Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey against the rules. Listeners, this is Catherine Gerardo.
Speaker 1: I'm one of the producers on the show. We're hard
Speaker 1: at work on season three, which will come out this fall. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: like most of us, our host Michael Lewis, spent a
Speaker 1: lot of the last year cowering in his home, trying
Speaker 1: to find solace in Netflix and take out from his
Speaker 1: local deli. But unlike most of us, he also wrote
Speaker 1: a book during the pandemic. He wanted to report on
Speaker 1: people who saw it coming and did their best to
Speaker 1: stop it. The book is called The Premonition, and we
Speaker 1: got him to read a chapter of it just for
Speaker 1: you a heads up. It contained some salty language and
Speaker 1: a somewhat graphic medical see Anyway, here's Michael The Premonition,
Speaker 1: Chapter one Dragon. By the time Charity heard about the
Speaker 1: young woman, it was too late to help. The woman
Speaker 1: was on life support in the Santa Barbara County Hospital.
Speaker 1: The doctors had just found tuberculosis in her brain. Before
Speaker 1: they could find anything more, she was dead and that
Speaker 1: was just the start of the problem. Doctor Charity Deane
Speaker 1: was the newly appointed chief Health Officer for Santa Barbara County.
Speaker 1: A health officer was a stopper of things, and the
Speaker 1: most important thing Charity was meant to stop, in her view,
Speaker 1: was people from giving diseases to their fellow citizens. Michael
Speaker 1: Bacterium tuberculosis moves through droplets in the breath of the
Speaker 1: infected person and is able to hang in the air
Speaker 1: for impressive stretches. The vast majority of the risk is
Speaker 1: in the first hour, but it may be there for two,
Speaker 1: three or four hours, said Charity. No one actually knows.
Speaker 1: That's Charity re enacting herself. There were other things about
Speaker 1: TB that no one knew. Some TB patients infected no one,
Speaker 1: and others infected huge numbers. No one knew why. No
Speaker 1: one knew why some people were super spreaders was at
Speaker 1: their behavior, their biology, the biology of their particular case
Speaker 1: of TB. The disease had been around basically forever. At
Speaker 1: the turn of the twentieth century, it was the leading
Speaker 1: killer of human beings and it remains in many ways
Speaker 1: a mystery. It's the most intriguing infectious disease, said Charity.
Speaker 1: My favorite infectious disease. It can do anything or be
Speaker 1: anywhere in the body. We've had TB of the uterus,
Speaker 1: of the eye, of the finger. Once in Niesare, she
Speaker 1: treated a man whose TB had started in his lungs,
Speaker 1: wormed its way through his chest wall, and finally oozed
Speaker 1: in hus down the side of its torso. To move
Speaker 1: from one person to another, however, TB needed to invade
Speaker 1: the lungs. The young woman in the Santa Barbara County
Speaker 1: Hospital had been diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain, and
Speaker 1: had the bacteria confined itself to her brain, it would
Speaker 1: have threatened no one. If it had found its way
Speaker 1: into her lungs, it had the power to kill, and
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the people who had TB in their
Speaker 1: brain had it also in their lungs. Santa Barbara County
Speaker 1: had become almost famous, at least in disease control circles,
Speaker 1: for both the number and sheer terror of its tuberculosis cases.
Speaker 1: When people heard this, they didn't quite believe it. At
Speaker 1: first glance. The county was a tranquil eden of beige
Speaker 1: boulders and golden grass and California oaks. Oprah lived there,
Speaker 1: Ellen lived there. The great estates in the foothills overlooking
Speaker 1: the sea blended into one another to form a single
Speaker 1: tapestry of American affluence. Even the ocean felt private. But
Speaker 1: Santa Barbara County was both bigger and more complicated than
Speaker 1: it seemed. It had the highest rate of child poverty
Speaker 1: in the state. It sheltered maybe fifty thousand non citizens
Speaker 1: in abject squalor plus. All hell could break loose at
Speaker 1: any time. Wildfires and mudslides and oil spills and mass
Speaker 1: shootings scratched the surface of paradise, and you were plunged
Speaker 1: into the book of job. The chief health officer of
Speaker 1: Santa Barbara County never knew exactly where, or when or
Speaker 1: how the next TB outbreak might occur. The young woman
Speaker 1: who just died in the county hospital illustrated the point.
