The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 366. Epidemics and Delusions

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone, I'm speaking today with Steve Templeton.

00:01:12.360 He wrote a recent book, very relevant to the Times, entitled Fear of a Microbial Planet, How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe.

00:01:24.340 Yeah, well, it seems to me that a safety culture, all things considered, probably makes us globally less safe, but that seems particularly the case in relationship, let's say, to germophobic safety culture, given what happened in the pandemic.

00:01:41.200 So, what specifically motivated you to write this book, and when did you start writing it? What did you see happening?

00:01:50.700 Yeah, so first of all, thank you for having me on your show, on your podcast.

00:01:55.500 I'm very grateful to be here. I've been a fan since 12 Rules for Life, so thanks so much for having me on.

00:02:02.200 But, you know, what originally happened was, just with anyone else, the pandemic took me by shock, surprise.

00:02:09.100 I didn't anticipate how we would respond to the pandemic, and I didn't anticipate the appetite of people for being able to have their lives completely shut down and controlled by politicians and other people, public health experts.

00:02:32.180 So, I was really floored by the type of response and the way that people were behaving, and it made me think, you know, they don't really have an idea of their microbial environment.

00:02:46.140 Because, you know, you're seeing things like people wearing masks outside, you're seeing playgrounds being shut down, hiking trails, things like that, that there was absolutely no evidence that there'd be any sort of risk to those activities.

00:03:03.560 And I was really floored by how widespread that was, you know, I mean, and people really bought into it, you know, I saw a single child at a playground that was shut down.

00:03:17.460 I mean, this was probably a teenager, and someone came up and berated him for being on a playground by themselves after it had been shut down.

00:03:25.920 So, this type of behavior was really eye-opening for me.

00:03:30.560 It was something that I didn't expect, and I really started to think, why is this happening?

00:03:36.260 I know as an immunologist, there are going to be pandemics.

00:03:42.580 This one particularly seemed to be age-stratified in terms of mortality.

00:03:47.580 Children weren't really affected.

00:03:48.800 These were all things that we were known, that we knew very early on.

00:03:52.420 And so, I was really surprised by that response.

00:03:57.100 I started thinking about how to explain it in a way that I could understand.

00:04:06.020 So, I've kind of been interested in writing a book, and this theme sort of kept popping into my head of, you know, all these things that weren't necessarily controversial three years ago.

00:04:19.740 And then all of a sudden became controversial.

00:04:24.060 And so, that was kind of the impetus for writing the book.

00:04:28.580 Well, it's interesting, because your training is in immunology, but what you said, what you're describing here is the fact that you're actually struck by the social and the political response, psychological, social, and political response.

00:04:43.480 And so, I've got a couple of questions about that.

00:04:46.040 The first is, psychologists have started to outline, and I don't know if this is research that overlaps with what you study, the operations of what's called, often called, sometimes called, the behavioral immune system.

00:05:02.400 And I suppose part of the behavioral immune system is the disgust response, right?

00:05:07.640 And it has a physiological basis.

00:05:11.040 The gag reflex, for example, is part of that.

00:05:13.400 The fact that poisons taste bitter to us.

00:05:15.720 The fact that we can be, that we sneeze.

00:05:18.260 The fact that disgust will evoke a defensive and avoidance reaction.

00:05:26.420 The fact that we'll regard things as contaminated.

00:05:29.200 Those are all parts of the behavioral immune response.

00:05:32.260 And one way of conceptualizing what happened with regard to the pandemic was that you can get an immune response that goes out of control like a cytokine storm.

00:05:44.160 But this looked to me like it was the equivalent of a cytokine storm on the behavioral immune front.

00:05:51.000 And what do you think of that line of theorizing?

00:05:54.960 Does that strike you as plausible?

00:05:57.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:05:57.620 So, first of all, I've written about the connection, or at least the metaphor, of an immune response to our own pandemic response.

00:06:07.620 Because in an immune response, things start out pretty nonspecific at first.

00:06:12.400 You have a lot of inflammation.

00:06:14.080 You have a lot of tissue damage.

00:06:15.940 But then, as it progresses, you get more of a specific or an adaptive response.

00:06:21.380 And that is more, you know, antibody cells that are more specific to any given pathogen.

00:06:28.300 And there's a lot less collateral damage because of that specificity.

00:06:32.280 And so, you would hope that a pandemic response would be like that.

00:06:37.300 I mean, obviously, in the first few weeks, you're not going to know what you're dealing with.

00:06:40.260 But as the pandemic spread through different populations, you got to see who the vulnerable people were, who wasn't affected, how transmissible it was, which was very highly transmissible.

00:06:53.680 And you would hope the pandemic response would kind of look like that, like an immune response that was successful in defeating a pathogen.

00:07:03.640 But I thought it became more like an autoimmune response, where we started attacking things that didn't matter, like schools and issuing mandates without evidence that they were really going to make a difference.

00:07:19.100 And so, I've used that metaphor before.

00:07:23.020 In terms of the behavioral immune response, I think that's a really interesting thing, and I've thought about it and written about it as well.

00:07:29.520 Well, because obviously, if you're thinking about the fear of this, being an immunologist, I had to delve into some psychology, which is another reason I'm fascinated to talk to you about this.

00:07:42.220 But, you know, the political sort of tribal conflict that we have here in the United States seems to override some of the studies on disgust.

00:07:55.460 Because you would think that, based on studies, more people who are conservative would tend to be more easily disgusted.

00:08:03.360 And that's been done in studies.

00:08:06.260 And early on in the pandemic, that was very much covered in the press.

00:08:11.740 Because, you know, Donald Trump is a germaphobe, and everyone wanted to kind of talk about that.

00:08:18.720 Media people covered that a lot.

00:08:21.260 But then it turned out that people who are more conservative tended to reject mandates and coercive public health measures, whereas liberals were more likely to just buy into all of it and enforce it almost to the level of it, you know, being a religion.

00:08:42.600 And so I think that's really interesting, that the sort of political considerations overrode that research.

00:08:51.800 Well, so, okay, well, let's walk down that road for a minute.

00:08:56.140 So I did, my lab did some of the research on disgust sensitivity and conservatism.

00:09:01.980 And we looked at it in relationship, for example, to trait conscientiousness, because there's some indication that conscientious people are more disgust sensitive.

00:09:11.460 Now, and it was striking that, as you pointed out, that what you might have predicted to begin with, and there's also a fair bit of research.

00:09:23.660 Which I can't, unfortunately, remember the researcher's name at the moment, but I had him on my podcast, who's documented quite clearly the relationship between contamination, the prevalence of contaminants, transmissible contaminants, state by state and country by country.

00:09:41.220 And the probability that especially right-wing authoritarian beliefs will arise culturally and individually.

00:09:50.680 And the relationship is quite tight.

00:09:53.180 But as you said, it looked like it was the left in particular that was gung-ho about the lockdowns, even more so than the conservatives, although they were also complicit.

00:10:05.780 Now, what seems to have emerged recently, there's another line of psychological research that bears on this.

00:10:13.020 And so, for 70 years, psychologists denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism.

00:10:21.500 And I'm going to lay that denial at the feet of social psychologists, because I believe that they turned a blind eye to left-wing authoritarianism 100% for political reasons.

00:10:32.220 Although, it might also be because some of them were also left-wing authoritarianism 100% for political reasons, although it might also be because some of them were also left-wing authoritarians.

00:10:36.960 But there's been a new line of research developed, and there's probably only about 10 studies in total.

00:10:43.360 We did one in 2016, before my research career came to an abrupt end.

00:10:49.140 First of all, establishing that left-wing authoritarianism was identifiable on statistical grounds, but then second, looking at the predictors.

00:10:57.080 We found low verbal intelligence and being female and having a feminine temperament were solid predictors of radical left-wing beliefs, combined with the willingness to use compulsion and force to enforce them.

00:11:12.960 But more recently, people have been examining the role played by dark tetrad traits.

00:11:20.720 So, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and sadism, which is a late addition to that horrible triad, let's say.

00:11:30.420 I read one study last week showing that the relationship between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism was so strong that they're almost indistinguishable on the measurement front.

00:11:47.700 And so, I wonder if what we saw wasn't so much a disgust reaction of the sort that you would associate with conservatives, but an opportunity for malignant narcissists to use fear to manipulate the population, to put themselves in positions of power.

00:12:05.240 Like your book, you make that case, you know, to a fair degree, because you concentrate not so much on disgust, but on fear, and then on, well, on the machinations that were used by people who manipulated fear to gain notoriety and political power.

00:12:23.680 In Canada, I'll give you one other example.

00:12:25.460 So, in Canada, I know for a fact, because I've been told by the people who were involved, even though they were embarrassed to have been a part of it, that virtually all the COVID lockdown policies were implemented on the basis of opinion polls, and then provided with a post hoc justification with the science, right?

00:12:52.920 So, it was 100% instrumental manipulation.

00:12:55.820 So, anyways, that's a set of ideas.

00:13:00.720 Yeah, I think that you can reduce it maybe to, instead of left and right, authoritarian versus non-authoritarian.

