Why did COVID Decision-Making Go So Wrong? (with David Zweig)

Early in the COVID pandemic, the US closed schools and sent kids home. And then, the schools stayed closed—even as they began to reopen in other parts of the world. Experts and officials claimed that these measures sprang from “an abundance of caution.” But what was the evidence on the necessity of keeping kids home? And, looking back, did the benefits of prolonged school closures outweigh the costs?

This week, Nate interviews author and journalist David Zweig about his book examining COVID policies and school closure decisions during the pandemic. They get into why we tend to find cost-benefit analysis so difficult, how political polarization shaped decision-making during the pandemic, and how the COVID models failed.

Further Reading:

David Zweig’s book is An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.
I'm Nate Silver. My co host Maria Khannikova is off today,
but we do have a special guest. David Swag is
a journalist and author, most recently of the book An
Abundance of Caution, American Schools, The Virus and the Story
of Bad Decisions. He also writes a substack newsletter, Silent Lunch.
So welcome David. There are two reasons we're having you

(00:48):
on today. Why is I really like your book, In fact,
I endorse it. I blurred the back cover. And the
other is that it is Risky Business. It is a
show about making better decisions. That's our tagline, and this
is the case where a lot of really bad, high
stakes decisions were made. So welcome, Welcome to the show, David,
Thanks Nate, and to help you and the audience navigate,

(01:09):
we are covering quite a bit of territory today. I
want to kind of situate us at the start of
the pandemic, which may be a traumatic time frankly for
a lot of people. I want to talk through the
notion of cost benefit analysis and go through some terminology there,
talk about politics, and psychology talk about the model. So
there's a lot to get to. But I want to
first just ask, Okay, sometimes you'll hear this more often

(01:31):
from liberals who may be at made a Interesteff, we
didn't have the best possible COVID response, But why is
it important to talk about this? I mean, it's been
more than more than five years. What's your response to that.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Well, I'd say I have two responses. One is that
this was, to my mind, possibly the most important event
in some regards, you know, as far as infringing on
personal liberties of American citizens that we've seen in a
generation or more. And you know, when you compare it
to other events like I don't know nine to eleven

(02:04):
or the Iraq War, the amount of analysis and books
written and scholarly study of those events to me seems
like there should be that but times ten for this,
I mean, like the actual impact on every single person
in the country, and of particular interest to me children,
to my mind, has not remotely been adequately studied or

(02:29):
reckoned with one of the prime reasons I wrote my book.
And the second answer to your question is that, ultimately,
you know, I think, like any good books should be
my book is not really about the pandemic. That's the backdrop,
but hopefully what it's about is indeed to the topic
of your podcast. It's really, to use a medical word,

(02:49):
it's an anatomy of decision making, and my whole book
is interested in how do individuals, how do policymakers, and
how do we as a society make decisions, particularly when
we have limited information and in a time of crisis.
I use the pandemic as a case study or is
a back to kind of explore these these dynamics in

(03:12):
our country, where the reader hopefully comes away from the
book with an understanding about these kind of decision making
dynamics that can be applied really to any time that's happening,
not just a sort of retrospective.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Look, do you think there's some scar tissue where people
find it traumatizing it because, like so, we just had
two big books come out about Joe Biden, which is
a case that in certain ways is parallel where things
maybe people on the left kind of got wrong right
directionally speaking, do you think people are traumatized by this

(03:48):
experience and don't like talking about it?

Speaker 1 (03:50):
Well, I don't just think and I know it because
many people have told me so. But you know, a
reaction I've heard many times to the book is someone
said they wanted to put their fist through a wall
while they were reading it. Someone else said they cried,
people are cringing. Someone said they had to read it
in stages. But with all that said, to my mind,

(04:11):
this is something that is both a difficult but necessary read.
So Scar Tiss would be damned.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
So I do want to take us back now five
plus years roughly. You know, for me, it was kind
of a crazy time. This is just the climax of
the Democratic primary campaign. So I'm like flying around like
New Hampshire and South Carolina and various events, big conference
in Boston. Increasingly you see every flight, every flight, it's
a little bit emptier every time. You get a little

(04:41):
bit more worried about, you know, maybe we shouldn't be
gathering all these people together. You are in Westchester County, correct,
which is if people don't know, it's the immediate northern
suburbs of New York City, stereotypically nice, leafy houses, liberal,
kind of pro democratic politics, middle class, upper middle class

(05:01):
depending on the precise community. Right, And you're a dat
of too Yep, everything you said sounds accurate. I live
part time in Weschester County two. My mom grew up
in a town called Crotons, so I can visualize this
and like, so one might say, it's like not the
worst place to be in a pandemic, right, It's kind
of medium density. There tend to be parks and places

(05:24):
to go jogging. So what's your sense at the very
start of the pandemic when do you start to worry
this is going to be severe? How are you behaving?

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Like most people in my area when when things kicked off,
I listened to the experts. We locked down. I'm a
little embarrassed to admit we even wiped our groceries when
they came in. So I did not start out as
a contrarian on this. I had no political motivations in
this at all, and I had no reason to disregard

(05:54):
what we were being told simultaneously. However, within like day
one of so called remote learning, it was very obvious
to me that this was not going to work over
a long period of time. It seemed a reasonable trade
off initially based on the information we were given, so

(06:15):
I wasn't disregarding that, but Nevertheless, this still seemed like, whoa,
how is this going to play out? Because this is
not working. I had a third grader and a fifth
grader at the time, and it was just obvious this
was going to be a disaster, and that really led
me to start digging into this.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
So when did you have these moments, David where you
felt like, oh my god, there's not a lot of
trustworthy information. What were those those inflections?