Speaker 1: No one had any idea she even had tuberculosis until
Speaker 1: she was on her deathbed. She'd had a husband and children,
Speaker 1: She'd lived in a crowded neighborhood. She'd worked inside a
Speaker 1: massive open plan office alongside three hundred other people. If
Speaker 1: the TB had reached her lungs, anyone should been anywhere
Speaker 1: near was now in mortal danger. That was Charity Deane's
Speaker 1: immediate problem. To figure out who, if any one, might
Speaker 1: be infected. She'd need to test tissue from the woman's lung.
Speaker 1: If the test came out positive, she need to call
Speaker 1: the company that employed the young woman and shut it
Speaker 1: down for long enough to test all three hundred of
Speaker 1: its employees, along with anyone they might have infected, along
Speaker 1: with anyone they might have infected, and on and on.
Speaker 1: In short, she might need to alert and alarm a
Speaker 1: big chunk of Santa Barbara County. But who was she?
Speaker 1: A nobody. Hardly any one in Santa Barbara County knew
Speaker 1: who she was or what she did all day She
Speaker 1: was invisible. Three years earlier, in two thousand and eleven,
Speaker 1: Charity had been a thirty two year old resident in
Speaker 1: internal medicine, pregnant for the third time in five years,
Speaker 1: when the Santa Barbara County medical director had asked her
Speaker 1: if she consider feeling an opening he had for a
Speaker 1: deputy health officer. The county required its health officers to
Speaker 1: possess both a medical degree and a master's in public health,
Speaker 1: and she had both. He also mentioned in passing, but
Speaker 1: so that Charity heard it loud and clear that the
Speaker 1: luxury she had of being married to a rich surgeon
Speaker 1: meant that she could afford to take the job. The
Speaker 1: job had no obvious appeal, at least to a normal
Speaker 1: young doctor. It paid a third of what she could
Speaker 1: earn starting out in the private practices that had already
Speaker 1: asked her to work for them. Doctors of Santa Barbara
Speaker 1: already referred to themselves as the working poor. Being a
Speaker 1: doctor in Santa Barbara without being paid like one, well,
Speaker 1: that was insane. Everyone tried to talk me out of it,
Speaker 1: said Charity. People couldn't believe it. They were like, you
Speaker 1: aren't seriously thinking of going to work for the county.
Speaker 1: They thought it meant that I was going to be
Speaker 1: a doctor down in the shiitthole basement of the County Clinic.
Speaker 1: The County clinic was where poor people without health insurance
Speaker 1: went for treatment. It was housed inside a decrepit facility
Speaker 1: erected a century earlier on the outskirts of Santa Barbara
Speaker 1: as a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. Charity still found herself
Speaker 1: drawn to the job. I couldn't figure out why my
Speaker 1: heart strings were tugged. The medical director handed her a
Speaker 1: thick binder whose pages described the job in detail. The
Speaker 1: Health Officers Authority in California it was called She read
Speaker 1: it closely. Health officers in California, like health officers across
Speaker 1: the United States and the rest of the free world,
Speaker 1: had a long list of responsibilities registering births and deaths,
Speaker 1: inspecting restaurants, counting bacteria in ocean water and swimming pools,
Speaker 1: managing chronic disease. None of that really interested her. Then
Speaker 1: she saw the phrase communicable disease controller. It was an
Speaker 1: official state role played by local health officers. Her mind
Speaker 1: lit up. I don't really care about obesity or diabetes.
Speaker 1: I actually don't give a shit about chronic disease. What
Speaker 1: I like is a crisis. What she more than liked
Speaker 1: was the kind of crisis that might be created by
Speaker 1: a communicable disease. She knew it sounded odd, but she
Speaker 1: had been consumed by this interest since she was a
Speaker 1: small child. Disease had shaped history, disease had crippled societies,
Speaker 1: but that's not why, at the age of seven, she'd
Speaker 1: become obsessed with it. It was gruesome death, it was
Speaker 1: the human powerlessness over it. In middle school, she'd created
Speaker 1: styrofoam models of viruses and hung them from her bedroom ceiling,
Speaker 1: just so I could stare at them and think about them.