00:13:09.440 And I think that that's what you said is correct.

00:13:12.500 I think the level of authoritarianism has changed between left and right in recent years.

00:13:20.540 And that's because the amount of relative power, I think, has changed.

00:13:25.280 I mean, you know, when I grew up in the 80s, and I remember, you know, censorship drives, and, you know, music was being attacked, and everyone was joking about it, because conservatives wanted to censor things.

00:13:39.860 And, you know, none of that really happens anymore.

00:13:43.220 It's kind of the other way around, where people can't joke about certain things, and they have to demonstrate how virtuous they are in sort of a left-wing kind of way.

00:13:55.520 So, I think that you can reduce it to changes in authoritarianism, definitely.

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00:15:38.080 Yeah, well, it's still uncertain the degree to which, let's say, we could make the hypothesis that oversensitivity to disgust will drive an authoritarian response on the right.

00:15:55.420 You definitely saw that in the Third Reich under the Nazis because Hitler, for example, appeared to be extremely disgust sensitive.

00:16:03.160 And I read a fair bit of his spontaneous utterances about the Jews and all the other people who persecuted.

00:16:11.240 And he used the language of purity and contempt and disgust constantly.

00:16:16.900 It wasn't the language of fear.

00:16:18.420 I mean, he did, you know, foster fear, let's say, in relationship to the people he targeted.

00:16:24.680 But more specifically, he fostered disgust.

00:16:27.780 And so maybe, and no one knows if this is the case, maybe a disgust reaction that goes overboard fosters at least part of right-wing authoritarianism and the dark tetrad psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism fosters something like radical left-wing authoritarianism.

00:16:48.020 No one's cleared that up yet, but it seems at least tentatively plausible.

00:16:53.120 I mean, I was struck by the recent research in particular because the relationship between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism is unbelievably strong.

00:17:05.080 I haven't seen correlations.

00:17:06.420 Correlations, I think, were 0.6, crazily high correlations for two constructs that can't be measured that accurately.

00:17:14.460 So, well, so it'd be good to sort that all out as rapidly as we possibly could, assuming it would do some good.

00:17:22.560 Yeah, I agree.

00:17:23.440 It's pretty complicated.

00:17:24.480 The use of fear was very, going back to what you said a little bit earlier, was definitely widespread.

00:17:32.140 And I think at the beginning, it's interesting to look at the contrasting messages that were given by the authorities.

00:17:39.720 In the beginning, they really were trying to prevent panic.

00:17:43.280 And they were really trying to lessen the fear of people because studies have shown if you are anticipating in a pandemic, it's actually the fear is higher than when it has actually arrived.

00:17:56.200 So, many of the messages were calming.

00:17:59.800 And then, you know, all of a sudden there was this switch.

00:18:03.520 And, you know, once there was community spread, we knew that there was a lot of virus around that wasn't being detected.

00:18:13.660 Then there was this sort of mysterious switch to basically the exact opposite, this fear-based messaging.

00:18:19.960 And, yeah, so that was really surprising to me and pretty infuriating because I knew it wasn't going to work.

00:18:30.000 Yeah, well, maybe what happened is that maybe that reversal took place when the more narcissistic, psychopathic, power mongerers started to understand that they could cement their positions and broaden them with the use of fear.

00:18:49.800 You mentioned earlier, I thought this was very interesting.

00:18:52.400 You mentioned earlier that in an immune response that is actually healthy, you get kind of flailing about on the part of the immune system to begin with as it attempts to get a purchase on the virus or the bacteria.

00:19:06.720 And so you get an overgeneralized response that's not very specific and sophisticated.

00:19:11.920 But as the immune system learns, the response gets more and more targeted and more specific.

00:19:18.240 And that you saw the opposite happen in the public response.

00:19:21.820 And that begs the question, right, what drove the opposite response, like the opposite of learning?

00:19:29.600 And the we want to accrue power to ourselves narrative and we'll use fear to do it does seem to fit the explanatory bill, let's say.

00:19:41.760 Yeah, that's the million-dollar question is how did that happen?

00:19:45.800 And my explanation of thinking about this, because, you know, it happened a lot in Western countries, many, many Western countries, but it didn't happen everywhere.

00:19:57.340 And so what I started to think about was, you know, I'm a parent, I have a child that's 11 and one that's 7.

00:20:07.200 They were obviously three years younger when the pandemic hit.

00:20:10.280 But being a parent, I've really noticed since I was a child, this sort of emergence of safety as this sort of overriding virtue of all the, you know, taking risks as being something that's left to reckless people.

00:20:29.980 And you can't even use sort of probability to assess whether something is risky or not.

00:20:38.780 If it's determined to be risky, then it's hazardous.

00:20:41.640 And so I think the distinctions that used to be sort of surrounding child rearing have, in terms of allowing them to develop on their own and take risks and, you know, get injured if they make a mistake or, you know, fail, you know, a lot of that has been removed.

00:21:05.340 And I feel like this example really leads us to the response to the pandemic.

00:21:15.040 I feel like it's a cultural problem because if you look at places that don't have this very strong safety culture, Nordic countries are a great example.

00:21:26.580 They did not have the same type of authoritarian response that we did in Europe and other Western countries, specifically, you know, Anglosphere countries, Canada, United States, UK, Australia, New Zealand.

00:21:42.500 They didn't have that.

00:21:43.660 And they actually don't have a safety culture that's the same.

00:21:48.740 I mean, I heard a story when I was in Denmark a few years ago, and it's been—it was covered widely at the time about parents that went to New York City, and they—these were Danish parents.

00:22:02.180 They brought their child in a stroller, and they had—in Denmark, it was very common at the time to leave their child in a stroller outside the restaurant so that they could watch people that, you know, are passing by.

00:22:14.800 And they got arrested for doing that in New York City.

00:22:20.420 And so, that was something brought up by my host in Denmark.

00:22:25.100 It was really interesting that, you know, their view of raising children is different than ours.

00:22:33.420 They believe much more in challenging them, allowing them to make their own decisions.

00:22:38.940 And so, I really think that that explained a lot.

00:22:42.200 And that's how I get to the point of having the safety culture in the title or in the subtitle is because of that explanation.

00:22:51.640 I mean, anyone who's been a parent has had to deal with—or had to deal with, like, public schools.

00:22:56.520 I mean, you know, the threshold for canceling school even before the pandemic got, you know, got pretty low.

00:23:03.760 I mean, they're even—now they even predict snow in Indiana here.

00:23:07.780 They cancel school.

00:23:09.140 It could never actually snow.

00:23:11.180 So, these things are much different than when I was a kid.

00:23:17.620 And I feel like that has, you know, as children have been raised that way and are now adults, now young adults, I have a feeling that that is one way to explain what happened.

00:23:27.880 Yeah, well, there is some psychological research pertaining to that that's associated with some of the things we've discussed already,

00:23:37.360 which is that mothers who have cluster B personality pathology, and so that would be associated with what's called externalizing behavior in women.

00:23:50.200 It's borderline personality disorder, for example, are much less likely to foster independence in their children.

00:23:58.540 And so, and that cluster B is also associated with some of the dark tetrad traits that we discussed, that malignant narcissism, that psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, you know, perhaps is pushing it, but perhaps not.

00:24:16.280 No, because the question, of course, is why does that safety culture emerge?

00:24:24.620 You can attribute some of that to neuroticism, to fear, but you can also attribute it to the willingness of hyperprotective parents to use their purported concern for the security of their children to justify their use of excessive power and control.

00:24:43.880 You know, and this is part of the reason why your book and the title of your book is interesting and the tack you're taking on this, right, because you are looking at the nexus between the use of fear and the justification for power.

00:24:58.620 And the safety culture, it's got that virtue signaling element, right, which is extremely dangerous.

00:25:05.300 It's like, well, listen, dear, the reason I'm doing this for you is because I care so much about you and all I really care is about your, let's say, short-term security.

00:25:17.840 And it's hard to argue against that because, of course, safety is a paramount concern or an important concern when you're dealing with children.

00:25:26.160 But the problem is that it can be gamed by people who want to exert power and who can use their putative moral superiority as a justification.

00:25:37.700 And I do think that this is a kind of epidemic.

00:25:41.240 I guess a question I would have for you, too, is like, I'm increasingly bothered by the fact that we even refer to a pandemic.

00:25:50.260 You know, Jay Bhattacharya, no, Ioannides, Ioannides, who's a very good statistician and researcher, I mean, he was the person who initiated the so-called replication crisis in psychology,

00:26:08.200 showing that so much of psychological research actually didn't replicate, not that it's necessarily worse in other disciplines.

00:26:14.660 But he just published a paper or has published papers showing that the case fatality rate for COVID is way lower than we had been led to believe.

00:26:26.880 In fact, it's so low, I think, that you could argue that there wasn't a pandemic at all in some real sense.

00:26:33.560 And you see this echoed in the Swedish data, because if you, I believe, if you average out the death rate over a two-year period,

00:26:42.240 there's no statistical blip in deaths in Sweden during the so-called COVID years.

