Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail

This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholds on Bloomberg Radio.

This week. On the podcast, returning for her third time, Bethany MacLean, author of such amazing books as The Smartest Guys in the Room about the incredible saga of Enron and how it became one of the most respected companies in the world, and then blew up her new book, The Big Fail What the Pandemic Revealed about who America protects and who it leads behind with her co author Jonasara.

Thank you for having me on, Barry.

My pleasure. So those books they're all about I guess giant mistakes, blunders seems to be your stock in trade, Enron Fracking, GFC, Fanny and Freddy, and now COVID nineteen. Where does this passion for disasters come from?

Porn right? I don't know. I swear I'm a happy person. Maybe this is my way of unleashing my enter demons. No, seriously, I always think when something goes wrong, there's always a story about how and why it went wrong, And it's a story that is so much more than numbers. It's people, it's history, it's predilections, it's all these things. And I think trying to figure out what that mix is and what has happened is just a fascinating puzzle.

So let's talk about the COVID nineteen puzzle. I found the book infuriating, just one unforced error after another. When you first sat down to write this, did you have any idea what you and Joe wanted to say? Or did it kind of develop as you progress?

We had some loose ideas that ended up becoming part of the book. But I'd be lying if I said that it all hung together from moment one. I mean, I was passionately interested in the spring of twenty twenty, in the healthcare system and the effect of private equity and healthcare. I was interested in the Federal Reserve and how we thought about the Fed's response, And we were both interested in globalization and supply chains and what that

No, Oh, no, it's coherent. It's too coherent. And the coherence is pretty much everybody is grossly incompetent in an emergency. Kind of makes you nervous if, like what goes down when there's a really terrible earthquake or other disaster, lots of people seem to not have their act together.

Yes, and no. I think the book probably does convey that. But then I think there are people that very much have their act together. I happen to think in the book, I think expresses that Operation Warp Speed is a tremendous success and a tremendous act of competence.

So let me rephrase my criticism. Lots of people rose to the occasion, Yes, but it seemed like lots of institutions failed.

I think lots of institutions did fail, and I think there are multiple reasons for that. I think one part of it is that pandemics had largely bypassed the US in the past, and we just simply weren't thinking that way.

You spend a bit of time talking about our two tiered healthcare system. We'll get to that in a bit. Let's sort of flash back to the pre pandemic period and you talk about previous pandemics where we did pretty well. But it raises the question why were we so unprepared and why does it seem like nobody but Bill Gates really saw this coming.

I think because it is beyond the human capacity to imagine that these things could actually happen. And I was thinking about this because I've said in the context of business disasters in the past that the old lesson from kindergarten, use your imagination is one of the most important lessons you can possibly learn, because if anybody ever says to you, oh, that can't happen, well, actually it can. And just look at the last couple of decades for instruction and to

So you mentioned Operation warp Speed, arguably the greatest success of the Trump administration. It seems like he was almost embarrassed to be associated with a giant medical win.

Well, I think it's I think it's it's more nuanced than that. I think Trump did support warp Speed, but somebody who was close to it said to me that Warpsbeed could never have succeeded in any administration but under Trump, precisely because Trump was so hands off and he just

You know, it's funny you said, I can't picture another administration doing it. Think about what Kennedy did with landing on the moon and setting up NASA and promoting it on a relentless and ongoing base. I can imagine a president of a different character and a I don't know, I don't know what the right word is. More serious maybe, but you more institutional I think.

I think that The only counterpoint in it's so difficult, you can't go back and hit rewind and see how things could play out differently. The only counterpoint to that is that a different president might have been all over warp Speed from the beginning and might have made it very difficult for warp Speed to function because politics might have been injected in it. And Trump, because he was so hands off, actually allowed warp Speed to be run by monsef Slowie in general perna and that it worked.

You don't see either George Bush or Obama handing it off and saying do you They were both pretty good delegators. They might be unfairly respectful of the institution of government, at least outside of.

I hope, so, I hope.

So it just looks like I mentioned unforced eras Hey, the US had all these excess deaths. When you look at US on a per capita basis against comparable economies Germany, Switzerland, Japan, France, I mean they all did much better than US, obviously through countries like Italy that did poorly and China didn't do so great. We'll talk more about China later, but it seems like we were at the bottom of the Western industrialized democracies on a per capita death basis.

We were. The economist has done a very good log of keeping track of excess deaths, and I think a couple of things account for that. I think our two tiered healthcare system, and I think some of what happened in COVID was that coming home to roost in the sense that COVID preyed upon people with pre existing health conditions, and pre existing health conditions are in some ways a byproduct of a healthcare system that doesn't take care of a lot of people.

You mentioned diabetes and high blood pressure in particular. Yeah, and you know, a bad diet tends to be associated with lower economic strata. And if you don't have good healthcare and you have diabetes and you get COVID, not great outcome.

Yep. It's also excess death captures things other than deaths from COVID too, And the deaths of despair in this country, and the desk from opioid to overdoses and lack of access to healthcare for other conditions not COVID are some portion of that too, we are a sicker country.

