00:08:54.480The Republican side has gotten a lot more extreme.
00:08:57.200You know, there aren't any moderates or very, very few people who would be considered moderate left in the Republican Party who were the classic fiscal conservative.
00:09:11.440They may claim to be, but, you know, they give away the taxes and so forth and so on.
00:09:16.000And now you have people on, you know, who are so committed to Trump, they believe anything that he says, you know, outright lies that have been disproved by every Republican.
00:09:33.440And yet people are just committed to Trump.
00:09:39.840That's never happened in recent, you know, I did drop out of grad school, almost got a Ph.D. in American history.
00:09:48.080I would say is it never happened ever in American history.
00:09:51.680I look back and I'm trying to think, go back, certainly not through the 20th century.
00:10:00.400I'm scrolling through in my head the 19th century.
00:10:05.920You know, there were people committed to Andrew Jackson, but not like this.
00:10:10.880John Adams, you know, when when Jefferson was elected president, Adams wouldn't go to the inauguration.
00:10:16.880He left Washington in advance, but there was no question over handing over power.
00:10:26.080Now, it's never been anything like this.
00:10:28.160And we've never had a leader in either party who incited followers the way Trump has done.
00:10:37.520You know, it's again, we didn't you didn't have me on to talk about this stuff, but.
00:10:46.720You know, it's happening in front of our eyes and I was watching Fox, which I don't usually watch,
00:10:54.080but they were saying all the right things that this is a desecration of American democracy.
00:11:00.320This is not who we are. And yet it's happening here and it needs to stop.
00:11:08.000What do you think the 74, 75 million folks who voted for him are most upset about?
00:11:13.680Well, you know, they've been lied to ever since the election, so.
00:11:20.800I don't blame them for believing some of the things that they've been told.
00:11:27.520You know, Tucker Carlson, for example, just to give you a single anecdote, you know, had this
00:11:36.480thing on about somebody dead who was voting, whatever the name was, John Doe, I don't remember.
00:11:43.040Well, a reporter went out and tracked that down and discovered it was a 95 year old woman
00:11:49.760who used her as some women do. They went by her husband's name, Mrs. John Doe.
00:11:57.120So it wasn't John Doe who voted. She signed in as Mrs. John Doe.
00:12:01.600And it was misreported as her deceased husband voting. Well, Tucker Carlson, in other words,
00:12:06.560there was no dead person voting. So Tucker Carlson makes a big deal out of claiming the dead person.
00:12:12.080But he never corrected himself. He never issued a correction explaining, no, it turns out it was
00:12:18.080actually the widow signing Mrs. John Doe. So if that's what you see all the time, I'm not surprised
00:12:28.080that some people believe it. You know, for me, I'm a registered independent. I was a former Democrat.
00:12:33.680Then I went and became a Republican. Then I became an independent. Eight, nine years ago,
00:12:38.480I became an independent myself. OK, and I can see from the outside myself. I think Clinton was a
00:12:46.240good president. I think it was good for economy. And him and Newt were good. I mean,
00:12:49.920it worked very good for America. I know Republicans probably didn't like Clinton and I know Democrats
00:12:54.960didn't like Newt, but they worked good together. You know, the whole conversation you and I were
00:12:59.360having with Tip and the Gipper, you know, the book written by Chris Matthews,
00:13:02.880how they worked together years ago where they would fight both Irishmen and then they would
00:13:06.320have a beer together. You know, I sit there and I wonder to myself, you know, when you say,
00:13:12.960you know, Tucker Carlson comes out and he says that he doesn't go back and apologize and say that.
00:13:19.360I mean, that's being done by both sides where the Russia story you heard for three years and
00:13:25.280nobody ever came out and said that wasn't a true story. And then that came out and was an inaccurate
00:13:30.160story. I think both sides of the aisle got to take some responsibility. I don't put it on the
00:13:34.480politicians. I think media has divided America at the highest level and we're getting caught
00:13:39.840in a middle fighting each other over them enticing more eyeballs to want to watch Fox and CNN to get
00:13:44.880more advertising dollars. What do you think about the role MSM's played, mainstream media's played in
00:13:50.880dividing many of us? Well, first, I wouldn't say there was nothing to the Russian deal. There was
00:13:58.240something there. Now, you know, maybe it didn't rise to the level of a felony, although, you know,
00:14:06.400that's questionable if you actually read the report. But, you know, we don't want to talk about that.