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah? So, like I said, I sort of had no
reason initially to disregard what we were being told. But
my nature, just my disposition is to always be somewhat skeptical,
and initially I wasn't pursuing this professionally at all. It
was just sort of my own need to feel informed
about what was going on. And what changed for me

(07:07):
was I started realizing the information was getting I started
emailing infectious disease experts and epidemiologists and others, almost all
of them in Europe because the ones in the States
weren't responding or didn't have the information. But I started
reaching out to people in Europe trying to get more information,
and I very quickly had this strange feeling. I'm like,

(07:29):
holy shit, like none of this stuff is really being
printed in the Times or I'm not seeing this elsewhere.
And then that's when I was like, all right, maybe
I need to do something about this. I'm in the media.
You know, it's like the media is disappointing me. Well, okay,
then I guess it falls on my shoulders. And I
was writing another book at the time, obviously totally unrelated
to the topic. I just couldn't concentrate on anything. All

(07:51):
I could think about was this insane, you know, circumstance
that we were in. And then just more specifically, Nate,
toward the end of April, I was walking with a
friend of mine on the high school track here in
my town and we were dutifully separated on like lanes
one and four, wearing masks most likely. And by the

(08:14):
end of April, I think it was new cases in
New York had dropped by something like fifty percent. And
as you'll recall and everyone else will, you know, we
were told and the official slogan was fifteen days to
slow the spread that began in March, and then they
tacked another thirty days onto that, and you know, and

(08:34):
there was seemingly, to my mind like there was no
real debate or pushbackers, just like, oh yeah, I remember
how we told you fifteen days. Now we're adding another thirty.
And so the thing is, the reasoning behind the fifteen
days to slow the spread was we had to prevent
hospitals from being overwhelmed. And you know how, we were
shown this this graph of you know, if everyone just

(08:56):
follows instructions, you'll have this gentle slope, and if you
don't follow instructions, we'll have this spike and the hospitals
will be overwhelmed. So by the end of April, cases
had fallen, new cases had fallen something like fifty percent.
And I said to my friend, I'm like, oh, well,
do you think schools are going to open next week?
You know, I assume, And he's like, what are you
talking about. I'm like, well, we did it. We flattened
the curve, man. We we had a very specific goal

(09:18):
that we were told we needed to achieve. We achieved it.
We flattened like literally, and and then he was like, dude,
they're not going back. They're not going back to school,
and like, still, even though I've retold this story a
million times and talk about in the book The Hairs
on the back of my neck still stand up, because that,
to me was one of the in was like the
initial moment where I'm like, oh, like, so that's really

(09:41):
weird that we're in a country where the government told
us like, here's the thing you need to do, here's
the goal that we're trying to achieve. Then we achieved
that goal, but but then they just kept going anyway.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, I know, people forget how much goodwill there was, right, Like,
so when shit hit the fan, like kind of Rudy
Gobert Tom Hanks day, Right, I was flying to Kansas City,
where my partner's father was in hospice cares. So, you know,
to be in an environment like that, in a kind

(10:14):
of rural Missouri hospital at a time when this disease
is getting to spread around the country was I think
scary for everybody involved. Right, But we wound up staying
in Kansas City for a month because there's a giant
red circle around New York City. Of course, there's no
way to ascertain cases in Kansas City. I call the
Department of Health in Missouri. They're like, have you been
to Wuhan, China, Well, then you can't get a COVID

(10:36):
test kind of thing, right, But then it was that
question of like, what is the endgame here?

Speaker 1 (10:40):
Right?

Speaker 2 (10:41):
I remember we had friends over like you. At first
I was very cautious, remember, like yelling at a stranger
for not wearing a mask on an elevator and some
carini ish behavior there, right, But gradually there was kind
of this thing where you start to I roll and
group chat and you're like, we can't really not do
and we don't even have kids, you do, right, we

(11:01):
can't really stay cooped up for the definite future, right,
because you could project fotward that like there was no
there was no plan at all.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
So one of the things that was really important to me,
and you know what I call like a record scratch
moment in the book is when at the end of
April and beginning of May, twenty two countries in Europe
began reopening their lower schools. So this is not like
one tiny schoolhouse in the you know, in the countryside

(11:30):
of you know, Denmark, twenty two countries and this includes
massive cities like Paris and you know and elsewhere. And
toward the end of April, the education ministers of the
EU met or met you know, at least online and
they said, we've observed no negative consequences of this. They

(11:52):
met a second time in June and they hade the
same reaction and that for me, I remember watching the
video of this and like I just it was like
a sense of unreality because that is the type of
thing that should have been splashed across the front pages
of every newspaper. This should have been you know, crawling
on the screen on every cable news network. This was

(12:14):
the news. Ostensibly we were waiting for Europe looked at
all the same information we had and came to a
very different conclusion about what was wise, and for them
was we should open the schools. And it is not
because Europe controlled the virus, which is like one of
the false arguments about oh well Europe did that, because

(12:34):
they know they didn't. I give an analysis within my book.
You know, maybe on a country level when you look
at it, but if you look at different you can
match up city to city, small town to small town,
and go on and on and on and see that
in Europe they had cases that were above, that were below,
and that were around the same. It was all over
the map, you know, literally and figuratively. So they didn't

(12:56):
quote control the virus. I think that you know, they
weren't doing mass mandates across the board, they weren't doing
distancing across the board of six feet. They didn't have
have the filters, they didn't have barriers across the board,
none of this stuff that we were told, and nevertheless
they said we haven't observed any negative impact. That is
an extraordinary moment that this was ignored and then if

(13:17):
it was ever mentioned, was waved away. I ultimately wrote
about it in June I think that meeting, and you know,
and I talk about it in my book, but this
was not covered. Essentially, this was just memory hold. So
that was one key point, key moment. Another one was
when the cases had fallen in New York City, as

(13:37):
I mentioned, you know, by the end of April dropped
something like fifty percent. Another key moment was an article
that had come out on NPR. Of all places where
they talked about the where they talked about the daycares
and the YMCAs, tens of thousands of kids were in
these programs early on and they observed no real outbreaks

(14:02):
or no kind of like overt negative impacts of this.
And then lastly there was the study out of Sweden
where they never closed the lower schools. And by the way,
Stockholm is, you know, that's a major city. We had
like empirical evidence just kind of like screaming at us
in the face, and it just kept being waved away.

(14:23):
So those were kind of like three or four really
important moments quite early in the pandemic when it was
clear that schools were not driving the pandemic, and indeed,
tons of studies later on showed how schools by and
large tended to mirror at most or or be below
the community rates of infection.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Do you want to talk a little bit, So, first
of all, it is an election year. Do you think
the polarity of this was inevitable? What if Hillary Clinton
had gotten a few more thousand votes in Wisconsin, Michigan,
Pennsylvania and Hillary Clinton had been president, do you think
this would have polarized in reverse?

