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editor of the financial times timesand also cnn's global econc analyst and includes makers and takers the finance and fall of american business and don't be evil, how big tech betrays its founding principles and all of us. i'm the founder and producer and we will talk towards the end i will pose some questions from the audience. i will if you take it from here. >> thank you and hello. i am so pleased to do this with you and i have been incredibly jealous not just because you've written 16 books and i've only written to so far, but your timing is kind of unbelievable.

your book that you've worked hard on. whether that reshapes your thinking. i don't think i recommend 16. that is probably too many books, but too late now. i was stating a lot about the disaster before covid-19 struck. in fact, i'd been plotting a book about the history of the future that was going to look at dystopias in the science fiction going all the way back to in many ways who invented the genre but i couldn't yet get my new york editor to buy the idea of

such a book of the paradoxical notion and then i was saved by a real disaster that struck back in january and i've been thinking lots about dystopia and disastrous scenarios. i think that we would spot the pandemic coming almost as soon i had heard about this strange new virus. too many science fiction books have that plot, so i turned around and decided to write a general history disaster because it suddenly hit me that we didn't have such a thing the

happy families or disasters or some that were the same. >> one of the things i do love about this book is you take on the big picture it's not one of those many changes post pandemic. you sort of look in a systematic way geopolitically, financially, ecologically, historically, technologically at all the disasters and i want to carve out some of the takeaways as you go through history and look at the different disasters it wasn't always about people that have the science and facts at hand really well or whatever it

was most importantly that goes against the grain of the narrative in that world and different sides of the aisle. talk more about that. >> there is a narrative in our heads and it's what might be called the interpretation of the history of science and in that account which as i said we have in our heads the past which is clueless and people die like flies and then we gradually start to figure it out and with every passing decade more brilliant men and women with microscopes bring us closer to understanding all of the true threats that we face and ultimately, we achieve victory over infectious disease but no

doubt that is the way a lot of us think about history when we ask ourselves the question why did life expectancy likely travel over the period. in the 19th and 20th century scenario, but at the same time we were creating networks capable of contagion on the scale so we would take two steps forward scientifically and then maybe one or one and a half steps back in terms of creating new vulnerabilities for ourselves as it happened in the 19th century but it became a problem because of the scientific and technological advances that made the city's possible and allowed for higher levels of travel and we travel

on an unprecedented scale and that means we are a lot more vulnerable to the pathogens than we used to be so that slightly changes the story and shifts the lens away from the scientific advances to a more complex story in which social networks on one level is great because they control the ideas we were both sick afterwards and this is exactly what you are talking about, this sort of network of evil and then we get this

pandemic. you look at the network optimization and supply chain and this is geopolitical conflict with china, efficiency versus resiliency and a lot of problems and i covered this in my first book it stems from the fact that they are optimized in a certain way but as you point out you never know what the next chapter is going to be and these things are unpredictable. what should we take to inform the debate about resiliency and efficiency from the industry to the financial system to how we should regulate technology. >> i think that it is safe to say that you and i and most of the people listening have witnessed more than one disaster. we witnessed the financial

crisis which is a different disaster than the pandemic and we witnessed the disastrous events of 9/11 and the sequence that followed from that so we've seen disasters in different domains in the space of 20 years and it strikes me one of the common features of what we've witnessed in practice when it strikes we think we are doing more than we use to and when the

financial crisis struck when the regulation seemed to work i think we had exactly the same experience in 2019 the u.s. was rated very highly and i've read some of them page after page of recommendations and i think there's a very important theme do to be aware of the illusion of the preparedness and meticulous preparations for the wrong crisis that is sufficiently different than the one we planned for. that is a thing that i've been thinking a lot about. it's not the case in taiwan or south korea and the response was

in the past the reason i wrote the book before the disaster was over and it wasn't at the end of this pandemic, the sense that we were learning the long lessons even before it was at an end. >> you are hitting on something important. experts agree that experts also tend to say i don't know. there's humility around these things and it's almost like you have an entirely different way of viewing the disaster and preparing for it. >> that is exactly right.