Speaker 1: She taught herself French so that when the time came
Speaker 1: to move to West Africa to chase disease, as she
Speaker 1: assumed she one day would do, she'd have the ability
Speaker 1: to communicate. In college, as a microbiology major, she stay
Speaker 1: up late reading about yellow fever, tuberculosis in Spanish flu.
Speaker 1: My favorite microbes in college were the human pathogens that
Speaker 1: caused horrific disease, she recalled. I mean, nobody cares about
Speaker 1: plant viruses. In medical school at Tulane University, she'd ignored
Speaker 1: the derision of her fellow doctors and studied at the
Speaker 1: same time for a master's degree in public health, but
Speaker 1: only because Tulane unusually offered a degree with a focus
Speaker 1: on tropical disease. After that, she'd gone to Gabone and
Speaker 1: Niger to work as a doctor, in part because the
Speaker 1: odds seemed to her pretty good that whatever disease was
Speaker 1: going to replicate the destruction of past plagues would come
Speaker 1: from Africa. She knew that her obsession with pandemic disease
Speaker 1: was unusual, even off putting. I learned not to talk
Speaker 1: about it because when I talked about it, people thought
Speaker 1: I was crazy. But the fact remained that from a
Speaker 1: very young age, when she was feeling low, she had
Speaker 1: cheered herself up by reading books on bubonic plague. The
Speaker 1: ones with the grisly drawings she liked best. She read
Speaker 1: more of the fine print in the binder describing the
Speaker 1: role of the local public health officer. One sentence struck
Speaker 1: her as more important than all the others combined. Quote
Speaker 1: Each health officer, knowing or having reason to believe that
Speaker 1: any case of the diseases made reportable by regulation of
Speaker 1: the department, or any other contagious, infectious, or communicable disease
Speaker 1: exists or has recently existed within the territory under his
Speaker 1: or her jurisdiction, shall take measures as may be necessary
Speaker 1: to prevent the spread of the disease or occurrence of
Speaker 1: additional cases, to minimize horrific death, and to chase disease.
Speaker 1: The State of California had bestowed upon local public health
Speaker 1: officers extraordinary legal powers. Charity accepted the job. She typed
Speaker 1: out that one sentence of law and taped to the
Speaker 1: wall of her new office. Once a t B quarantine room,
Speaker 1: her office still had the original grates in the wall
Speaker 1: used to get fresh sea air into the patient's lungs.
Speaker 1: Sitting at her desk in Building four, she could hear
Speaker 1: the screams of the psychiatric patients from across the courtyard
Speaker 1: in Building three. In the halls, cabinets as old as
Speaker 1: the building stored medical instruments that belonged in a museum.
Speaker 1: The stairs led to a dank tunnel under the building
Speaker 1: that went to the old morgue. It was her kind
Speaker 1: of place. She had, in theory, incredible legal powers to
Speaker 1: prevent disease. She soon realized how few people in practice
Speaker 1: knew the law. Most to the citizens of Santa Barbara,
Speaker 1: including nearly all of the public officials, didn't even really
Speaker 1: understand what a public health officer was supposed to do.
Speaker 1: The public health officer had somehow come to be a
Speaker 1: recessive character. The other officials and the public expected her
Speaker 1: to lie low until called upon, usually to make some
Speaker 1: brief ceremonial appearance. The law's words felt strong, but their
Speaker 1: spirit felt weak. By her second year on the job,
Speaker 1: she found herself quoting the laws so often that she
Speaker 1: asked her assistant to laminate a copy of that one
Speaker 1: passage so that she might carry it with her in
Speaker 1: her briefcase. I'm in a meeting, trying to explain to
Speaker 1: people that I actually do have the authority to do
Speaker 1: something I need to do. She said, I really tried
Speaker 1: hard not to whip it out, but I pulled it
Speaker 1: out once a week. By the time she got the
Speaker 1: call about the young woman with tuberculosis in her brain,
Speaker 1: she'd read that one sentence aloud more than just about
Speaker 1: any other in her life. Lines weren't as easily performed
Speaker 1: to say, the verses of the twenty third Psalm, which
Speaker 1: she also loved, but she could bring them equally to life.