00:26:48.640 And so I think our terminology for what happened during that time might also be deeply wrong.

00:26:55.660 And that what we had was an epidemic of tyrannical lockdown with a putative novel illness.

00:27:05.940 Well, the illness was novel, but a putative pandemic as the excuse.

00:27:11.740 Now, maybe that's too radical, but I'm not sure it is too radical.

00:27:15.420 You know, it certainly was a disease that I think the Israelis recently announced, if I remember correctly,

00:27:22.760 that they didn't have any deaths at all for people under 50 who had fewer than four comorbidities.

00:27:31.900 It's something like that.

00:27:33.760 And so, like, do you think it's completely preposterous to proclaim that we didn't have a pandemic at all, except one of tyranny?

00:27:42.140 Yeah, I would say we had a pandemic, but, you know, the response was something that we really, really blew and didn't, you know, focus on the people who were actually affected.

00:27:58.100 I mean, if you have a population of people who are average of 81 of people who are dying,

00:28:03.620 that's going to be actually pretty difficult to measure in terms of, you know, excess deaths.

00:28:09.160 And because a lot of people in that age group and with comorbidities, if you have a pandemic that lasts two years,

00:28:16.040 the chances of many of those folks living two years is much lower than it is in populations of, say, young people.

00:28:24.340 So, the ability to measure that becomes more difficult when you're dealing with an old and frail or infirm population, I think.

00:28:35.000 Well, that's especially true, too, if you then purposefully confuse dying with COVID with dying from COVID, which clearly happened, right?

00:28:46.480 And, I mean, I talked to physicians who said that they were instructed by their, well, their professional organizations.

00:28:52.760 They were encouraged by their professional organizations to list any death with COVID as a death from COVID.

00:28:59.600 And God only knows how that gerrymandered the statistics.

00:29:02.920 And I think it was the London Times, even the Times now, reported two days ago on the fact that all the evidence in the UK suggests

00:29:13.460 that the costs to the lockdown were orders of magnitude above the costs that were actually associated with the biological pathogen itself, right?

00:29:25.060 They're not even in the same league.

00:29:26.340 It's not like the lockdowns were a little worse than the virus.

00:29:30.340 They were stunningly worse than the virus.

00:29:33.140 And we haven't even seen all the accruing catastrophe that's emerged from that yet.

00:29:38.880 But, I mean, I don't know what to make of the excess death statistics, for example, that just don't seem to go away.

00:29:49.500 Do you have any thoughts on that matter?

00:29:51.840 Meaning, you know, in the last few years, we have more excess deaths?

00:29:56.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:29:57.340 Well, even right now, it doesn't like the excess deaths in Europe are between 15 and 20 percent, something like that, 10 and 20 percent above normal.

00:30:07.780 And that doesn't seem to be going away.

00:30:10.700 And, you know, I think the simplest explanation for that is that we hurt people very badly with the lockdowns.

00:30:17.640 But then the other open question is, is there some degree to which the actual vaccines are contributing to this?

00:30:25.760 And, you know, that's an absolutely horrifying possibility.

00:30:29.040 But I don't think it's off the table statistically at the moment.

00:30:32.200 Yeah, I mean, the vaccines were very promising for people who were in that vulnerable age group.

00:30:39.940 But, you know, what happened was politics took over, especially here, and mandates, in addition to removing all liability from the vaccines themselves, which had been tested minimally and not necessarily on the population you'd want to test them on, that is, older and infirm people.

00:31:02.760 They were minimally and so, you know, for an emergency, you'd want to focus on the vulnerable population because that would be where the biggest benefit would be obvious.

00:31:15.800 But that didn't happen.

00:31:16.980 I believe that there was a lot of influence from pharmaceutical companies acting upon government agencies.

00:31:25.360 And their incentives were actually not to promote actual public health of people here in the United States.

00:31:33.380 And I'm sure in the UK and Canada, it was exactly the same.

00:31:36.860 There was outside influences.

00:31:38.840 The same is true for, you know, just counting COVID deaths.

00:31:41.640 If you provide an incentive to overcount, if you give hospitals more money for COVID patients, whether they're, and if they're on a ventilator or their type of treatment, you're providing an incentive for those hospitals and healthcare providers to increase those numbers so that they can increase their profits.

00:32:05.180 And these are just, it's just a matter of incentives, giving people perverse incentives is going to lead to perverse outcomes.

00:32:13.180 And, and I think that's exactly what happened.

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00:33:21.900 When you started writing this book, when you started observing what was happening around you, how would you characterize your political stance?

00:33:35.920 Because people who are listening are going to be wondering, and I think it's a reasonable thing to wonder,

00:33:41.140 how your a priori political stance might have formed the lens through which you were viewing what was laying itself out.

00:33:50.320 How would you have characterized your political views, let's say, five years ago, and how would you characterize them now?

00:33:58.220 I've always been a, you know, I've been in academia for a long time.

00:34:03.720 I was in, you know, graduate school for a while and here in Indiana for about 12 years.

00:34:09.000 So being around other scientists, being around other people in universities and medical schools, I was never, you know, the most,

00:34:19.060 I was not a liberal person in relation to my peers in that way.

00:34:25.700 If you put me in a room of people who are hardcore, you know, Trump supporters, I wouldn't fit in with that group either.

00:34:34.980 So, you know, I haven't actually, you know, voted for someone who's won an election in a very long time.

00:34:41.540 So if that gives you an idea, I would probably say I was a center right.

00:34:47.640 But one of the things that this really became associated with, anyone who's willing to speak up,

00:34:53.740 there was this fear that you'd be automatically put into this camp of, you know,

00:34:59.140 well, you're doing this for political reasons, you're doing this because you support Trump or something like that.

00:35:04.500 And I really encountered that both from friends and acquaintances that were,

00:35:11.780 and even people just on social media that I didn't know, but, you know, that were liberal.

00:35:16.900 They would assume that I was, you know, a hardcore right-wing Trump supporter.

00:35:23.120 And even Trump supporters would assume that, which, you know, when it comes to closing schools,

00:35:28.860 this became so politicized that even wanting to open schools became a sign that, you know,

00:35:35.860 you didn't want to necessarily agree with Trump on something.

00:35:39.700 And that was really unfortunate.

00:35:42.340 I heard this firsthand from people that I talked to.

00:35:45.300 It's not something that I anticipated really at all because I've lived in a world where

00:35:51.440 a lot of people I know and like, you know, disagree with me.

00:35:56.540 My wife and I disagree on a lot of things, and I'm used to that.

00:36:00.620 But this is kind of the world that we're in now where that's not,

00:36:05.240 those kind of disagreements are not allowed and discussion and debate are shut down.

00:36:09.980 Yeah, well, the question, I guess one of the questions that we might want to address today

00:36:14.440 is what do we think we could do to make sure that the next time this happens,

00:36:18.680 assuming there is a next time, we're not quite so insane about it.

00:36:21.700 And I would say also, what could we learn so that we don't respond the same way

00:36:28.140 to other hypothetical crises that confront us?

00:36:30.900 Because I feel that we could do precisely the same thing and that there are many people

00:36:35.800 hoping this will happen in some real sense, that we could do exactly the same thing,

00:36:39.500 for example, on the climate doom front.

00:36:42.440 And, you know, the more paranoid conspiratorial types have presumed that this was just a warm-up

00:36:48.020 for that.

00:36:48.620 But I have a certain degree of sympathy for their concerns, given what happened.

00:36:52.940 Now, you start your book out.

00:36:54.520 Part one of your book is Fear and Germs, and one of the things you do to begin with

00:36:59.560 is to lay out a little bit of background for people about the nature of the microbial environment

00:37:05.360 that we do find ourselves in, right?

00:37:08.060 So that you can, I suppose, you can give people some sense of how much the relative risk increased

00:37:15.500 because of the introduction of this new pathogen.

00:37:18.500 Do you want to walk us through that a bit?

00:37:19.900 Yeah, so I use my oldest sister as an example of a germaphobe because she was a nurse in a cardiac

00:37:29.020 surgical team, and, you know, obviously her job was very much involved being very diligent about

00:37:37.040 preventing infections in patients.

00:37:38.960 And so I think that sort of translated into, you know, she brought that home and became very diligent

00:37:46.260 about avoiding infections and sanitizing and, you know, any sort of exposure to germs she became

00:37:52.800 sort of interested in and obsessed with dealing with.

00:37:58.820 And so I use her as an example, and I talk about how, you know, that way of thinking is not helpful

00:38:07.340 because we're already in a microbial world and we're exposed to all sorts of things.

00:38:13.460 We have, you know, at least 10 viruses latently infected in our system, in our body at any given time,

00:38:21.820 possibly more, and that's not counting viruses that infect the bacteria that inhabit us,

00:38:28.280 which are astronomically high numbers.

00:38:31.800 So I kind of lay out just how much exposure we have to microbes that we don't realize.

00:38:42.200 And, you know, it's just everywhere in the environment and it's not something you can avoid.

