Ill Literacy, Episode 180: An Abundance of Caution (Guest: David Zweig)

In Episode 180 of Ill Literacy, Tim Benson talks with David Zweig, author ofAn Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.

 

Heartland’s Tim Benson is joined by David Zweig to discuss his latest book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. They chat about how everyone from journalists to eminent health officials repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence regarding COVID and the closing of American schools, and how there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way.

 

Get the book here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549158/an-abundance-of-caution/

 

Show Notes:

 

The Atlantic: David Zweig – “The Disaster of School Closures Should Have Been Foreseen”

 

City Journal: James B. Meigs – “What Were We Thinking?”

 

Commentary: Noam Blum – “School’s Out Forever”

 

The Dispatch: Kevin D. Williamson – “The Wrong Kind of Abundance”

 

Education Next: Frederick Hess – “The Junk Science of Pandemic School Closure”

 

The Free Press: David Zweig – “How Covid Lies Destroyed Kids’ Lives”

 

The Wall Street Journal: Philip Wallach – “‘An Abundance of Caution’ and ‘In Covid’s Wake’: Failing the Pandemic Test”

 

Washington Examiner: Jesse Adams – “David Zweig proves the fog of war is no excuse for the damage done to children’s education in the name of public health”

 

The 74: Greg Toppo – “Journalist David Zweig Calls COVID School Closures ‘A False Story About Medical Consensus’”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Alright. We're good. Hello, everybody, and welcome to
the Illiteracy Podcast. I'm yourhost, Tim Benson, a senior
policy analyst at the HeartlandInstitute. Thank you guys for
tuning in.
Once again, sorry for the theshort little hiatus for the last
few months. I know I haven'tbeen recording anything, but a

(00:25):
very good reason for that isbecause I've been extremely busy
with my actual job forHeartland, the one that they
actually pay me to do. So justwanted so that's why the little
hiatus were just a little busywith the all the legislative
sessions around The States thisthis season, this year. So, you

(00:47):
know, I just didn't wanna haveto reschedule stuff with people,
book guests, reschedule them,book guests, reschedule them,
etcetera, etcetera. So, decidedjust to take a little break for
a couple months.
But anyway, should be back fromnow on with with some regular
podcasts once a week for youguys. So just a heads up on
that. But thank you very muchagain for tuning in. And if you
like this podcast, pleaseconsider giving illiteracy a

(01:10):
five star review at ApplePodcast or wherever you listen
to the show and also by sharingwith your friends as the best
way to support programming likethis. And my guest today is
mister David Zweig.
And is it Zweig? Is that how you

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Zweig? Yelled it. Yeah. Zweig.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Zweig. That's what I thought.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
David Zweig.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah. So mister Zweig is a journalist and author based
in New York. You may have seenhis work in the New York Times,
the Wall Street Journal, theAtlantic, the New Yorker, the
Free Press, Wired, New YorkMagazine, and the Boston Globe
among many others, as well ashis substack newsletter, Silent
Lunch. And he is the author ofthe novel Swimming Inside the

(01:49):
Sun, as well as the non fictionwork, The Power of Anonymous
Work in an Age of RelentlessSelf Promotion. And he is here
to discuss his latest book, AnAbundance of Caution, American
Schools, the Virus, and a Storyof Bad Decisions, which was
published back in April by theMIT Press.
So, missus Weich, thank you so,so much for coming on the

(02:10):
podcast. I do appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
No problem. Now before we get to the heavy stuff
in the book, I gotta ask youabout this because I was on your
your website, and it says at thevery end of your website, says,
years ago, as singer, guitarplayer, and producers, White
released two albums, All NowWith Wings and Keep Going. Both
albums chartered on collegeradio playlists and garnered
accolades with the press callingyou a, quote, symphonic pop

(02:37):
prodigy. And then so I'm a bigmusic geek dude, you know, just
not not too far removed from thethe guys in high fidelity. If
you've seen that movie, I'm sureyou have.
So I went and checked it out onAmazon just to see if, you know,
the stuff was still availableand there was any reviews and

(02:58):
got people comparing you to, youknow, Kevin's Shields of My
Bloody Valentine. My BloodyValentine, excuse me, and Billy
Corgan and all this stuff. And,you know, someone said that they
bought your CD, I guess, yourfirst album at the same time
that they bought Abbey Road andthat they actually spent more

(03:19):
time in the car listeninglistening to your album.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Where this where is this written?

Speaker 1 (03:23):
This is on Amazon. I'll read let me see. I bought
the CD when I purchased AbbeyRoad, although I love Abbey
Road, all now with wingsremained in my CD carousel far
longer.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
I'm so glad that that payment I made to that person
worked.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
That was a review from 02/2002. It's still up on
Amazon. Incredible. So if youcheck it out. Anyway, so I
wanted to ask you about that.
So Symphonic Pop, who are yourwho are your influences? Who are
your you know, who do you sortof style yourself after? You
know, is symphonic pop a anaccurate description of the type

(04:00):
of music you were making onthose two records?

Speaker 2 (04:02):
I think certainly some of it is is symphonic pop
for sure because it's like poprock music with symphonic kind
of arrangements with it, youknow, with the string section,
sometimes the horn sections,very big grandiose music.
Although there's also short kindof rock songs mixed in. I love

(04:26):
those big, I grew up loving TheWall and stuff like that where
it was like where you're takenon a journey and other like prog
rock bands.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
So you're a prog guy?

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah like Yes and Rush where you know Rush there's
like you know the second half ofthe album is you know just like
a one hundred twenty minutesong. I love that type of stuff.
I love big just epic things soin my book now you know that
just came out An Abundance ofCaution it's like four fifty
pages and I have hundreds ofendnotes. I'm a bit of a

(04:59):
maximalist so I guess in musicand writing and you know
whatever else I tend to kind ofturn the dial to 11 So yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah. Alright. Well, I'm gonna have to check it out.
I'm gonna have to search aroundfor some, for some copies of
this of these albums and checkthem out. I mean, if someone's
if someone likes it more thanAbbey Road,

Speaker 2 (05:23):
it's on Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Are they on Spotify?