it's partly by the work not only in the black swan but anti-fragile. it's about the central argument that in diplomacy we optimize and build systems, whether it's financial systems or a public health system. but we really are optimized for efficiency. and work 99% of the time. the problem is that in the distribution in the 1% of the time when the disaster strikes and that is the moment that suddenly the fragility is the optimized system is revealed and that happened both in the financial crisis and it also happened in the pandemic. so i guess one of the lessons from history in the seeing the path through that lens is that we've become somewhat more fragile over time. in 1957 a pretty big pandemic hit the united states, not

perhaps quite as deadly in the u.s. but it killed about the same proportion of the population, 0.04%. the experience of the united states one reason it was different, one reason that there was no letdown or school closures [inaudible] i hadn't fully appreciated that until i was revisiting the story to write a piece on the book's publication fast-forward to 2020 it simply didn't have the redundant capacity with illness

we can think about risk and it is essentially distributed. this is what i took away in the book is that unfortunately disasters are not normally distributed you can model your self into an exhausted heap and you will not get the future right. the more you carefully try to build the model and try to attach to things from a pandemic to earthquakes to world war iii, the more disappointed you are going to be because it just won't work the way the model says. live with uncertainty and rule number two, be paranoid and a general way rather than

meticulously prepared for a couple scenarios. >> interesting. i'm going to tell my husband that because i'm a paranoid person and he criticizes me for things. >> just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that they are out to get you it is added by a bright script writer and i think i should have made the epigraph of the book. to some extent israel did so much better is that they are paranoid and for good reason. i don't know what the neighbors are going to try next and for the draw of something like the new coronavirus -- >> i was going to go to geopolitics. taiwan for example was fascinating. paranoid, yes but you've got to china ready to annex next door and also decentralize which

picked up on some of the previous books at least one of the stories right now is going to be a goliath you are saying know that everything you've seen in this book is saying that actually smaller might be better and decentralized might be better. >> i wouldn't want to give all my hopes on being one of those small nimble countries. you are in the end a lot smaller than the goliath but we had a couple of mistakes in the last year. but let me focus on two. number one when things really started to turn and we suddenly realized that it was already spreading out of control, we

decided we would copy the people's republic of china the other because it turns out there were those in college who spells his name n-e-i-l. he said we aren't sure if it will work in a non-communist setting. but that wasn't the right china for us to be copying. we should have been copying the republic of china, taiwan and looking at the ways they had responded very quickly with wrapping up testing, digital contact tracing and then isolating and protecting the vulnerable. they did all that really quickly. really hardly anybody died. i think a dozen or ten people had been classified as having died of covert. if you think about the problem of centralization it was

beautifully illustrated by the way we got testing wrong and then if i were a super spreader in january and february because you couldn't find out with no tests available which is supposed to be pretty fancy. and that is because the cdc said at the outset we will control testing and then they sent out a test that didn't work. you couldn't ask for a better illustration of how centralized bureaucracy can screw things up off the bat. it meant we lost the opportunity to do what they did in many of the countries which was to use testing tracing and in fact they had about the most relaxed regime of any developed country. >> it's so interesting because there is another way in which the conventional wisdom might have told you okay, you're up

europe gotthis centralized natil healthcare system in many countries may be they will do better. they are still on lockdown. they've been around. it is amazing. thinking about the u.s. and china brings up another point that you've made. the u.s. got things wrong, mainland china got things wrong. in some ways it isn't about the leader be at trump, but all of the bureaucrats living in the middle and this idea of problems in the middle, problems at the operational level really resonate with me because somebody that thinks about business and the exploding, it's always the mid-level designers that took some decision for the reason that was three steps away and that is how you get to these places. can you tell us about that and give some examples? >> i was thinking about this problem early last year and one

of my former students said you need to read this book. how did they redefine the book about the challenges. it is a fantastic book that everybody should read because it finally shows where the points of failure were in that disaster. this disaster is in the book because i cover disasters large and small partly because of the geometry. it can have a lot in common with the big one. so what does it show, he shows that the engineers at nasa need to deliver a 1% chance that things blow up because of leaking fuel but some bureaucrats in nasa turned out to 100,000 because it sounded better and you didn't want to get the money flow cut off that

guy in the middle management recurs throughout history and that failure is somewhere in the middle and is always worth considering. last year a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that we were having a disastrous pandemic because donald trump was an imbecile and if he hadn't been president, we wouldn't have had such a bad experience. the book shows all of the significant mistakes made and there were a dozen at least. but i would say whether it would have been a radically different experience with a different president because it wasn't trump telling the cdc go ruin the testing -- the deputy secretary for preparedness, it

