Ill Literacy, Episode 180: An Abundance of Caution (Guest: David Zweig)
Download MP3Alright. We're good. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Illiteracy Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Benson, a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute. Thank you guys for tuning in.
Speaker 1:Once again, sorry for the the short little hiatus for the last few months. I know I haven't been recording anything, but a very good reason for that is because I've been extremely busy with my actual job for Heartland, the one that they actually pay me to do. So just wanted so that's why the little hiatus were just a little busy with the all the legislative sessions around The States this this season, this year. So, you know, I just didn't wanna have to reschedule stuff with people, book guests, reschedule them, book guests, reschedule them, etcetera, etcetera. So, decided just to take a little break for a couple months.
Speaker 1:But anyway, should be back from now on with with some regular podcasts once a week for you guys. So just a heads up on that. But thank you very much again for tuning in. And if you like this podcast, please consider giving illiteracy a five star review at Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to the show and also by sharing with your friends as the best way to support programming like this. And my guest today is mister David Zweig.
Speaker 1:And is it Zweig? Is that how you
Speaker 2:Zweig? Yelled it. Yeah. Zweig.
Speaker 1:Zweig. That's what I thought.
Speaker 2:David Zweig.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So mister Zweig is a journalist and author based in New York. You may have seen his work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Free Press, Wired, New York Magazine, and the Boston Globe among many others, as well as his substack newsletter, Silent Lunch. And he is the author of the novel Swimming Inside the Sun, as well as the non fiction work, The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self Promotion. And he is here to discuss his latest book, An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, which was published back in April by the MIT Press.
Speaker 1:So, missus Weich, thank you so, so much for coming on the podcast. I do appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:No problem. Now before we get to the heavy stuff in the book, I gotta ask you about this because I was on your your website, and it says at the very end of your website, says, years ago, as singer, guitar player, and producers, White released two albums, All Now With Wings and Keep Going. Both albums chartered on college radio playlists and garnered accolades with the press calling you a, quote, symphonic pop prodigy. And then so I'm a big music geek dude, you know, just not not too far removed from the the guys in high fidelity. If you've seen that movie, I'm sure you have.
Speaker 1:So I went and checked it out on Amazon just to see if, you know, the stuff was still available and there was any reviews and got people comparing you to, you know, Kevin's Shields of My Bloody Valentine. My Bloody Valentine, excuse me, and Billy Corgan and all this stuff. And, you know, someone said that they bought your CD, I guess, your first album at the same time that they bought Abbey Road and that they actually spent more time in the car listening listening to your album.
Speaker 2:Where this where is this written?
Speaker 1:This is on Amazon. I'll read let me see. I bought the CD when I purchased Abbey Road, although I love Abbey Road, all now with wings remained in my CD carousel far longer.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad that that payment I made to that person worked.
Speaker 1:That was a review from 02/2002. It's still up on Amazon. Incredible. So if you check it out. Anyway, so I wanted to ask you about that.
Speaker 1:So Symphonic Pop, who are your who are your influences? Who are your you know, who do you sort of style yourself after? You know, is symphonic pop a an accurate description of the type of music you were making on those two records?
Speaker 2:I think certainly some of it is is symphonic pop for sure because it's like pop rock music with symphonic kind of arrangements with it, you know, with the string section, sometimes the horn sections, very big grandiose music. Although there's also short kind of rock songs mixed in. I love those big, I grew up loving The Wall and stuff like that where it was like where you're taken on a journey and other like prog rock bands.
Speaker 1:So you're a prog guy?
Speaker 2:Yeah like Yes and Rush where you know Rush there's like you know the second half of the album is you know just like a one hundred twenty minute song. I love that type of stuff. I love big just epic things so in my book now you know that just came out An Abundance of Caution it's like four fifty pages and I have hundreds of endnotes. I'm a bit of a maximalist so I guess in music and writing and you know whatever else I tend to kind of turn the dial to 11 So yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Alright. Well, I'm gonna have to check it out. I'm gonna have to search around for some, for some copies of this of these albums and check them out. I mean, if someone's if someone likes it more than Abbey Road,
Speaker 2:it's on Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are they on Spotify?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Alright. Cool. I will look for that. Alright.
Speaker 1:Now to the book itself, and it's, basically, your book is a story on, the COVID pandemic and how basically everybody failed America's children, in 2020 and 2021 going forward. I I mentioned to you on before we started recording that this book was one of the most aggravating books I'd ever read. Not with anything to do with how it was written or anything like that, but just the narrative of events and how things were decided, how things were agreed upon, how things were promoted, not promoted, how this whole COVID situation, pandemic, the school closures, and all that stuff came about. And I actually I actually called my grandfather earlier this afternoon because I was just finishing up the book. And I basically was like, I just need to, like, vent at you for about fifteen, twenty minutes because I wanna get all this out before I record the podcast because no one's gonna wanna listen to me just, you know, hurl invective at, you know, the teacher's units and the health officials and all these people for if, like, if I get going on this, I'm never gonna be able to stop.
Speaker 1:So I just need to get it all out now and get with you. So I did that.
Speaker 2:If anyone's looking to get angry, boy, drive the book for you. Right. Right. But it's, you know, it's good to it's better to feel angry than to feel nothing or to be bored. Sometimes it's important to be pissed off.
Speaker 2:And my book is, you know, it's rare to have a book that can really infuriate you by what you learn in there and that is one of the things I wouldn't say I aimed to do that, but it was, but that is an important and I think natural reaction that someone, people reading my book should be enraged when they learn about the failures, you know, I mean, most people have an awareness of certain broad failures within the pandemic, but I actually show what happened behind the scenes. You know, and there are things that happen that your listeners have no idea of how bad it was. They like, there's no way people can actually know without getting into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I sort of go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. No.