00:38:50.000 And then I talk about, you know, although that's the case, there are definitely instances where we've become

00:38:55.380 very clean and our ability to avoid microbial exposures has resulted in some first world diseases

00:39:03.940 like increased autoimmunity, increased allergy, asthma, those type of things.

00:39:11.940 These are all first world diseases.

00:39:13.780 You don't see them in developing countries at nearly the same prevalence that you see

00:39:17.640 here and in Canada and UK and other places.

00:39:20.500 So I talk about why that is, and mainly it's because we're not exposed to the same level of

00:39:28.060 environmental microbes or even pathogens that we used to be because of obviously huge gains

00:39:36.960 that we had from sanitation revolution.

00:39:39.440 We don't want to go back to that, but something has definitely been lost.

00:39:42.640 And, you know, I give many examples of that, you know, in terms of pandemics, polio is an

00:39:50.640 example where polio was endemic for a very long time until sanitation improved to the point

00:39:59.180 where people weren't being exposed to polio until they were older.

00:40:03.260 And then it became a lot more severe and noticeable in, you know, when you're talking about older

00:40:09.140 children, as opposed to a baby who's nursing, who just has a mild infection and their mother

00:40:14.280 breastfeeds and helps them clear the virus.

00:40:17.440 So, you know, that was an example of a trade-off.

00:40:21.700 And so I wanted to sort of highlight that all of these things were trade-offs and, you know,

00:40:27.740 people have been, this hasn't been controversial at all for a long time.

00:40:33.880 There's no reason to aim for something like zero microbial exposure because that's completely

00:40:42.200 preposterous.

00:40:43.220 And so I think if I remember correctly, in terms of sheer cell number, I think you have

00:40:49.260 more bacteria in your body than cells.

00:40:51.940 Now, they happen to be very, very tiny, but it gives you some, that gives the listeners

00:40:57.140 and watchers, let's say, some indication of just exactly how prevalent, as you said, the

00:41:02.400 microbial load is.

00:41:04.080 And then do you have any sense of what actually constitutes, let's say, reasonable precautions?

00:41:11.260 You don't want to sterilize everything in sight, partly because maybe you make your immune

00:41:15.620 system hyper-responsive if you're overprotected.

00:41:19.080 But obviously, we don't want to return to the filth of the centuries prior to the 20th century

00:41:24.700 where people were dying of infectious diseases at an incredible rate, especially in hospitals.

00:41:32.400 Let's say, so what, and I don't imagine you made yourself particularly popular with your

00:41:38.500 older sister, by the way, using her as an example.

00:41:42.260 But, so what do you think of as a reasonable response to, you know, to cleanliness, given

00:41:50.240 the necessity of minimizing both kind of error?

00:41:53.620 Yeah, so, you know, certain viruses are pretty nasty and cause really awful infections in people.

00:42:04.760 But it turns out that in a general sense, the nastier the virus, the harder it is to transmit it.

00:42:14.160 And so there's sort of an association between the ability to transmit something and then the

00:42:19.560 severity of the disease that it transmits.

00:42:22.800 And so if you take something like HIV, it's a nasty infection, has a very long period where

00:42:33.220 there's not a lot of symptoms, but then becomes very awful in terms of destruction of the immune

00:42:41.040 system leading to opportunistic infections.

00:42:43.700 However, you can avoid getting HIV, for the most part, unless you have some sort of accidental

00:42:50.840 exposure directly to your blood, which did happen, but has been, you know, greatly reduced.

00:42:59.320 The same thing is true about something like hepatitis.

00:43:02.180 You know, these are nasty infections, but you don't necessarily get them from just being in

00:43:08.680 contact with other people.

00:43:10.040 In terms of respiratory infections, those are much more harder to avoid because they are

00:43:17.140 very easily transmissible.

00:43:20.760 They have a lot of genetic variability.

00:43:25.860 And so the immune system is able to, might be able to prevent severe disease, but not the

00:43:33.780 actual infection itself.

00:43:35.120 So, you know, there are some viruses that you want to avoid and some that you really can't.

00:43:42.900 And people should kind of understand the distinction between that.

00:43:47.080 Yeah, well, the rationale was, I think once that became obvious, that the rationale was, well,

00:43:54.860 if we slowed the rate at which it spread, we wouldn't overwhelm the hospital systems.

00:44:00.360 And, you know, one of the things I saw in Canada that was particularly remarkably dim and pathological

00:44:08.540 was that the governments took almost no actions whatsoever to increase the availability of

00:44:15.820 emergency, of intensive care unit, intensive care units, which was seemed, at least at the

00:44:23.300 time, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, seemed like the logical thing to do, especially

00:44:28.120 after this extended over a multi-year period.

00:44:31.120 I mean, we knew, how early did we know that virtually everybody was going to get COVID?

00:44:35.880 You said, as you pointed out, respiratory illnesses are transmissible and there isn't really a damn

00:44:40.500 thing you can do about it.

00:44:41.980 Yeah, I mean, the response was very much like, you know, a behavioral modification was absolutely

00:44:51.020 necessary and everyone had to completely change their behavior.

00:44:54.180 And that sort of did not consider the length of time that was going to be necessary and

00:45:02.920 the fact that, you know, the whole world doesn't operate that way.

00:45:07.140 We're so interconnected.

00:45:09.320 You know, you'd read articles about how I would read them and think, you know, people would

00:45:15.540 talk about, yeah, just get groceries delivered and, you know, you don't have to leave your house.

00:45:22.440 But somebody somewhere is going to have to leave their house in order to support that.

00:45:27.840 And these things weren't really thought out.

00:45:31.280 And, you know, as a result, in some cases it could be delayed, but not completely eliminated

00:45:38.840 by behavioral modifications.

00:45:41.220 Yeah, well, when you say they're not completely thought out, I mean, I think that's what you

00:45:45.960 might say that's the understatement of the decade.

00:45:48.080 I watched recently a viral video of the new CDC director talking about how she made the

00:45:55.480 decision to lock down football.

00:45:59.380 And she is giggling while she's saying this, which is appalling beyond comprehension.

00:46:04.680 And it doesn't really seem to me to be a nervous giggle.

00:46:07.820 It's more like, well, isn't this cute?

00:46:09.740 It's so funny that this is the way it happened.

00:46:11.780 And she talks about talking to one of the health officials in Massachusetts and just sort of

00:46:17.380 bandying back and forth ideas about who should be locked down next.

00:46:21.260 In this case, it was anybody who wanted to go watch football game.

00:46:25.360 And that kind of random scattershot approach to depriving people of their civil liberties

00:46:31.960 seemed to be par for the course.

00:46:33.600 And this particular video is an incredibly egregious example of that because it combines

00:46:39.160 an idiot cutesiness with this terrible proclivity to, well, to really deprive people of their

00:46:46.600 fundamental mobility rights, you know, except for the expendable people, let's say, who were

00:46:50.780 doing the grocery deliveries.

00:46:52.700 And there was a really nasty element to that as well is that, you know, the important people

00:46:57.360 could stay at home and lock themselves up and protect themselves.

00:47:00.480 But the expendable working class could go about their business as usual.

00:47:04.500 Right.

00:47:04.960 I mean, there are all sorts of exceptions too, right?

00:47:08.040 So, I mean, if there were lots of videos of, you know, where, I don't know what the video

00:47:14.560 version of a hot mic is, but where, you know, officials would know that they were off camera

00:47:20.140 or think that they were off camera.

00:47:21.580 And you could see them immediately take their masks off, you know, because they're truly believing

00:47:27.680 that this is something they have to perform to show for people.

00:47:31.580 And they don't necessarily believe that it's going to be 100% effective in reality.

00:47:41.080 And so there were lots of examples of that where people didn't actually believe what they

00:47:47.020 were saying.

00:47:47.580 I mean, when there were protests, there were lots of public health people that said, you

00:47:53.900 know, protesting racism is public health necessity or something like that.

00:47:59.000 And a lot of people rightfully identified that as just being completely based on nonsense.

00:48:08.500 I mean, the idea that, you know...

00:48:10.780 Yeah, well, the same thing happened with COP26 in the UK, right?

00:48:15.060 So it wasn't just like Black Lives Matter protests.

00:48:18.400 It was also climate change meetings.

00:48:21.640 The UK government completely inverted its rules to allow the delegates to the climate change

00:48:27.800 conference to proceed apace with no restrictions, because apparently that was what the important

00:48:33.660 people got to do.

00:48:35.000 Whereas ordinary people who were going about their lives weren't able to continue.

00:48:39.140 And one of the things we did see, and this is going to have extraordinary long-term consequences,

00:48:44.140 is that there was a massive transfer of wealth from the, like, essentially working-class and

00:48:52.320 lower-middle-class business owners who got demolished by the pandemic restrictions to

00:48:57.560 huge retailers like Amazon.

00:49:00.780 And once those little businesses are gone and many of them disappeared, it's very hard to

00:49:07.140 get them back.