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Okay. Alright. Cool. I will look for that. Alright.
Now to the book itself, andit's, basically, your book is a
story on, the COVID pandemic andhow basically everybody failed
America's children, in 2020 and2021 going forward. I I

(05:51):
mentioned to you on before westarted recording that this book
was one of the most aggravatingbooks I'd ever read. Not with
anything to do with how it waswritten or anything like that,
but just the narrative of eventsand how things were decided, how
things were agreed upon, howthings were promoted, not

(06:19):
promoted, how this whole COVIDsituation, pandemic, the school
closures, and all that stuffcame about. And I actually I
actually called my grandfatherearlier this afternoon because I
was just finishing up the book.And I basically was like, I just
need to, like, vent at you forabout fifteen, twenty minutes

(06:42):
because I wanna get all this outbefore I record the podcast
because no one's gonna wannalisten to me just, you know,
hurl invective at, you know, theteacher's units and the health
officials and all these peoplefor if, like, if I get going on
this, I'm never gonna be able tostop.
So I just need to get it all outnow and get with you. So I did

(07:04):
that.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
If anyone's looking to get angry, boy, drive the
book for you. Right. Right. Butit's, you know, it's good to
it's better to feel angry thanto feel nothing or to be bored.
Sometimes it's important to bepissed off.
And my book is, you know, it'srare to have a book that can
really infuriate you by what youlearn in there and that is one
of the things I wouldn't say Iaimed to do that, but it was,

(07:29):
but that is an important and Ithink natural reaction that
someone, people reading my bookshould be enraged when they
learn about the failures, youknow, I mean, most people have
an awareness of certain broadfailures within the pandemic,

(07:50):
but I actually show whathappened behind the scenes. You
know, and there are things thathappen that your listeners have
no idea of how bad it was. Theylike, there's no way people can
actually know without gettinginto it.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
I sort of go ahead.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah. Yeah. No. No.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
I was just saying, why don't

Speaker 1 (08:08):
we just start there before we get into that?

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
Why don't you just tell everybody what, you know,
what made you wanna write thebook? You know, what was your
what was the genesis of thiswhole thing? What was your your
kid's experience with school andwith COVID, and how did that
lead you to this project?

Speaker 2 (08:31):
What got me started, you know, before I was working
on the book, just as a parentand as an American citizen, the
pandemic began in The U. S. Orat least the response to the
pandemic in March. I liveoutside New York City. I was
following along with the rulesand the guidelines like pretty

(08:55):
much everyone else in my area.
You know, we were told that, youknow, New York City was, you
know, facing a crisis. I had noparticular reason to question
what the public authorities weretelling us. I'm a skeptical
person. I've always been thatway. I don't just automatically
believe what governmentofficials are saying.

(09:16):
Nevertheless, I didn't havesomething in me saying oh my god
this might be untrue or they'relying or something. I just kind
of went with it in the beginningBut after a brief amount of
time, I felt like given thegravity of the response, which
in my view, and I'm 50, I meannever in fifty years, I've never

(09:42):
observed or experienced thisdegree of an infringement on the
personal liberties of Americancitizens. I would challenge
anyone name another event inAmerica in the last fifty or
more years of this scale wherewe were not allowed as citizens

(10:08):
to function and do sort ofnormal things that we would do.
It was against the law to gatherand it was against the law that
the schools were closed. So thiswas an extraordinary
circumstance and it seemed to methat there was not a
sufficiently correlative amountof explanation behind it.

(10:37):
It was just there's a virus,this is an emergency, this is
what we have to do, which againfor a week or two seemed
reasonable to me. But then Istarted just asking questions to
myself in my mind and I've spentmany years as a journalist doing

(11:00):
a lot of sort of science andtech journalism and cultural and
psychological type of topicsthat have involved me reading.
I'm really good at readingacademic studies and journals,
I'm used to it, I likecorresponding with scholars. I'm
used to that. I used to workbefore the profession, before

(11:24):
the thing became politicized, Iused to be a magazine fact
checker a zillion years ago andit's part of my disposition just
naturally but in that role as afact checker you're really
taught to have to go to thesource for something.
That something is simply beingyou know written about in the
New York Times or somethingthat's not like that would never

(11:46):
be a sufficient source of proofbehind something or backup for a
statement. We have to go deeperand like what's the actual
source of this thing not just amedia account. So all that
coupled together I'm like here'sthis completely insane
circumstance happening, maybeit's justified I don't know but
what I do know is I'm notgetting enough information at

(12:07):
least to satisfy me. So andwhile all this is happening, I'm
also observing my kids who arethe way I describe it in the
book that I just saw themwilting away in the gray light
of their Chromebooks in theirbedrooms and I'm like this is
not going to work over a longperiod of time. Was very
obvious.

(12:29):
Now again, so

Speaker 1 (12:30):
how long did it take for your kids to go back to full
time in person

Speaker 2 (12:37):
At least a year I think before they were back in
school full time and even thenit was still bizarre. There was
mask mandates for an entire yearafter that.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
So how long until it was like back to normal?

Speaker 2 (12:53):
I think it's like a good two years before you're
like in school every day as akid like with things being
normal or at least close tonormal. It's like two freaking
years. So I'll just try to wrapup the initial thing. So I'm
observing this. I started askingquestions.

(13:14):
I was working on another book atthe time. I couldn't work on it
anymore because I was just likeobsessed with trying to figure
out what's going on during thisperiod of time and I started
reaching out to researchers anddoctors and others mostly in
Europe because you couldn't talkto anyone in The States. And it

(13:36):
became apparent very, veryquickly a few things that
children were at basically closeto zero risk, a risk on par, not
zero but close to it, a risk onpar generally with the flu or
any number of other things thatkids face in a given year. Sure.
And actually you know and I givesome statistics in my book.

(13:58):
Mean look more kids die drowningin a given year than they do
from COVID in a year. More kidsdie in car accidents, multiples
more.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
Probably more die in car accidents driving to school.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah exactly like there's so many things so the
point is not that COVID is zerorisk but that kids just being a
person in the world. Bad thingshappen sometimes and more kids
killed themselves than died ofCOVID given year. So anyway

(14:32):
there's all these things thatlike it's not that it's no risk
but it's relative to otherthings. Then the other argument
of course was that well even ifkids aren't at risk that they're
putting everyone else at riskand we can get into it Tim but
like so anyway all this got mestarted I'm looking at stuff and
then and I'll just kind of segueinto this which is the original

(14:57):
sin in my mind or one of themthe main ones

Speaker 1 (15:00):
is A lunch date Tapper might sue you if you use
that phrase.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
Is that oh that's his book right yeah well is that at
the April and the May schoolsbegan reopening in Europe
they're like at least they'relower schools and we're talking
about millions of kids. Okay,not you know one school
somewhere in Denmark. We'retalking about millions of kids

(15:25):
and in the May, the educationministers at the EU met and 22
countries, 22 began reopeningtheir schools, millions of
children and the officialassessment was that they

(15:46):
observed no negativeconsequences of the school's
reopening. They didn't observean increase in cases among
teachers, among the communityAnd like this is the real kind
of like record scratch moment onthe soundtrack here. And one of
the things that's so importantabout this or perhaps the most

(16:08):
important part about this isthat this was virtually ignored.
It was like you would think thiswould be on the front page of
every newspaper. This would bein every cable news, everyone
would be talking about it. Thiswas essentially just completely
nonexistent. I'm watching thisvideo over and over again

(16:30):
because I can't believe what I'mHow can this be? How can it be
possible?
Is this real? Is this actuallythe EU? Is this fake? How can it
be that 22 countries reopentheir schools and we're being
told that we can't reopen ourschools? Well, why?
Why is that? So that is one ofthe things that set me on my