Speaker 2:I was just saying, why don't
Speaker 1:we just start there before we get into that?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Why don't you just tell everybody what, you know, what made you wanna write the book? You know, what was your what was the genesis of this whole thing? What was your your kid's experience with school and with COVID, and how did that lead you to this project?
Speaker 2:What got me started, you know, before I was working on the book, just as a parent and as an American citizen, the pandemic began in The U. S. Or at least the response to the pandemic in March. I live outside New York City. I was following along with the rules and the guidelines like pretty much everyone else in my area.
Speaker 2:You know, we were told that, you know, New York City was, you know, facing a crisis. I had no particular reason to question what the public authorities were telling us. I'm a skeptical person. I've always been that way. I don't just automatically believe what government officials are saying.
Speaker 2:Nevertheless, I didn't have something in me saying oh my god this might be untrue or they're lying or something. I just kind of went with it in the beginning But after a brief amount of time, I felt like given the gravity of the response, which in my view, and I'm 50, I mean never in fifty years, I've never observed or experienced this degree of an infringement on the personal liberties of American citizens. I would challenge anyone name another event in America in the last fifty or more years of this scale where we were not allowed as citizens to function and do sort of normal things that we would do. It was against the law to gather and it was against the law that the schools were closed. So this was an extraordinary circumstance and it seemed to me that there was not a sufficiently correlative amount of explanation behind it.
Speaker 2:It was just there's a virus, this is an emergency, this is what we have to do, which again for a week or two seemed reasonable to me. But then I started just asking questions to myself in my mind and I've spent many years as a journalist doing a lot of sort of science and tech journalism and cultural and psychological type of topics that have involved me reading. I'm really good at reading academic studies and journals, I'm used to it, I like corresponding with scholars. I'm used to that. I used to work before the profession, before the thing became politicized, I used to be a magazine fact checker a zillion years ago and it's part of my disposition just naturally but in that role as a fact checker you're really taught to have to go to the source for something.
Speaker 2:That something is simply being you know written about in the New York Times or something that's not like that would never be a sufficient source of proof behind something or backup for a statement. We have to go deeper and like what's the actual source of this thing not just a media account. So all that coupled together I'm like here's this completely insane circumstance happening, maybe it's justified I don't know but what I do know is I'm not getting enough information at least to satisfy me. So and while all this is happening, I'm also observing my kids who are the way I describe it in the book that I just saw them wilting away in the gray light of their Chromebooks in their bedrooms and I'm like this is not going to work over a long period of time. Was very obvious.
Speaker 2:Now again, so
Speaker 1:how long did it take for your kids to go back to full time in person
Speaker 2:At least a year I think before they were back in school full time and even then it was still bizarre. There was mask mandates for an entire year after that.
Speaker 1:So how long until it was like back to normal?
Speaker 2:I think it's like a good two years before you're like in school every day as a kid like with things being normal or at least close to normal. It's like two freaking years. So I'll just try to wrap up the initial thing. So I'm observing this. I started asking questions.
Speaker 2:I was working on another book at the time. I couldn't work on it anymore because I was just like obsessed with trying to figure out what's going on during this period of time and I started reaching out to researchers and doctors and others mostly in Europe because you couldn't talk to anyone in The States. And it became apparent very, very quickly a few things that children were at basically close to zero risk, a risk on par, not zero but close to it, a risk on par generally with the flu or any number of other things that kids face in a given year. Sure. And actually you know and I give some statistics in my book.
Speaker 2:Mean look more kids die drowning in a given year than they do from COVID in a year. More kids die in car accidents, multiples more.
Speaker 1:Probably more die in car accidents driving to school.
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly like there's so many things so the point is not that COVID is zero risk but that kids just being a person in the world. Bad things happen sometimes and more kids killed themselves than died of COVID given year. So anyway there's all these things that like it's not that it's no risk but it's relative to other things. Then the other argument of course was that well even if kids aren't at risk that they're putting everyone else at risk and we can get into it Tim but like so anyway all this got me started I'm looking at stuff and then and I'll just kind of segue into this which is the original sin in my mind or one of them the main ones
Speaker 1:is A lunch date Tapper might sue you if you use that phrase.
Speaker 2:Is that oh that's his book right yeah well is that at the April and the May schools began reopening in Europe they're like at least they're lower schools and we're talking about millions of kids. Okay, not you know one school somewhere in Denmark. We're talking about millions of kids and in the May, the education ministers at the EU met and 22 countries, 22 began reopening their schools, millions of children and the official assessment was that they observed no negative consequences of the school's reopening. They didn't observe an increase in cases among teachers, among the community And like this is the real kind of like record scratch moment on the soundtrack here. And one of the things that's so important about this or perhaps the most important part about this is that this was virtually ignored.
Speaker 2:It was like you would think this would be on the front page of every newspaper. This would be in every cable news, everyone would be talking about it. This was essentially just completely nonexistent. I'm watching this video over and over again because I can't believe what I'm How can this be? How can it be possible?
Speaker 2:Is this real? Is this actually the EU? Is this fake? How can it be that 22 countries reopen their schools and we're being told that we can't reopen our schools? Well, why?
Speaker 2:Why is that? So that is one of the things that set me on my path. I had already written an article in the very May for Wired magazine where I argued we need to reopen the schools and I had a list of evidence why that would be the case and Europe agreed with me because they already had begun reopening their schools so it wasn't like this was some outlandish conclusion to come to. This is the conclusion that 22 ministers of health in different countries, they came to the same conclusion and I want to be clear about something because this is really important and this is like one of the main kind of bogus arguments that we heard and that people still make to this day which is, well that's Europe, that doesn't count and then they would list any number of reasons why we're not supposed to believe that Europe reopening schools and there being a problem. There's a whole long list of reasons about why that's supposed to like not matter.