Speaker 1: Each health officer, knowing or having reason to believe what
Speaker 1: does that mean, should cry and point her finger in
Speaker 1: the air. It means suspicion. You only need to suspect
Speaker 1: that any case of the diseases made reportable by regulation
Speaker 1: of the department, or any other contagious, infectious or communicable
Speaker 1: disease exists or has recently existed within the territory under
Speaker 1: his or her jurisdiction. Any disease should cry and then
Speaker 1: parse the adjectives. Contagious isn't really a medical term, so
Speaker 1: ignore that they just tossed in the kitchen sink there.
Speaker 1: But you really need to understand the distinction between infectious
Speaker 1: and communicable. All communicable diseases were infectious, but some infectious
Speaker 1: diseases were not communicable. Communicable men a person could give
Speaker 1: it to another person. You could get lyme disease, for instance,
Speaker 1: but you couldn't give it to somebody else. Communicable diseases
Speaker 1: were the diseases that created crises. In an adjective, she'd
Speaker 1: found a vessel for her life's purpose. Shall take measures
Speaker 1: as may be necessary to prevent the spread of the
Speaker 1: disease or occurrence of additional cases, Shall, She'd exclaim, not
Speaker 1: a may A shall not think about it, not consider it,
Speaker 1: not maybe get around to it one day. If you
Speaker 1: feel like it, it's your duty. If you suspect disease,
Speaker 1: you can do whatever the hell you want. Now. She
Speaker 1: had a corpse with TB in a hospital and hours
Speaker 1: drive north. She'd ask them to move the body to
Speaker 1: the Santa Barbara Coroner's office, then call the coroner to
Speaker 1: ask him to send her a sample of the lung tissue.
Speaker 1: That's when the real problem started. At first, he wouldn't
Speaker 1: even come to the phone. Once she'd telephone him into submission,
Speaker 1: and he finally picked up. He simply refused to do it.
Speaker 1: Yet the law was the coroner was meant to do
Speaker 1: with any corpse whatever she told him to do. Instead,
Speaker 1: he explained to her why he wouldn't. To her growing incredulity,
Speaker 1: this seventy something coroner, who had contracted with the county
Speaker 1: to work part time and who clearly had only the
Speaker 1: vaguest idea of what he was talking about, began to
Speaker 1: lecture her about tuberculosis, saying that it was both dangerous
Speaker 1: and unnecessary to extract the young woman's lung, citing some
Speaker 1: study that purported to show that TB in a corpse
Speaker 1: subjected to surgery could become aerosolized and infect the surgeon.
Speaker 1: Charity Deane was at this point the chief health officer
Speaker 1: of Santa Barbara County. She was the youngest chief health
Speaker 1: officer in the history of California. She'd also spent three
Speaker 1: years running the county's TB clinic. She was legally responsible
Speaker 1: for every single case of TB in the county. Fancy
Speaker 1: doctors who had supervised her residency now called her to
Speaker 1: ask for advice about the disease, for crying out loud.
Speaker 1: She was about to be named president of the Tuberculosis
Speaker 1: Controllers Association of the entire State of California. She tried
Speaker 1: to be civil with the old coroner, but it was hard.
Speaker 1: I knew the study, it was a bullshit study, but
Speaker 1: the douchebag said he wouldn't do it, would not even
Speaker 1: allow someone else to come into his office and do it.
Speaker 1: She hung up and called the sheriff. She explained the
Speaker 1: situation sweetly and asked the sheriff to require the coroner
Speaker 1: to cut the young woman open and extract her lung.
Speaker 1: The sheriff didn't know the law either, it seemed as
Speaker 1: he said he wouldn't interfere with the coroner's authority, at
Speaker 1: which point Charity lost her patience. I couldn't believe he
Speaker 1: wasn't doing what I told him to do. She wrote
Speaker 1: out a legal order and delivered it to the sheriff
Speaker 1: in person. Then I waited for the phones to blow up.