Speaker 1 (15:02):
You know, it's a counterfactual, so who's to say. But
I do think, based on all the evidence that I
describe in my book, it seems impossible to not see
it that way. That and I you know, and I believe,
and you can tell me if you disagree, But I
think I make a pretty strong, like lawyerly persuasive case

(15:25):
that much of the response in America from the public
health establishment, from the legacy media, from the broader sort
of like left wing you know, elites, so to speak,
was reactionary against Trump and against Republicans. And you know
that's not just sort of like an opinion. There's all
sorts of like interesting data on this, and also you know,

(15:46):
my anecdotal experience of this, you know, and we can
get into it. You know, there's the countless numbers of
doctors and others who reached out to me saying that
they agreed with the stuff I was writing, but they
were afraid to say so publicly, or they were explicitly
told they couldn't say so. I don't make this statement
lightly about the left being reactionary. I think a lot

(16:09):
of people and left weren't even aware that they were
being reactionary. I don't even know how much they were
thinking about it. This is what the people from on
high were telling them. So, you know, we could get
into it. But it's like most these you know, most
experts in anyfield have a relatively narrow range of expertise.
But yet somehow this is slightly tangential to your question.

(16:29):
But somehow anyone who was a quote epidemiologist, anyone who
had MD after the name, they all of a sudden
became experts in like an entire way of living your life,
an entire sort of societal response.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
I can't I can't resist the bait about the way
that experts were thrown around and they I mean, first
of all, sometimes it was just like blatantly exclusionary, where
if you're you know, like Jay Boicharia who now works
to the White House, right perfectly what credential expert, but
he was going against the consensus, so therefore was kind
of black balls too strong a phrase. He had a

(17:03):
strong voice and social media and so forth right, but
like who is an expert when it comes to COVID policy?

Speaker 1 (17:10):
So that's an awesome question, and it's one of the
to my mind, I think key threads in my book
where I discussed the idea that only certain people were
allowed really within the public conversation and within the media
to weigh in on what we should be doing. There's

(17:31):
sort of two problems with that. One is that someone
like Anthony Fauci has a particular at least ostensibly a
particular expertise within infectious diseases and perhaps how to manage them.
He does not have an expertise in the values of
society and in second order effects of non pharmaceutical interventions

(17:52):
and mitigations that I know, that's like a mouthful, but
in plain English, he's not an expert on what happens
to children who when schools are closed and they won't
be able to graduate, you have kids stuck at home
with an abusive parent. Because child abuse cases had skyrocketed,

(18:13):
and by the way, we knew this data as early
as April of twenty twenty. They already had indications that
very very bad things were happening to a lot of
really vulnerable kids. So Anthony Fauci, you know, and others
sort of like within that lane, have a very specific
range of knowledge and expertise, and yet they were given

(18:35):
this mandate really on being the overall sort of director
of society. And then to make matters worse, Nate, there
were other people who sort of fashioned themselves as these
like COVID pundics, who really for much of the population
dictated how they were supposed to think about what was

(18:57):
prudent and what was critical or not critical about various
interventions that we had to be subject to.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Yeah, my model of this right, as you have kind
of one group of experts that might attempt to predict
how bad the disease will be, both in terms of
number of cases and mortality under certain scenarios. You might
have another group of experts, maybe more economists, who talk
about what the what the trade offs are, what are
the consequences of closing schools, And then it's a society's

(19:28):
job to, in our flawed democratic system way that expert
evidence and make what our ultimately political decisions. But I
want to set one thing up, and maybe it's kind
of an inside baseball question about the reporting of the book,
But so, why the decision to focus so much on

(19:48):
schools right? Why that focus?

Speaker 1 (19:50):
I mean, I use schools right as a launch point
into this sort of larger Obviously I get into a
lot of mask mandate stuff and all these other interventions
imposed I would say schools and children in tandem, because
I'm really concerned about not just the school closures, but
the broader sort of view of children in society during
in America and the positioning of them as these sort

(20:12):
of like silent super spreaders and the interventions that were
imposed on them in our country in a sort of
somewhat uniquely aggressive medical culture that we have here, you know,
where it's like two year olds had to be masked
in America, whereas in Europe, the ECDC, that's their version
of the CDC, they didn't even recommend that kids in

(20:34):
primary school wear masks at all. And you know, the
World Health Organization they had mask mandate. I think it
was age six and up. So the fact that just
just one of the zillion examples, the fact that it
was like required for two year olds in America to
wear masks was you know, it was quite unusual and
worthy of comment. So the reason I mentioned this is

(20:55):
is to me, the kind of like biggest unforced error
in America was the long term closure of schools, and
then secondarily the impositions imposed on children when schools were open. Finally,
that of all the harms that happened, to my mind,

(21:16):
this one is, you know, and it's hard to quantify
this stuff, mate, but this was perhaps the most consequential,
and if not the most consequential, certainly the most unnecessarily
harmful of all the interventions that were imposed.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
Yeah, I want to get one. So I guess I'm
going to ask you an epidemiological question, right. So one
of the first things that was there very early on
that this disease was hitting older people exponentially harder than
younger people, which is not true for all pandemics. So
can you explain why that was true for this particular coronavirus.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
One of the things that that I'm really interested in
his narrative formation and you know, and I talk about
that a lot in the book is like how these
certain narratives and ideas were formed and then how they
were enforced. And one of them is even when you
think about the term novel coronavirus, even the word novel

(22:22):
adds on an immediate type of association for people. This
is new, and often with a disease, something that's new
is going to be particularly scary. Think about the word COVID.
It's written in all caps. It's different than just like
the flu, you know, in lowercase. These things, these things matter,

(22:43):
I think to some extent. And the reality is that
coronaviruses have been with us for a zillion years. Much
of the common colds that we get are from coronaviruses.
There's a lot of literature that shows that SARS Kobe two,
which causes COVID, you know, the novel coronavirus, that it
behaved very similarly to way other coronaviruses had behaved. And

(23:06):
I interviewed this gentleman who's a specialist in actious diseases
and looking historically from an ethical perspective about how we
respond to these things, and he kind of went into
a whole thing with me saying like, look this, He's like,
this was positioned from the beginning as something that was
quote unprecedented. He's like, if I can tell you one thing,

(23:28):
please don't use the word unprecedented. It's not our reaction
was unprecedented. But having a highly contagious respiratory virus, that's
old news. And we shouldn't have been surprised that this
was particularly dangerous to old people. There are old people
who die every year from just common cold coronaviruses in
you know, long term care homes. It's very typical, and

(23:52):
children are largely unscathed. It's like a common cold. So
unless we were given evidence or shown a reason why
to think that this should be performing or acting differently,
we should have gone with what to expect. You know,
in medicine, there's that expression, if you hear or hoods,
think of a horse, don't think of a zebra. I

(24:12):
mean everyone and I talked about this in the book.
Everyone thought of the zebra, but we should have thought
of the horse. Whether this came from a lab or not,
it's still a coronavirus and still largely behaved similarly to
other coronaviruses, if perhaps more virulent for older people. Though,
of course.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
We'll be right back after this message. I'm going to
give you some phrases and you can kind of use
these as jumping off points. I think these are all
phrases where there was some degree of ambiguity or maybe

(25:02):
strategy and how they were employed. But let me start
with precautionary principle. It's kind of related to the title
of your book. What does that mean? What should it mean?