Speaker 2:And we have to ignore that and wave that away. And what I do in the book is I show point by point how all these reasons were completely made up. This is just, if I may on the podcast, this was bullshit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, It was, it
Speaker 2:was bullshit. And I wanna say, you know, suspect your audience is generally leaning in a particular political direction. I came at this problem apolitically. Did not have
Speaker 1:any You're not some winger.
Speaker 2:I'm not a right wing operative. I'm not like I used to be on the left, I'm just you know completely independent at this point. Although I was never like a knee jerk sort of left person, was never like a know yeah you're just like a normal yeah I was kind of like a normie democrat but an independent yeah
Speaker 1:there used to be a lot of you guys but now
Speaker 2:yeah so my point being I had no reason to want this to be true I had no motivation for this other than I was observing something that seemed crazy to me and I had to follow where the facts took me and that's what I did.
Speaker 1:Well, even to your point about what we knew from Europe in April and May, we had even before then, February 24, talking about JAMA. So the Journal of the American Medical Association's peer reviewed medical journal, probably one of the bigger medical journals of that type. They got this summary report from what was essentially the Chinese CDC. And you know, it's China, so take it with a grain of salt, but it was a big, don't know if was a study or analysis that the Chinese did. Basically, they found even in late February, so before we even started locking anything down really in The United States, that only one percent of patients under of all the COVID cases, only one percent were children 10, another one percent were children ten to nineteen, and that the disease in children appears to be relatively rare and mild.
Speaker 1:And they also say there is not one instance of transmission from a child to an adult. So we already had that study. And again, it's you know, people might not wanna you might wanna take it with a grain of salt because it is communist China that is coming out of, the epicenter of this thing, and they've been lying about, you know, pretty much everything else. But but when you have that and then you have, you know, what comes out of Europe in in all 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.
Speaker 1:And that showed what that showed. I mean it was pretty it seemed like the evidence showed pretty clearly that we could get these kids back to school. Again,
Speaker 2:that's the conclusion, like the people in Europe don't want to kill their kids or kill themselves and the ministers of health in 22 different countries there came to the conclusion that it was not only reasonable but wise to start reopening their schools at the April, the May. They looked at the data from China and the data from Europe. There's stuff out of Iceland and I go through all this stuff in my book obviously. So one of the way I describe our initial closures was that they were both reasonable but wrong. You can understand to some extent that there's this new virus, people are trying to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 2:I get it and I think it's fair to have some degree of latitude for some sort of action on that. I think argument could be made and perhaps you disagree with me that's like that's never okay.
Speaker 1:No, no, no. Mean, I was, you know, at the time, I mean, so sort of my thing. So my son was born on 02/22/2020. And basically, like a week later, the hospital where he was born, they stopped letting people in for like deliveries and all that sort of stuff. I remember when we first took into the pediatrician, the pediatrician was like, look, we don't know anything about this virus, really.
Speaker 1:But we do know that these type of things tend to impact children and old people more because their children because their immune system hasn't developed, especially with such a newborn. So they were like, basically, don't take your kid out of the house until or take him around anybody other than, like, immediate family until we give 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:the most person. Right.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. Like So that seemed entirely reasonable to me because, like, I mean, I know the thing about kids not having a developed immune system. So, I mean, to a layman like me, I mean, just my first thought would be probably not gonna bring my kid out to Target or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I, you know, I took everything that they were sort of telling us with a you know, I wasn't unduly suspicious. I thought, you know, they probably know better than anybody. These guys are all health professionals. I mean, that's why we have the freaking CDC in the first place and all these other places. So, know
Speaker 2:What's very clear and what people may already think this themselves, but what the book really kind of bakes in when someone reads it is the notion that we are told, we were told and the narrative continues that it's like, well, there was so much we didn't know, they did the best they could. Again, people need to ask themselves, well, why is it that all these other countries came to a different conclusion from The United States? How could that be? How is that possible? One of the things that we were told repeatedly from public health officials, from these various pundits, you know, there's this emergency medicine physician who was at Brown at the time, think now she's at Yale, who is in the New York Times constantly.
Speaker 2:She was on TV, no particular expertise. Again, we're talking about an emergency room doctor. Nevertheless she turned herself into a COVID pundit and so people like her and everyone else one of the things we were told was well Europe controlled the virus that they're allowed to do. They earned the right to do this. I want to be very clear that what I show in my book and I do this analysis between different cities, different towns in Europe and sort of the equivalent in America where they had similar demographics or similar population size or density and that no, on the contrary they did not control the virus there, that countries, cities, and towns throughout Europe had virus levels that were above that in The US, below that in The US, and around the same.
Speaker 2:It was literally and figuratively all over the map. There was absolutely untrue that like, quote, Europe controlled it and we didn't. The United States is huge. So the idea that like the prevalence of the virus in Chicago should somehow influence what happens in Chattanooga does not make sense. Like this is, it's absurd, but nevertheless they were just looking at the sort of like American rate or prevalence of certain things rather than looking at it on a more regional or local basis because the range between where you were was massive.
Speaker 2:The viral prevalence was almost non existent in an enormous part of the country early on. Nevertheless, these people were still shut down. So one of the things that like amongst many dispel is the idea of like quote we didn't know. And the other thing tied to that, and one of the reasons I call the book An Abundance of Caution, it's a bit tongue in cheek, is caution for whom and caution in which direction and I spend a lot of time in the book. I interviewed this really interesting guy named Eric Winsberg who's a philosopher and he studies sort of the like bioethics in the philosophy of medicine and the ethics that go along with these different decisions with modeling and such and I spend a lot of time talking about the precautionary principle and because to many people including me, know you think of the precautionary principle as this idea well like look I'm just playing it safe, know like this other thing is scary and crazy and you know this is the right thing to do.