Speaker 1: The sheriff couldn't simply ignore a legal order. He phoned
Speaker 1: up the Chief council for the Board of Supervisors to
Speaker 1: confirm his belief that a legal order issued by a
Speaker 1: local public health officer carried no authority. Santa Barbara's Chief
Speaker 1: Council looked into it, and to his surprise, discovered that
Speaker 1: the sheriff was mistaken. The woman was right. The only
Speaker 1: person whose authority trumped the health officers in cases involving
Speaker 1: disease was the governor of California, and then only if
Speaker 1: the governor had declared a state of emergency. With that,
Speaker 1: Charity considered the matter settled, but the coroner's office called
Speaker 1: her the next day to say that it wasn't. They said, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll do it, she recalled, but we won't do it
Speaker 1: inside the office because the building's old and lacks proper ventilation.
Speaker 1: I said, okay, could you do it outside? They said, okay,
Speaker 1: but only if you are here. Not for the first time,
Speaker 1: she wondered what would happen in Santa Barbara County if
Speaker 1: there was ever a serious outbreak of communicable disease. They
Speaker 1: won't even do an autopsy because there are worried about
Speaker 1: arioslised TV. She said, what the fuck are they going
Speaker 1: to do if it's arioslis ebola. It didn't help that
Speaker 1: this was all going down over Christmas. She just turned
Speaker 1: thirty seven, was newly divorced from the rich surgeon, and
Speaker 1: was a single mother to three young boys. As she
Speaker 1: drove to the County Morgue on the day after Christmas,
Speaker 1: she was unsure what awaited her. She sensed that the
Speaker 1: coroner and the sheriff and maybe some other people had
Speaker 1: grown irritated with her. Just how irritated became clear only
Speaker 1: as she rolled into the parking lot beside the Coroner's office.
Speaker 1: Seven people were waiting for her. Outside the morgue, all men,
Speaker 1: the coroner, the sheriff, and a bunch of his deputies.
Speaker 1: They had clearly come for the show. She'd driven straight
Speaker 1: from cleaning up the mess under the tree, and so
Speaker 1: she wasn't in her usual battle armor of Talbot's suit,
Speaker 1: pencil skirt and grandma heels, just attacky Christmas sweater and
Speaker 1: blue jeans. All the men wore full on hazmat suits.
Speaker 1: They look like they're about to walk on the moon,
Speaker 1: the whole team. You'd have thought this wuzzy bullet. The
Speaker 1: morgue itself was even more appalling than the public health office.
Speaker 1: Poking up from scrub oaks and dirt fields. It resembled
Speaker 1: more of the bathrooms at a highway rest stop than
Speaker 1: an official public office. Not for the first time, she
Speaker 1: wondered where they put the bodies. If ever, there were
Speaker 1: lots of gruesome deaths at once. At some remove on
Speaker 1: a picnic table lay a body bag with the young
Speaker 1: woman inside. The coroner was now just angry. He explained
Speaker 1: all over again that the entire operation was unsafe and
Speaker 1: that he was not going to risk opening up the
Speaker 1: body indoors. He sighted the bullshit paper again, this time
Speaker 1: to explain why he hadn't even brought his bonesaw with him,
Speaker 1: as the one known case of a surgeon becoming infected
Speaker 1: with TB by a corpse had involved a bone saw.
Speaker 1: Instead of the bone saw, he had brought along a
Speaker 1: pair of garden shears. Now he offered to her garden shears.
Speaker 1: They were brand new in Gleaming, with the word Ace
Speaker 1: on the red handles for the hardware store. If the
Speaker 1: new chief health officer wanted to cut open the young
Speaker 1: woman and remove a piece of her lung, she'd need
Speaker 1: to do it herself with garden shears. I had thought
Speaker 1: I was just there to watch, said Charity, and he
Speaker 1: turned it into a game of chicken. Medicine had always
Speaker 1: felt to her a man's world, especially in the places
Speaker 1: like here where it touched government. It was then charity.
Speaker 1: Deane realized, the real problem is that this man is frightened.
Speaker 1: She'd been around terrifying diseases most of her adult life,
Speaker 1: and it made a pact with herself not to fear them.
Speaker 1: If you're a truck driver, you know you're going to
Speaker 1: get into an accident sooner or later, so you just
Speaker 1: learn what to do if you are in an accident.