(16:53):
path. I had already written anarticle in the very May for
Wired magazine where I argued weneed to reopen the schools and I
had a list of evidence why thatwould be the case and Europe
agreed with me because theyalready had begun reopening
their schools so it wasn't likethis was some outlandish

(17:14):
conclusion to come to. This isthe conclusion that 22 ministers
of health in differentcountries, they came to the same
conclusion and I want to beclear about something because
this is really important andthis is like one of the main
kind of bogus arguments that weheard and that people still make

(17:35):
to this day which is, wellthat's Europe, that doesn't
count and then they would listany number of reasons why we're
not supposed to believe thatEurope reopening schools and
there being a problem. There's awhole long list of reasons about
why that's supposed to like notmatter.
And we have to ignore that andwave that away. And what I do in

(17:56):
the book is I show point bypoint how all these reasons were
completely made up. This isjust, if I may on the podcast,
this was bullshit.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, It was, it

Speaker 2 (18:08):
was bullshit. And I wanna say, you know, suspect
your audience is generallyleaning in a particular
political direction. I came atthis problem apolitically. Did
not have

Speaker 1 (18:21):
any You're not some winger.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
I'm not a right wing operative. I'm not like I used
to be on the left, I'm just youknow completely independent at
this point. Although I was neverlike a knee jerk sort of left
person, was never like a knowyeah you're just like a normal
yeah I was kind of like a normiedemocrat but an independent yeah

Speaker 1 (18:43):
there used to be a lot of you guys but now

Speaker 2 (18:44):
yeah so my point being I had no reason to want
this to be true I had nomotivation for this other than I
was observing something thatseemed crazy to me and I had to
follow where the facts took meand that's what I did.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Well, even to your point about what we knew from
Europe in April and May, we hadeven before then, February 24,
talking about JAMA. So theJournal of the American Medical
Association's peer reviewedmedical journal, probably one of
the bigger medical journals ofthat type. They got this summary

(19:25):
report from what was essentiallythe Chinese CDC. And you know,
it's China, so take it with agrain of salt, but it was a big,
don't know if was a study oranalysis that the Chinese did.
Basically, they found even inlate February, so before we even
started locking anything downreally in The United States,

(19:50):
that only one percent ofpatients under of all the COVID
cases, only one percent werechildren 10, another one percent
were children ten to nineteen,and that the disease in children
appears to be relatively rareand mild.

(20:10):
And they also say there is notone instance of transmission
from a child to an adult. So wealready had that study. And
again, it's you know, peoplemight not wanna you might wanna
take it with a grain of saltbecause it is communist China
that is coming out of, theepicenter of this thing, and
they've been lying about, youknow, pretty much everything

(20:31):
else. But but when you have thatand then you have, you know,
what comes out of Europe in inall of Europe in April, May, and
the fact that we even have,like, a country like Sweden that
didn't close anything at all,period. The schools remained
open the entire time.
And that showed what thatshowed. I mean it was pretty it

(20:54):
seemed like the evidence showedpretty clearly that we could get
these kids back to school.Again,

Speaker 2 (21:02):
that's the conclusion, like the people in
Europe don't want to kill theirkids or kill themselves and the
ministers of health in 22different countries there came
to the conclusion that it wasnot only reasonable but wise to
start reopening their schools atthe April, the May. They looked

(21:24):
at the data from China and thedata from Europe. There's stuff
out of Iceland and I go throughall this stuff in my book
obviously. So one of the way Idescribe our initial closures
was that they were bothreasonable but wrong. You can

(21:44):
understand to some extent thatthere's this new virus, people
are trying to figure out what'sgoing on.
I get it and I think it's fairto have some degree of latitude
for some sort of action on that.I think argument could be made
and perhaps you disagree with methat's like that's never okay.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
No, no, no. Mean, I was, you know, at the time, I
mean, so sort of my thing. So myson was born on 02/22/2020. And
basically, like a week later,the hospital where he was born,
they stopped letting people infor like deliveries and all that
sort of stuff. I remember whenwe first took into the

(22:25):
pediatrician, the pediatricianwas like, look, we don't know
anything about this virus,really.
But we do know that these typeof things tend to impact
children and old people morebecause their children because
their immune system hasn'tdeveloped, especially with such
a newborn. So they were like,basically, don't take your kid
out of the house until or takehim around anybody other than,

(22:50):
like, immediate family until wegive you, like, the green light.
And it was just like, okay.Well, I mean, I don't know. I
mean, again, this thing is

Speaker 2 (22:57):
the most person. Right.

Speaker 1 (22:58):
Right. Yeah. Like So that seemed entirely reasonable
to me because, like, I mean, Iknow the thing about kids not
having a developed immunesystem. So, I mean, to a layman
like me, I mean, just my firstthought would be probably not
gonna bring my kid out to Targetor something like that.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
And so I, you know, I took everything that they were
sort of telling us with a youknow, I wasn't unduly
suspicious. I thought, you know,they probably know better than
anybody. These guys are allhealth professionals. I mean,
that's why we have the freakingCDC in the first place and all
these other places. So, know

Speaker 2 (23:34):
What's very clear and what people may already think
this themselves, but what thebook really kind of bakes in
when someone reads it is thenotion that we are told, we were
told and the narrative continuesthat it's like, well, there was
so much we didn't know, they didthe best they could. Again,

(23:58):
people need to ask themselves,well, why is it that all these
other countries came to adifferent conclusion from The
United States? How could thatbe? How is that possible? One of
the things that we were toldrepeatedly from public health
officials, from these variouspundits, you know, there's this
emergency medicine physician whowas at Brown at the time, think

(24:21):
now she's at Yale, who is in theNew York Times constantly.
She was on TV, no particularexpertise. Again, we're talking
about an emergency room doctor.Nevertheless she turned herself
into a COVID pundit and sopeople like her and everyone
else one of the things we weretold was well Europe controlled
the virus that they're allowedto do. They earned the right to

(24:42):
do this. I want to be very clearthat what I show in my book and
I do this analysis betweendifferent cities, different
towns in Europe and sort of theequivalent in America where they
had similar demographics orsimilar population size or
density and that no, on thecontrary they did not control

(25:05):
the virus there, that countries,cities, and towns throughout
Europe had virus levels thatwere above that in The US, below
that in The US, and around thesame.
It was literally andfiguratively all over the map.
There was absolutely untrue thatlike, quote, Europe controlled

(25:29):
it and we didn't. The UnitedStates is huge. So the idea that
like the prevalence of the virusin Chicago should somehow
influence what happens inChattanooga does not make sense.
Like this is, it's absurd, butnevertheless they were just
looking at the sort of likeAmerican rate or prevalence of

(25:53):
certain things rather thanlooking at it on a more regional
or local basis because the rangebetween where you were was
massive.
The viral prevalence was almostnon existent in an enormous part
of the country early on.Nevertheless, these people were