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, I spend a lot of time talking about the
precautionary principle. I think it's fascinating. I interviewed this scholar
named Eric Winsburg, who's a philosopher of medicine and particularly
of ethics in modeling, and we talked a lot about
the precautionary principle. And one thing I learned from him,

(25:34):
and that I talk about in the book, is that
a lot of philosophers don't even believe there's such a
thing as the precautionary principle, because it's based on an
assumption that you know how much harm may come to
you from doing one thing and how much harm you'll
avoid by doing this other thing that already within the
beginning of the precautionary principle. It's based on certain assumptions. Now,

(25:56):
the precautionary principle, as we conventionally understand it, is a
prudent and reasonable course of action in certain circumstances. But
those circumstances require a real kind of specific set of
data or information that you can be certain about, and

(26:16):
very very quickly within the pandemic, we no longer met
that specific criteria for the precautionary principle. Certainly so Nate.
By the end of April beginning of May, if particular,
if we're thinking about schools, millions of kids twenty two
countries reopen their schools. At that point, you can no
longer say that we are keeping schools closed. Here quote

(26:38):
out of an abundance of caution, you just can't so.
But this was the sort of like mic drop, It's like, well,
I'm just being cautious. It became very hard for most
regular people to push back against something when they're like,
who wouldn't want to be cautious?

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah. There's kind of this effective altruist slash rationalist adjacent
phrase called Chesterton's fence, which is the idea that if
you see a fence out in the middle of the wilderness,
then you probably shouldn't remove it, right, Maybe it's preting
you from bears or snakes or who knows what, right,
And that's I think a more coherent version of the

(27:16):
precautionary principle, or like be wary of uprooting society if
there might be unknown consequences. But it seemed like, if anything,
that might be the reverse of it, right.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
Just to kind of dontail with your point there. In medicine,
everyone knows the cliche of first, do no harm, yea,
and we reversed that in the pandemic that typically what
you're supposed to do ethically is you don't act first
and then try to figure out things you first. You
know there's a reason why the FDA's you know modo,

(27:50):
you know, or their mandate is first you have to
find out if something is safe and effective, then it
gets approved by the FDA. Yet we did the opposite
in the pandemic. We had all these interventions because the
school closure is an intervention. That's not the norm. The
norm is for kids to be in school, that's the default.
But we flipped the default. And again there could be

(28:12):
some argument made for that in you know, March tenth
of April twenty twenty. But once there was an enormous
amount of empirical evidence that millions of kids in school
was not having a catamoclysmic effect. The precautionary principle or
this quote acting out of an abundance of caution, like

(28:33):
I titled my book, this was just a complete bastardization
of what that actual sort of principle is about and
how it can or should be used.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
The two word phrase quote no evidence. I came to
be very wary of, right, because you'd read things like, oh,
there's there's no evidence that children transmit the disease less
effectively than adults, right when like though the way that
we used to me, there's like there's no absolute proof, right,
when there's lots of evidence, right, there might be pulminary studies.

(29:07):
They're also you know, to use term that our listeners
will know there are Bayesian priors, right, you know, we
probably had strong priors to believe that, yes, if you
got this disease, like almost every other disease, you would
get some degree of immune protection from that. I mean,
how did a certain faction manage to wrangle the default

(29:28):
toward being on their side? How did that become the default?

Speaker 1 (29:33):
I think a lot of it has to do with that.
We have a very very large degree of homogeneity of
uniformity within certain very influential institutions in our country, and
in particular to the pandemic. We think about public health
and within the legacy media. And the uniformity, there's two

(29:58):
aspects to it. One is sort of political uniformity that
both of these kind of institutions tend to lean left
the people within them. And number two, they also to
self select for a certain type of person. So you
have this kind of thing where you had almost everyone
there on the left in these important institutions in our

(30:20):
country during the pandemic. And not only were they all
kind of largely of the same political persuasion, but they
were also most of them, not all, but most of
them are of the same type of personality type that
got to the level of success where they are so
all that merged together, Nate is it leads to a
situation where when Donald Trump tweeted in July, schools should

(30:45):
open in the fall or schools must open in all
caps or a bunch of exclamation points. That was immediately
radioactive to a lot of these people, and to whomever
else it wasn't radioactive. They got the message quickly that
you cannot agree with Donald Trump on anything. And there
was such a sort of enforced uniformity within these institutions,

(31:09):
within public health, and within the media that that's how
you get to a circumstance where something manifestly crazy is
accepted by a very large portion of society. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
The next phrase I wanted to ask you about, which
I think a quite complicated phrase actually, is scientific consensus.
What does that mean? What should it mean?