00:14:10.720I mean, Adam Schiff said, for sure, there is something, you know, the way he made it seem
00:14:16.240like it's guaranteed. I mean, you got to realize to use words like he used, I mean, all of us sat
00:14:21.840there and said there was some scandals with Russia. So again, I just want to make sure.
00:14:25.840Well, even if you recall, Lamar Alexander, who did not run for reelection, but voted against hearing
00:14:34.480witnesses at the Senate trial, he said, well, the reason he voted against witnesses was the
00:14:40.240Democrats approved the case. Now, whether you want to say it rose, the wrongdoing rose to the level
00:14:47.600of impeachment, you know, that's, that's arguable and a reasonable position to take. But, you know,
00:14:56.720again, we don't want to talk about that. I would agree with you that, you know, Fox, MSNBC, CNN,
00:15:10.000they, you know, like to cite because it does get clicks and, or, you know, clicks being, you know,
00:15:21.840obviously print media, you know, you know what I'm getting at. And I would like to see a little
00:15:28.000bit more reporting on that. I mean, just, there's a lot of news that happens all the time
00:15:36.400that never gets reported because it's not exciting to get enough, but it's real,
00:15:43.680has real impact on people's lives. And it's ignored because the latest,
00:15:48.000you know, outrage by one side or another is all they talk about on all three of those shows
00:15:57.280or networks. You know, I would agree with, with you there for a proper, might not go as far as you go,
00:16:06.080but essentially in agreement. Yeah. I'd be curious to know what happens with that because I think
00:16:13.440on one end, you know, you, most of us are emotional creatures, you know, so, so let's just say on both
00:16:19.200sides out of a 78 million, 74 million that voted, what percentage really did a lot of due diligence
00:16:25.440before voting? Let's just say 80% just voted emotionally, 20% research a little bit more
00:16:32.080out of the 20% that research a little bit more, say 10% of them extensively went into it to look at it.
00:16:38.320So media ends up controlling the majority of us because we're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe
00:16:42.880what's going on. So I think, I think there's gotta be something about that because it's,
00:16:47.280unfortunately we are looking like fools to the world. Forget about us fighting each other.
00:16:50.960We're looking like fools too. If other countries are watching them right now, they're laughing,
00:16:54.640saying, look at what's going on to supposedly the greatest country in the world. Look how divided they
00:16:58.880are, you know, and anytime they're divided, you know, it's a very easy thing to come in,
00:17:02.800infiltrate, but you know, let's, let's talk about your book because I think that's a,
00:17:06.560that's the one thing I do want to spend some time talking with you about specifically
00:17:10.000the great Influenza, which, you know, Newt Gingrich said it's the third best book,
00:17:17.360you know, he's ever read. And for him to say something like that.
00:17:20.160Well, he didn't quite see, I know I, you know, want to correct that. What he said was my first book,
00:17:26.720which was not the Influenza. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're right. The book on, yes.
00:17:31.040That was a book on America, on the Congress really, uh, in the Reagan administration.
00:17:35.760You're talking about the ambition and the power is correct. Yes. So that's cool for him to say
00:17:40.320that about a book that you wrote, but let's talk about the great influence of 2004. So for some
00:17:44.800folks that haven't seen an interview of yours, I think you did some stuff with the folks at library
00:17:48.560Congress and other interviews you've done. What happened in, uh, with the great influence,
00:17:52.960if you want to kind of walk us through with the story and some of the stats,
00:17:55.600so the audience can come up to date. Oh, you know, uh, uh, an animal virus,
00:18:00.960all influenza viruses are actually bird viruses. They all start in birds. So in a sense,
00:18:06.960they're all bird flu, but obviously they circulated mammals, uh, and a new bird virus
00:18:13.920jumped species to humans. Uh, we hadn't seen it before, or at least most hadn't seen before.