(26:14):
still shut down. So one of thethings that like amongst many
dispel is the idea of like quotewe didn't know. And the other
thing tied to that, and one ofthe reasons I call the book An
Abundance of Caution, it's a bittongue in cheek, is caution for

(26:34):
whom and caution in whichdirection and I spend a lot of
time in the book. I interviewedthis really interesting guy
named Eric Winsberg who's aphilosopher and he studies sort
of the like bioethics in thephilosophy of medicine and the

(26:54):
ethics that go along with thesedifferent decisions with
modeling and such and I spend alot of time talking about the
precautionary principle andbecause to many people including
me, know you think of theprecautionary principle as this
idea well like look I'm justplaying it safe, know like this
other thing is scary and crazyand you know this is the right

(27:16):
thing to do.
But what I show is how that wasreally distorted and
manipulated, the idea of whatwas cautionary and that the
precautionary principle can beemployed under certain
circumstances for a very briefperiod of time. But once you

(27:38):
continue to kind of saysomething is part of, well,
we're just playing it safe, Onceyou continue to do that after
empirical evidence shows what'sgoing on on the other side, the
precautionary principle is aboutwhen you have an absence of
evidence, when you don't knowwhat's going to happen, you're

(27:59):
playing it safe. But once you doknow what's going to happen,
once you do have evidence, foryou to continue to do that is
dishonest and in this instanceincredibly harmful. So we had a
circumstance where it wasn't theprecautionary principle and it
wasn't even a cost benefitanalysis because that was never

(28:22):
performed either but rather andI don't use this word lightly
but it was a lie and it's hardfor a lot of people to hear
that. Know again like you werementioning you had no reason to
like particularly distrust thepublic health experts in the
country who were telling usthings and I'll say this, I
believe these people, almost allof them, were trying to help

(28:48):
everyone.
There was no one like Mr Burnsfrom The Simpsons or something
putting their fingers togetherlike oh how can I harm the
country?

Speaker 1 (28:56):
Well I might disagree with you on the unions.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
I haven't mentioned the unions yet, that's
different. We can get to theteachers unions but when I'm
talking about the public healthprofessionals, don't these
people were not trying topurposefully harm society. In
their minds, they were doing theright thing and what I

Speaker 1 (29:19):
And they were doing sort of they were taking steps
that were sort of to themjustified their positions.
That's right. Their job is to dosomething in this situation.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
That's

Speaker 1 (29:34):
right. If we do something, that means that
there's no purpose to us.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Tim, you read my book, man. Yes, exactly. So one
thing I love this section in thebook where there's these
fascinating studies where weknow that public health people
have admitted to this that theysay even when they were shown
evidence that some interventiondidn't work, that they still

(30:02):
wanted to continue with itbecause quote, it feels good to
feel like you're doingsomething. And this comes from a
noble place. You want to feellike you're helping, but
unfortunately, America hasuniquely aggressive medical
culture and public healthculture.
There's, you know, and you canthink about like the gender

(30:23):
affirming care stuff hererelative to Europe where in The
US it's deemed perfectlyappropriate, not only
appropriate, but the moral andcorrect thing to start giving
little kids hormones and pubertyblockers and you know even
surgeries and such. Whereas inEurope they were far far more
hesitant for that type ofinteraction. There's all sorts

(30:45):
of stuff and there are variousreasons sometimes it's
financial, sometimes it's youknow just cultural but we have
an aggressive medical culturehere and that really came to the
fore during the pandemic wherethe idea was like the more you
do, the better you are. The morequote afraid of COVID you are,
the more you hunker down, themore masks you wear, the more

(31:07):
virtuous you are.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yes. If you don't, if you're one of these people that
doesn't want a mask or anything,you're an asshole, you're a
killer.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Exactly. So I believe this came from a good place for
a lot of these people. However,and what I talk about a lot in
the book is I show how likethere were many, many bad
incentives for these people thatled them down this harmful path.

(31:38):
The scariest thing is a personwho's a tyrant, but who believes
that tyranny is for your owngood. That's worse than someone
who sort of knows they're doingharm for some other It's worse
when they believe they arereally helping, that this
infringement and this tyranny,no, no, no, this is the right

(31:59):
thing.
So it's easy to have these sortof like conspiracy theories and
talk about everyone working incahoots together with these
ulterior motives and this, thatand the other thing, which
again, we can set the teachers'unions aside for a moment. But
as far as the public healthpeople and combined with the

(32:20):
legacy media it's much more tome much more interesting about
what happened where it's notlike they got together in a back
room but rather there are allsorts of social dynamics at play
in America relate to thesepeople behaving in the manner
that they did and but what's theresult? People need to and I

(32:44):
don't know you know who'slistening to this how many of
them not that you need to be aparent but it does kind of bring
it into full relief further buteven if you're not a parent of
younger kids or even a parent ofolder kids now but you can
remember what it was like. Wehad healthy children in America,

(33:05):
healthy kids, millions of themwho were barred from entering
school, some of them for morethan a year or a year and a half
even kids in California,Virginia, and other places, many
of them were not allowed inschool while at the same time
bars were open, restaurants wereopen, California you could go to

(33:34):
the mall a healthy kid waslocked in his his or her
bedroom.
And we're not talking about afew weeks. We're not even
talking about a few

Speaker 1 (33:44):
months. Years.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
We're talking about more than a year. This is a
radical, radical circumstance.And to my mind, there is not
nearly enough reckoning andanalysis of what actually took
place. People listening to thisprogram right now might be

(34:05):
annoyed about it. They might belike, yeah, that was so dumb,
but that's not enough to justsimply say that was stupid.
And that's why I spent yearswriting this book and
researching it and I sort of diginto the studies and dig into
the absence of evidence from thethings they told us about mask
mandates and on and on becauseit was really, really important

(34:27):
to me for there to be anofficial accounting, an official
record of the decision makingprocess behind something as
completely batshit crazy ashaving millions of healthy kids
who were imprisoned in theirhomes essentially while adults

(34:48):
could go on kind of doingwhatever they felt like to one
degree or another. That isinsane and we need to reckon
with that and the harm to kidswas extraordinary.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
Oh sure no I mean I honestly like I'm surprised that
you guys weren't you know takento the streets and out slitting
throats over stuff man.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
My I book is why why that didn't happen because
that's also fascinating. Why isit that millions of people
weren't with pitchforks? Whywere millions of college kids
perfectly okay with school thatthey're paying 50 or a $100 for
their parents or at least ortaking out loans where it was

(35:33):
just conducted online and thenlater they were told you have to
get vaccinated or you're notallowed back even after we knew
that the vaccines didn't stopinfection, they didn't stop
transmission, you weren't, youcouldn't, most universities did
not allow students to go back toschool without getting, these
are things and like but yetthere were not, you you got them