Speaker 1: She said. That's how you get over the fear. You
Speaker 1: just accept that you'll get the disease one day. Men
Speaker 1: weren't so accepting. She'd noticed, especially the big and supposedly
Speaker 1: brave ones. As a medical student, she'd seen the fear
Speaker 1: in the eyes of the New Orleans cops in the
Speaker 1: trauma center. They'd haul in some guy with a gunshot wound,
Speaker 1: but when they found out he had HEPSI or HIV,
Speaker 1: they'd squeal and go take a shower in chlorox from
Speaker 1: head to toe. Over and again. She's seen mesomorphs with
Speaker 1: crew cuts who'd happily run into a burning building to
Speaker 1: save a dog turn uncertain and uneasy in the presence
Speaker 1: of disease. Airborne diseases in particular seemed to spook them.
Speaker 1: That was the number one reason I could not get
Speaker 1: t be patients arrested. She said, the police would turn
Speaker 1: into these squeamish little girls. They'd sit in the car
Speaker 1: and let a nurse go get them. Charity was not
Speaker 1: without her own fears, both real and imagined. The walls
Speaker 1: of her office and home bedroom were plastered with post
Speaker 1: it notes, there is no shortcut to courage. Courage is
Speaker 1: a muscle memory. The tallest oak in the forest was
Speaker 1: once just a little nut that held its ground. Like
Speaker 1: most everyone else, she needed reminding. Unlike most everyone else.
Speaker 1: She reminded herself constantly. Her realization that the men outside
Speaker 1: the coroner's office were afraid in a way that she
Speaker 1: was not led to a thought, they don't think I'm
Speaker 1: going to go through with this, Then another, they don't
Speaker 1: think I will do it because I don't look like
Speaker 1: a person who would do it. Even in heel. She
Speaker 1: was only five foot six and slender. She had mixed
Speaker 1: feelings about her own looks, but men did not appear
Speaker 1: to share them. She'd gotten used to cat calls. She
Speaker 1: created a rule for herself when entering a meeting with
Speaker 1: a certain kind of mail, allow a thirty second recovery
Speaker 1: period before attempting to convey information upon which that mail
Speaker 1: might need to act. Men judge her by appearance and
Speaker 1: were badly deceived. The inside doesn't match the outside, she
Speaker 1: sometimes said of herself. She unzipped the body bag and
Speaker 1: looked at the corpse. A bone saw would have allowed
Speaker 1: her to cut right down the middle of the young
Speaker 1: woman's sternam, but with garden shears, she'd have to snap
Speaker 1: the ribs at the ends. She felt for the edge
Speaker 1: of the first rib snip. It was a sharp, thin sound,
Speaker 1: like a crab shell cracking snip. As she cut, she
Speaker 1: sensed the eyes inside the hazmat suits looking away. They
Speaker 1: had left the young woman's face uncovered. That was the
Speaker 1: most unsettling part. Normally, a surgeon saw only the tiny
Speaker 1: patch of flesh upon which she operated. The sight of
Speaker 1: the young woman's face made the operation feel personal, disturbing.
Speaker 1: She felt woozy and nauseous. I was just saying over
Speaker 1: and over in my head, don't faint, don't faint. And
Speaker 1: I was mad. This was such disrespect for her and
Speaker 1: for her family. But they were like, you want to
Speaker 1: see it, you get to do it. Snip. The crab
Speaker 1: shell finally cracked. She tossed the garden shears to one
Speaker 1: side of the body and pulled apart the woman's ribs.
Speaker 1: At that moment, I had this feeling, this feeling of
Speaker 1: such grief for her husband. She didn't show any feeling
Speaker 1: at all to the men, though she didn't want to
Speaker 1: give the douchebag the satisfaction. She needed a chunk of
Speaker 1: the woman's lung tissue to take back to Manny in
Speaker 1: the lab for testing. But as she reached into the
Speaker 1: woman with the garden shears, the coroner reached in too.
Speaker 1: He wanted to help. Should we look in her belly,
Speaker 1: he asked gently, Right, thought, Charity. If it was in
Speaker 1: her belly, then it was in her blood. And if
Speaker 1: it was in her blood, it was probably on her
Speaker 1: lung She felt around for signs of tuberculosis. Her internal
Speaker 1: organs were perfect, lovely. If the lungs were speckled and bumpy,
Speaker 1: I would know, and they weren't. Her hands, sensed with
Speaker 1: the would later find the TV hadn't ever left the brain.