00:18:21.280There are, there are eight gene segments in influenza. Seven of them came directly from
00:18:25.680birds. One may, it may have passed through another mammal before it got to humans on the eighth. It
00:18:30.960spread worldwide, very rapidly. You don't need airplanes to have a pandemic. There were pandemics
00:18:36.800that made it from Africa to Asia, to Europe, even to the Americas going back into the 1600s.
00:18:43.920Uh, it infected about the 1918 virus infected about a third of the world's population. It was much,
00:18:53.040much deadlier than COVID-19 and it killed between 15 and according to a Nobel laureate, uh, made this
00:19:02.000estimate in the 1940s and it's been confirmed by modern epidemiologists. Probably between 50 and 100
00:19:10.240million people died. Obviously that's a big range. If you adjust for population, the world back then was
00:19:15.760less than a quarter of the size of today's world. So that would be equivalent to 225 to 450 million
00:19:22.080people dead today. Uh, so the worst, worst case scenarios for COVID-19, nothing like that. Uh, thank God.
00:19:31.120Uh, and you know, so that virus was much more virulent. It, it also killed these people in an
00:19:40.560incredibly compressed period of time. Probably two thirds of the dead died in the fall of 1918. Uh,
00:19:47.520the pandemic stretched over a couple of years and in a particular city, it was even faster than that.
00:19:55.440It would probably be six to 10 weeks. Most of the people who died were, uh, adults between the ages of 18
00:20:04.000and 45 or 50, probably about two thirds of the dead. So that's very different from COVID-19 and very
00:20:09.280different from ordinary influenza. Uh, possibly as many as 8% of the world's population. This would be on the
00:20:19.200worst case, uh, of people in the age group of that age group died in a matter of weeks. So it was pretty
00:20:29.440violent and the Western world was at war and because of the war, uh, every government that was fighting
00:20:39.520was focused entirely on the war. And for that reason, uh, governments tended to
00:20:49.520minimize the pandemic and the United States, Wilson, the president at the time never made a single
00:20:58.320public statement of any kind about this pandemic. Uh, and in an effort to, there was a concern that any
00:21:11.280that Wilson didn't want any bad news about anything period. We didn't want any news
00:21:19.040that might hurt morale. This had nothing to do with the pandemic. They created an infrastructure
00:21:24.960in advance of the pandemic. Again, nothing to do with the pandemic, something called the committee
00:21:30.160for public information, a propaganda arm. The architect of that committee said nothing
00:21:35.280and experience tells us that truth is superior to falsehood. The only thing that matters is its
00:21:41.520impact on what you say. So the government created this entity that was geared toward telling lies
00:21:51.040to keep morale up for the war. Uh, the government also passed a law that made it punishable by 20 years
00:21:58.160in prison to quote utter right printer, publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language
00:22:04.400about the government of the United States. That law was upheld by the Supreme Court, by Oliver Wendell
00:22:11.040Holmes, and an opinion from two phrases from that opinion, uh, survive. One is you don't shout
00:22:17.520a crowd, fire in a crowded theater and, uh, clear and present danger. And, and they, and the government
00:22:24.800enforced that law vigorously. They sent a congressman sentenced to prison for 10 years, a congressman.
00:22:31.360You're kidding me. Uh, so this is the 1980s. So that's, yeah, so that's the context. On the one hand,
00:22:39.360and again, prior to the pandemic, only because of the war, the government created an institution
00:22:46.720designed to lie to keep morale up and at the same time, punish people for criticizing any action
00:22:52.800by the government. So there, that's the context that influenza arrived in. As a result, you have,
00:22:59.440there was no Tony Fauci in 1918. You had national public health leaders associated with the government
00:23:07.360saying things like, this is ordinary influenza by another name. It was called Spanish influenza,
00:23:12.800although it didn't start in Spain. Uh, and they are, you have nothing to fear if proper precautions
00:23:20.000are taken. And yet people could die less than 24 hours after the first symptoms. And they could die
00:23:28.960with horrific symptoms. Uh, to probably the scariest would be they could bleed not only from their nose and
00:23:36.960mouth, but from their eyes and ears. That's a pretty frightening symptom. Uh, so people are, are dying
00:23:46.720in some cases with these horrible symptoms and in some cases very rapidly. And a lot of people are dying
00:23:54.240and the government is telling you, this is ordinary influenza by another name. You have nothing to worry
00:23:58.800about. I could, you know, go into greater detail, but we're going to be talking for a long time.