(35:55):
all you know protesting Gaza butthey weren't protesting this
like incredible incredibleinfringement on bodily autonomy
of someone they're forcing youto have a medical product
injected into you that againsomeone could make an argument
that that's a reasonableinfringement by the government.
I'm not saying I do or don'tagree with it. Someone could

(36:17):
make the argument that it isreasonable if the vaccine
stopped infection

Speaker 1 (36:22):
or transmission. Generally pro mandating vaccines
like the ones that actually workand you know like my kid's
catholic school you have to have

Speaker 2 (36:35):
you know, the sort of normal schedule. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
You know, the normal, the the one I grew up with and
everything else.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
So misprint. But yeah, but I mean, it's just
crazy. Like, you know, say youwere a junior in high school in
California in March 2020. Thelast day of school you had March
2020, that was the last day ofhigh school for you.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
There was no I mean, no senior prom, no junior prom,
no graduation, none of thatstuff. And you probably missed

Speaker 2 (37:05):
that. Season.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
No football season. No sports.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
No class trips to Disneyland or whatever the hell
they do

Speaker 2 (37:12):
in California. Out with your friends outside this
you know, school school bellrings. You're, like, hanging out
with your pals after and goingto whatever, getting a slice of
pizza or something in town orwhatever it may be. So one of
the things that I talk about inthe book is there's much
attention rightfully so paid tolearning loss and there's an

(37:36):
enormous amount of data on thisthat the more kids were out of
school, like the districts thathad excessive school closures or
hybrid schedules and stuff wherethe kids were only in one or two
days a week, that the ratio, themore kids were out of school,
the worse they were performingacademically. Needless to say,

(38:00):
there are all sorts of enormouslong term consequences of these
academic

Speaker 1 (38:08):
Oh, it's not even, I mean, I do education policy, not
even like kids being out ofschool. Even if the teachers
aren't there, it affects thestudents. I mean, the more often
that the teacher is absent, fromschool, the the more of an
effect it has on the results ofthe kids in their class.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
All of it. So for many reasons this is incredibly
harmful and not to mention thereare many kids who just
disappeared. They just stoppedlogging in online because it was
a waste to them or they didn'tcare or maybe they had some
other thing going on in theirhome life, you know, that made
this impossible to do it. Sothere were many kids who just

(38:51):
disappeared. So anyway, my pointis much attention has been paid
to the learning loss and I'msure will continue to be paid to
that because you can track itsomewhat, you know, there's a
way of, you know, looking at thedata.
But as important as that is,what's so important and it's
kind of like ineffable. It'slike, you know, all things that

(39:16):
are quantifiable are importantand not all things that are
important can be quantified.And, you you were mentioning
about the prom and stuff likethat. And like, that's one of
the things. And again, we're nottalking about one school
district.
We're talking about millions andmillions and millions of kids.
Like it's hard to evenconceptualize how many kids and

(39:40):
adolescents that is. The numbersare so massive that they were
robbed of this experience.Childhood is brief, man. Know, I
mean, it's all fun all the time,but once you're an adult that's
it, things begin to kind of slowdown that those experiences of
life you know we all have thiskind of montage film reel in our

(40:03):
heads you know of growing up.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Childhood, yeah sure.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
And these kids, the public health authorities along
with the help of the legacymedia and with the prodding of
the teachers unions on top ofit, These kids had this taken
away from them. Yes, they werestill alive but what I talk

(40:27):
about in the book, there'sfascinating psychological
research on this about we andthis is pretty well known that
like we remember things that arenew. You don't remember kind of
like something generic in yourlife. That's the way our brains
work. We tend to remember thingsand that's tied to physical

(40:48):
location that when you enter anew space, like physically enter
a space that triggers things inyour mind where there's more
memory formation happening.
So when they step into theschool building each day or they
step out of their home or you'regetting into a friend's car or
stepping onto the soccer field,wherever it may be, these things

(41:12):
impact your brain differentlyfrom I'm gonna wake up, maybe go
down to the kitchen and grab abowl of cereal and then go back
to my bedroom where I just spentthe last eight or ten hours. Now
I'm gonna go back in there orI'm gonna sit at the dining
table and I'm gonna do that dayafter day after day, week after
week, month after month. Thatcreates essentially just a

(41:36):
vacuum of memories because it'sthe monotony. There's nothing
worth remembering.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
Yeah it's a void.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
It's a void. So what I talk about in the book is that
as important as learning losses,we took away a year and in some
cases a year and a half or moreof memories from kids.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
That we took those experiences. They will never
have the prom but even beyondthe prom, they'll never have
just those kind of special butyet completely mundane
experiences of like just arandom day in high school or
like a little kid in third gradeputting her arm around a friend

(42:17):
you know at the playground thatwas stolen from them and one of
the things that's reallyimportant is that there was
nothing gained from this. Andmaybe your listeners, I don't
know, maybe they would agreewith that or not because our
intuitions might tell us, well,closing schools, that's gotta
have some effect, right? Becausethere's, it's a bunch of snotty

(42:39):
kids running around or maskmandates putting something in
front of you like a piece ofcloth, that's going to help
something, Maybe it's notperfect. What I show in the book
is that that is completelyuntrue.
That other than an extremelyshort period of time in a very
small number of select placeswhere everything, if

(43:02):
everything's closed at once, notjust schools, but all of
society, men's school closurescan have some effect. But that's
not what happened. What happenedwas schools remained closed
while the rest of society inAmerica began reopening. Let's
not forget that also plenty ofpeople never locked down because

(43:24):
they couldn't, because they werethe ones running the country.
They were the ones keeping itmoving from, you know, having
the electricity on to fixing thethe infrastructure to working as
a cashier, to working in thewarehouses, delivering the stuff
to your home, to aslaughterhouse, and so on.
So all those people were out andabout, and many of them have

(43:46):
children. So, their kids, therewas always going to be a virus
circulating and I talk aboutthere's mobile phone data that I
mentioned this in the book. Youcan see that even before they
began relaxing theserestrictions, people began
moving about. Why? Not becausethey're but because they're
human and even the mostintroverted among us as human

(44:07):
beings, we, it is not normal ortolerable to be sequestered at
home for just some indefiniteperiod of time.
So what we know Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
Mean, that's why they I mean, a lot a lot of people
consider solitary confinement inprison, you know Torture. Cruel
and unusual punishment.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Right. Yeah. We had we had Netflix and whatever else
and you know, people could alittle kid could my kids, I
mean, I watched my son, he hewatching some other kids on a
screen for a little while,that's not a substitute. Let's
get real. You know, I mean,there's a reason why we get on
planes to visit relatives andsee them in person even though
we could FaceTime with them.