So one of the more fascinating little tidbits you drop in the book, Most California cities end up pretty much in line in terms of per capita deaths with the rest of other large urban areas, the exception being the San Francisco. When you point to all the infrastructure put in place during the AIDS crisis that led San Francisco to a much better outcome, tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, it was fascinating, and this was highlighted our first written about in a really good New Yorker piece about what San Francisco was doing and why it's numbers were so low. And the idea was, you can't just lock down and leave the most defenseless parts of our population defend for themselves under a lockdown, meaning essential workers who still have to go out and do their jobs and

So you throw pretty much everybody under the bus. Trump, Cuomo, Desanti's, Deblasio, cushn or Pence, even Fauci and lots of others. Will get into personalities later. But who came out of the pandemic with their reputation intact.

Well, I think I don't think anybody intended to do a bad job, and people were placed into a difficult situation. It was hard when you look back at the terrible beginning of this in January and February of twenty twenty. If anybody had told you up until it happened that this was going to be a global pandemic and we would be living with this for years, you would have said, no, no, no, that can't happen, that can't possibly be true. We'll figure

Than private citizens doing their.

Private, private citizens doing job, but that official. But that whole list is all public officials. And I think some part of it is just a failure of leadership, a failure of anybody to really want to be accountable and to say the buck stops here in the way that General Perna actually did during Operation Warp Speed. And it's why I love the story of Operation Warp Speed so much, because I think it stands as a contrast to so

Let's talk about another giant fail China, not exactly the world's most responsible member of the global community. Tell us about some of the things China did that range from merely irresponsible to utterly reckless.

Well, I think China, I don't think there's much question now that China understood what was happening and did not want to let the rest of the world know. And it's really frightening because the whole system relies on countries being honest when they've discovered some so that the rest

We figured out pretty quickly when someone came home from abroad and then their husband who hadn't traveled. God, it's like, oh, obviously it's human to human. Why the delay? It seems like the whole US National Institute of Health is designed for this information to bubble up to the top for a little commandment, control and communication. That didn't seem to happen.

No, and the doctor and Wuhan, who was on the front lines of this alerted her superiors, and I think late December that she thought human to human transmission was happening. And so you think about that and how the whole course of the pandemic have been different if that knowledge had been out there from the very beginning.

So let's talk about some of the broad policies that could have been in place on a timely basis but seemed to be mishandled. Testing, lockdowns, vaccines, personal protection equipment, PPE masking, social distancing. What in that list wasn't mishandled. It seems like across the board nothing was done right anywhere.

So I think testing is a top the list of the things that were mishandled, and there was the CDC took control of the test and could not design a test that worked.

You write in the book that they tried to manufacture this themselves. They have zero manufacturing expertise. What the hell were they thinking?

I think the CDC has a culture that is arrogant and perfectionist and believes that they should be in charge. But even more broadly than that, even if the CDC test had worked, that should never have been the sun and moon and stars upon which America is testing strategy hung because we needed tests to be broadly available everywhere.

So I'm going to come back to lockdowns in a minute. Let's stick with testing and masking, which I thought was kind of fat. We hadn't even rolled out tests, and you mentioned South Korea was doing some ungodly number of tests a day, one hundred thousand tests a day. They very quickly were able to figure out who to quarantine and who not to and had a much better outcome than we did. Various state institutions had the ability to create a test and have it outsourced and manufactured, but

I think that's a very good way of putting it, and I think there was also a failure to realize that things that we had put in place then made it difficult to roll out testing. So once an emergency was declared, then the FDA has to approve test. It is put in place so that you don't have shoddy test manufacturers running around selling tests that don't actually work. But when you need to get tests out the door quickly, the things that are put in place to protect people can backfire.

So let's talk about PPE and MASK. Speaking of shoddy the government could have used one of the defense accent right to ramp that up. Instead, the White House led the states all compete with each other, absolute disaster profiteering, fraud.

All, Yes, And to be clear, I'm not sure. So part of the theme of the book is that a lot of the problems were put in place before the pandemic even hit. Even if you had had that incredibly coordinated, sophisticated, competent response, we had outsourced so much of the manufacturing sharing of these critical things to China and elsewhere that

Right, life and death at stake, And people like I can make a book on this. Yes, interesting story within the book about a small mask company that tried to set up in the United States and in the past had every time there's a potential pandemic by American even though it's a little more expensive, it doesn't go anywhere, and then starts ramping up fifty one hundred, one hundred and fifty million masks. But if you bought from this company, you had to sign a seven year contract. You figured out,

Right, And you just hope that there's a lesson taken from that. And again it's something that we just don't do well because I think we have this blind belief in the market and that the market forces are going to take care of issues like this without the recognition that there are a couple things that can go wrong in modern day capitalism, that the focus on profits, on pleasing shareholders, and on profits that can be sustainable, means that the response in a pandemic isn't going to be

Last question on masks in want to just spend the whole two hours talking about this. Seems like there was a lot of confusion on masking early on, when it should have been the easiest thing to get right. You know, you go in for surgery, everybody in the operating theater wears a mask. It's pretty obvious it slows, if not stops, the spread of anything that's respiratory based. How did we screw that up?

Well, I think there was a lack of recognition early on, a lack of knowledge. I won't call it recognition because I don't think it was there to be known about how the virus actually spread, So I think that's part of it. I think Fauci has explained his initial comment about against masking as an attempt to preserve ppe for doctors and nurses. But I do also think even as the pandemic war on, the communication about masking was not great.

So let me ask you the obvious question, how did this get it's so hopelessly politicized so quickly.