00:24:03.520So I'll let you ask some questions. So John, what, how was the media at that time
00:24:08.000covering this? I mean, obviously we don't have the, the Fox, CNN, CBS, ABC, any, we don't have
00:24:13.840the kind of media that we have today. Who's writing about it, opposing, um, uh, President Wilson
00:24:20.800while he's saying everything's fine. Don't worry about it. Who's opposing and telling stories about
00:24:24.640what's really going on? Pretty much nobody in 1918. Uh, uh, you know, the, the newspapers in the country,
00:24:32.240uh, number one, they were patriotic and wanted to support the war effort. Number two, they had that
00:24:38.880law that I told you about a minute ago that if you criticize the government, you could go to jail
00:24:44.160and a congressman was sentenced to prison. Uh, so in most cases, in most cities, the, uh, newspapers
00:24:54.800simply went along with the program and printed lies. I'll give you a couple of examples. Uh,
00:25:04.560in Philadelphia, which was one of the hardest hit cities in the United States, hundreds are dying
00:25:09.680every day in Philadelphia, probably about 15,000 total. When they finally, and they're using steam
00:25:17.120shovels to dig mass graves, you literally have priests in Philadelphia driving horse-drawn carts
00:25:24.160down the street, calling upon people to bring out their debt. So when they finally, in Philadelphia,
00:25:32.640closed saloons, closed theaters, closed schools, and so forth and so on, one of the newspapers actually
00:25:40.000said, a direct quote, this is not a public health measure. You have no cause for a panic or alarm,
00:25:48.320unquote. And yet people, you know, their neighbors are dropping dead. You know, their mass graves being
00:25:57.760dug. They are using, reusing coffins because they didn't have any coffins. And the newspaper is saying,
00:26:08.880this is not a public health measure. So, I mean, how stupid did they think their readers were?
00:26:15.760The readers knew what was going on. Uh, another example in, in Little Rock, you know, I, I quoted,
00:26:23.760uh, a doctor in, in, uh, an army camp, uh, a couple of miles out, actually, I guess seven or eight miles
00:26:31.040outside of Little Rock, uh, talking about thousands in the, in the base hospital, you know, card is
00:26:39.360overflowing with, with beds, beds outside the hospital. Uh, and he writes, there is nothing
00:26:46.800here but death and destruction. Just a few miles away in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Arkansas Gazette,
00:26:53.840princess, big headline, Spanish influenza, same old chills and grip. And, and, you know,
00:27:02.160it's just total dismissive, just like it was ordinary influenza. Uh, you know, there are a couple of
00:27:09.600exceptions. Uh, there's a small city in Wisconsin where the, uh, newspaper started to print the truth
00:27:16.080and the army started to institute prosecution against them, uh, under that law I mentioned a little while
00:27:24.240ago. Uh, although the prosecution was dropped as the pandemic proceeded, uh, San Francisco is, is, uh,
00:27:35.280uh, was pretty exceptional and San Francisco, uh, which got hit pretty late, actually, the, uh, in, you know,
00:27:45.360most cities say they're saying things like this is ordinary influence by another name, San Francisco,
00:27:50.720the mayor, the business leaders, trade union leaders, and the medical community all got together,
00:27:57.120signed a joint statement, huge typeface in the newspaper saying, wear a mask and save your life.
00:28:04.080Uh, whether the mask was in 18, this is in 1918, wear a mask and save a life. So you save your life.
00:28:11.120Uh, so that is a very different message than saying this is ordinary influenza by another name, which was
00:28:21.280the most common treatment of it in the press. Or a third example in Phoenix, they wrote a little bit
00:28:29.600about it when the disease erupted in Boston, which was the first place in the United States to get hit
00:28:35.280by the disease came in waves. And the second wave was the deadly wave. Um, so when it's in Boston,
00:28:43.680they write a little bit about it in Phoenix. When it's in New Orleans, they write less about it in Phoenix.