Speaker 1: In the end, the coroner saved her the trouble of
Speaker 1: cutting out a piece of the lung with the garden
Speaker 1: shears by showing her how to release the lungs. They
Speaker 1: did it together. It was as if her nerve had
Speaker 1: changed his view of the situation. Now she held the
Speaker 1: young woman's lungs in her hands. This jello outside the
Speaker 1: human body, lung tissue didn't hold its form, and now
Speaker 1: she could see just how sure the coroner had been
Speaker 1: that none of this would ever happen. He had nowhere
Speaker 1: to put them. The only container in sight was an
Speaker 1: orange plastic bucket from home depot. She grabbed the woman's
Speaker 1: lungs and placed them into it, then tossed the bucket
Speaker 1: into the car and drove away to the men she
Speaker 1: left behind. The entire scene would remain a vivid memory
Speaker 1: to her. It was almost just another day in the
Speaker 1: life of the local health officer. They had no idea
Speaker 1: of the things she had done or what she was
Speaker 1: capable of. The coroner obviously hadn't even considered the possibility
Speaker 1: that she was a trained surgeon. Men like that always
Speaker 1: underestimate me, she said. They think my spirit animal is
Speaker 1: a bunny, and it's a fucking dragon. You've been listening
Speaker 1: to chapter one of Michael Lewis's new book, The Premonition,
Speaker 1: But we have more of Michael still to come. Stay
Speaker 1: with us after the break for an exclusive author interview.
Speaker 1: We're back with one more extra for you ATR listeners.
Speaker 1: In a very COVID safe interview, the author Michael Lewis
Speaker 1: agreed to talk about his new book The Premonition with
Speaker 1: the author Michael Lewis. Here's their hard hitting conversation. Good
Speaker 1: to see you, Michael. It's been too long. So look,
Speaker 1: I like dudes to ask you the kind of questions
Speaker 1: that you don't get asked that often. You get asked
Speaker 1: all the same questions on a book tour, and you
Speaker 1: get sick of answering them my bed and so first
Speaker 1: kind of insulting. We know from your biography that you
Speaker 1: got a d in biology your sophomore year in high school,
Speaker 1: and that you wiggle through the science requirement college by
Speaker 1: taking a course called Physics for Poets, and you were
Speaker 1: so insecure about it that you took it past fail
Speaker 1: and you flunked. So you have established that you aren't
Speaker 1: the go to guy for matters of science. What business
Speaker 1: do you think you have writing a book about a virus?
Speaker 1: You don't know me as well as you think you
Speaker 1: know me. All right, Yes, I did poorly in high school.
Speaker 1: Alogy and I didn't do well in physics and college,
Speaker 1: but I actually got my start as a writer on
Speaker 1: the science pages of The Economist. It's true that I'm
Speaker 1: nobody's idea of a scientist. No one would hire me
Speaker 1: in their lab. But there's a funny kind of advantage
Speaker 1: to having no clue about the subject when you enter it,
Speaker 1: because you're in the state of the mind of many readers.
Speaker 1: And I think my problem with science back in high
Speaker 1: school and even in college, it wasn't that I couldn't
Speaker 1: grasp it. It was just it was presented to me
Speaker 1: in the most mind numbingly boring way as kind of
Speaker 1: a fat, all complete rather than a search or request
Speaker 1: or a tool for curiosity. So in my defense, my
Speaker 1: attitudes towards science have changed, all right, next question. You
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Fifth Risk, and it seemed to
Speaker 1: be all about how horrible Donald Trump was and that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump was going to kill everybody because he wasn't
Speaker 1: managing the government properly, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And in this book Trump hardly appears. He's kind of
Speaker 1: a shadowy presence, but it isn't certainly not about Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: And in this other book you wrote the fifth risk.
Speaker 1: You were holding out all these public servants as heroes,
Speaker 1: and in this book there's some ones who are clearly
Speaker 1: not heroes, like they're clearly making a hash of things.