00:49:07.860 And so, and I don't know, you know, I don't know how you count up that kind of collateral

00:49:13.760 damage when you're trying to derive the statistics about exactly what the pandemic lockdowns cost

00:49:18.720 us, because the toll that took on families, well, there is no one even interested in measuring

00:49:24.100 that, I suppose, in some fundamental sense.

00:49:27.500 Yeah, I mean, you cannot put a single number on it, because there's so many areas of life that

00:49:33.920 are affected by it.

00:49:35.000 I mean, healthcare in a way of treatment of cancer, treatment of heart attacks, screenings,

00:49:41.700 that kind of diagnostic tests, all of these things were completely eliminated.

00:49:47.220 People who were dependent on communities, Alcoholics Anonymous, that kind of thing, all those things

00:49:54.960 were shut down, and some people needed that to survive and were unable to continue something

00:50:04.540 that kept them in a healthier state than they would be otherwise.

00:50:09.900 And so, this sort of singular COVID monomania is so damaging in so many areas.

00:50:16.380 And, you know, you see it every day, there's some news that comes out, you know, of the kids,

00:50:24.260 you know, BMI has doubled, you know, and retention rates are still low in terms of kids staying

00:50:31.940 in school, even, you know, three years after the pandemic, and test scores.

00:50:37.100 Right, right.

00:50:37.860 And a huge number of kids never, a huge number of kids never returned to school.

00:50:44.200 Yeah, absolutely.

00:50:45.600 And so, you know, there's studies that have shown that even three months of disruption

00:50:52.180 in a child's education can affect their long-term, you know, ability to earn money and make a

00:51:00.540 living and, you know, to have this happen on kind of a global scale.

00:51:05.080 People who are already in a poverty-type situation are going to be forced further into that than

00:51:13.480 they would be otherwise.

00:51:14.440 And so, it's going to be so pervasive that it's going to be very difficult to measure.

00:51:20.520 But we're seeing so much of it in terms of other health care costs, inflation, all that

00:51:27.000 stuff.

00:51:27.680 This is all very related to what happened.

00:51:32.260 Well, there's another interesting political issue here, too, that's, I guess, relevant to

00:51:37.240 the use of fear and also to some of the topics we discussed earlier.

00:51:40.780 One of the things I found that was virtually miraculous in terms of its incomprehensibility

00:51:47.240 was the fact that people, particularly on the left, lined up on the side of the pharmaceutical

00:51:52.960 companies.

00:51:53.640 And if you would have told me 10 years ago that left-wing politicos and believers would

00:52:03.240 have aligned themselves with pharmaceutical companies, I would have thought you were completely

00:52:07.320 out of your mind.

00:52:08.120 Because the bugbearer of the left, the bugbearers of the left on the corporate front for the

00:52:13.340 last 60 years, likely, have been oil companies and pharmaceutical companies.

00:52:19.500 You know, and with some justification, especially in the latter category.

00:52:23.900 And yet, there was this unholy alliance between the left-wing authoritarians and the pharmaceutical

00:52:30.280 companies.

00:52:30.880 And I can't help but think that that's likely mediated by this association, heretofore unexamined

00:52:39.880 association between psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism, and the desire for

00:52:45.800 power.

00:52:46.540 Because one of the things that aligning with the pharmaceutical companies did for the power-mongering

00:52:54.020 left was, what would you say, justify their willingness to use power to compel and force

00:53:03.360 people.

00:53:04.400 And I can't find another explanation because it runs so counter to what you would assume

00:53:09.800 the leftist narrative would be.

00:53:11.240 Because of all the people who should be skeptical of gigantic pharmaceutical corporations, you'd

00:53:17.340 think the leftists would be number one.

00:53:19.820 So I don't know if you've had any thoughts about that.

00:53:22.280 Yeah.

00:53:22.640 Absolutely.

00:53:22.860 You would think that, you know, with the sort of natural distrust of big business and pharmaceutical

00:53:30.340 companies that has historically been on the left, combine that with the distrust of the

00:53:38.100 ability of government on the right to take over massive projects, subsidize economies,

00:53:48.600 regulate all health care and things like that.

00:53:51.440 And you'd think that there would be some bipartisan consensus there, but that wasn't the case

00:53:56.580 at all.

00:53:58.140 And I think, you know, for certain people, this benefited them to sort of push the – they

00:54:09.560 shared the same interests with pharmaceutical companies, people who were in power.

00:54:16.240 And even if that didn't mesh with their political beliefs in the past, the promise of gaining power

00:54:25.520 and influence was simply, you know, too much to – it basically overrode that traditional

00:54:34.600 stance.

00:54:35.560 So in the first part of your book, you talk a fair bit about fear and germs, and you try

00:54:43.940 to make a case for what the proper relationship might be between a fear response and the, say,

00:54:52.440 the overwhelming prevalence of the microbial biome around us.

00:54:58.460 In the second part of your book, you concentrate more on a pandemic in the time of safety.

00:55:05.100 So maybe we should delve into that a little bit more.

00:55:07.400 I don't feel that you've had the opportunity to develop your hypothesis about the relationship

00:55:13.800 between the safety culture and the planning and pandemic planning thoroughly.

00:55:18.100 One of your chapters, six, is pandemic planning meets the safety culture.

00:55:23.540 Seven is all the doom we need and the face badge of virtue.

00:55:27.040 Do you want to delve into that a little bit more and elaborate that for everybody who's

00:55:30.960 watching and listening?

00:55:32.300 Right, yeah.

00:55:32.900 So the first part of that is sort of the realization that, you know, the safety culture has enabled

00:55:39.640 a lot of this to happen.

00:55:42.740 A lot of people like to, you know, ascribe the whole pandemic response and all the bad

00:55:49.160 things that happened to, you know, a select few, you know, supervillains out there.

00:55:54.260 And while I am sure that lots of people took advantage of the situation in sort of odious

00:56:01.120 ways, I didn't feel like that's just not my nature to think in the sort of conspiratorial

00:56:09.360 terms and blame a small, you know, cabal of supervillains on the whole pandemic response.

00:56:18.740 But instead, I feel like there was a cultural problem that enabled all of this.

00:56:24.240 And I could see it in some of the things, even on a local level.

00:56:28.100 One example I give is when my daughter was probably about two years old, she got what's

00:56:35.800 called hand, foot, and mouth disease.

00:56:37.660 And her daycare, her daycare, hand, foot, and mouth disease is one of these things where

00:56:42.940 if it gets into like a daycare, it's not going to get out until everybody gets it and gets

00:56:48.680 over it and who's susceptible at least.

00:56:51.220 And adults, daycare workers can get it and have very mild or no symptoms and still be able

00:56:57.320 to transmit it to others.

00:56:59.540 It's passed through the stool.

00:57:01.820 And so if you're in a daycare and you've got toddlers and babies, it's nearly impossible

00:57:07.140 to keep that clean and to prevent spread.

00:57:10.020 Once it's there, it's going to spread.

00:57:12.440 But it's very sort of innocuous.

00:57:15.420 This gives children, it makes them very uncomfortable.

00:57:18.260 They can't eat.

00:57:19.060 They have sores in their mouth.

00:57:21.140 They have sores in their body.

00:57:22.640 They have a fever for a few days.

00:57:24.420 But then it goes away.

00:57:26.480 And sometimes it takes a while for, you know, the spots on their body to heal.

00:57:31.940 And what the daycare was telling us is that my daughter had to stay home until she was

00:57:37.880 completely healed, which was opposite of what, you know, had been, people had been told about

00:57:46.520 hand, foot, and mouth disease for a very long time.

00:57:48.960 It was generally, you know, what the American Academy of Pediatrics said was that after they've

00:57:53.740 had fever, a day later, they can go back to school or daycare or whatever.

00:57:59.180 But instead, we were told to be, you know, to keep our kid home and, you know, continue

00:58:07.400 to pay for daycare until all of her lesions were completely healed.

00:58:13.440 And, you know, that wouldn't have made anyone safer.

00:58:17.660 I mean, this was that, obviously, she got the virus at the daycare, which means it was

00:58:22.460 in the daycare.

00:58:23.620 It was going to be spread.

00:58:25.140 Lots of kids were going to get it.

00:58:26.580 And it's just going to blow through the daycare until it was done.

00:58:33.240 And so, keeping her home would have been absolutely, had zero effect on the spread in the daycare.

00:58:40.460 But at the same time, the local health department backed up what the daycare owner said and said

00:58:51.020 that she should stay home for two weeks, even though our pediatrician agreed with us based

00:58:57.580 on what the American Academy of Pediatrics said.

00:59:00.440 So, I mean, I went directly to the health department and talked to the head of the health

00:59:05.760 department and, you know, she was basically unapologetic.

00:59:09.580 And I really thought later, I really thought later on that, you know, this way of thinking

00:59:16.460 could be translated into how we thought about the pandemic response.

00:59:22.400 And it wasn't just safety or keeping kids safe.

00:59:26.760 It was the appearance of it that was important.

00:59:30.420 And so, I have a chapter called Hurting Children for the Appearance of Safety.

00:59:36.900 And that's, you know, one of the things that really bothered me as a parent, not just an

00:59:41.820 immunologist or infectious disease scientist.