Yeah, it's fascinating, right, because there is no way that in any kind of logical world, your beliefs about how you respond to a pandemic should have nothing to do with your political beliefs. In other words, it should be possible to be anti lockdowns. It could even be possible to be anti masking and to be a strident Democrat. And yet we conflated everything, and it became that if you were a good Democrat, then you believed in masking, in lockdowns, and if you were a good Republican, then

The crazy thing about vaccines, and I've had this conversation with other people. The anti vass movement really was kind of a you know, California granola and nuts sort of left wing. Oh, I don't trust the government to give me a vaccine. That this is a giant experiment on the left to operation warp speed. The m RNA vaccines became Bill Gates is putting a chip in me on the right, and there's nothing that anybody can do to get the furthest outliers to recognize just some basic science.

Yeah. One of the things we chronicle in the book that is that I found interesting is that the anti VAC sentiment did start under Democrats when they were when they were the Trump vaccines, and so you had Democrats like Cuomo saying, I don't know about these things being rushed by Trump, and you had a lot of skepticism about the vaccines being generated by Democrats before the vaccines were even produced, and then once they were produced, and

You know, if you want to say, the first five hundred million vaccines, all right, this is a new vaccine, let's see what comes out of it. I don't agree with that, but I can follow the logic there. But when we're at the eight, ten, twelve billion shots with really very little side effects at that point that that argument seems to go away.

Yeah. I think though the government has shot itself in the foot once again. And one of the other themes in our book is this loss of trust broadly speaking that had been taking place before the pandemic happened, of course, but the pandemic really exacerbated it. And I think the government public health officials did not do themselves any favors by overselling the vaccines. The original vaccines miracle basically a miracle of science.

Right in like a decade. This wasn't done overnight, This was a decade, was worth.

More than a decade in the works. But the clinical trials that proved the efficacy of the original vaccines did not measure whether or not they affected transmission. And so when public health officials went out there and said, if you take this vaccine. You can't pass this on, you won't transmit this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. It

Of a big snaff foo. And to be honest, so I'm fully vaxed. I'm fully boosted. If the government said to me, well, we don't know if this will stop you from getting it, but it means that you're not gonna die. Okay, way do I sign up exactly? You didn'tumb for that.

You didn't you didn't have to oversell it. But there was this belief that we wanted to get to her immunity, so you had to encourage everybody to take the vaccine and so overselling it and say you wouldn't saying people wouldn't get it. It was wishful thinking that in the most generous of interpretations, it was wishful thinking. But I think it did damage.

I think you're right, And in fact, one of the groups that came up for criticism in the book is the Red Dawn Team highlighted in Michael Lewis's book The Premonition. You guys seem to be a little critical on some of their emphasis on Hey, this means the result in Italy means we could do lockdowns here.

Yeah. I think critical is too strong a word. I think the idea that the Influenza Playbook would work with COVID is it was flawed and I think it did a lot of damage.

Leane, Why is a coronavirus so different from an influenza infection.

The biggest reason, and this is not a scientific answer, it's a practical answer. The biggest difference is that influenza schools are super spreading zones right with the coronavirus, they are not. In fact, it's been documented over and over again that the skip spread in schools is lower than that in the community, and so that playbook became I think part of the excuse for keeping schools closed in the United States in a way that did not happen in other countries.

Point out in the book, and I thought this was a fascinating detail. In the pandemic of nineteen eighteen, thousands and thousands of young people died in the COVID nineteen pandemic. Young people seem to do fairly okay with this.

They did. Young people with pre existing conditions did.

Terribly, but everybody with pre existing.

Everybody did, but very very few, a vanishingly small number of healthy young people got sick from COVID, And as I said, the spread in schools was lower than in the communities. That's why other places played in Europe, for example, open their schools. And I think the fact that we kept our schools closed has probably done more damage than just about anything in the pandemic, because you've lost a generation of young people who have lost their hopes for life.

And I think, will you think it's that severe you have kids that are school aged, I think that's listen. I know lots of kids that miss proms, they missed graduations, they miss Barr and Bob mitzvahs and sweet sixteens and confirmations. So it was a rough year or two, obviously, nothing like World War two. But that those are formative years tell us a little bit about But these.

Are but these but these are the privileged kids you're talking about, the ones with parents who could homeschool them, or who had a parent at home so that they could at least have supervision computers in high school while they did zoom schooling. It's the least privileged kids in our society, the very ones that were supposed to protect who got the most screwed by this. The ones whose parents were essential workers and had to go to school and had to leave the kids at home to try

Really very sad. And I learned a lot going through the book about the impact on that. The Red Dawn team talked about how close the desks are in school, how close the seats are on a bus. They're like, there's no social distancing in grammar schools. If this was a vector for transmission, you would think there'd be a lot more kids that were infected. How did the numbers shake out for the under twenty cohort versus the twenty to fifty cohorts.