(44:45):
It is not a substitute. This wasjust a ridiculous fantasy that
that would somehow be anadequate substitute for
children. Yeah. Can a whitecollar worker do a Zoom meeting
and that's like enough? Sure.
But they're

Speaker 1 (45:00):
Well, that was that's the other thing is too. Right?
Mean, people that are makingthese recommendations and, like,
the the people think that aremaking these recommendations and
saying, well, this seemsreasonable or this is
reasonable. All these people,for the most part, are of the
class that is going to be leastburdened by everything that

(45:22):
they're recommending. You know?
Oh, the schools are closed.Well, okay. Well, I can pay for
a tutor. Or we're we work fromhome, so we can help, you know,
little Billy or little Sally,you know, with their homework or
with, you know, whateverbullshit they're doing on, you
know, schoolwork remotely.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
That's exactly right. The people, the sort of laptop
class, these are the people whoare generally making 6 figure
salaries and up and whateverthat who work in public health,
who work at universities, whowork at the CDC. These are the
people who are making therecommendations and the rules,

(46:02):
not to mention the politicianswho obviously do not live in the
same type of atmosphere as asignificant portion of the
country. The people who made therules of course had a very
different lifestyle thanmillions of Americans, including
a lot of really financially notwell off families, people who

(46:27):
really were low income. Maybeyou have a family jammed
together in a small apartment inthe Bronx somewhere.
And I guarantee if the peoplemaking these rules and who made
and we didn't you know I seewe're going to run out of time
soon but I have a lot of talk inmy book about the models that
the whole pandemic response wasbuilt upon, that the people who

(46:50):
made the models that if theywere living in a cramped
apartment in The Bronx with sixother people and no air
conditioning and maybe anabusive adult in the home,
somehow I don't think they wouldbe as convinced that just
keeping the schools closed for ayear on end would be a

(47:11):
reasonable trade off. Somehowthat seems highly unlikely, but
these people live in comfortablehomes. Their kids, as you
mentioned, they could hire atutor, maybe they could go to
private school, they could getthe parents oftentimes were home
to help the children. So thiswas one of the most class.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
They had space, lots of space. Space.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
This was one of the most classist events in recent
American history.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Oh, sure. Without a doubt.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
The idea that that the wealthy were the virtuous
because the wealthy could stayhome and the lower income
people, those were the peoplewho were intended to serve the
virtuous wealthy people.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
You never saw one of those in this house we believe
signs on like any, you know whatI mean? In someone's lower
income neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Right, in some like dilapidated house in Appalachia,
they didn't have in this housewe believe in signs because they
were fucking out working. Theywere doing stuff in many
instances these people, theydidn't get to just be in the
relaxed home Netflixing andwhatever else. So like it's to

(48:31):
me one of the ironies andtragedies is that the left which
purports to care about lowerincome people and
underprivileged people the most,like this is how they view
themselves as champions of thepoor, that the left caused the
most harm that policies thatthey advocated for, including,

(48:56):
and in particular long termschool closures, these very
policies harmed the people whothey purport to care about the
most. How ironic and how tragicthat you are the one causing
that damage. And one of thereasons my book is so important

(49:16):
is that these people are thesame ones, they're in the same
sort of elite class in Americawho are part of the legacy media
and other influencers in ourcountry.
They are not inclined to admitthat they made a horrible,

(49:37):
horrible mistake. That's just,you know, human nature

Speaker 1 (49:40):
But they never will.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
Most people are not inclined to admit. There's a
reason why there's been so muchanalysis of like the Iraq war,
of Afghanistan, of Vietnam, ifwe wanna go back. Why? Because
the villains are generally theright. If, you know, Colin
Powell lied to us about weaponsof mass destruction, you know,
George Bush launched us intothis or whatever it may be.

(50:03):
So it's easy to to have, youknow, 500 books about Iraq war
and how horrible a mistake thiswas and about Vietnam, it's easy
to have all these analysesbecause the villain is on the
other team. It's highly unlikelythat these people are inclined
to talk about the reality ofwhat actually happened. Instead,

(50:27):
we are fed a very convenientlyexculpatory narrative that well,
we did the best we could andDonald Trump's an asshole and
this was scary and a millionpeople died. And so that's it,
case closed, mic drop, we'redone. But that's one of the
reasons why my book is importantthat it exists as a record of

(50:50):
why that's a lie.
And it's important for peoplelistening, the next time you're
at a small party or you're withsome relatives and you're met
with that type of answer whichis, well we did the best we
could, Donald Trump's a piece ofgarbage, A million people died

(51:10):
and so on. You will be armedwith information to say, well,
actually what you're describingisn't true and here's why. So if
anyone listening wants to beable to confront that and not
just like sort of say, no,that's not true. My book arms
you with just an absolutecompendium of data and

(51:32):
information, but you willremember it. At least the major
bullet points, you will be ableto destroy anyone in an argument
who makes these claims.
I think it's really importantfor as many people in our
population to be able to dothat. That's my pitch for buying
my book. Be able to destroy someidiot in an argument who's

(51:54):
making Yeah, this

Speaker 1 (51:56):
no. A couple months ago

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Very satisfying. A months month caution, how to
destroy people in an argument.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
There you go. There you have it. Yeah. So a couple
months ago, I was having aconversation, with a friend of
mine, although he hasn't talkedhe hasn't spoken to me since
then, that I've known for, youknow, pretty much since college
or since, like, senior year ofhigh school, basically. And,
he's a school teacher, unionguy, has a PhD in, neuroscience,

(52:28):
has a master's.
His wife has a couple masters.They're very liberal. And
somehow the union thing we weretalking about something not
COVID related, but we weretalking about unions or
something. And I brought up thepoint that, like, how the unions
totally fuck themselves byopposing tooth and claw every

(52:49):
attempt to open the schools, youknow, even well past the point
that they knew these schoolswere safe. And he was like, no,
that's not true.
I mean, they just they were justdoing the best they could with
the information they had. And,you know, you don't understand
what it was like for theteachers, how scared everybody
was. And I was just like, dudeand I knew some of this stuff in
the book, like, going inbecause, like I said, I I I, you

(53:12):
know, I do this for a living. Soall all the stuff about Europe
and everything in in the 2020of, you know, what they knew
from their schools, what theyknew that, you know, teachers
actually had a lower rate ofinfection than, you know, most
professions, that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
I was like, dude, it's like, we knew like, they
knew this, like, again, in the2020. Like, this was fucking
known. Everybody knew this. And,you know, there's a reason that
the school systems that stayedclosed stayed closed when every
other school system on Earth wasgoing back was already in full

(53:49):
time schooling or was going backto full time schooling. And that
was because if the unions hadenough political muscle to keep
them closed until then and thatI mean, there are literally
studies.
You point to them in the book.There's like, I think there's,
like, three of them in the book.I know there's another one, I
think, from Wisconsin Institutefor Law and Liberty. I could be

(54:09):
wrong about that, though. That'sshowing that basically, yeah,
the re like, the determinant forwhen schools open and when some
schools open and when someschools didn't had nothing to do
with science at all or inanything to do with the data at
all.
It all had to do with howpowerful the union was in that
and and how ideologically bluethat district was.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Correct. There's no correlation between the viral
prevalence. It was a 100%political. I have like maps and
stuff in the book. It's youknow, showing this.
It's it was a 100% political.The way I view the unions is
they were opportunistic. Theytook advantage of the situation.