Speaker 2:But what I show is how that was really distorted and manipulated, the idea of what was cautionary and that the precautionary principle can be employed under certain circumstances for a very brief period of time. But once you continue to kind of say something is part of, well, we're just playing it safe, Once you continue to do that after empirical evidence shows what's going on on the other side, the precautionary principle is about when you have an absence of evidence, when you don't know what's going to happen, you're playing it safe. But once you do know what's going to happen, once you do have evidence, for you to continue to do that is dishonest and in this instance incredibly harmful. So we had a circumstance where it wasn't the precautionary principle and it wasn't even a cost benefit analysis because that was never performed either but rather and I don't use this word lightly but it was a lie and it's hard for a lot of people to hear that. Know again like you were mentioning you had no reason to like particularly distrust the public health experts in the country who were telling us things and I'll say this, I believe these people, almost all of them, were trying to help everyone.
Speaker 2:There was no one like Mr Burns from The Simpsons or something putting their fingers together like oh how can I harm the country?
Speaker 1:Well I might disagree with you on the unions.
Speaker 2:I haven't mentioned the unions yet, that's different. We can get to the teachers unions but when I'm talking about the public health professionals, don't these people were not trying to purposefully harm society. In their minds, they were doing the right thing and what I
Speaker 1:And they were doing sort of they were taking steps that were sort of to them justified their positions. That's right. Their job is to do something in this situation.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:right. If we do something, that means that there's no purpose to us.
Speaker 2:Tim, you read my book, man. Yes, exactly. So one thing I love this section in the book where there's these fascinating studies where we know that public health people have admitted to this that they say even when they were shown evidence that some intervention didn't work, that they still wanted to continue with it because quote, it feels good to feel like you're doing something. And this comes from a noble place. You want to feel like you're helping, but unfortunately, America has uniquely aggressive medical culture and public health culture.
Speaker 2:There's, you know, and you can think about like the gender affirming care stuff here relative to Europe where in The US it's deemed perfectly appropriate, not only appropriate, but the moral and correct thing to start giving little kids hormones and puberty blockers and you know even surgeries and such. Whereas in Europe they were far far more hesitant for that type of interaction. There's all sorts of stuff and there are various reasons sometimes it's financial, sometimes it's you know just cultural but we have an aggressive medical culture here and that really came to the fore during the pandemic where the idea was like the more you do, the better you are. The more quote afraid of COVID you are, the more you hunker down, the more masks you wear, the more virtuous you are.
Speaker 1: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: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 like there were many, many bad incentives for these people that led them down this harmful path. The scariest thing is a person who's a tyrant, but who believes that tyranny is for your own good. That's worse than someone who sort of knows they're doing harm for some other It's worse when they believe they are really helping, that this infringement and this tyranny, no, no, no, this is the right thing.
Speaker 2:So it's easy to have these sort of like conspiracy theories and talk about everyone working in cahoots together with these ulterior motives and this, that and the other thing, which again, we can set the teachers' unions aside for a moment. But as far as the public health people and combined with the legacy media it's much more to me much more interesting about what happened where it's not like they got together in a back room but rather there are all sorts of social dynamics at play in America relate to these people behaving in the manner that they did and but what's the result? People need to and I don't know you know who's listening to this how many of them not that you need to be a parent but it does kind of bring it into full relief further but even if you're not a parent of younger kids or even a parent of older kids now but you can remember what it was like. We had healthy children in America, healthy kids, millions of them who were barred from entering school, some of them for more than a year or a year and a half even kids in California, Virginia, and other places, many of them were not allowed in school while at the same time bars were open, restaurants were open, California you could go to the mall a healthy kid was locked in his his or her bedroom.
Speaker 2:And we're not talking about a few weeks. We're not even talking about a few
Speaker 1:months. Years.
Speaker 2:We're talking about more than a year. This is a radical, radical circumstance. And to my mind, there is not nearly enough reckoning and analysis of what actually took place. People listening to this program right now might be annoyed about it. They might be like, yeah, that was so dumb, but that's not enough to just simply say that was stupid.
Speaker 2:And that's why I spent years writing this book and researching it and I sort of dig into the studies and dig into the absence of evidence from the things they told us about mask mandates and on and on because it was really, really important to me for there to be an official accounting, an official record of the decision making process behind something as completely batshit crazy as having millions of healthy kids who were imprisoned in their homes essentially while adults could go on kind of doing whatever they felt like to one degree or another. That is insane and we need to reckon with that and the harm to kids was extraordinary.
Speaker 1:Oh sure no I mean I honestly like I'm surprised that you guys weren't you know taken to the streets and out slitting throats over stuff man.
Speaker 2:My I book is why why that didn't happen because that's also fascinating. Why is it that millions of people weren't with pitchforks? Why were millions of college kids perfectly okay with school that they're paying 50 or a $100 for their parents or at least or taking out loans where it was just conducted online and then later they were told you have to get vaccinated or you're not allowed back even after we knew that the vaccines didn't stop infection, they didn't stop transmission, you weren't, you couldn't, most universities did not allow students to go back to school without getting, these are things and like but yet there were not, you you got them all you know protesting Gaza but they weren't protesting this like incredible incredible infringement on bodily autonomy of someone they're forcing you to have a medical product injected into you that again someone could make an argument that that's a reasonable infringement by the government. I'm not saying I do or don't agree with it. Someone could make the argument that it is reasonable if the vaccine stopped infection
Speaker 1:or transmission. Generally pro mandating vaccines like the ones that actually work and you know like my kid's catholic school you have to have
Speaker 2:you know, the sort of normal schedule. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, the normal, the the one I grew up with and everything else.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So misprint. But yeah, but I mean, it's just crazy. Like, you know, say you were a junior in high school in California in March 2020. The last day of school you had March 2020, that was the last day of high school for you.