I think it's hard to know what the numbers were on infections because so many kids who got COVID were asymptomatic. I think you can look at the desks which are vanishingly small for people under twenty, and so that's the key measure that this was not influenza, which again back to your point about unforced errors. It is very hard to be prepared for a pandemic because every pandemic is different, and so if you followed an influenza playbook, you would

And to be fair to read Dawn, because I'm throwing them on the bus a little bit, they predicted eighty one percent of the US population would eventually be effected and as many as two million in the US would die. Those numbers turned out to be pretty dead on, right. So we're talking about catching this early. The one person in the Trump White House that was jumping up and down about this early on was Peter Navarro, who was widely yelling this is a giant pandemic threat. But he

Well, So there's this great quote in the book that the battle in the Trump administration was between those who wanted to do everything and those who wanted to do nothing. And unfortunately, and Navarro is the best example of this. Sometimes those who wanted to do everything had lost credibility for other reasons, and so Navarro had become known as kind of its, kind of aloney, and so he wasn't taken seriously on the thing that he should have been

So let me invite a little maga hate mail. And I don't think I'm going on a limb when I say the Trump White House appointed a lot of people that just weren't perceived as serious players in the various institutions. But you can't help but look at the Trump White House and say, hey, if they were a little more serious and if they had put together a better team, this might have gone better.

So I'm going to protest that a little bit. I think, for one thing, that a lot of very competent people did start off in the Trump administration. They just did. They just didn't last, but they did start right. I think there were competent people in the Trump administration even when the pandemic, like alluisays are I think they just they were fighting so many battles on so many fronts, and there was so much internescing warfare that it made it difficult for competence to rise to the top.

And I think it's fair to hold the president and accountable for how is White House operates and who gets appointed to key roles.

I do, but this is going to make you mad. But I think a point that's in the introduction that I think is important is that I think it's magical thinking to believe that the course of the pandemic would have been radically different had we had a different president in the White House. And all you need to do to see that is to see that more people died in the first year of the Biden administration than they did under Trump. So I don't I don't think it was it was It would have been that easy for

I totally agree with you. Why the White House just didn't take control of First it was Kushner, then it was Pence, and nobody could get that under control. You could have gone to the guy who ran Operation Warpsbeed and said, hey, who should we put in charge of PPE? You have beenwidth for that, or find us a guy in the military to do this, and that would have had a big difference. It just seemed, you know, so silly. And then the opportunism. That's the other thing in the

So I'm not, to be clear, I'm not defending Trump. I think his failure of leadership was massive. And even if you are a Trump supporter and you hate Fauci, then you have to look at that and say, well, then why did Trump allow Fauci to attain the preeminence he did? Because Trump didn't want to take responsibility. It's

That reduced those one point.

Perhaps could have could have made it better. I still think the United States outcomes would have been terrible, and I think we need to look at these underlying conditions in order to in order to have a chance of making it better the next time around. And so I think it's not only magical thinking, it's dangerous thinking to just say, oh, it's just all about Trump, because that then because then you miss you miss the real problems.

Right to me, the most interesting part of the book was the hands that we were dealt coming into and when I not to make this about me, but when I was working on bailout Nation. As much as I wanted to blame George Bush, when you look at everything that took place before Bush took office, he was one of many, many players that led to that disaster. And all the people who said this is Bush's fault, it's like, what are you going to ignore twenty years of deregulation

That is probably true.

Right, So let's talk a little bit about our broken ci and I mentioned earlier you throw everybody under the bus from Cuomo DeSantis de Blassio. You kind of focus on Cuomo and DeSantis throughout the books as two governors are a Northern Democrat a Southern Republican. What made you choose these two governors to focus on.

Well, because their policies were so different in the pandemic, although they actually personality wise they might be more alike than they are different. I would be both dropped the ball right. But DeSantis obviously was the most prominent person who came out against lockdowns and Cuomo was very pro locking down, and so we thought it would set an

All right, So I have a ton of criticisms on Cuomo, But before we get to my form of governor, let's talk a little bit about DeSantis. Starting with spring Break twenty twenty, there was a move to close that down that became a super spreader event. You sent COVID back to fifty to other states. From there, he said, we don't want to shut it down because this is a big boom for our local business. How do you excuse putting one hundred thousand college students together twenty something college

Well, I'm not sure the extent to which that was a super spreader event. I also think that some of what DeSantis insisted on early in the pandemic, which was that the evidence shows that it's safer outside and that it's safe to have the beaches open, he was right, and the people criticizing him were safer.

Not safe, but safer, but safer.

And by the way, some of the terrible things that happened in the pandemic came from keeping people cooped up in their houses, elderly people who didn't get out for years, whose dementia exacerbated. So you have to weigh, if you're a leader, you have to weigh some of these things against each other. Safer to be outside, yes, worth it to get people outdoors exercising, being able to see other human beings. Yeah. Maybe I'm a little less opposed to that aspect of DeSantis than you are.

All Right, so let's talk about some of the other things Ron did. Governor Ron did he stopped reporting COVID data. Now I've heard the excuse. We didn't want to focus on this, we didn't want to panic people. But let's be honest, their numbers were terrible and he just didn't want to see it represent him. Come on, push back on that.

I'm not sure that's true. I mean, some of the.

Stuff Florida did terrible on a per capita basis your own.

Justin Fox did an analysis of the desk coming out of Florida and California, and when you adjust it for age, which you have to because COVID kills the elderly, the numbers aren't that.

So let me let me push back on this. And that's an email I sent to Justin said differently, Hey, we have a lot of elderly people in our state, and we did a terrible job protecting them.