was his one job and his name was robert and he reminds me of the nasa guy. a zealot attracted my attention to this and said if we really don't do something about getting the pandemic preparedness ride, right,we could be sol if there . i didn't know was an acronym, but the guy whose job it was that the system wouldn't actually work and wasn't casually saying this in the lecture. again it isn't like trump knew this. we must not tell ourselves a very story. and i've heard it too often. before anybody listening goes crazy because some people go crazy when i say this, he did a really bad job and so did boris johnson. but guess what there are a lot of countries that have high

excess mortality. try belgium. but you cannot claim that it is because of this. so we got away from this story and it was all their fault and recognize it was lower down the chain of command and we need to recognize that because if we don't we are just going to be blindsided in a similar way by the next disaster. >> it is a really important point about nuance. the greatest mistake was to put himself away from the center of something he had no clue about. nobody's ever written an article saying that the pandemic was barack obama's fault but an enormous number of people died

from overdoses so i do think we need to change the way we frame these questions in one way of doing that is to recognize that we have a habit that was identified in war and peace. we want to exaggerate the importance that they are one mode in the network but not necessarily the crucial one particularly when a disaster comes along. >> thinking about the social network obviously it plays a big role in things good and bad around the pandemic. is this time different? i mean, is the depth and breath of the network that we are dealing with not just in the social media but, i mean, i'm thinking about the pipeline disaster just this week, the internet of things, the fact that you've now got ran

somewhere attacked. >> we have been a vulnerable contagion for a remarkably long time even independent of technology. i was struck as i was writing a section about how swiftly that spread once it reached the more commercialized parts of europe and that is the 1340s. everything happens much faster, but the spread of the asian flu in 1957 when most travel was still almost as fast. we slightly exaggerate but the way in which we use this for

managing critical infrastructure has created all new vulnerabilities that really were not there before and when people say to me it is a disaster, i say the whole point in the book is i can't tell you. to have a model that says it is going to do this or that so that is the kind of preferred disaster but clearly a massive cyber attack from the united states or any major country would be much faster than climate change and i hate to think what this country would be like if we had a massive outage. the pipeline the story is a bunch of east european crooks picking out a huge part of the energy infrastructure in the united states. i think that is the very important novelty about our time and it illustrates the point that you made earlier that we

have ever larger and more optimized network structures that work 99% of the time that are very fragile and i worry our infrastructure probably is our biggest vulnerability now in the event of the escalation between the u.s. and china. this will be cold war. >> i have no doubt. on that note i was thinking of someone this past week with the food shortages and this pandemic where suddenly every restaurant is shot yet there are lines at grocery stores with separate supply chains and it turns out you've got 90% of the country's food supply going through five different counties with the housing crisis and financial risk et cetera. all of these risks seem to be

emerging. if you were advising the administration and maybe they will read your book, what are they doing right now or what can they do particularly given as you said you don't know where the next problem is going to be. >> if in some strange parallel universe i was asked that question, i would say first of all can you get the network scientists to think about the contagion, just get them involved so first of all if you don't have, i'm pretty sure you don't have a network scientist picture you need to have that and it needs to be permanent. i won't offer the services of a bunch of historians but history. the key thing i would say would be if what happened at the cdc were to happen in our defense of infrastructure, we would be so screwed in other words look at

every part of the federal government for these pathologies of the bureaucratic dysfunction and you will find them because really since the administrative state was born in every domain you find the same phenomenon and the need that is to say the illusion of preparedness and if there's some risk that we can attach probability to let's devise a 36 page and those were exist in such that no human being in a lifetime could read them all. we need to sort of do network science and we think the problems and then look at the bureaucracy and ask is any of this going to work because i

suspect whether we look back at all the disasters we have seen the common factor seems to be people knew that they were not trivial. it wasn't like they had never been discussed and yet it turned out that when the crisis came, the preparedness and preparations were very effective and i think that is going to be true everywhere. think about the earthquake in california scenario. we know it was a really big earthquake that will happen at some point. we just don't know when or how big. can you imagine dealing with for thebig one? this is a place that can't even keep its public schools open. it's a place where as far as i can see there's going to be a wildfire disaster. i live in california and i am kind of scared to think about how that would go given what we