00:28:50.320When it's actually in Phoenix, it disappears from the newspapers, not a word initially, uh, because again,
00:28:57.760they didn't want any bad news out there that might hurt the war effort. Now, eventually when it was
00:29:04.000impossible to ignore, uh, the Phoenix paper did start writing about it. But again, initially
00:29:12.400to keep morale up and so forth and so on, uh, they ignored it, you know, and other newspapers,
00:29:18.960they simply, they didn't even print names of the people who died. Uh, and you know, all of this had a
00:29:28.560impact on the public and it wasn't what they wanted. Instead of keeping morale up, it hurt morale more than
00:29:36.720the truth would have, uh, because people knew, again, their neighbors are dying. In some cases,
00:29:45.040the bodies are lying in the house for days because there's no one to get, take it out. And they can,
00:29:51.120and people knew this was happening all around them. They knew that they were being lied to by the,
00:29:56.400by the media and by the public officials. And all that did was alienate them and cause them to feel
00:30:04.800that they had no one they could rely on except for themselves. Uh, and you know, it's sort of split
00:30:12.640society apart. John, uh, John, for you, did you ever sit down and have a conversation about this
00:30:19.840with your grandparents? Uh, I'm assuming your parents are probably born in the twenties
00:30:24.800or, or late teens. Actually, my mother just died at 102 and she was born in 1918.
00:30:31.520Oh, you gotta be kidding me. Wow. But when I first started working on the book,
00:30:37.280you know, my grandparents were dead. Uh, but I had an aunt who was considerably older than my mother.
00:30:46.080Uh, and when I told her that I was working on the book, I mean, she sort of like grabbed her,
00:30:51.520to her chest and said, oh my God, that, you know, that's the only time she ever saw her father
00:30:57.680to cry. That was because a couple directly across the street who had a couple of kids,
00:31:02.880you know, both of them died, uh, leaving several orphans, uh, which was not uncommon. Because as I
00:31:10.960said earlier, the 18 to 45 is like the peak age at which people were dying. So there were a lot of
00:31:20.400orphans created. Well, that I was asking to, but by the way, sorry for your loss. I mean, it's, it's so
00:31:25.440interesting. You write this book, uh, uh, uh, you know, the great influence in 1918 and your mom's born that
00:31:31.440you're, uh, but you know, it's always interesting when you talk to your parents and your grandparents,
00:31:36.640you know, when I talked to my dad and I said, dad, what was it like with the Shah's father versus the
00:31:41.840Shah when he was in charge or what was Mossadegh like? And you're always curious, you know, to,
00:31:46.880to see what it was like during that season. But you know, when you look back now, I'm sure,
00:31:51.200I mean, this is your topic. This is what you've written about. This is what you research.
00:31:54.240One, how was Woodrow Wilson judged his legacy based on this? Did it at all impact his legacy?
00:32:01.520Because at that time, maybe we didn't have the media. And number two, looking back now,
00:32:06.720based on more experience that we have today and having gone through a few other epidemics, pandemics
00:32:14.160in the recent decades, what could have been done even at that time out of 1918 to have prevented
00:32:20.000something like this from happening? Well, first, thanks for your comment about my mother.
00:32:27.760You know, historians haven't written much about this. And it's hard to say exactly how
00:32:35.920Wilson was viewed because of the pandemic response. At the time, there was essentially no
00:32:41.200federal infrastructure for, there was a public health service. There was no national institutes
00:32:47.280of health, which was actually created partly, in fact, primarily because of the pandemic,
00:32:52.640although not for a few years. Everything was handled locally anyway. And it's hard to say, you know,
00:33:04.240the war was so much more dominant in the news. It's hard to say how Wilson was evaluated or because of
00:33:11.600this. Also, we didn't have the notice that we had this time around. You know, there was a first wave in
00:33:20.880the spring. But at the time, it was almost not noticed at all in the United, for one thing,
00:33:30.080the virus changed and the first wave was very mild. I'll tell you how mild there were over 10,000
00:33:36.960soldiers in the British Grand Fleet, which patrolled the coast of Europe, which missed duty in the
00:33:45.280middle of a war to report for sick day with the first wave. Only four out of 10,000 died. That's
00:33:53.200pretty mild. That's how mild the first wave was. So that first spring wave, nobody paid any attention to.
00:34:00.000They were hit by surprise with the second wave, the virus became much more very much deadlier.