I'm not sure that's fair. So I think that the risk of dying from COVID goes up so dramatically when you were over sixty five? What does what does what does taking care of your elderly mean? DeSantis moved aggressively to try to protect people in nursing homes in a way that, by the way, New York in a way that, by by the way, by the way, New York did not.

Are, so let me blame her.

Let me take that back. I'm not probably more pro his original strategy. I'm definitely more.

So let me blame him for things that are unambiguous. Okay, he stops reporting the data, he fires his director of Health and Human Services, He points a surgeon general for the state who doesn't believe in vaccines and is a wacked.

That comes later, That comes later.

I'm looking at the continuum of him starting out with spring break, which there is there's a decent amount of evidence that suggests lots of people either got COVID, there a lot of hookups. You're not always outside at spring break, and then went back to their state and managed to spread it there to the live stream of the Health and Human Services director having her door kick down by a swat.

Team that she turns out to be. And so if you read not only a little wacky, the whole thing turns out to be made up. And by the way that the press was all over that celebrating her glowing articles everywhere without ever and this is when you without ever looking at some of the facts underneath them. Should

But she was not the person to.

If you want to hold somebody up as being ill treated by DeSantis, Rebecca Jones, it's not the person.

So let's talk about his surgeon general, who doesn't really think of VC like the CDC was regularly correcting some of his mistakes.

So right and let's let's I know, you don't want to put things on a continuum. I'm going to put things on a continue that came later, and I am There's there's nothing about DeSantis' current stance on the vaccines that I think is defendable. I think it's morally reprehensible.

So let's all right, so we're on the same page. Now, let's throw Cuomo into the bus a little bit. And similarly started out thinking, oh, okay, he is the guy on the ball, and then goes off the rails. He begins with these press conferences that kind of reminded me of Giuliani during nine to eleven, where there's this leadership var and somebody not the president steps up to fill the void. Were those conferences required viewing?

They were absolutely required viewing. And I think that points to two things. I think it points to the earlier part of our discussion where we talked about Trump's failure of leadership. Had Trump been providing that leadership, there wouldn't have been a void that Quoma needed to fail, or that Cuomo could fail. But I think it also points to something else, which is the appearance of leadership versus actual leadership.

So let's get into it, because he really so what he started out looking like, Oh my god, this guy is going to be president one day. Then let's talk a little bit about his feud with Mayor Deblasio in New York City, which was very much a hotspot in the beginning of the pandemic. What were the impacts of this childish feud on the healthcare of New Yorkers.

So that even after the New York Department of Health, which is in the city's department, which are really well respected institutions, we're saying, we're seeing these upticks and all these measures that are alarming. This feud between Cuomo and Deblasio kept either from doing anything for a way too long, and so and then and then, of course, on top of it, Cuomo's policy of sending sick people back to nursing home that's my next which he blamed on the

So let's clarify exactly what you're talking about, because it's literally my next question. There are elderly people who get sent from nursing homes to hospitals where they are identified as having COVID, and Cuomo's policy was to take them out of the hospital and send them back to the nursing homes where I have no idea what the thinking was. Maybe you could lock them in their rooms and not have the people who serve meals and go from room

There is one possible reason for it, which is they were really worried about hospital space. Right, So there's this thinking, we'll free up hospital beds when I'm on an ice flow. But then two things have to happen. One, you have to be able to protect those people and protect the people around them when they get back to the nursing home. And secondly, you don't lie about it. And so those were the two big problems. And that's that old adage, right,

Accusations talk about rolling downhill. He just started out good, went off the rails and just man was it was like a wily coyote hitting the bottom of the Ravine. Let's talk about a few other people who may or may not have distinguished themselves. Anthony Fauci, How well did he perform?

So my cauthorne I might have a little bit of a split on this. I'm probably more sympathetic to Fauci then Joe might be. I view any criticism Ofauci as misplaced, because it was the job of the president not to have Fauci in that role if he didn't want him in that role.

But he got great media.

But he got great media. And as if you're putting someone out there whose views you don't agree with, and then and then sort of ducking and saying, oh, look at what that guy's saying. I mean, it's just it's it's terrible, be accountable, say then I'm going to be the person speaking to the American public. It makes me.

I mean, but Trump seems to do that with every single person he appointed, and nobody ever says to him, why are you criticizing this person, Why don't you criticize the person who hired them? Oh wait, that's you. And at least with Fauci, we got the Curb your Enthusiasm memes we did, and which was to me the highlight of the past.

I think you sent me one of those early on, and I think it might have been the highlight of the pandemic.

Just like because you just see him drop his head into his hand when when Trump was talking about AMV was bleach or light or something and the music just it was chef's kiss? What about Jared Kushner?

How did that back to Fauci?

Me?

I think there there are a couple of things that I don't understand why why Fauci did them, Either to say the least, the mask thing, the shutting down of any inquiry about the origins of the pandemic, which in a way, I don't really care where this thing came from, but the fact that we weren't allowed to discuss where it came from reflects well on nobody. The idea that you couldn't say that it might have been from inside

Whether it came from a lab or a Chinese wet market, I mean, he's still.

China cares, but we should know and I.

And we, so let me ask you that question. Since you references, where do we think the virus came from?