(54:51):
And

Speaker 1 (54:52):
that's why they're bad.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Right, no, no, that's in no way excusing it. To me,
but what's important tounderstand is that like that
quote, my book is really aboutthe failure of the expert class
and that the unions couldn'thave done this without the
public health quote expertsfeeding the country a bunch of

(55:16):
BS and without the legacy mediaacting as an amplifier for this
BS and that the unions could nothave had this sort of all these
outlandish claims if they werenever said by the public health
experts to begin with. The thewhole thing about everyone now

(55:36):
is saying and Randy Weingartenfrom the American Federation of
Teachers, second largestteachers union in the country,
she's repeatedly said, oh Iwanted schools open Anthony
Fauci. Yeah Anthony Fauci's, youknow, I never closed a school.
Well yeah you didn't go therewith like a padlock you know on
the front door but by everyonesaying, we want schools open

(56:00):
quote, when it's safe.
Well, so then they described awhole

Speaker 1 (56:05):
series And that metric was an ever shifting
goalpost.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
It was ever shifting it was never tied to science at
all. One of the things that's socrazy is that mask mandates were
not universal across Europe byany stretch. Indeed, the ECDC,
that's Europe's version of theCDC, they did not recommend
masks on kids in primary schoolat all. And even the World

(56:31):
Health Organization didn't wantmasks on kids under six years
old. But in America, two yearolds were wearing masks all day
long.
They were not doing six feet ofdistancing across the board in
all these European countries intheir schools. Many of them were
doing one meter, which is likeroughly three feet or no

(56:52):
distancing requirement at all.They didn't have HEPA filters in
their schools that we were toldwe needed HEPA filter. And it's
not because of windows Plentythat didn't of them at schools,
the windows stayed closed. Youknow, in in in the Nordic
countries and Scandinavia, thosewindows were closed in the dead
of winter when it was well belowfreezing.
And they didn't have HEPAfilters either. And it's not

(57:14):
because they controlled thevirus. They didn't have mass
tests and trace in every singleschool district. All these
things that we were told werenecessary in order to reopen a
school were not being doneacross the board in Europe and
nor were they being done onceschools began reopening here in
The States. What we knew at thetime was that this didn't matter

(57:38):
regarding viral transmission,that these measures were just
simply not effective.
We knew that time and we knowthis now in retrospect as well,
that Florida versus California,that the excess death rates,
once you control for thedifference in the age of the
population between Florida andCalifornia, once you control for

(57:59):
that, there's no advantage inCalifornia. So the mask
mandates, gathering limits, sixfeet of distancing, all these
closures of schools andbusinesses and all these things,
none of that did anything. Andif the people who say, well,

(58:20):
wait a minute, there's this,look, there's a study published
in the Lancet, or there's asomething in the New England
Journal of Medicine, It doesn'tmatter. Those studies, this post
hoc analysis where theresearchers get to choose all
the parameters themselves, wedon't need those studies. It's
much better if we just look atempirical reality and we can

(58:41):
just simply look at the numberof deaths and the number of
cases overall between two statesthat functioned totally
differently and how they handledthe pandemic.
And in the end, there was noadvantage at all. Everyone got
COVID anyway. It didn't matterthat California had all these
things put in place and childrenin California, millions of them

(59:06):
kept out of school except GavinNewsom. The governor, his kids
could go to school in person,which he did. So like, it's just
this whole thing was completelyinsane and harmful.
And what's frustrating to me islook, it's really easy to kind
of pick on like QAnon or otherstuff and be like, oh, these

(59:29):
people don't know what they'retalking about. Look at these
crazy people. It's much harderand more important to call out
the experts, to call out thepeople and that you know one of
the things you might rememberthis Tim in the book is I talk
about how you know when we thinkof these models that showed you
know where they project out howmany cases and hospitalizations

(59:51):
and such will happen based on ifwe follow, if we do these
special things and everythingthen the case rate's going to be
this, but if you don't listen tothe instructions it'll be that.
Three out of the four mostaccurate modelers that the CDC,
you know, looked at their data,three out of the four most
accurate modelers didn't evenwork in public health.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
Yeah. They're just like, dude.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
It's a rando, like some guy out of Washington state
who's a, just pick this up. He'she's a software consultant. He
performed better than teams thathad people from Harvard, from
Dartmouth, from Columbia, fromthe Los Alamos lab, you know,
the famed brilliant peoplethere, all this stuff that your

(01:00:36):
friend who you talked about,Tim, who's, you know, has a PhD
and stuff like that. I'm surehe's really bright, but there's
a difference between being smartand being a critical thinker.
There's a difference betweenbeing able to memorize a lot of
information and get yourcredentials and actually
thinking through andunderstanding how to look at

(01:00:57):
evidence and how to thinkcritically.
And the fact that these publichealth professionals who've
spent their entire professionallife or decade or decades doing
this work and a bunch of randosperformed better than they did
on their models is extremelydevastating in my mind. I find

(01:01:20):
it sad and upsetting because Iwant to trust these people but
they were not up to the task.And there's a number of I know
we're I'm basically out of timehere, but I explain all this in
the book about why and how didthis happen. So we know these
things did happen, but what I'minterested in, what I think is
so fascinating is like how didthe gears turn in society, you

(01:01:45):
know, both at a political leveland also at like a social level?
Like how is it that these thingshappen?
And that's sort of what I try toshow in the book is like how
these different pieces cometogether. How can something so
crazy as this happen?

Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
Yeah. I mean, what do you think the repercussions of
this are for the next pandemic?I mean, who knows when it'll be,
you know, if it happened next,you know, next spring or
something like that. I mean,everything is so fresh. Do you I

(01:02:23):
mean, do you think that this ispoison like, say, and that's
even, like, an even worsepandemic.
Do you think that the how thehealth officials, the media, the
unions, all these people,politicians handled this, do you
think they've made it basicallyimpossible for for, to get the
public buy in on this everagain? Or do you think people

(01:02:44):
are just gonna be like, well,everything you said before was
bullshit about the masking andthe HEPA filters and the social
distancing and six feet apartand all that stuff. I'm not
taking anything that you say onface So

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
here's what we know. People tend to not be stupid
generally in so far as theyreact accordingly to a threat.
Now, are some threats we can'tsee. So it's not like everything
is based on just sort of likeempirical observation, but

(01:03:21):
generally people will react thatif you see people just dropping
dead in the street, you're notgonna send your kid to school.
You're not gonna go like, andpeople will react.
So if a pandemic is trulydangerous and life threatening
for an enormous number ofpeople, people will act
accordingly. They'll see thattheir neighbors are dying or a a