know about the competence and face of the pandemic. >> california had a lot of problems but that doesn't necessarily fix them. that makes me wonder about incentives for the public sector and whether we need to totally rethink about the incentive structure because we've already touched on some of the problems in the private sector yet you have a system maximized for the shared volume efficiency that creates sort of shortcuts that may work 99% of the time but not the 1%. what about for the government and leadership, do we need a different structure? >> one piece of advice, send a bunch of people to spend a month with one of the heroes of the book who is a kind of critic of the government but they brought

in and said if you are so smart, you do something about this and she's one of the more interesting people in the world thinking about how you use technology to empower citizens in the people's republic in beijing the technology passed to the party and the state and significantly reduces the power and the opposite is true in taiwan. since the beginning of the year before the pandemic got going, i was learning so much about how they fought through with the digital revolution can do for government and it was long before see it work. they thought the problems were sabotaged so when i was there they were running up and the people i was talking to was concerned about the chinese cyber attacks on the process which were difficult because they keep their electoral

process simple and vote with pencil and paper but that is the way they might disrupt the process. then the pandemic came along and that same nimbleness that i think bringing into this kicked in to do the things we failed to do. it is a little bit about making the government accountable to the consumers who are the citizens and that is what we really don't do. we don't use technology in this crisis. i think one of the kind of unexplained things in the story is why the companies decided against doing contact tracing. if you think back, there were a couple of stories discussing contact tracing and they were not very quiet.

it should be done at the state level by state government. if you wanted to kill something, that's what you could do. i think they killed contact tracing in the u.s. for reasons that i don't know maybe they just decided there was too much risk at a time they were in the spotlight for the power in other respects but until we learn how to use technology to empower citizens and make the government accountable, then these bureaucratic pathologists i think will continue. >> i expect you are right they knew the contact tracing would make them seem even more powerful and that it would be quite powerful and bring up issues of data ownership and all the things they were already struggling with. i completely agree with what you said that she's interesting and she made the point to me the way

that it works is about a chicken and egg cycle of trust where the government is trusting citizens to record things and is very much participatory in government and then when things go well that builds trust and the government that allows more of a reason to maneuver and is sort of the opposite of what we have in the u.s. at the moment with of the polarization and the parties and primaries and the kind of extremes reported in the political system i think. >> every public service issue becomes part of that. it's very difficult to arrive at a consensus. the united states wasn't always like this. in the 1950s when the u.s. led the world in vaccine technology, everybody was happy about the fact that the u.s. was good at developing vaccines and rolling them out and that was one reason that the flu pandemic was so

well-managed. the fascinating figure got the vaccine incredibly fast and distributed even faster than we've been able to do. so, something's changed. the society was at least on some issues capable of putting these positions aside. this is something i wrote a bit about in which the ways of the internet and the tendency had a hostile partisan group, but i think that 2020 revealed that this is a major problem because if you stop politicizing everything from facemasks to hydroxychloroquine then the policy sort of becomes impossible and the trust that you've rightly mentioned in the context keeps sinking until every institution is not trusted by the public and that is a problem i think for any society.

>> let me ask before we throw th this open to audience questions. there's lots of talk about which of the many changes we have seen are going to be permanent. work from home, the real estate market, the geopolitics, the nature of capitalism. are we seeing a shift in capital labor, what do you think? >> this leads us not to expect much change because of what happens next and that is one of the things i got from looking at this experience with the plague. you've got these tremendous peaks of excess mortality and then it is carried out very quickly. i think there will be quite a

lot. they've already started to come back here in california. that is when i would expect it. the masks will soon be in the drawers of our desks and will only come out if we get a wave in the winter. what is going to stink is the working from home and i agree that this is already detectable prior to the pandemic. it is accelerating the transition to working for a significant proportion of us and that would have consequences for the cities and the way people live. i could see that being one of the changes but there's a bunch of other stuff that is may be less obvious. it is clear for me that we are going to have trouble going back to globalization as it was if we fully vaccinated the developed countries of the west and already figured out how to

investigate the american south asia. that's going to make it difficult to get rid of this rather rapidly mutating virus. was it really necessary to do such drastic lockdowns and then to ignore the measures like it was a financial crisis. and what would the consequences of that be because we are in the midst of a strange moment in economic history with extraordinary growth that has been driven by vaccinations and on top of that kerosene has been poured on the barbecue and i cannot help but feeling we are going to overheat this faster than we think and i don't buy