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:There was no I mean, no senior prom, no junior prom, no graduation, none of that stuff. And you probably missed
Speaker 2:that. Season.
Speaker 1:No football season. No sports.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:No class trips to Disneyland or whatever the hell they do
Speaker 2:in California. Out with your friends outside this you know, school school bell rings. You're, like, hanging out with your pals after and going to whatever, getting a slice of pizza or something in town or whatever it may be. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is there's much attention rightfully so paid to learning loss and there's an enormous amount of data on this that the more kids were out of school, like the districts that had excessive school closures or hybrid schedules and stuff where the kids were only in one or two days a week, that the ratio, the more kids were out of school, the worse they were performing academically. Needless to say, there are all sorts of enormous long term consequences of these academic
Speaker 1:Oh, it's not even, I mean, I do education policy, not even like kids being out of school. Even if the teachers aren't there, it affects the students. I mean, the more often that the teacher is absent, from school, the the more of an effect it has on the results of the kids in their class.
Speaker 2:All of it. So for many reasons this is incredibly harmful and not to mention there are many kids who just disappeared. They just stopped logging in online because it was a waste to them or they didn't care or maybe they had some other thing going on in their home life, you know, that made this impossible to do it. So there were many kids who just disappeared. So anyway, my point is much attention has been paid to the learning loss and I'm sure will continue to be paid to that because you can track it somewhat, you know, there's a way of, you know, looking at the data.
Speaker 2:But as important as that is, what's so important and it's kind of like ineffable. It's like, you know, all things that are quantifiable are important and not all things that are important can be quantified. And, you you were mentioning about the prom and stuff like that. And like, that's one of the things. And again, we're not talking about one school district.
Speaker 2:We're talking about millions and millions and millions of kids. Like it's hard to even conceptualize how many kids and adolescents that is. The numbers are 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 slow down that those experiences of life you know we all have this kind of montage film reel in our heads you know of growing up.
Speaker 1:Childhood, yeah sure.
Speaker 2:And these kids, the public health authorities along with the help of the legacy media and with the prodding of the teachers unions on top of it, These kids had this taken away from them. Yes, they were still alive but what I talk about in the book, there's fascinating psychological research on this about we and this is pretty well known that like we remember things that are new. You don't remember kind of like something generic in your life. That's the way our brains work. We tend to remember things and that's tied to physical location that when you enter a new space, like physically enter a space that triggers things in your mind where there's more memory formation happening.
Speaker 2:So when they step into the school building each day or they step out of their home or you're getting into a friend's car or stepping onto the soccer field, wherever it may be, these things impact your brain differently from I'm gonna wake up, maybe go down to the kitchen and grab a bowl of cereal and then go back to my bedroom where I just spent the last eight or ten hours. Now I'm gonna go back in there or I'm gonna sit at the dining table and I'm gonna do that day after day after day, week after week, month after month. That creates essentially just a vacuum of memories because it's the monotony. There's nothing worth remembering.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's a void.
Speaker 2: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 more of memories from kids.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:That we took those experiences. They will never have the prom but even beyond the prom, they'll never have just those kind of special but yet completely mundane experiences of like just a random day in high school or like a little kid in third grade putting her arm around a friend you know at the playground that was stolen from them and one of the things that's really important is that there was nothing gained from this. And maybe your listeners, I don't know, maybe they would agree with that or not because our intuitions might tell us, well, closing schools, that's gotta have some effect, right? Because there's, it's a bunch of snotty kids running around or mask mandates putting something in front of you like a piece of cloth, that's going to help something, Maybe it's not perfect. What I show in the book is that that is completely untrue.
Speaker 2:That other than an extremely short period of time in a very small number of select places where everything, if everything's closed at once, not just schools, but all of society, men's school closures can have some effect. But that's not what happened. What happened was schools remained closed while the rest of society in America began reopening. Let's not forget that also plenty of people never locked down because they couldn't, because they were the ones running the country. They were the ones keeping it moving from, you know, having the electricity on to fixing the the infrastructure to working as a cashier, to working in the warehouses, delivering the stuff to your home, to a slaughterhouse, and so on.
Speaker 2:So all those people were out and about, and many of them have children. So, their kids, there was always going to be a virus circulating and I talk about there's mobile phone data that I mentioned this in the book. You can see that even before they began relaxing these restrictions, people began moving about. Why? Not because they're but because they're human and even the most introverted among us as human beings, we, it is not normal or tolerable to be sequestered at home for just some indefinite period of time.
Speaker 2:So what we know Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean, that's why they I mean, a lot a lot of people consider solitary confinement in prison, you know Torture. Cruel and unusual punishment.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. We had we had Netflix and whatever else and you know, people could a little kid could my kids, I mean, I watched my son, he he watching 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 and see them in person even though we could FaceTime with them.
Speaker 2:It is not a substitute. This was just a ridiculous fantasy that that would somehow be an adequate substitute for children. Yeah. Can a white collar worker do a Zoom meeting and that's like enough? Sure.
Speaker 2:But they're
Speaker 1:Well, that was that's the other thing is too. Right? Mean, people that are making these recommendations and, like, the the people think that are making these recommendations and saying, well, this seems reasonable or this is reasonable. All these people, for the most part, are of the class that is going to be least burdened by everything that they're recommending. You know?