(01:03:45):
family member who, you know,they'll see kids getting
tremendously sick and dying.They no one no one I mean, it's
just natural self preservation.What happened during the COVID
pandemic was that COVID is, youknow, a horrible, horrible virus
for a very tiny percent of thepopulation who are particularly

(01:04:06):
vulnerable. So these people, oldpeople, and people with certain
underlying conditions were andare vulnerable to really bad
effects from COVID in the sameway they're vulnerable to bad
effects from all sorts ofthings.
I'm in no way suggesting thatCOVID was not dangerous to some

(01:04:26):
people. But what we saw was thatpeople over time observed a
disconnect from what the mediakept telling them and what was
actually happening. That like,look, we have like three thirty
million or so people in ourcountry. And you know after I
forgot what duration of timethere were one million deaths

(01:04:47):
attributed to COVID and this isa whole other topic to get into
died with COVID versus fromCOVID but let's set that aside
one million deaths attributed toCOVID that you know not too many
people are close with threethirty people. It's one out of
every three thirty people andmost people just simply didn't

(01:05:09):
know someone who they're reallyyou might have known a friend of
a friend or like oh a relativeoh that oh my your best friend
tells you that their cousin diedor whatever it may be.
Know you knew of someone butthat's different than like being
really close to someone. Thatthe likelihood just
statistically of being superclose to one, let alone multiple
people who died from COVID wasextraordinarily low. And the guy

(01:05:34):
who took over at CNN after, so Ithink his name is Chris Licht,
It's really interesting and talkabout this in the book. He did
an interview, which I think heregretted later, but he was
talking about why CNN had lostthe trust of a lot of people and
he said, look, he said, peoplelooked out their window and saw

(01:05:56):
that everything was okay, butyet they flipped on CNN and
nothing had changed. It just waslike, you know, a siren going
off every day with, you know,death and destruction and fear
and he's like, eventually,people just tune that out.
Yeah. Because there there wassuch a disconnect from their own
experience from what they werebeing told was reality. It was

(01:06:20):
quite Orwellian in that sensethat you were told literally
like the opposite of what youwere actually experiencing. So
all this is a long answer toyour question which is that like
people act based on theirempirical reality around them
And if something is terrible,people most likely will will act

(01:06:42):
accordingly. But if we see overtime that you know particularly
if we're given information fromoutside the country which sadly
as I show in my book was largelykept from the American people
unless you really dug for it.
But if you're given sufficientinformation that you will then

(01:07:03):
be able to make your own valuejudgments and decisions based
on, oh, wow. So there's 22countries in Europe reopen their
schools and the kids are thereand they said, you know,
everything's fine. Oh, well,that's useful information for me
to know, except no one freakingcovered it in America. I
ultimately wrote about it in anarticle in Wired in June. I

(01:07:26):
mentioned the EU meeting, know,and this is just one data point.
There are others. We had, youknow YMCAs that were open with
tens of thousands of kids.Daycares. Daycares. No mask
mandates.
They weren't doing exactly andthey also found that there was
no you know catastrophic sort ofoutbreaks happening. There were
numerous things going on thatwere virtually absent from the

(01:07:48):
public conversation, both frompublic health experts and from
the legacy media. So this keptpeople in the dark and this kept
much of the population, not all,but much of the population, it
kept them in compliance with therules because they were
frightened understandably. Buteventually over time, people
stopped listening when theirempirical reality is so

(01:08:11):
divergent from what they arebeing told. And ultimately
schools in America began toreopen in defiance of what the
CDC's guidance said.
Because so including, you know,in blue blue state America and
blue regions that ultimately,even then, they were they turned
into the bad people. Even bluestate America turned into the

(01:08:33):
into their just like their hatedRepublicans. They began
reopening their schools eventhough the quote experts had not
given them permission to do so.But they did I think

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
the tipping point for most normal people, I mean, not
even like political people was,you know, like, they had these
health professionals saying,like, you can't go to church,
you can't go anywhere. But thenthe George Floyd murder
happened. Yeah. And then theywere like, well, you can go out
and protest. That's fine becausesystemic racism is a bigger
public health threat than thanthe COVID pandemic we're in

(01:09:06):
right now.
So going outside and and, youknow, not social distancing
being

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
part the breaking point for or the quote red pill.

Speaker 1 (01:09:13):
I think that's when most people were like all right
this is entire this is allbullshit I'm just gonna go live
my life and I don't careanymore.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
But

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
anyway that was a turning point for for many
people So I gotta wrap.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
Yeah yeah

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
yeah but yeah it was it's great to chat with you. I'm
thrilled that you know to haveme on your program and I do urge
people please go out and buy thebook it's available everywhere
or it should be you can order itonline. I would describe it as
both a enraging but necessaryread and it will arm you and

(01:09:51):
it's really ultimately in myview Tim, the book's really not
about the pandemic in the end,it's not that's the backdrop,
it's really a case studypandemic. The book is really
about how decisions are made inour society, how elite
institutions and influentialpeople come to the decisions,

(01:10:11):
you know conclusions that theycome to and make the decisions
they make and how regular peoplemake decisions. That's what it's
really about.
It's to have an understanding.So for the next crisis and it
doesn't need to be a publichealth crisis, it could be
something else that and even nota crisis but just the day to day
narratives that are put forth inour culture that what I hope and

(01:10:33):
what I believe happens is thatthrough reading the book, it
gives you a differentunderstanding about how to view
what's actually going on and ithelps arm you with the tools to
be able to argue and articulatewhat these problems are.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):
Yeah. No. I was gonna say normally, you know, when we
do this, I tell people that, youknow, when when Austin, hey, you
know, you should check this bookout. With this book, I'm gonna
say you need you need to checkthis book out. You need to read
this book.
It's a it's an indispensable,book. Everybody, like I said,

(01:11:10):
it's very aggravating. You'regonna wanna, you know, throw the
book, you know, against thewall, you know, a couple dozen
times while you're reading itwhen you're finding this stuff
out. And by the end of it, youknow, you might be entirely
radicalized to, you know, thethe Jacobin slaughter of
teachers, unions, and presidentsand whatnot. But no.

(01:11:31):
But it's it's an indispensableread. It's I highly, highly,
highly, highly recommend it foreverybody out there. The name of
the is An Abundance of Caution,American Schools, The Virus, and
A Story of Bad Decisions, andthe author, our guest today,
David Zweig. So, David, thankyou so so much for, you know,
taking the time out of your lifeto come on this podcast, and

(01:11:53):
thank you so so much for takingall the time out of your life to
research this book and all, youknow, all the sweat equity you
put into this, you know, findingall this stuff out and and
putting this stuff all togetherfor us so that we, you know, we
could benefit from the from thefrittier of your labors. We,
really, really appreciate it.

(01:12:13):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Well, thank you, Tim. I I appreciate chatting with you
about it and, you know, to becontinued for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:12:20):
Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. Take care, everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
Thanks, Tim.