a CDC where, look, actually a pandemic might happen
Speaker 1: on my watch, because my watch is going to be
Speaker 1: a pretty long watch. You get a different relationship. The
Speaker 1: leaders know the institution in a different way. So, yes,
Speaker 1: that would be another reform. So you were saying that
Speaker 1: you want very good at biology in school, and you
Speaker 1: didn't take SIVIX, but you you were an art historian.
Speaker 1: And before we leave this conversation, we look at history backward,
Speaker 1: and we live it forward, and we write because we
Speaker 1: know the end of the story, but we don't know
Speaker 1: the end of our own story. And I'd like you
Speaker 1: to revisit the Michael Lewis who at Princeton was writing
Speaker 1: about Donna Tello and the antique and who was going
Speaker 1: to be an historian, and tell us how you got
Speaker 1: from there to hear Well. It wasn't until I was
Speaker 1: writing that thesis that I thought I loved doing this
Speaker 1: thing called writing, and had never any notion of myself
Speaker 1: as a writer, like I didn't write for school papers,
Speaker 1: and no English teacher ever thought I was especially able,
Speaker 1: just the opposite. But I got absorbed with this particular project,
Speaker 1: and I first confused that as a desire to be
Speaker 1: an art historian, I want to write art history books.
Speaker 1: And my thesis advisor actually said two funny things to me.
Speaker 1: Said One, you're not going to be an artist storian.
Speaker 1: That because there aren't going to be hard historians is
Speaker 1: basically what he said. We're going out of business here.
Speaker 1: There's no there're not gonna be any jobs. But I
Speaker 1: asked him during my thesis defense, I what he thought
Speaker 1: of the writing, because I was vain about it. You know,
Speaker 1: I'd gotten so absorbed with it. He was a perfect
Speaker 1: Princeton professor. He had a tweet jacket with patches on
Speaker 1: his elbow, and a pipe and salt and pepper mustache,
Speaker 1: and he pulls down his pipe and he says, put
Speaker 1: it this way, never try to make a living at it.
Speaker 1: And he didn't. That he didn't dissuade me shows just
Speaker 1: how much energy I had at that point. At that point,
Speaker 1: I just went off willy nilly. After I graduated from college,
Speaker 1: and I didn't care much about what job I had.
Speaker 1: I just was trying to have experiences and write about
Speaker 1: them and submit them to magazines. And it took two
Speaker 1: years before anybody published anything. They were lots of rejections.
Speaker 1: I did a no idea what I was doing. I
Speaker 1: didn't know any writers, basically, I mean, I didn't really
Speaker 1: have any kind of reason to think I should be
Speaker 1: doing this except I liked doing it. My favorite rejection
Speaker 1: was I went and spent some months ladling soup at
Speaker 1: the Bowery Mission and Young Men's Home. I'd do that
Speaker 1: after I got off of work, and it was just
Speaker 1: a volunteer job, and I got to know homeless people.
Speaker 1: They were clearly like different types of homeless people, and
Speaker 1: I thought how interesting it was, just how kind of
Speaker 1: cool and smart some of them were. And I started
Speaker 1: writing thing about the homeless and about destitution on the Bowery,
Speaker 1: and I looked through magazines about where you could submit
Speaker 1: things and you might get published if you weren't a
Speaker 1: published author, And apparently at that time in flight magazines
Speaker 1: like for Delta and American Airlines that it was like
Speaker 1: that was where you went. So I sent this thing
Speaker 1: about destitution and poverty in New York City, and I
Speaker 1: got these letters back from like the editor of Delta
Speaker 1: in Flight magazine saying, you know, it's really interesting, but
Speaker 1: which to get people to go to New York not
Speaker 1: So it really isn't for us. You know. The next
Speaker 1: experience you went in search up was working on Wall Well,
Speaker 1: so that and yeah, so that's it was kind of
Speaker 1: like I just there was a whole lot of accident
Speaker 1: in a period of a few years that ended with
Speaker 1: me with this job at Solomon Brothers and on Wall Street.
Speaker 1: And I started writing about Wall Street and that Delta
Speaker 1: in Fight magazine want to hear about that? Uh So
Speaker 1: that was the beginning of the career. I mean that
Speaker 1: really was the beginning of the career. Well, I'm very
Speaker 1: grateful to you for once having a long discussion with
Speaker 1: my son wanting him not to go to Wall Street.