Speaker 1:Oh, the schools are closed. Well, okay. Well, I can pay for a tutor. Or we're we work from home, so we can help, you know, little Billy or little Sally, you know, with their homework or with, you know, whatever bullshit they're doing on, you know, schoolwork remotely.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. The people, the sort of laptop class, these are the people who are generally making 6 figure salaries and up and whatever that who work in public health, who work at universities, who work at the CDC. These are the people who are making the recommendations and the rules, not to mention the politicians who obviously do not live in the same type of atmosphere as a significant portion of the country. The people who made the rules of course had a very different lifestyle than millions of Americans, including a lot of really financially not well off families, people who really were low income. Maybe you have a family jammed together in a small apartment in the Bronx somewhere.
Speaker 2:And I guarantee if the people making these rules and who made and we didn't you know I see we're going to run out of time soon but I have a lot of talk in my book about the models that the whole pandemic response was built upon, that the people who made the models that if they were living in a cramped apartment in The Bronx with six other people and no air conditioning and maybe an abusive adult in the home, somehow I don't think they would be as convinced that just keeping the schools closed for a year on end would be a reasonable trade off. Somehow that seems highly unlikely, but these people live in comfortable homes. Their kids, as you mentioned, they could hire a tutor, maybe they could go to private school, they could get the parents oftentimes were home to help the children. So this was one of the most class.
Speaker 1:They had space, lots of space. Space.
Speaker 2:This was one of the most classist events in recent American history.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Without a doubt.
Speaker 2:The idea that that the wealthy were the virtuous because the wealthy could stay home and the lower income people, those were the people who were intended to serve the virtuous wealthy people.
Speaker 1:You never saw one of those in this house we believe signs on like any, you know what I mean? In someone's lower income neighborhood.
Speaker 2:Right, in some like dilapidated house in Appalachia, they didn't have in this house we believe in signs because they were fucking out working. They were doing stuff in many instances these people, they didn't get to just be in the relaxed home Netflixing and whatever else. So like it's to me one of the ironies and tragedies is that the left which purports to care about lower income people and underprivileged people the most, like this is how they view themselves as champions of the poor, that the left caused the most harm that policies that they advocated for, including, and in particular long term school closures, these very policies harmed the people who they purport to care about the most. How ironic and how tragic that you are the one causing that damage. And one of the reasons my book is so important is that these people are the same ones, they're in the same sort of elite class in America who are part of the legacy media and other influencers in our country.
Speaker 2:They are not inclined to admit that they made a horrible, horrible mistake. That's just, you know, human nature
Speaker 1:But they never will.
Speaker 2:Most people are not inclined to admit. There's a reason why there's been so much analysis of like the Iraq war, of Afghanistan, of Vietnam, if we wanna go back. Why? Because the villains are generally the right. If, you know, Colin Powell lied to us about weapons of mass destruction, you know, George Bush launched us into this or whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:So it's easy to to have, you know, 500 books about Iraq war and how horrible a mistake this was and about Vietnam, it's easy to have all these analyses because the villain is on the other team. It's highly unlikely that these people are inclined to talk about the reality of what actually happened. Instead, we are fed a very conveniently exculpatory narrative that well, we did the best we could and Donald Trump's an asshole and this was scary and a million people died. And so that's it, case closed, mic drop, we're done. But that's one of the reasons why my book is important that it exists as a record of why that's a lie.
Speaker 2:And it's important for people listening, the next time you're at a small party or you're with some relatives and you're met with that type of answer which is, well we did the best we could, Donald Trump's a piece of garbage, A million people died and so on. You will be armed with information to say, well, actually what you're describing isn't true and here's why. So if anyone listening wants to be able to confront that and not just like sort of say, no, that's not true. My book arms you with just an absolute compendium of data and information, but you will remember it. At least the major bullet points, you will be able to destroy anyone in an argument who makes these claims.
Speaker 2:I think it's really important for as many people in our population to be able to do that. That's my pitch for buying my book. Be able to destroy some idiot in an argument who's making Yeah, this
Speaker 1:no. A couple months ago
Speaker 2:Very satisfying. A months month caution, how to destroy people in an argument.
Speaker 1:There you go. There you have it. Yeah. So a couple months ago, I was having a conversation, with a friend of mine, although he hasn't talked he hasn't spoken to me since then, that I've known for, you know, pretty much since college or since, like, senior year of high school, basically. And, he's a school teacher, union guy, has a PhD in, neuroscience, has a master's.
Speaker 1:His wife has a couple masters. They're very liberal. And somehow the union thing we were talking about something not COVID related, but we were talking about unions or something. And I brought up the point that, like, how the unions totally fuck themselves by opposing tooth and claw every attempt to open the schools, you know, even well past the point that they knew these schools were safe. And he was like, no, that's not true.
Speaker 1:I mean, they just they were just doing the best they could with the information they had. And, you know, you don't understand what it was like for the teachers, how scared everybody was. And I was just like, dude and I knew some of this stuff in the book, like, going in because, like I said, I I I, you know, I do this for a living. So all all the stuff about Europe and everything in in the 2020 of, you know, what they knew from their schools, what they knew that, you know, teachers actually had a lower rate of infection than, you know, most professions, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:I was like, dude, it's like, we knew like, they knew this, like, again, in the 2020. Like, this was fucking known. Everybody knew this. And, you know, there's a reason that the school systems that stayed closed stayed closed when every other school system on Earth was going back was already in full time schooling or was going back to full time schooling. And that was because if the unions had enough political muscle to keep them closed until then and that I mean, there are literally studies.