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, this was bandied about all the time, and this
you know, what's nice is your questions here. Everything kind
of threads together because the idea of a scientific consensus
was to a large extent, or at least to some
extent manufactured. Once I started writing some articles that were

(31:52):
challenging to some of the establishment views, but I was
writing them in largely kind of legacy media outlets, so
it's kind of had a different type of impromoter, you know,
attached to it that people could accept it. I started
getting emails from people around the country, including a lot
of doc and including some former CDC and former NIH people,

(32:13):
and they would say most of them would start off
something like, thank you so much for this, you know,
for writing this article. I agree with the points you're
making in here. This just doesn't seem like it's beneficial
for schools to be closed. I think it's really harmful.
I don't see the value in mask mandates on these
little kids, or barriers on their desks, on and on
whatever it may be. And then they would say, but

(32:34):
all of this is off the record.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
And then the second part of that is some of
these people were told explicitly by their bosses, you know,
when we're talking like at you know, some of our
top university hospitals in the country. There was a particular
physician who I spoke with who worked in the nick you,
that's like the the pediatric or pick you pediatric intensive
care unit. And she had said to this was like
a small kind of like niche media outlet, so it

(33:00):
didn't have a big readership. But she had done an
interview after the vaccine had come out and was available
then for adolescents, and she said, look in our pick
you we've had more kids, more patients here from Meyer
Kurt Artists following the vaccine than we had COVID patients

(33:21):
in an entire year. Now this was someone I just know,
this shouldn't matter. She was like very much like a
lefty democrat, like she had no motivation behind this. She
was just telling the truth. This is just simply what
happened in the intensive care unit for pediatrics in her hospital.
This is what happened. Her boss told her, you are

(33:43):
never to speak to the media again about this. So
people need to understand when we are told there's a
scientific consensus on something, that consensus very much maybe manufactured,
it's an illusion. So I had people, you know, contacting me,
you know, because they self censored, or you had people

(34:04):
like this physician who I just talked about, where they
were explicitly told not to say things. And then the
third category, mate, aren't all the experts outside the United States.
It's quite remarkable when you think about in the modern
era it was. And I had some sort of joke
about this in the book. It was as if we had,
you know, rewound the clock like five hundred years and

(34:25):
the message from the continent hadn't reached us yet, you know,
across the Atlantic that like, there were plenty of public
health experts throughout Europe who viewed what was happening very
very differently from what was happening here, yet that somehow
was not included in the consensus. So the idea of
a consensus is almost always BS, or certainly was during

(34:50):
the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
For the next phrase, this would be the last one.
I'm gonna give your pick between two, either flatten the
curve or social distancing.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
Oh god, I'll pick social distancing. You know, I discuss
it at length in the book. I make a really
to my find valiant effort to try to track down
the origin of six feet of distancing. You know, as
everyone now knows, this was made up. And I would
just say on that point that I actually don't think

(35:21):
it's unreasonable to have benchmarks for like behavior, because we
need something to aim for. It's a bit too vague,
particularly if you're talking about like schools for example, or
it's like do your best. You know that's going to
be interpreted differently and it could lead to a contentious
and chaotic kind of environment. However, the way that these

(35:41):
interventions were presented to the public, they were presented with
such a degree of certainty about like their effectiveness and
a degree of certainty about the evidence behind them, that
it led to this perverse situation where you had people,
you know, I likened it to sort of like a

(36:02):
master carpenter, you know, the precision you had you know,
teachers and school janitors with with tape measures of r
up this is five feet and three quarters. Nope, this
isn't going to work, and they're measuring down to this
was madness. There was never anything particular about somewhere between
five feet and seven feet that made something magical. So

(36:24):
if they want to create a benchmark, that's okay, But
then you have to say, look, we don't have strong
evidence for this being a particularly magical distance, but try
to aim for it if you can. Here's why we
think it might be helpful. But you know, the American
Academy of Pediatrics, early on their initial guidance said, and

(36:44):
you know that one of the people from the AP
discussed this in an interview. He had said, look, if
you can do six feet, great, but if you can't,
don't worry about it. It's far more important to get
the kids in school. We don't think there's any real
good evidence that the benefit of an extra couple of
feet is going to matter in the scheme of things. That,
of course, was reversed after Donald Trump's tweet. So we

(37:05):
had inklings of a reasonable sort of idea about social distancing,
but those sadly kind of evaporated relatively quickly, and then
it became this very militant type of idea.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
No, well, some of it is kind of is ritualistic, right.
I think I heard friends in Mexico that like, using
ultra violet technologies was kind of this ritual they used, right.
I mean, in New York City, we would put our
mask on to walk past the hostess sand in a
crowded restaurant, right, and then go eating a room full
of people. Everyone's mouths open, right, So you're reducing their

(37:38):
risk by zero point on one percent, But like I
do want to you know, I do want to get
into a little bit more of the evidence. Well, how
strong is the evidence on the effect of school closures.
So you'll see some studies saying it's really bad. See
another city is saying only sort of bad. Right, But
what's what's your best review of the evidence.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
Our intuitions, and particularly our intuitions with medical matters are
often wrong. And I'm sympathetic to the idea of anyone
which included me in early on, who would think, well,
of course school closers are going to have some sort
of benefit. It's a bunch of snotty kids running around
or teenagers gathering. Of course, that you know intuitively makes sense.

(38:22):
Other people similarly, well, of course, having like a cloth
in front of your face strapped on, of course that's
going to have some sort of benefit. There's this intuitive sense.
But what I show in the book there's a zillion
examples throughout history, including recent history, where things that seem
really obvious, where it's like, well, if course, if kids

(38:42):
are we're seeing a spike in peanut allergies, well, of
course we should dial back exposure to peanuts in in
little kids because that's exactly what the American Academy the
Pediatrics told us to do, and that was the exact
wrong advice. It was literally the opposite of what they
should have done. You know, they said, uh, doctor Spaga,
you said, you know, put a baby on their stomach,

(39:03):
that'll prevent sids because they could choke. Wrong, bad advice.
We should actually do the opposite. There's a zillion things,
I'm sure you know of of many examples where things
that seem obvious that they will be beneficial once you
actually use science, once you actually look at the evidence,
it turns out, oh my god, this thing that seemed
to be one way is not so. So the reason
I mentioned all of this is that you or people

(39:25):
listening might think, well, of course they had some benefit.
The reality is they had no benefit any intervention. There's
this phrase called voltage drop within medicine, which is like
that they expect when you do something that its impact
is going to wane over time. People don't comply with
things that are uncomfortable. Wearing a mask, human beings, you

(39:48):
tug at them, even if even unconsciously you're pulling on it.
You do things and also people, even the introverts among
us were social creatures, and there's cellular phone data that
I talked about in the book. Even well before they
started easing restrictions, people started moving around that closing schools
could have a benefit need for a week or a

(40:10):
couple of weeks, if done in conjunction with everything else
being closed. But there is zero evidence that over time,
having them close over a long period of time was
going to have any benefit at all, because everyone was
mixing anyway. And that includes, by the way, not just voluntarily.
As we know, a significant portion of the country were
never locked down. These were the people you know in

(40:31):
the in the slaughterhouses, the cashier in a store, the
people fixing the electrical lines and so on, and the
healthcare workers. So a significant portion of our country were
never even allowed to be locked down. So for all
of those reasons, it should make sense now to anyone
listening why extended school closures were never going to be beneficial.
When you had everyone moving about, and you had adults

(40:53):
going to restaurants and grabbing a drink at a bar,
while at the same time you have a healthy kid
locked in their bedroom for six months or for twelve months,
it made no sense epidemiologically or ethically.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, Castinos were open, as I experienced a couple of times.
I only went after it got vaccinated. I was a
good boy on that. But I want to kind of
back up to something we've been kind of dancing around
a little bit. Why is it so difficult for people
to accept the notion that we need to do some
form of cost benefit analysis?