00:59:47.060 The ability of, you know, people can remain ignorant about what their real risks are and

00:59:53.900 still have a lot of control about, over these things, just in the name of safety, but not

01:00:02.500 real safety, just an illusion of it.

01:00:05.260 It seems to me that, you know, your chapter nine, Hurting Children for the Appearance of

01:00:09.880 Safety, for the Appearance of Safety.

01:00:12.700 Part of the question there is, well, why would people be concerned about the appearance of

01:00:17.120 safety?

01:00:17.520 And I think part of the reason for that is that people like to use their concern for

01:00:25.900 children and for other vulnerable people, let's say, as a way of signaling just exactly

01:00:31.660 how morally virtuous they are.

01:00:33.780 It's a real demonstrative performance of, look how much I care.

01:00:40.460 And it also gives you the opportunity, if you do that, not only to elevate your moral virtue

01:00:44.960 as a consequence of doing that in an unearned way, but to demonize anybody that would stand

01:00:51.080 in the way, which is also convenient if what you're trying to do is to accrue power.

01:00:55.620 You know, you told the story about your daycare.

01:00:58.020 When you were in the midst of that, what was your personal reaction?

01:01:06.040 I mean, how did you find yourself responding to the demands that the daycare was making on

01:01:12.400 you and your wife, your family, given that you knew that their actual factual concerns were

01:01:19.800 unwarranted?

01:01:20.820 Yeah, well, I would think that, you know, I had some sort of relevant knowledge that could affect

01:01:28.300 the outcome of this.

01:01:31.060 It actually helped other parents because, you know, this was obviously going to come up.

01:01:36.720 Other kids were going to get the infection because it's highly contagious, and kids can

01:01:43.180 transmit it for weeks after their symptoms have resolved.

01:01:46.900 So even when, you know, the spots had completely healed, she could still give it to other kids.

01:01:53.700 And so I wanted the other parents to understand that this had really no basis in making their

01:02:03.120 kids safer.

01:02:03.840 There was no argument that could be made.

01:02:07.260 And I would think that that would have had an effect on the owner of the daycare.

01:02:12.540 It didn't at all.

01:02:14.940 In fact, we ended up getting booted from that daycare.

01:02:18.660 But that experience was, I think, you know, really set up.

01:02:25.960 It helps set up the pandemic response because there's something has changed in the culture

01:02:32.240 where we don't accept any sort of risk.

01:02:35.960 We want risk to be completely minimized away until there's none, which is many cases not

01:02:42.480 possible.

01:02:43.960 And if that isn't possible, then we want to pretend that we can do that.

01:02:48.620 And the illusion of control, the illusion of being able to eliminate any sort of risk,

01:02:57.140 it becomes very attractive for people.

01:03:01.060 And any sort of leader or official politician, whatever, it becomes a very easy sell when people

01:03:09.440 are afraid.

01:03:10.140 And that's kind of the way that I set up all this safety culture explanation for how we

01:03:18.500 responded.

01:03:19.660 So, Steve, you said something rather ruefully and interestingly to me that you and your child

01:03:28.140 got the boot from that particular daycare.

01:03:30.720 And so, you know, that perked up my clinical ears, let's say, because that seems to me to

01:03:36.660 be a perfectly logical extension of exactly what happened if we're using the power mongering

01:03:41.840 theory here a bit.

01:03:43.380 What happened exactly there and what did that, what did you derive from that?

01:03:51.660 What moral did you derive from that?

01:03:54.180 Yeah, I mean, I basically contacted all the other parents in an email chain and told them

01:04:01.440 why this was not making any of their children safer.

01:04:08.560 And, you know, none of them really responded saying, you know, thank you or anything like

01:04:14.140 that.

01:04:15.080 It was more the daycare owner saying, you know, you don't have a right to do that and we don't

01:04:21.220 want you to come back after your daughter is better.

01:04:24.860 So...

01:04:25.900 On what grounds?

01:04:27.460 On what grounds exactly?

01:04:28.840 Well, I mean, that was kind of a personality thing, too, that we had discovered before with

01:04:38.880 other issues.

01:04:41.020 So I don't think that's necessarily a cultural thing.

01:04:45.820 However, I do think what the health department did and the way that they responded, agreeing

01:04:51.580 with the daycare owner, they would have no other reason to support her other than the

01:04:57.480 fact that they've sort of been conditioned to be overcautious and in ways that wouldn't

01:05:05.220 actually make people safer.

01:05:07.260 And that was, you know, ultimately how I made that connection once people started behaving

01:05:13.320 in a way, treating children like they were disease vectors.

01:05:16.380 I mean, the way that my kids were treated at school, even in a place like Indiana, which

01:05:20.440 you wouldn't think would be, you know, like Portland or San Francisco, the way that they

01:05:26.960 were treated, even in public schools in my area, was just completely unnecessary and not

01:05:33.460 based on evidence at all.

01:05:36.020 And so my futility of dealing with the daycare situation was kind of a harbinger of my futility

01:05:47.160 to deal with anything in the local area in terms of trying to quell panic or irrational

01:05:55.000 or non-evidence-based responses and the way that children were treated more specifically.

01:06:01.060 So let me throw out a couple of hypotheses at you with regards to the prevalence of this

01:06:07.340 safety culture.

01:06:09.720 So here's five different reasons, perhaps, why it's become more prevalent.

01:06:19.000 So one would be people have children much later than they used to.

01:06:25.240 So instead of having children in their early 20s, they have their children in their early

01:06:30.420 30s.

01:06:31.080 And so that means that in some ways, they're grandparents by the time they have children

01:06:35.040 rather than the normal age for human beings to have children.

01:06:39.580 And I suspect that makes them less risk tolerant because younger people are wilder and more impulsive.

01:06:48.320 And obviously there's a downside to that, but God only knows what the upside is.

01:06:52.460 Then the next problem, hypothetically, might be that, well, you know, if you have six kids,

01:06:59.840 you're just not going to be able to exercise that much control over them because they outnumber

01:07:04.340 you terribly and you're exhausted and you're going to just let the tribe go out and do like

01:07:10.100 tribal things.

01:07:11.460 And you're going to chase them the hell out of the house because, you know, enough kids.

01:07:16.100 But if you have one, well, then you have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

01:07:20.920 And so, and the child is also not being challenged and provoked by his or her siblings in that

01:07:30.520 constant manner that might have been the case more likely when there were more siblings.

01:07:37.780 And then also parents are richer now.

01:07:42.020 And so that means that they can dote in a way that would have been practically impossible before.

01:07:49.740 And then additionally, like we did find, for example, in the study that I cited to you at

01:07:54.320 the beginning of our discussion, that one of the predictors of left-wing authoritarianism was being

01:07:58.840 female and also having a female temperament.

01:08:01.600 It was quite a strong predictor and quite a surprising predictor.

01:08:04.680 And there are a lot more female-dominated families and institutions now than there were 40 years

01:08:13.340 ago.

01:08:13.760 I mean, there's lots of single mother families.

01:08:16.220 And then in schools, of course, the vast preponderance of teachers are female.

01:08:22.060 And so, well, there's five reasons why the safety culture might have become increasingly

01:08:28.240 paramount.

01:08:29.980 So, I don't know if you've, have you thought through at all and written about why you think

01:08:40.140 that culture has become more predominant?

01:08:42.120 I mean, we obviously have talked about its dangers.

01:08:44.980 Yeah.

01:08:45.800 Well, to think about some of the things that you've said, with the size of families, I mean,

01:08:52.300 in the age that people are having children, that certainly might have something to do with it.

01:08:56.680 If you look at places like where I live, so in the United States, there are a lot of different

01:09:03.400 areas where the average age that someone, a family, decides to have children is different.

01:09:12.080 Here, it's probably much lower, and I know it's much lower than it is on the coast.

01:09:16.460 And so, there are lots of families here where, you know, they're having three kids by the time

01:09:26.560 their mother is 28 or something like that.

01:09:29.580 I mean, that's something that you wouldn't see generally on a major population, cosmopolitan city

01:09:37.880 on the coast.

01:09:38.880 And so, you would see differences, if that were the main explanation, you would see differences

01:09:45.560 in safety culture.

01:09:47.060 And you see some of that.

01:09:48.860 But I mean, like in the neighborhood I live in, there's a whole, it's like a historic neighborhood.

01:09:53.000 There's a whole degree of socioeconomic levels in the neighborhood.

01:09:57.220 And there's just, it's very difficult to find lots of children outside playing, and even

01:10:05.960 with those levels there.

01:10:08.900 And I think that, so I think that's one possible contributing factor.

01:10:13.440 But it's not, it can't be the whole explanation.

01:10:20.380 Because even here, you know, I try to get my kids to go outside, but they don't want to

01:10:26.340 because there isn't an outdoor culture like there used to be.

01:10:29.000 I mean, I knew I would miss something.

01:10:31.060 I knew I was going to miss something if I didn't go outside.