Speaker 1: It only sort of worked, yes only, so, yes, that's
Speaker 1: the second one. It will work better. So how much
Speaker 1: of how much of your imagination do you attribute to
Speaker 1: having grown up in New Orleans? A lot, particularly since
Speaker 1: I grew up in a privileged in household. I think
Speaker 1: privileged elsewhere might have been a lot more deadly. Privilege
Speaker 1: to New Orleans was very messy in that it was
Speaker 1: the society was all mixed up, and I wasn't just
Speaker 1: spending lots of time with other rich people all the time,
Speaker 1: and I was with lots of different kinds of people,
Speaker 1: and not just economically but racially oddly, And the culture
Speaker 1: of New Orleans was such as it's not a literary culture.
Speaker 1: It's a verbal culture, but it's a storytelling culture, and
Speaker 1: there is some obligation when your mouth is open for
Speaker 1: it to be delivering something that's entertaining to the other person.
Speaker 1: Nobody really wants to hear about the weather, or they don't.
Speaker 1: They don't, They wouldn't even occur to them because the
Speaker 1: level of the expectations are so high about the pleasure
Speaker 1: that's going to occur between people when they interact, that
Speaker 1: you just do better. And I think that muscle of
Speaker 1: having to do better when you encounter someone is a
Speaker 1: very powerful thing. And I think it's kind of what
Speaker 1: happens when I sit down and write. I feel like
Speaker 1: I have to do better here than talk about the weather.
Speaker 1: I have a here's an odd New Orleans story that
Speaker 1: just popped into my head, and I remember thinking, when
Speaker 1: it's an anecdote. Two anecdotes about New Orleans, can I
Speaker 1: do this all right? One is I remember flying home.
Speaker 1: I was maybe like late twenties, and every time I
Speaker 1: flew home, I felt this like I'm going home. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is I love this place. It's just different. The
Speaker 1: people on the plane from Atlanta to New Orleans to
Speaker 1: just differ from all the other people on earth. They're
Speaker 1: a bunch of a lot of New Orleanians and there's
Speaker 1: just a festive atmosphere, and three guys walk in carrying
Speaker 1: like six phone books each, Like New Orleans just generates stories,
Speaker 1: like there's no explanation for why they have six phone books.
Speaker 1: They take all the overhead bin space with phone books,
Speaker 1: so there's no overhead bin space. So right behind them,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting down watching them come in. About right behind them,
Speaker 1: another dude comes and he's kind of a youngish guy.
Speaker 1: He looks up at the phone books and he looks
Speaker 1: at me and he smiles. He goes, he goes. Not
Speaker 1: much of a story, but it's got lots of characters,
Speaker 1: and it was he was a New Orleanian, and I thought,
Speaker 1: that's such a New Orleans moment, and it's also such
Speaker 1: a description of New Orleans. The other New Orleans story
Speaker 1: was right after Liar's Poker, my first book came out.
Speaker 1: I was all over national television, like David Letterman in
Speaker 1: a national television and all of a sudden is being
Speaker 1: recognized all the time on the streets. And I spent
Speaker 1: about a week or so doing having this happen to me.
Speaker 1: When I went home to New Orleans, and I got
Speaker 1: to my parents' house, still on the book tour, just
Speaker 1: staying with them, and my mother says, could you run
Speaker 1: over the Laginstein's and get this to hand me a
Speaker 1: grocery list? And so I went over the grocery store
Speaker 1: and it's a little local grocery store and I got
Speaker 1: a cart and I was pushing it down the aisle
Speaker 1: and there was a little old lady coming the other
Speaker 1: way and she starts to point, and I didn't recognize her,
Speaker 1: and I thought she saw me on Letterman or whatever.
Speaker 1: And she comes up right up close to me and
Speaker 1: she says, you're Malcolm and Rose grandson. And I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: how'd you know? She said, I saw it in your eyes.
Speaker 1: Those eyes are your grandfather's eyes. And that recognition, and
Speaker 1: it's the recognition that famous people get in a cheap
Speaker 1: way with their celebrity. New Orleanans get it in a
Speaker 1: very deep way because of the smallness and interconnectedness of
Speaker 1: the society. Like everybody's a celebrity. Everybody's kind of on stage,
Speaker 1: and that being on stage all the time, that's another
Speaker 1: muscle that's useful. Well, may you always stay on stage.
Speaker 1: And Michael Lewis's new book is called The Premonition. You
Speaker 1: can buy it wherever books are sold. Season three of
Speaker 1: Against the Rules will be out in the fall. Against
Speaker 1: the Rules as a production of Pushkin Industries. Sign up
Speaker 1: for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot fmp de. Find more
Speaker 1: Pushkin podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.