Speaker 1 (41:25):
I mean, this is perhaps, you know, a jaundiced view
of things, but people like to be told what to do.
Some portion of people in a certain way, and what
we saw are at least some people in our country.
What we saw was this very paternalistic, almost like infantilization

(41:48):
of the public. You had the equivalent of like a
mom wagging her finger at a three year old saying
because I told you so, you know, when they didn't
provide evidence for something. And that's how much of the
response was conducted and how people reacted. And most people,
at least in Blue America went along with this, this

(42:11):
sort of argument from authority. That they went along And
I can only surmise that that is because it's just
a it's just easier, it's less cognitive load on you.
Then everyone was just kind of externalizing a complex at

(42:31):
least you know, moral and logistical decision making. They were
just sort of farming it out to someone else, let
them decide for me. It's kind of amazing, mate, how
few people actually dug into the data, actually looked at
and it didn't even require much digging. This was an

(42:52):
extraordinary kind of like default to the experts, don't ask
any questions.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah. Look, there are a lot of books about kind
of when. I mean, if you read Daniel Kneman and
late now Dan Conman is sticking fast and slow. There's
like so someone fast sticking, which is more kind of
intuitive in the system too, thinking that requires more deliberation, right,
And if any problem required more deliberation, I think it
would be Covid right, that you have to kind of

(43:19):
go back almost the first principles and thing through things.
You know, to the extent people's had intuitions, they were
often very wrong intuitions, right. I remember Mary de Blasio
in New York told people we're gonna shut the bars
down for a while, right, so go out and have
a big night tonight, right, which is an intuition you
might have in New York if there's a hurricane coming

(43:40):
which we've had a couple of hurricanes, right, because there's
zero threat from the hurricane at one point in time,
then there's a window where it's threatening, and then hopefully
it's not too bad. Right. But that's probably the most
time of most transmission in New York, right. Or I
think you point out like a lot of people's intuitions
were based on it being an influenza pandemic and not
a coronavirus pandemic, which is dramatically different. Effects on how

(44:02):
transmisfold is in children, for example. And we'll be right
back after this break. Okay. The models. So I've built

(44:25):
models in the past. Sometimes I think skepticism of models
is unwarranted. I think people also have very difficult, very
difficult time telling from the outside what's a good model
and what's a bad model. When is a model reliable
and when is it just garbage in? Garbage out? But
these COVID bells were not very good, David, Can you

(44:46):
tell me kind of more about what you learned about them?

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah? Well, you know, as you know, one of my
chapters is titled Geigo for Garbage and Garbage Out. And
the models were built upon an enormous kind of pile
of assumptions, and I started digging into them because I'm curious.
It was like, how did they come up with this model?
You know, showing that if you you do X, Y

(45:11):
and z actions, this will lead to such and such results.
That's what the models were showing. You said, if you
follow instructions, then we'll have this amount of case rates
or this amount of you know, transmission, and if you
are bad and you don't follow instructions, then it's going
to be this big spike. And they would show these visualizations.
It's like, well, how did they figure this stuff out?

(45:31):
And I started reading some of the papers that went
along with the models and the methodology, and what I
always do is, because I'm a crazy person, I always
look at the citations. I'm like, well, where did they
get that from? So you see there's like a little
superscript citation. I see it there, you know, in that notes,
and I click on it. I'm like, okay, where did

(45:51):
they get this from? And then it leads me to
another model. I'm like what, so wait, this models based
another model. Okay, well where did they get that from?
So then I'm leading the second model, and then I'm
looking through and there's claims in there, and then I say, oh,
that's based on yet more models, And then I likened
it to this of like a never ending Russian Dolls

(46:11):
type of thing. It was just models upon models upon
models and one of them. Ultimately I get to like
the bottom and I'm reading in like the supplement buried
in the supplement of a paper where they had a
claim about transmission in schools as a certain portion of
overall kind of transmission activity and it was something like

(46:33):
thirty seven percent, and you go deep in, you know,
in my mind sort of metaphorically, it's in like six
point five it says this figure was chosen arbitrarily. Now
that's like you just are peeling back model upon model
upon model until finally in the supplement you get to
like actual data and then you find out that it

(46:55):
was made up. That's kind of wild.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
What's so tricky about building models is like, yeah, they
are kind of a definition simplifications, right, and sometimes if
a point in a model, a data point, is non
central to the thesis of the model, then it's totally
fine to estimate, right. It's like, Okay, we could do
a more rigorous job with this, but it's probably not
very important. The model is like robust to different specifications

(47:20):
of this parameter. I'm using technical language here, right, there
are other times when like it just becomes littally garbage
in garbage out, where you know, you're just taking that
arbitrary back of the envelope number, feeding it through a
bunch of loops, right, and then spinning it back out
and pretending that you've done like real real science there.
I mean, you know, I mean there's the other big
problem with these models too, is so I call it

(47:42):
like the kind of like tyranny of the measurable. So
cases are easy to measure, actually not as easy as
they might be, because it was hard to find enough
tests and a lot of cases are you know, asymptomatic
and things like that, right, but you know, and you
can always try to make the red arrow on CNN

(48:02):
go down. Conversely, things like psychological harms of being isolated
from other people for months at a time are harder
to measure, you know, I know in baseball analysis, offense
is much easier to measure than defense in baseball, Right,
So some of these teams would build teams that hit
a lot of home runs but were terrible defensively because
we couldn't measure it well. It turns out as you

(48:23):
study it more carefully, it is important. So what are
the psychological harms to people of social isolation?