01:10:33.760 And they will miss something if they go outside because, you know, there's computers and there's,

01:10:41.580 you know, streaming and, you know, there's a whole lot of alternatives that can keep them

01:10:47.580 inside.

01:10:48.060 So, I think that's another part of it is that, you know, before there wasn't any mechanism.

01:10:55.820 And you sort of alluded to that a little bit in terms of being wealthy to dote on children

01:11:02.640 to be helicopter parents.

01:11:04.680 The tools to do that have become much more available.

01:11:11.060 And so, I think that's another possibility.

01:11:14.820 And that, you know, goes to the whole explanation of, you know, and there's still this debate

01:11:20.960 out there, did Zoom enable the pandemic response that we had?

01:11:28.680 And I think that there's a lot to that.

01:11:31.520 The technology became matched what the culture wanted to do.

01:11:37.640 And it basically took it in that direction, whereas it wouldn't have been possible.

01:11:43.240 So, Steve, you experienced on a broader scale in the social world the same thing or something

01:11:50.400 analogous to what happened to you at your local daycare.

01:11:52.840 And you learned something about the opaqueness, let's say, of the general population or maybe

01:11:59.780 even of the human mind to scientific research.

01:12:04.000 I mean, whatever we might be as human beings, we're not, it's not easy to make us into scientists.

01:12:09.780 And so, what did you learn on that front?

01:12:11.240 Yeah, so it seemed to me like people really wanted to be given certainty in things that

01:12:20.360 were not necessarily certain or fully known.

01:12:23.400 And they don't want to leave things up to chance.

01:12:28.120 And like I said, they want risks reduced to zero, which in any case can't be done.

01:12:36.500 And I'd see this with, you know, the local schools.

01:12:42.280 Sometimes my children would come home and tell me, you know, even things that weren't

01:12:48.400 mandated by the school, they were doing extra, taking extra measures.

01:12:55.440 You know, they were like dousing them with hand sanitizer.

01:12:58.500 You know, hand sanitizer is not something that's proven to be effective, especially for respiratory

01:13:07.640 viruses.

01:13:08.140 It doesn't even actually work that well for other types of viruses, like GI viruses, which

01:13:12.680 you would want it to be more effective for that than hand washing.

01:13:17.120 So, I mean, all these measures, another thing they made them do was they could not play with

01:13:22.880 each other unless they were in the same class.

01:13:26.680 So, even when they were outside at recess, they had to distance themselves from the other

01:13:31.060 classes.

01:13:31.540 So, if my daughter had friends in another class, they couldn't interact with each other.

01:13:37.240 And, you know, outside.

01:13:39.440 For how long?

01:13:40.140 For how long was that?

01:13:41.400 For how long was that policy in place?

01:13:43.380 Yeah, probably a whole year.

01:13:45.560 And so, I was asked at some point to be on an advisory board for the local school district.

01:13:56.740 And I think one of the reasons I was asked is because I had talked to the medical director

01:14:01.280 of our county health department and had become kind of friendly with them.

01:14:06.000 And even though we disagreed with some things in public, you know, there wasn't as much

01:14:13.380 disagreement and we were, you know, still became fairly friendly with one another discussing

01:14:18.640 things that were happening.

01:14:19.920 But he recommended to the superintendent that I be on this board because a lot of the people,

01:14:27.980 other people were local physicians and community people who would never really deviate from what

01:14:34.240 they were being told by the CDC and other organizations.

01:14:38.020 And so, they actually did want somebody who was contrarian to kind of challenge what was

01:14:45.420 being mandated and what was being done in the school.

01:14:48.880 So, that was a pretty good opportunity.

01:14:51.220 Although, you know, you really encounter the cautiousness of people, especially physicians.

01:14:57.960 You know, I mean, they are used to being, avoiding caution and being very cautious and avoiding

01:15:04.140 any sort of risk in their practices because they're afraid of malpractice and, you know,

01:15:09.300 they've been sort of conditioned to think that way.

01:15:12.220 And so, it was kind of a tall order to be able to convince them that a lot of these measures

01:15:17.500 were hurting children, not actually making them safer.

01:15:22.500 And were really only there in sort of a theatrical way to give people this sort of illusion

01:15:28.720 or appearance of safety.

01:15:30.020 And I started writing, I had been writing for the local paper on some of these issues

01:15:37.120 about especially how children were treated.

01:15:40.520 And obviously, those weren't going over well.

01:15:44.960 But then some of the writing started to get picked up on a national level.

01:15:49.760 And one of the reasons is, you know, I started really putting together evidence and compiling

01:15:57.120 it for things like masks, especially in a child population, which there was really no evidence

01:16:04.020 that they would make a difference in schools.

01:16:07.340 And there was no consensus prior to the pandemic that they would play an important role in pandemic

01:16:15.060 mitigation.

01:16:15.560 You could go back and read papers for 10 years before and really see that just by looking at the publications.

01:16:26.360 Even up until, you know, the beginning of the pandemic, there was really no consensus about

01:16:31.280 whether masks would work for the population, much less for children.

01:16:35.000 So I put together a lot of evidence and gave some presentations to the physicians and the other people.

01:16:43.900 And, you know, I think it had an effect.

01:16:46.340 But in the end, the governor sort of overrode all of the local district's power

01:16:51.720 because, you know, they had mandates for masks tied to things like, you know,

01:16:58.240 the ability of classrooms to operate with, you know, six feet of separation between children,

01:17:04.860 which was impossible.

01:17:06.040 Right, right.

01:17:06.500 And then if they were masks, they would have—

01:17:09.000 And arbitrary.

01:17:10.040 Completely arbitrary.

01:17:11.880 If they were masks, then they could have three feet, which is actually doable.

01:17:16.640 So six feet was something that schools didn't have the space to do.

01:17:22.380 And so that was essentially a mask mandate without actually calling it a mask mandate.

01:17:27.720 But anyway, because I put together these things, it really became useful to write about them.

01:17:35.000 And it ended up getting some national attention, getting picked up by certain outlets like Brownstone Institute

01:17:43.440 and other outlets that a lot of people read.

01:17:46.940 And so that's how I kind of got from the local level to a little bit more national exposure.

01:17:55.940 And, you know, ultimately to the point where I had enough to write a book.

01:18:01.400 When did your book come out?

01:18:03.680 Yeah, it came out in April.

01:18:05.120 So it's been out less than two months.

01:18:08.720 And how's it doing?

01:18:09.540 It got a really good push.

01:18:11.880 And one of the reasons is because I have a lot of—I've made a lot of friends.

01:18:16.360 You know, Jay Bhattacharya talked with you about this.

01:18:19.980 You know, the prevalence of social media is a curse and a blessing.

01:18:27.620 Because we can really put people together that would normally not be able to define each other.

01:18:35.000 And so I've met a lot of people through social media and through my writing that has really sort of formed a community

01:18:43.340 and given me a lot of other opportunities.

01:18:44.980 I was involved in, you know, writing a document that you talked about with Jay,

01:18:51.820 which we call the Norfolk Group document,

01:18:54.800 questions for COVID-19 commission that is being used by people in Congress.

01:19:00.920 I was invited to be on a public health integrity committee for Florida,

01:19:08.280 appointed by the governor, DeSantis, and the surgeon general.

01:19:12.120 So because of all these connections, you know, when I released the book,

01:19:18.280 I could ask a lot of people to retweet it and, you know, write a little bit about it.

01:19:24.280 And so I have a lot of connections that way.

01:19:26.200 So I think that really translated into a pretty nice push at the beginning.

01:19:30.700 Obviously, doing things like being on your podcast will help tremendously as well.

01:19:36.880 So I haven't got the sales numbers yet, but I think it's doing okay.

01:19:40.620 So there's some optimism in what you just described.

01:19:45.920 I mean, you have attempted to voice a contrarian opinion, let's say,

01:19:53.800 although one that increasingly appears to be in accordance with anything,

01:20:00.140 with common sense and with the facts on the ground.

01:20:04.200 I think that's got to the point now where that's indisputable,

01:20:08.540 unless you're completely off your rocker.

01:20:12.100 So that's a positive thing.

01:20:13.620 And here's another mystery, you know.

01:20:17.480 I think that what we did during the pandemic was unforgivable.

01:20:23.420 However, we did stop doing it.

01:20:25.700 And it isn't exactly clear to me why.

01:20:30.720 You know, given everything we've talked about, given the joy that people had,

01:20:35.460 like my sense in Canada, especially in Toronto, which is my home city,

01:20:39.960 was that 70% of people who lived in Toronto would have been perfectly happy.

01:20:44.940 They would have worn a mask for the rest of their lives without making a peep.

01:20:48.120 And half of them would have been happy about it just because it would have given them an opportunity

01:20:52.160 to inform and spy on their neighbors.

01:20:55.580 And it was pretty appalling to see.

01:20:57.840 But, you know, in the final analysis, we did back down, right?

01:21:02.680 We backed off this.

01:21:03.860 And we have lifted the pandemic restrictions and requirements.

01:21:09.480 And we have returned to something approximating whatever the hell the new normal is, right?