I don't have a clue. But what I do know is that because the lines of inquiry were shut down early on, we probably never will know for sure. And I think that that's not a great outcome. And I think shutting down lines of inquorey are shutting down people with different opinions. Is just there's a line between that and quote misinformation, and I'm not really sure in a free society what we want to label misinformation. I detest

They walk that way back though the meta study, there were subsequent articles that said, well, this isn't exactly what we're saying. The whole mask thing. I think, if you're going into an operating theater, don't you check that box? Yes, I want everybody wearing surgical masks in there.

I mean, I don't think the Great Bearrington Declaration said much about mask It was about it was about. The Great Barrington Declaration was about focused protection for the elderly. It was against lockdowns.

The other stuff.

And I think, and I think in a free society where polarization doesn't dictate what one is allowed to say and one is not allowed to say, there should have been a debate about that. And the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration were not French scientists, epidemiologists carverd epidemiologists at Stanford, epidemiologists at Oxford, highly respected people. Why is it so offensive to listen to them and to listen

So let's talk a little bit about misinformation, because that leads to a couple of questions. Hydroxy chloroquin ivermectin bleach heard immunity. It seems like there was some really crazy nonsense coming from to some degree from social media. Also spread by social media, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Not so much LinkedIn as far as I could tell, and far more on the right wing than the left wing, other than

I think it's really difficult because the line between misinformation and information that we don't want to hear is can be a very fine line sometimes, and sometimes things that we label misinformation in a moment come back to perhaps maybe be something that we should have listened to. I guess my view on free speech is that if we believe in free speech, we should believe in free speech.

Yelling fire in a crowded theater. At what point is don't get vaccinated. It's a chip that will track you. How close is that to yelling fire in a theater?

I think it's I think it's a long way away. And I think that when there is so much information out there to the counter about that, you actually do more damage by shutting people down and saying you can't say that than you do by saying, go ahead and say it. Sound crazy.

People people literally Barber Streis and effect people.

People, people can figure out their own their own information. There's enough out there running counter to that, so I don't I think it's a really tricky issue. But I think the pandemic, if anything, made me feel that we are very very quick to label things misinformation and we just don't like.

It if we just disagree with it, all right, so we did Fauci. Let's talk about Jared Kushner and Mike Pence, who each took turns heading a task force on PPE.

How those guys do I think Kushner, I don't think the task force that he set up to get PPE

So Chok went up for Jared Kushner. What about Mike Pence kind of that just went nowhere.

I mean when Mike Pence, when Alex Azar was kicked off basically running the task force and Mike Pence was put in charge. It's hard to think of anything that happened at the Coronavirus Task Force after that other than Mike Pence's op ed in the spring of twenty twenty saying there won't be a second way. I think most people see him as the ultimate poly Titian, and that he was more focused on his own chances for a presidential run than he was on actually doing anything about

James tell us about Azar. I think a lot of people have no idea who he is or was during this era.

So Asar was a Secretary of Health and Human Services and not a well liked figure within the Trump administration for reasons both good and bad. He developed a reputation for being hierarchical, being thin skinned, being a politician, but he was also he was an old school Republican in an administration where that was a very bad thing to be. I think it is impossible to look at alex Azar and not see a highly principled person who wanted to

So let's stick with warp Speed for a second. Of course, the economy began to recover pretty quickly. He could have stepped up and said I did this, I saved America. Vote for me. I think he could have won if he had made better decisions about the pandemic.

Well, I think I'm not sure that's true, because the

That's smart.

If Trump had pushed them and called them the Trump vaccines, would you have had exactly the response from Democrats that we had said got from Republicans. Given how ridiculously polarized we are, would you then have had Republicans taking the vaccines and celebrating them and Democrats saying I'm not taking a Trump vaccine.

Counterfactual is it's amazing.

It's actually tragic that we even have to ask this question, because why should a vaccine be a Trump vaccine or a Giden vaccine. It's it's insane, it's insane.

There was a big piece not too long ago, I don't remember if it was the Wall Street Journal of the Washington Post that showed that if you looked at a break the country down by zip code, red zip codes had much worse outcome than blue zip codes, And you kind of wonder, you can't help but wonder this has to be partisan based, whether you took the vaccine, got boosted socially distanced, unless you're going to say the red districts are just so much worse on the pre

I think it's some combination of both. And again, I don't think anybody's done the work, nor I think is it possible to actually do the work and break it down. What percent of the problem came from people in Red states being less willing to get vaccinated, and what percentage of the problem came from the fact that pre existing health conditions that led one to terrible COVID outcomes were worse in many of those states, which brings us back and access to healthcare.

Which brings us back to DeSantis, who has refused to embrace Medicaid and is leaving something like one hundred and fifty million dollars a year in healthcare aid to his state. Now work that out into those pre existing conditions a lot more medical care that buys you a decent amount of money every year. He has not embraced it. A handful of Red state governors have refused to embrace this, and I'm always shocked at how their population goes along with it. I don't want healthcare. What do I need

I think that's hard because they all did different things. I think the CDC is at the bottom. I think it's hard and even the CDC, I think would say that. Rachelle Wilenski, when she was running the CDC, came out with this report basically that' said the CDC has failed and lost lost a lot of trust. The NIH not terrible, no, and it's the NIH that funded a lot of the development of mRNA led us to have the vaccines. You know, again, the existence of the vaccines is a long standing collaboration

You can't get shareholders to say, I'm going to put money to this company and maybe in fifteen years we'll have a product we can and more.