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, just before I get to that, just to your
point about the models is the modelers decide what goes
in and they can turn those dials whichever way they
want if the model doesn't put out what they want
to put it out. And I interviewed some really interesting philosophers,
Eric Winsburg, who I mentioned before, and a colleague of his,
Stephanie Harvard, who they study how models are made, in

(48:57):
the sort of ethical implications of models, and what does
it say about a society about what goes into the
models that they do, and what does it say about
the people who build the models. And it's quite astonishing
when you think about it that the people who built
the models are also the people who tended to fare

(49:18):
really well in the pandemic relative to the rest of
the country. That's not an accident. So we had models
dictating how we responded in America, and the models only
took into account certain factors that were of the most
interest to the people who are in this kind of

(49:38):
white collar profession if they were living If the people
who designed the models for IHME and Imperial College were
living in a studio apartment in the Bronx with no
air conditioning and you know, six children in there, maybe
they would have had an input on there. For school closures,
you know, maybe they would if they were running a

(49:58):
little mom and pop business, et cetera, et cetera. So
all these things that are really important in society now.
Of course, if anyone's listening, really well, it's not as
important as death. But that's a false binary to draw,
and for a whole variety of reasons. We tolerate death
in a whole variety of ways in our country. For
because you know, on the highway we can make the

(50:19):
speed limits thirty five, but we don't because we want
to get places faster. There's all sorts of things going
on that they chose not to put these things in
the models, and one of them. So just kind of
getting now to your question, there's all sorts of evidence,
and this is quite obvious. We know this just as
people that isolation is incredibly damaging. It's also it's physically

(50:40):
damaging to people. We had people in hospitals, particularly the
elderly people who were not allowed to see their family.
We had children. The rates of depression and anxiety and
of eating disorders both B and I going up, and
also anorexia going up and bolimia going up. All these

(51:01):
things were directly tied to isolation and school closures. There
were people who've said, no, it's just because of the
pandemic overall, and they were upset. It's just simply not true.
There was a lot of evidence and I cited in
my book that directly ties these effects to isolation to
school closures. It had nothing to do with the broader

(51:22):
kind of like experience of the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
There's this thing called the value of a cistical life,
which is like from empirical data on how many trade
offs people are willing to make, and like people have
well established trade offs for how much they're willing to
trade off length of life in essence for quality of life.
It gets complicated when like when I was, you know,
a pretty dutiful mascuer and indoor crowd avoid before I

(51:48):
got vaccinated, and I wasn't doing it for me. I
was doing it for because I would feel guilty as
fuck if I transmitted COVID right, but at some point
people it just people's tolerance for it lags. And anyway,
do you think the models were trying or the modelers
were trying to scare people?

Speaker 1 (52:07):
Yes, yeah, I mean it's unequivocal, and we know there's
more broadly, there are statements, you know, from Fauci saying,
if you think you're doing too much, that's probably the
right thing. There's some internal documents in the UK government
that I cite my book where they talk about specifically

(52:28):
like exaggerating and scaring people in order to get them
to comply. There are articles in the New York Times
that talked about this where they were fairly explicit about
having people be frightened in order to get them to
behave in a certain way. Ultimately, people people's experience of
reality was so divergent from what we were told was

(52:52):
the risk ratio and what we were told we needed
to do. At a certain point people just called bullshit.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
I agree. At the same time, I do think COVID
was in this kind of like messy middle ground, where
like if it were an order of magnitude more deadly,
then people would comply on their own and then very
harsh protocols I think would be rational and justified and
passed most cost benefit tests. Right. If it were ten
times less deadly, then it would be you know, the

(53:21):
seasonal flu basically, and people would just kind of let.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
It pass through.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
We're kind of stuck in the middle, and then there's
kind of so much data to cherry pick, and you
kind of are forced to kind of figure things out
on your own. I think the problem at its core,
as I describe it in the book, is that it's
really kind of epistemological, isn't it. And it comes down to, like,
how do we know it is true? How do we

(53:45):
think about evidence? And what frustrated me, just endlessly and
enraged me and fascinated me was and still is the
fact that the idea of like anyone can cherry pick
stuff and you can have dueling studies. If I were
to debate someone tomorrow about school.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
Closures, they could cite twenty studies if they want, then
I could cite twenty studies that you know, have an
opposite conclusion. And I spoke to a guy who an
oncologist who's but he's I don't think he's practicing anymore,
but he talks to patients about how to think through
like their treatment and what to do or not and
how to think about evidence. And I was talking with
him and I said, you know, I talked about you know,

(54:26):
the millions of kids in school in Europe and stuff,
and I'm like, so does that not count though, because
it's you know, in the hierarchy of evidence, it's not
a randomized trial. And he was like, David, He's like,
that's better than a study. He's like, that's just reality.
Studies always have chosen parameters. And it like was really

(54:46):
an incredible like moment for me where it was like, right,
like empirical reality trumps everything. So the idea, like you know,
you mentioned like, oh, in five years from now, you
don't want to get into an argument with some and
again about like what the outcomes are this that or
the other thing. But it's like, I feel like we
don't have to. You don't have to look at tons
of studies. We can, but studies to just by their nature,

(55:10):
have some degree of subjective parameters, you know, put around them,
the timing that they run from X day to Y day,
you know, the inputs, et cetera. But when you just
look at reality, empirical reality. If millions of kids are
in school, nothing really happened that, you know. When I
spoke to this on college is, he's like, that's better.
That's actually above a randomized trial. We're just observing empirical, empirically,

(55:35):
something that's true. But instead of looking at that, we
favored theory, you know, and all of these things well
we well they didn't say we think, They said we know.
But implicit in this idea, remember the Swiss cheese model,
ny where of course, right, So they told us each
of these interventions was like a slice of Swiss cheese,
and if you do all of them, hopefully the holes

(55:58):
won't line up and the little very ons won't get
you know, won't make it through. But what's the implicit
message in that? It's that they don't know what works.
They were already admitting they didn't know which intervention worked.
Therefore we have to do all of them. But yet
no evidence was actually accrued to support them, and and
we had evidence to the opposite that in reality. So

(56:20):
that to me is the thing that I just find
endlessly fascinating, you know, and I know you do a
lot of work on kind of like human nature and
decision making and stuff like that, like on why and
how our country, by and large, or at least half
of it went along with favoring a sort of like
epistelological model of life that favored theory over evidence.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
What did the contrarians get wrong?