01:21:14.720 I mean, things are a lot less bizarre than they were during the lockdown.

01:21:19.240 And, like, why do you think it is that we moved back from the brink,

01:21:23.780 given all the push there was to put us in this authoritarian position to begin with?

01:21:29.620 Well, that's a really good question.

01:21:31.560 I mean, I think all of the machinery of the pandemic response is still there.

01:21:39.660 I think you have to have a leadership class that has learned a lesson from what happened.

01:21:51.180 And I'm not really sure that that's the case.

01:21:54.960 Because you can see it, you know, there are some areas where there is some concession of harms of the pandemic response.

01:22:03.160 You know, you see people running away from the idea that we should have closed schools, even to the point of pretending that they never advocated for it,

01:22:11.460 such as, like, Randy Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers.

01:22:16.720 You know, you see that happening.

01:22:18.740 It's sort of a tacit admission that there are certain things that people will actually understand were very, very harmful.

01:22:26.160 But at the same time, it's still not enough to have that sort of underlying admission.

01:22:34.740 There has to be a real accounting of what happened and why it happened.

01:22:40.040 And I think, you know, some of that's happening on the political level with COVID commissions in the U.S. Congress and in other countries.

01:22:48.480 But it's going to be kind of a long haul because there's a lot of people who will want to sort of control how the history is told in a way that kind of whitewashes the harms of what was done.

01:23:03.940 So has the fact that we did retreat from the authoritarian controls that were implemented, has that restored a certain degree of optimism to you?

01:23:14.340 It doesn't exactly sound like it.

01:23:16.240 I mean, the argument that you just made seems to be, if I've got this right, that you think that it wouldn't take a lot of provocation for the same kind of hammers to come down again.

01:23:28.580 But that does beg the question, why do you think it was lifted?

01:23:35.040 I mean, we kind of made an arbitrary decision in some ways that the pandemic was over.

01:23:40.420 And I don't understand why we reverted back to something approximating normality.

01:23:45.500 Well, I mean, was it finally that enough people got tired of it, people like Jay Bhattacharya, and started to make enough noise so that there was some pushback?

01:23:56.300 It just took people a while to get organized?

01:23:58.040 It was because enough people got infected is what I think.

01:24:00.620 You know, you have these really highly transmissible variants like Omicron that were actually quite not as severe as the earlier variants.

01:24:13.980 And they just spread like wildfire.

01:24:15.720 And I mean, it's been shown that if you're on the edge of a pandemic and you haven't experienced it, your anxiety and fear levels are much, much higher in the population because they're getting their information from the news.

01:24:28.220 And they're getting their information from the media in a way that's not comforting because the media relies on advertisements and clicks and things like that.

01:24:37.980 So, the fear level, when you're not exposed to the actual pathogen, is quite high.

01:24:44.280 But then once it's actually burned through the population and people have gotten it, whether they were vaccinated or not, they start to see the reality of what the actual risk was.

01:24:57.260 You know, burns through their entire family, their parents get it, they might even have some comorbidities, they might be 80 years old or whatever, and they did fine.

01:25:06.960 I mean, so you have enough people like that, that even though they sort of bought the story and the idea of sort of distorted risk that everybody had, the reality of being infected and having that direct exposure lessened the fear and the willingness to go along.

01:25:28.400 So, but I think, you know, so, I mean, if some pandemic happened right now, I think there'd be a lot of pushback because we're so close to what happened with the COVID-19 pandemic.

01:25:42.860 But I do think that there's going to be, you know, an official story that has to be more correct than incorrect.

01:25:50.700 And I think that's going to be a fight that's going to go on for a while.

01:25:53.900 So, well, so part of what you've concluded actually is somewhat optimistic, because your conclusion seems to be that once the facts of the severity of the illness were actually thoroughly and tangibly accessible,

01:26:11.700 because so many people ended up with COVID, they weren't hypothesizing it anymore,

01:26:17.200 that we had enough grounding in our civil rights tradition to return to normality, right?

01:26:27.100 So once the fear did decrease to a somewhat normal level, we didn't find the attractions of the authoritarian lockdown sufficient to continue in that direction.

01:26:39.240 So there is some optimism in that, right?

01:26:42.320 We reverted back to being a free society.

01:26:45.480 There is, I mean, but you still see hints of things that are sort of left over, like drives to, you know, I've read articles about, you know, eliminating, there's been several of them like this,

01:26:59.740 eliminating all respiratory viruses from the air of buildings based on their ventilation and filtering and building engineering, basically.

01:27:10.660 And, you know, I mean, one thing we witnessed when kids had finally been in in-person schools is that they were getting lots of viruses.

01:27:23.160 I mean, influenza, adenovirus, RSV, these things spiked.

01:27:28.700 And sometimes it was even in the summer, outside of their normal seasons, because these endemic viruses had been suppressed.

01:27:36.700 And it actually, the separation and distancing worked better for those endemic viruses than they did for the pandemic virus itself.

01:27:45.480 And so the idea of, you know, eliminating respiratory viruses from the air that we breathe, I think is not right.

01:27:56.920 I think it's a dangerous idea.

01:27:59.260 And much like people who thought when antibiotics came out that you could just give everybody an antibiotic for anything, that there would be no downside to that.

01:28:11.680 Now, of course, we know that there is.

01:28:13.400 So I think there is a lot of sort of hubris that's still out there about, you know, eliminating risk, even from sort of everyday infections, that I think is going to take a while to go away.

01:28:29.040 Yes, well, part of the hubris is that we don't understand that the demand to reduce risk to zero is a cardinal form of risk, right?

01:28:41.760 Because it requires a kind of impossible totalitarian overreach.

01:28:45.640 It's probably the case when we're agitating for zero anything, you know, because I think the same thing with regard to the war on drugs.

01:28:53.160 I think the same thing with regards to net zero on the climate front.

01:28:57.000 It's like, no, you're mitigating one form of risk, but you're radically increasing another form of risk.

01:29:04.320 And it's obvious that that's what we did with the pandemic.

01:29:07.720 Is there anything else you want to bring to the attention of our viewers and listeners before we close out?

01:29:15.160 We've been talking, I'll just let everybody know, we've been talking to Steve Templeton today about his book, Fear of a Microbial Planet.

01:29:21.740 How a germaphobic safety culture makes us less safe.

01:29:26.620 And so you can obviously pick up that book and walk through Steve's argument in more detail.

01:29:31.140 Is there anything else that you think people should know that we haven't covered?

01:29:35.700 Or are we at a point where we can reasonably begin to bring this to a close?

01:29:42.620 Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, just when you ask something about how do you respond to this?

01:29:49.620 How do you fix things?

01:29:52.120 That's obviously a very difficult question.

01:29:55.040 But, you know, some of the things that we've lost in the previous three years, you know, like our communities, our education of our children,

01:30:06.600 and the ability to sort of challenge them, which has gone on for much longer in terms of a safety culture.

01:30:14.660 I mean, it's important to try to reverse some of that.

01:30:18.620 And I think that that could go a long way to making things better.

01:30:24.800 Right, yeah, well, it's a difficult, as we said earlier, we don't understand the preconditions,

01:30:32.680 all the preconditions that were in place to allow children to roam and range more freely than they do now.

01:30:40.060 And so it's very difficult to figure out what we would have to return to, let's say, or approach in order for that to occur again.

01:30:51.020 I mean, to some degree, encouraging parents to understand that fostering independence in their kids is the proper risk-free approach.

01:30:58.940 I mean, people can learn that.

01:31:00.020 And I wrote about that a fair bit in my, especially in my book, 12 Rules for Life, encouraging parents to understand that they can be the biggest risk to their children because of their hyper-concern with safety.

01:31:13.880 Absolutely.

01:31:14.620 And that's the message is that, you know, this paradoxical safety culture makes actually children less safe,

01:31:23.080 less prepared to face the world and less prepared to deal with any sort of threat, whether it's microbial or, you know, arguments in college with people they disagree with.

01:31:36.140 I mean, a lot of these things are related.

01:31:39.540 Yeah, yeah, well, it's always one risk or another.

01:31:42.480 It's never no risk.

01:31:43.800 Absolutely.

01:31:44.440 And that is a hard, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

01:31:48.560 All right, well, for everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms, thank you very much for your time and attention.

01:31:58.040 To Dr. Steve Templeton, author of Fear of a Microbial Planet, thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:32:03.780 We're going to go over to the Daily Wire Plus platform now.

01:32:07.160 I'm going to talk to Steve for an additional half an hour about the development of his interest in immunology.

01:32:13.240 And if you'd like to join us there, that would be just fine.

01:32:16.360 Otherwise, thank you very much, Dr. Templeton.

01:32:19.340 It's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for the book and congratulations on its success.

01:32:25.020 And hopefully the message that you're attempting to distribute will be picked up and there'll be some positive consequence of that.

01:32:33.160 Thank you. It's been an honor to chat with you.

01:32:36.380 Hello, everyone.

01:32:37.660 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 12, 2023

366. Epidemics and Delusions ｜ Steve Templeton

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