Even more so, you can't get shareholders to back vaccine development because too many times governments are the buyers of vaccines. The profits aren't big enough, and the need for the vaccines comes and goes, and so shareholders don't want anything to do with it because it's not sustainable earnings growth and so you have to be aware of where capitalism works and where it doesn't work. And that's one of

I'm kind of fascinated and I was like raised an eyebrow when I come across the chapter in the book on the Federal Reserve. Let's talk a little bit about what the FED did and didn't do. Starting with their initial thinking was, hey, interest rates don't cure pandemics. Tell us a little bit about what's going on at the FED.

Well, I think you can't look at the pandemic without looking at the Federal Reserve. And for all sorts of reasons. One is that if it hadn't been for the fed's actions in the spring of twenty twenty, the world literally might have shut down. Markets are not incidental to life there,

So let's explore that a little bit more. Following the financial crisis, FED takes the rates down to zero, keeps him there, can't get inflation up to two percent a decade no inflation. We really haven't talked about the Cares Act and what a massive fiscal stimulus that was that we didn't see during the financial crisis. So let's put some numbers on that. CARES Act one under President Trump two point two trillion dollars, right, ten percent of GDP.

It's insane, and it has left our has helped leave our federal debt in a frightening place. Plus the impact on inflation, and there was a lot of thinking about the impact of fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus right together. And so you're right, we didn't have that in the financial crisis, and I think it was a mistake. We had a very limited amount of fiscal stimulus because the idea was, oh my god, that the deficit and what

And so the FED had a mediocre recovery because and so the FED.

For that decade between the financial crisis and the pandemic, that decade plus felt promote the title of Muhammad al Aarian's great book that they were the only game in town. They were the only ones who could try to fix the economy. But that, to me is a little bit analogous to Fauci. Just like maybe Fauci shouldn't have been in the position he was in, the FED shouldn't have been in the position it was in. That's Congress's job. Again,

It's always more complicated. One of the things that I think a lot of folks don't realize is when you take rates to zero, everything priced in credit and dollars is going to benefit from that. And that means stocks, bonds, real estate's business and who owns that the wealthier people in America. So the most fascinating takeaway from this massive fiscal stimulus, aside from the inflation, is hey, it did a pretty good job for the middle and lower class.

Of yes, exactly whereas monetary stimulus made the rich richer. I mean, people said when the when the Fed began throwing everything it could at the wall, basically in the spring of twenty twenty, traders were like, this is the greatest trading opportunity the world has ever seen. And when you look at how staggeringly rich people with exposure to the markets got in in the year after the pandemic first hit, it's really I mean, it's sort of disgusting.

From the lows in March twenty twenty. Till the end of the year, the S ANDB five hundred sixty eight percent. The following year up on ROMO was twenty nine thirty one percent. Every huge, reaching, explosive.

Boom, everything was a screaming buy. And that benefits the segment of the American population that has exposure to as not the bottom. And then the bottom is left to fend for itself when and not to fend for itself, but the bottom is left to pick up the pieces when inflation kicks in, because guess who inflation hurts more?

The less well off always. So let's talk. You know, it's funny. I'm gonna tell you a quick, funny digression. I'm at an event over the summer camp Kotok and we're talking about rising interest rates. And someone asked the question, Hey, will the wealthy benefit from higher rates or not? And three of us in the room, myself included, raised their hand and said, of course they will. You know what history has told us, the wealthy do just fine in all sorts of economies.

Well, I agree, And it seems that everything we've done, from the financial crisis through to the pandemic response has helped the wealthy at the at the expense of the poor. And that's why I very much like the subtitle of of.

Our boots left Beyond.

Of our book, Who's getting left Who's getting left behind? And that it's true that the fiscal stimulus has done miracles for people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. So I don't want to discount that it was really.

Reduce poverty for children.

It had enormously effective. Nonetheless, a lot of the gains and wages have been eaten up by inflation. So once again, it's the people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who are left to who face the most pain from just about any policy.

So one of the things we really haven't spoken about very much is the supply chain. I want to focus on semiconductors because you specifically write about Taiwan semiconductor and the shortage and how it's impacted everything from cars to computers. What drove that shortage and how much are we still dealing with the after effects of that.

So it was just it was it was the increased demand combined with the increased time to ship. One CEO of a company told me it just it was like lost in translation. You just couldn't figure out where your gear,

So there's this ongoing political debate as to whether it's a pipe dream that we can bring manufacturing or critical manufacturing back to the United States. Can we bring semiconductor or evy battery production or next generation technologies like that here? Is this is this a pipe dream or is this a viable Hey, we can't leave it five thousand miles away. It just doesn't work for us.

So I think the train has left the station on semiconductor manufacturing. When you look even at the a billions in the Chips Act, but you compare it to Taiwan Semiconductor's annual capbex budget, it's just there's no catching up. That doesn't mean we couldn't have manufacturing of some critical chips here in the US as a just in case backup, But I think the idea that we're ever going to become a manufacturing powerhouse of semiconductor chips. Ever, again, I

You might have thought, and I admittedly this is all hindsight bias, that after nine to eleven we would have said, hey, we are now dealing with asymmetrical warfare, what do we need to do to make sure that just a defense department has access to what they need? That never seemed to happen, did it. I mean, it was chatter about it and then it just kind of faded the following quarter.