Speaker 1: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 Institute for Law and Liberty. I could be wrong about that, though. That's showing that basically, yeah, the re like, the determinant for when schools open and when some schools open and when some schools didn't had nothing to do with science at all or in anything to do with the data at all.
Speaker 1:It all had to do with how powerful the union was in that and and how ideologically blue that district was.
Speaker 2: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 you know, showing this.
Speaker 2:It's it was a 100% political. The way I view the unions is they were opportunistic. They took advantage of the situation. And
Speaker 1:that's why they're bad.
Speaker 2:Right, no, no, that's in no way excusing it. To me, but what's important to understand is that like that quote, my book is really about the failure of the expert class and that the unions couldn't have done this without the public health quote experts feeding the country a bunch of BS and without the legacy media acting as an amplifier for this BS and that the unions could not have had this sort of all these outlandish claims if they were never said by the public health experts to begin with. The the whole thing about everyone now is saying and Randy Weingarten from the American Federation of Teachers, second largest teachers union in the country, she's repeatedly said, oh I wanted schools open Anthony Fauci. Yeah Anthony Fauci's, you know, I never closed a school. Well yeah you didn't go there with like a padlock you know on the front door but by everyone saying, we want schools open quote, when it's safe.
Speaker 2:Well, so then they described a whole
Speaker 1:series And that metric was an ever shifting goalpost.
Speaker 2:It was ever shifting it was never tied to science at all. One of the things that's so crazy is that mask mandates were not universal across Europe by any stretch. Indeed, the ECDC, that's Europe's version of the CDC, they did not recommend masks on kids in primary school at all. And even the World Health Organization didn't want masks on kids under six years old. But in America, two year olds were wearing masks all day long.
Speaker 2:They were not doing six feet of distancing across the board in all these European countries in their schools. Many of them were doing one meter, which is like roughly three feet or no distancing requirement at all. They didn't have HEPA filters in their schools that we were told we needed HEPA filter. And it's not because of windows Plenty that didn't of them at schools, the windows stayed closed. You know, in in in the Nordic countries and Scandinavia, those windows were closed in the dead of winter when it was well below freezing.
Speaker 2:And they didn't have HEPA filters either. And it's not because they controlled the virus. They didn't have mass tests and trace in every single school district. All these things that we were told were necessary in order to reopen a school were not being done across the board in Europe and nor were they being done once schools began reopening here in The States. What we knew at the time was that this didn't matter regarding viral transmission, that these measures were just simply not effective.
Speaker 2:We knew that time and we know this now in retrospect as well, that Florida versus California, that the excess death rates, once you control for the difference in the age of the population between Florida and California, once you control for that, there's no advantage in California. So the mask mandates, gathering limits, six feet of distancing, all these closures of schools and businesses and all these things, none of that did anything. And if the people who say, well, wait a minute, there's this, look, there's a study published in the Lancet, or there's a something in the New England Journal of Medicine, It doesn't matter. Those studies, this post hoc analysis where the researchers get to choose all the parameters themselves, we don't need those studies. It's much better if we just look at empirical reality and we can just simply look at the number of deaths and the number of cases overall between two states that functioned totally differently and how they handled the pandemic.
Speaker 2:And in the end, there was no advantage at all. Everyone got COVID anyway. It didn't matter that California had all these things put in place and children in California, millions of them kept out of school except Gavin Newsom. The governor, his kids could go to school in person, which he did. So like, it's just this whole thing was completely insane and harmful.
Speaker 2:And what's frustrating to me is look, it's really easy to kind of pick on like QAnon or other stuff and be like, oh, these people don't know what they're talking about. Look at these crazy people. It's much harder and more important to call out the experts, to call out the people and that you know one of the things you might remember this Tim in the book is I talk about how you know when we think of these models that showed you know where they project out how many cases and hospitalizations and such will happen based on if we follow, if we do these special things and everything then the case rate's going to be this, but if you don't listen to the instructions it'll be that. Three out of the four most accurate modelers that the CDC, you know, looked at their data, three out of the four most accurate modelers didn't even work in public health.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're just like, dude.
Speaker 2:It's a rando, like some guy out of Washington state who's a, just pick this up. He's he's a software consultant. He performed better than teams that had people from Harvard, from Dartmouth, from Columbia, from the Los Alamos lab, you know, the famed brilliant people there, all this stuff that your friend who you talked about, Tim, who's, you know, has a PhD and stuff like that. I'm sure he's really bright, but there's a difference between being smart and being a critical thinker. There's a difference between being able to memorize a lot of information and get your credentials and actually thinking through and understanding how to look at evidence and how to think critically.
Speaker 2:And the fact that these public health professionals who've spent their entire professional life or decade or decades doing this work and a bunch of randos performed better than they did on their models is extremely devastating in my mind. I find it sad and upsetting because I want 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 time here, but I explain all this in the book about why and how did this happen. So we know these things did happen, but what I'm interested in, what I think is so fascinating is like how did the gears turn in society, you know, both at a political level and also at like a social level? Like how is it that these things happen?
Speaker 2:And that's sort of what I try to show in the book is like how these different pieces come together. How can something so crazy as this happen?
Speaker 1: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 mean, do you think that this is poison like, say, and that's even, like, an even worse pandemic.
Speaker 1:Do you think that the how the health officials, the media, the unions, all these people, politicians handled this, do you think they've made it basically impossible for for, to get the public buy in on this ever again? Or do you think people are just gonna be like, well, everything you said before was bullshit about the masking and the HEPA filters and the social distancing and six feet apart and all that stuff. I'm not taking anything that you say on face So
Speaker 2:here's what we know. People tend to not be stupid generally in so far as they react accordingly to a threat. Now, are some threats we can't see. So it's not like everything is based on just sort of like empirical observation, but generally people will react that if you see people just dropping dead in the street, you're not gonna send your kid to school. You're not gonna go like, and people will react.