Speaker 1 (56:52):
It's a good question. Well, it depends who you define,
you know, as a contrarian, and what that means. I
think some of them overstated harms from the vaccine distills.
I haven't seen that evidence yet. Maybe it exists and
it just had have been uncovered. I have not seen
strong evidence that that they caused the mass harm. You

(57:15):
know that some people purport them to be causing. I
think the contrarians. I think people on both sides, but
including the contraints, perhaps misjudged how to effectively argue for
their position. I don't know, tell me, maybe I'm missing something.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
I do think there was over optimism among the speed
with which HERD immunity would be reached. Right. Look, a
lot of transmission was not being picked up. It was asymptomatic,
and you'd have these waves and there are complicated patterns
that you know that every time you feel like you
kind of got the hang of modeling, them. Then they

(57:58):
wouldn't quite hold up, right, But like I thought, they're
you know, there are people that thought, okay, well, actually
sixty percent of people have already been infected, we think,
and therefore there's heard immunity, you know, notwithstanding evidence about reinfections.
You know, kind of I was in, I think the
little denial about that. Clearly these reinfections were a problem.

(58:20):
So I need to start wrapping up here. So let
me kind of let me ask this. Let's say that
there is a COVID twenty five pandemic, and let's say
that we know this is going to be have roughly
the same characteristics as COVID nineteen. For some reason, any
immunity you had from previous COVID nineteen infections or vaccines

(58:44):
provide no protection. So we're starting from scratch. How do
you think the United States would react today?

Speaker 1 (58:50):
It'll be it'll be a nightmare, right, I mean, it
was just I think the one area where there has
been a softening though, is certainly on kids in schools.
That's like the one kind of like the narrative initially
was we have to do this, we got to protect
the kids. Then the narrative shifted to well, the kids
are OK, but we need to protect teachers. And then

(59:11):
once it became obvious that like that, didn't you know
that teachers were not at any greater risk than other professionals, which,
by the way, Sweden had a study on this very
early that showed this that teachers there were not at
higher risk than the average professional, and on and on.
Once once like all that's established, it's like then the
narrative shifted to which like a year or two into

(59:34):
the pandemic, it then shifted to, well, this was a
regrettable decision, but they were building the plane as they
fly it, you know, as a fog of war. But
the key part, just to answer your question, is though,
but the narrative did shift, at least to the extent
that there was an acknowledgment that this was a mistake.
They then come up with some you know, very kind

(59:55):
of like exculpatory reasons for why it was a mistake
that I think are are convenient and untrue. But the
fact that this is now acknowledged that it's like even
in like normy kind of liberal circles, most people I
think today say like, yeah, that was a mistake. I
think that suggests that if there's some you know, virus

(01:00:17):
that behaves in exactly the same way, that there's going
to be far far less tolerance for these kind of
like long term closures and other interventions on kids. Like
people just aren't going to tolerate it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
You know. Look, I'm gonna be honest. I think they
are like a certain number of people who uh might
be more introverted, right, which is normal, But it felt
like it felt like people weren't able to extrapolate from
their situation. Where if you have like a nice home
in the suburbs and you're someone who loves nothing more
than like snuggling on the couch with your partner and

(01:00:52):
your kids or whatever, right and watching movies, and you
don't like going out, then maybe this seems good. You
don't have any more fomo or guilt for like not worse,
you know, Whereas other people I know where like they're like,
this is not gonna work for even a week the
social distancing thing, and are already going to like illicit
parties in New York, and people vary along those dimensions.

(01:01:12):
I'm not even sure what my point.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
Was, but my point is, so I know we're bouncing
around here but just one more thing, you know, but
much of this also has to do with class and
and you know, social and economic class. That regardless of
whether you're an introvert or not, if you had the
means of living in a comfortable home and doing your
work from home and not losing your income, that you

(01:01:35):
were just going to experience the pandemic very differently from
someone who had to leave their home to work, from
someone who lives in a dump somewhere and you know,
and their kids are jammed in some tiny apartment with them.
It's just so it's like it wasn't just about an introversion.
It's also about class. And this was a remarkably class

(01:01:55):
based policies that were put in place during the pandemic
that dramatically favored those who were comfortable and dramatically escalated
the harms to the people who to not have those
same means. I want to talk or close by talking
about the United States and kind of social solidarity in

(01:02:16):
the United States, because look, I am certainly like a
libertarian leading person by acknowledge that pure libertarianism becomes problematic
in a pandemic, right, So you could say, for example, okay,
well if it is a time of high transmission.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
I want to go to a restaurant. The owner wants
to keep the restaurant open. The waiter and the servers
want to make money noon tomic income for their families,
And so what's so bad about that we're all assuming
the own risk. However, we are also creating a negative
externality for like people in our community. More broadly, right,
and these questions become easier to solve when the countries
are more united, right. I mean, you have a quote

(01:02:53):
in the book that you kind of flight at the top.
All of this is not a book about COVID, It's
about a country ill equipped to ac sensibly under duress.
How much of this is about the United States? And
has that made you more pessimistic about the United States's
leadership abilities? State capacity is a fancy term for it
going forward.

Speaker 1 (01:03:13):
I'm very pessimistic. I'm hoping my vook will act as
some sort of corrective for people and serve as a
record and also as a means of thinking through how
these things happen, which will hopefully act as some degree
of like a countermeasure. But the reality is, you know,

(01:03:35):
when you have this kind of like constellation of all
these different influential institutions, and through both political and kind
of like personality inclinations, it created a very bad environment
with bad incentives for people to be afraid to either
think critically, or if they were thinking critically, then be

(01:03:58):
afraid or told explicitly that they were not allowed to
go against the purported consensus. Well, it certainly certainly permanently
shifted my priors as far as kind of how wrong
the expert consensus can be, and how wrong motivated by
I think somewhat banal and obvious political motives, how how

(01:04:22):
unsubtle the effort to maintain the consensus was. And you
absolutely would get screamed at if you expressed views that
were very centrist a and later proved to be mostly
correct B. But they were very careful about how they
are drawing, drawing the lines between what was acceptable and
what and what was not. And I will never forget it,
but I'm glad we're not going through it anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
So, thank you so much for joining us, David.

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
Thanks for having me, Nate, it's good to chat with you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
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(01:05:13):
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(01:05:34):
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