Yeah, the Department of Defense has done this report, the Industrial Capabilities Report, every year, and it's pointed out that do to shareholder pressure to generate earnings, that all these critical aspects of manufacturing have gone overseas. And so it's easy to not pay any attention to that if you're just focused on this quarter's earnings or this year's earnings.

So Lennon was right. The capitalists will sell you the rope to hang you business.

It might be true. I mean, I'm still going to defend capitalism is a version of Winston Churchill's quote about democracy the worst possible system with the possible exception of everything else up there. But I do think we need to have a discussion about where capitalism is appropriate and where it's not, and what's fears of life it should be contained, and what its limitations are.

So I have another four hours worth of questions for you, but I know you have a lunch date, So let's jump to our speed round and we'll blow through these five questions as quickly as possible, starting with what have you been streaming these days? What's been keeping you entertained?

So this is going to make you unhappy. But I grew up without a TV set, and I did, and I see there's amazing. We might be the only two people in the world.

Who can say that I wasn't allowed to watch Oh.

We didn't even have one. My parents still don't have one, so I don't. I don't stream that much.

I know it's audio. I have.

I have some things that i've that I've listened to that I love, but I default to a book when I'm when I'm left alone audio. I have been loving Huberman's podcast on health and longevity. He has a great podcast that just came out on meditation that makes you think really differently about meditation.

Umen. Yeah, I'm going to check out. Yeah. Let's talk about your mentors who helped shape your career as a writer.

So Joon No Sarah, who's my co author on this book, and my co author and all the devils are here and edited the smartest guys in the room. He was my editor at Fortune for a lot of years, and he taught me and still teaches me to this day, a lot about writing and storytelling.

Since we mentioned books, let's talk about some of your favorites and what you're reading right now.

So I do a podcast with a guy named Luigi's and gallis at the University of Chicago, and I think I have to read a ton for that, as you do for this. It's a lot of work, right, But I think the books that I read for the podcasts that have been most influential for me were two contradict reviews on meritocracy, one by professor at Harvard named Michael Sandel, and the other by a professor at Oxford named Adrian Woldridge, and one is kind of a defensive meritocracy and the

Oh, I didn't know you were a fantasy fan. Give me some other authors you like? So, because I go back to like Peer's Anthony and.

Early So do I back back to Tolkien? Of course? Yes, that's a gimme game, owns of course. George double R.

Martin, I would like to read that. I started watching it and said, I got to read.

This I know I read. I read them all, but the.

Probably as great as everyone says.

They're as great as everybody says. The problem is now I can't watch the show because it's so stressful to read those books that you can't relive some of the high moments of high stress.

You know, he kills a lot of people.

There's there's another So I have a fourteen year old daughter and a twelve year old daughter, so I consume an inordinate amount of fantasy novels and I can't keep all the names straight because that's what my daughter reads. But right now I'm in the process of reading some by a woman named Rissa Meyer, which are rewrites of fairy tales from a different perspective and they are super interesting.

And the Last kind of Wicked, which is told from the witch's perspective.

Yeah, or like Maleficent. But back to things that.

I love Moens so do I.

But back to things that I read as a child that I think are really interesting to reread. Now I've been rereading a lot of Isaac Ossamov.

Unbelievable.

I think, in this in this era where we're talking about AI, to realize how incredibly prophetic Awesomov was with his three Laws of Robots and his and his and his thoughts about the world. He's a terrible writer, and you have to struggle through his prose, but if he read it, yes, he is terrible.

He's a great storyteller, and some of his some of his prose is not the most polished. But his idea is everything.

Well, that's exactly his prose is. His prose is clunky, and his characters are one dimensional, but his ideas and the fact that he could see all of where we are today from when he was writing, I just think it's it's fascinating.

So foundation trilogy. Robert C. J. Serrah Larry Nivin. The last question is Anthony I mean to say nothing of Philip K. Dick, which is just next.

Level, Yes, and and the and the greatest of all Dune.

Right, you know, I've been plowing through the most recent and version. It's like every time there's a decade goes by, someone reattempts to redo that story and it's just too grand. Unless you're going to do Lawrence of Arabia, right, you just can't do Dune. And it seems every attempt has failed. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either investing finance or journalism.

And journalism a career in journalism, I might say, find something else where you can make money. And then right on the side, No, seriously, I would say to anybody interested in anything, just do something. You never know where your path in life is going to take you. But if you don't do anything, then you know where it's going to take you, which is nowhere. And so if you're not sure what you want to do, just go do things. Go do interesting things. Go try to be

And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing finance writing today? You wish you knew twenty twenty five years ago when you were first getting started.

I wish I had understood that it wasn't just about numbers, that it's about people. It's about history. You have to understand psychology, You have to understand the past. That makes it so much more interesting and infinitely and just interesting. And I wish I had understood what we talked about earlier on the podcast, which is that that most important rule is the thing you used in kindergarten, which is

William Goldman's is penned my favorite expression of all time. Nobody knows anything right.

That is pretty fantastic.

Bethany, thank you for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Bethany MacLean, co author of The Big Foul. If you enjoy this conversation. Be sure and check out any of the previous five hundred plus discussions we've had over the past nine years. You can find those at YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Sign up for my daily reading lists at