Speaker 2:So if a pandemic is truly dangerous and life threatening for an enormous number of people, people will act accordingly. They'll see that their neighbors are dying or a a 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, you know, a horrible, horrible virus for a very tiny percent of the population who are particularly vulnerable. So these people, old people, and people with certain underlying conditions were and are vulnerable to really bad effects from COVID in the same way they're vulnerable to bad effects from all sorts of things.
Speaker 2:I'm in no way suggesting that COVID was not dangerous to some people. But what we saw was that people over time observed a disconnect from what the media kept telling them and what was actually happening. That like, look, we have like three thirty million or so people in our country. And you know after I forgot what duration of time there were one million deaths attributed to COVID and this is a whole other topic to get into died with COVID versus from COVID but let's set that aside one million deaths attributed to COVID that you know not too many people are close with three thirty people. It's one out of every three thirty people and most people just simply didn't know someone who they're really you might have known a friend of a friend or like oh a relative oh that oh my your best friend tells you that their cousin died or whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:Know you knew of someone but that's different than like being really close to someone. That the likelihood just statistically of being super close to one, let alone multiple people who died from COVID was extraordinarily low. And the guy who took over at CNN after, so I think his name is Chris Licht, It's really interesting and talk about this in the book. He did an interview, which I think he regretted later, but he was talking about why CNN had lost the trust of a lot of people and he said, look, he said, people looked out their window and saw that everything was okay, but yet they flipped on CNN and nothing had changed. It just was like, 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because there there was such a disconnect from their own experience from what they were being told was reality. It was quite Orwellian in that sense that you were told literally like the opposite of what you were actually experiencing. So all this is a long answer to your question which is that like people act based on their empirical reality around them And if something is terrible, people most likely will will act accordingly. But if we see over time that you know particularly if we're given information from outside the country which sadly as I show in my book was largely kept from the American people unless you really dug for it.
Speaker 2:But if you're given sufficient information that you will then be able to make your own value judgments and decisions based on, oh, wow. So there's 22 countries in Europe reopen their schools and the kids are there and they said, you know, everything's fine. Oh, well, that's useful information for me to know, except no one freaking covered it in America. I ultimately wrote about it in an article in Wired in June. I mentioned the EU meeting, know, and this is just one data point.
Speaker 2:There are others. We had, you know YMCAs that were open with tens of thousands of kids. Daycares. Daycares. No mask mandates.
Speaker 2:They weren't doing exactly and they also found that there was no you know catastrophic sort of outbreaks happening. There were numerous things going on that were virtually absent from the public conversation, both from public health experts and from the legacy media. So this kept people in the dark and this kept much of the population, not all, but much of the population, it kept them in compliance with the rules because they were frightened understandably. But eventually over time, people stopped listening when their empirical reality is so divergent from what they are being told. And ultimately schools in America began to reopen in defiance of what the CDC's guidance said.
Speaker 2: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 blue state America turned into the into their just like their hated Republicans. They began reopening their schools even though the quote experts had not given them permission to do so. But they did I think
Speaker 1: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 then the George Floyd murder happened. Yeah. And then they were like, well, you can go out and protest. That's fine because systemic racism is a bigger public health threat than than the COVID pandemic we're in right now.
Speaker 1:So going outside and and, you know, not social distancing being
Speaker 2:part the breaking point for or the quote red pill.
Speaker 1:I think that's when most people were like all right this is entire this is all bullshit I'm just gonna go live my life and I don't care anymore.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:anyway that was a turning point for for many people So I gotta wrap.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah
Speaker 2:yeah but yeah it was it's great to chat with you. I'm thrilled that you know to have me on your program and I do urge people please go out and buy the book it's available everywhere or it should be you can order it online. I would describe it as both a enraging but necessary read and it will arm you and it's really ultimately in my view Tim, the book's really not about the pandemic in the end, it's not that's the backdrop, it's really a case study pandemic. The book is really about how decisions are made in our society, how elite institutions and influential people come to the decisions, you know conclusions that they come to and make the decisions they make and how regular people make decisions. That's what it's really about.
Speaker 2:It's to have an understanding. So for the next crisis and it doesn't need to be a public health crisis, it could be something else that and even not a crisis but just the day to day narratives that are put forth in our culture that what I hope and what I believe happens is that through reading the book, it gives you a different understanding about how to view what's actually going on and it helps arm you with the tools to be able to argue and articulate what these problems are.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I was gonna say normally, you know, when we do this, I tell people that, you know, when when Austin, hey, you know, you should check this book out. With this book, I'm gonna say you need you need to check this book out. You need to read this book.
Speaker 1:It's a it's an indispensable, book. Everybody, like I said, it's very aggravating. You're gonna wanna, you know, throw the book, you know, against the wall, you know, a couple dozen times while you're reading it when you're finding this stuff out. And by the end of it, you know, you might be entirely radicalized to, you know, the the Jacobin slaughter of teachers, unions, and presidents and whatnot. But no.
Speaker 1:But it's it's an indispensable read. It's I highly, highly, highly, highly recommend it for everybody out there. The name of the is An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, The Virus, and A Story of Bad Decisions, and the author, our guest today, David Zweig. So, David, thank you so so much for, you know, taking the time out of your life to come on this podcast, and thank you so so much for taking all the time out of your life to research this book and all, you know, all the sweat equity you put into this, you know, finding all this stuff out and and putting this stuff all together for us so that we, you know, we could benefit from the from the frittier of your labors. We, really, really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, Tim. I I appreciate chatting with you about it and, you know, to be continued for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. Take care, everybody.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Tim.
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