00:34:07.520And the whole thing was over so fast, it wasn't really an opportunity to evaluate plus medicine
00:34:14.320was much more primitive. The only thing that they did have in 1918 was the same thing
00:34:22.240that we have today. Social distancing, you know, hand washing, business closures,
00:34:31.920so forth and so on. But those were decided on a city by city basis, not even by governors. It was
00:34:40.400always up to the mayor and local. You know, there were very few statewide closures.
00:34:46.480And I'm assuming that's documented, right? Meaning that it's easy for anybody to be able to research
00:34:52.240to see that it was city by city, not state by city. Right. Yeah, you can read in pretty much any
00:34:58.000local paper. It's always in 1918, it was always up to the mayor who made decisions. Very few states.
00:35:07.200So, you know, Wilson really wasn't judged on the performance of the federal government. And again,
00:35:19.360it was so fast. One of the biggest differences between COVID-19 and 1918 is the speed. The two
00:35:27.360biggest differences are the virulence of the virus and the other is the speed of movement. Influenza is
00:35:32.960a much faster moving disease. So as I said earlier, in any particular city, the second wave was usually
00:35:42.880gone. You know, the whole cycle was six to 10 weeks. So it was quite different in terms of evaluating the
00:35:51.680actions of the government. One of the reasons I got involved in pandemic preparedness was because
00:36:00.000what they call non-pharmaceutical interventions, what do you do when you don't have any drugs,
00:36:06.240was based on studies of what happened in 1918. And we did discover that, you know, the cities that closed
00:36:15.440down earlier in the epidemic before the virus was widely disseminated in their populations,
00:36:24.560and stayed closed longer, not only had better results in terms of how many people get sick and died,
00:36:31.440but their economies actually recovered faster and more strong and more strongly than cities that that did
00:36:41.040not do that. Interesting. So, you know, looking there, looking now, what we experience, you're
00:36:47.920talking about here's a virus that is more of the are not score. It's more, you know, it can spread
00:36:54.400faster and people are dying within 24 hours. And some instances, it's pretty ugly where it's not just
00:37:00.720bleeding, bleeding from the eyes and ears. And it's a scary sight to go within 24 hours. And the ages you're
00:37:06.560talking about, it's 18 to 45, which is not necessarily the ages we're looking at right now.
00:37:12.000And then we look at COVID-19 with what we experienced the last, say, 12 months. That's
00:37:17.120what, first week of January, December 27th is the first one they find out and comes here,
00:37:21.760it gets pretty bad in March, and then it takes off. How do you think we handled it? Do we
00:37:27.520overreact? Do you think it was done the right way? Do you think we could have,
00:37:30.800you know, comparable with numbers to what happened with the influenza? It's nowhere near the numbers.
00:37:38.080We obviously, any loss of a loved one to anybody who loves them, that's more than anyone ever wants
00:37:43.440to have. But statistically speaking, it's nowhere near that. How do you think it was handled with COVID-19
00:37:50.560and what we did the last nine, 10, 11 months? Well, of course, it varies country to country. So if you
00:37:56.880want to look worldwide, there's a tremendous range. Iran is not done very well. One of the reasons is
00:38:07.840the Iranian government lied to the public. I'm sure you probably know more about what's going on there
00:38:14.960than I do. And the United States, in terms of the developed world, I think we've done just about the
00:38:21.520worst. Again, because we were not told the truth by, you know, chiefly by Trump, you know, why he made
00:38:32.080a decision to politicize masks. I mean, how is something as simple as that? How does that become
00:38:40.160a political statement? If you look at the countries around the world that have done well, it's not just,
00:38:48.640you know, you could say that Japan and Taiwan and Thailand and so forth, that those,
00:38:59.120their cultures are different. So maybe it's easier for them to do things as a community than it is
00:39:08.000for the United States. But look at Australia.
00:39:11.040Australia's culture is probably in the sense of individualism and things like that,
00:39:19.040probably as close to the United States as any country in the world, maybe even including Canada.
00:39:27.280Australia has 25 million people and they have just over 900 deaths.
00:39:35.920So if you adjust for population, that would be the equivalent of 13,000 deaths in the United States.