Speaker 1: In particular, people at the CDC, Could you reconcile all
Speaker 1: this for us so we can at least delude ourselves
Speaker 1: that there's some coherence to your work. Well, thanks for
Speaker 1: putting it that way. I'd say two things. One is
Speaker 1: that as I dug into the material that became the premonition,
Speaker 1: it became really clear to me that the causes of
Speaker 1: our horrible response to the pandemic ran much deeper than
Speaker 1: just one president. I didn't think of the government employees
Speaker 1: who performed badly in the pandemic as like villains. I
Speaker 1: thought of them as people who were trapped in a
Speaker 1: horrible system, and that the villain and in in this story
Speaker 1: is really a broken system, and that the heroes in
Speaker 1: this story, the people, were inside the system kind of
Speaker 1: trying to fight the system. I don't think the two
Speaker 1: things contradict each other in the way you described. I
Speaker 1: think your question is a little stupid. All right, that's
Speaker 1: one way to charm an interviewer. Let's see what else
Speaker 1: I have here for you? What do you expect to
Speaker 1: be the biggest mistake that readers meg about the story
Speaker 1: you were trying to tell, Like, what do you expect
Speaker 1: is going to happen after the book comes out where
Speaker 1: you're going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. That wasn't
Speaker 1: the point. You're missing the point. Well, that's funny you
Speaker 1: asked that because I've been thinking about that, and I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about it because after the big short was published.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't tell you how many calls I
Speaker 1: had from like people on Capitol Hill who wanted me
Speaker 1: to come testify or will you come speak to the
Speaker 1: Democratic Caucus or the Republican Caucus. But what the book
Speaker 1: was trying to say is it's these people I wrote about.
Speaker 1: I found the people who can explain the thing that
Speaker 1: was my only job. I was their stenographer. And that's
Speaker 1: what's happened again. And I know what's going to happen
Speaker 1: is that I'm going to get calls from like a
Speaker 1: senator saying, Wow, could you talk to me about what
Speaker 1: actually happened and what we need to do to I
Speaker 1: don't know, change disease control in the United States, And
Speaker 1: I'll say to them. You know, I know it's in
Speaker 1: the book, and I got a d in biology my
Speaker 1: sophomore year in high school. Why you asking me call
Speaker 1: those people? That's what I'll say. It's nice to see
Speaker 1: you hid and rare note of modesty and humility in
Speaker 1: that answer to the question. There's this kind of a
Speaker 1: false modesty, but I guess false modesty is better than
Speaker 1: no modesty at all. Why don't we end with this?
Speaker 1: I'm actually not all that curious about this, but the
Speaker 1: producers of Against the Rules asked me to ask you
Speaker 1: this question, and it's how does your book connect with
Speaker 1: the next season of Against the Rules? I am so
Speaker 1: glad you asked that. Finally asked me something as useful.
Speaker 1: There is a connection, a very deep connection. One of
Speaker 1: the things that became very clear when I was working
Speaker 1: on The Premonition was that the United States had an
Speaker 1: expert problem. So like newspaper reporters, when they needed to
Speaker 1: know something about epidemiology, we call a virologist and they
Speaker 1: treat them all the same. And if they need to
Speaker 1: know something about virology, they call the epidemiologists, or they
Speaker 1: just be these talking heads on TV who happened to
Speaker 1: have gotten somewhere near someone who knew something. We're presenting
Speaker 1: themselves as pandemic experts. At least part of the story
Speaker 1: in The Premonition is a story about experts that is
Speaker 1: not fully explored in the book, because the book really
Speaker 1: is a story, but that we will explore in the
Speaker 1: next season of Against the Rules. Thank you for your time, Michael,
Speaker 1: It's been my pleasure. If it's okay with you, I'm
Speaker 1: going to read the credits now. Against the Rules is
Speaker 1: written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by
Speaker 1: Katherine Girardo and Lydia Gencott, edited by Julia Barton and
Speaker 1: Audrey Dilling, with music by Stellwagen Sinfonett. Mia Lobell is
Speaker 1: our executive producer. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain,
Speaker 1: John Snars, Carli Miliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Emily Rosnick, Maya Kaney, Jason Gambrel, Kadija Holland,
Speaker 1: and special thanks to Charity Deane for lending her story
Speaker 1: and her voice to the Premonition. Against the Rules is
Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. Sign up for Pushkin's newsletter
Speaker 1: at Pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcast listen
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. Against the Rules, we'll be back with our
Speaker 1: new season this fall. The Premonition is out now. You'll
Speaker 1: find it wherever books are sold.