the analogy are you sure you want that an analogy because you may not remember how the presidency ended but one thing was the inflation expectation. >> that is a good point. when i think about that comparison i think about any idea that we are and some point between the group and i don't see that we can just keep throwing money at the problem and definitely. there's going to be some tough choices. let me ask you a final question regarding how have things changed for you personally in the last year? i don't intend to return to it. i spent a year with my wife and small younger children in

montana. i am in fact a rather antisocial person by nature. it's all been rather wonderful and i am ashamed to admit it. obviously it's got more than 3 million and will kill more before it's done but no question being one of the lucky ones i wouldn't just carry on doing my work. it was much improved by getting off the circuit and sitting in one place reading, thinking, writing. that's what i'm good at and it's been just unmitigated joy to be able to do that barely traveling more than 5 miles until i was forced back to california. >> i couldn't agree more. it's been wonderful to have more time to read books like yours. i'm going to hand this back to

you. i think you've got a few questions. >> yes, i do. first question could you tell me about the cover of your book, the image and how it was chosen? >> that was my choice in case you were wondering what this refers to. i solve the photograph with a wildfire raging behind him and it was a metaphor that i had been looking for and i am amazed more people haven't made use of this wonderful image so we were sort of arguing back and forth about the book jacket and of course they wanted a history jacket so it should look like a history book and this is american history, innately

boring. i wanted to signal that it is a book about disaster in all of its forms and our strange relationship to it that we can be fascinated by it and totally ignore it. >> the next question, correct me if i am mistaken but you lean conservative, am i right? how do you feel about the conservative movement in the united states right now and compare that to a conservative movement met and globally. >> i wonder about that. i've never been a member of the conservative party in britain and i am not a registered republican. i am a conservative relative to most academics, but academia is so far to the left that you don't have to try very hard to seem conservative. i am a classical liberal steeped

in the principles of the scottish enlightenment more than i am a conservative. but when i am confronted then i definitely turned conservative. conservatism in the united states is a contradiction in terms. committed to the fundamental principles derived from the enlightenment really have conservatives. it is a project from the outset and so the americans conservatives are a strange community and have to do ultimately what william f buckley says which is to understand the progress of horses and say stop or at least slow down and try not to get run over and that is the story of the american conservatism.

it has -- if you read buckley's buckley'sbiography you realize h and the point that he was just trying to get the conservatism's and have the kind of respectable conservatism that wouldn't identify with example the civil rights. and i think that kind of relationship between the respectable conservatism and distinctly not respectable conservatism came back into the open when donald trump ran for the republican nomination and all of the non-respectable elephants trampled the conservatives. i wrote a lot over the last four or so years, first for the sunday times in london and "boston globe" and then the opinion and i've got a certain sympathy for those that voted for him because i understand why in 2016 they did for the same

reason i understand why the counterparts voted but it was hard for me to see anything other than a bad ending for the story. my own inclination i remember seeing at the end of 2016 after it was clearly one and there was a transition in progress that this would end in a wealth of litigation was my prediction and that is not yet over but that is pretty much how it has ended so by the last four years they were painful in many ways and i will continue to find them painful until the conservatism has kind of managed to regain some control over the republican party, and that will take some time for obvious reasons. it's there in britain and a number of countries where the populist right has simply taken

over what has been a conservative tradition so as somebody that came of age during the years in the 1980s and was attracted because so much was wrong with 1970s socialism in britain, i am not in a comfortable place. there really isn't a comfortable place for somebody like me. you just end up getting hated on by they woke left and trump right. maybe it is a sign you are doing something right, but it can be harrowing as an experience. >> another question on preparedness for disasters. the gentleman says allocating resources and time towards something that hasn't happened is competing for resources against things that are happening. could you comment on how the case for that is made and how it

gets handicapped against sort of the timetable of when is it good and not good. >> when i was writing the first volume of the biography, i came across the problem of conjecture which essentially says in the democratic policy, that a politician and statesman has the choice between doing what requires the least effort, kicking the can down the road hoping nothing goes wrong and then doing something that requires the effort to avert some disaster that you feel might lie ahead and it says there are no rewards for the disaster because nobody's grateful for the disaster that didn't happen so there is an asymmetry that leads you to kick the can down the road rather than to make sacrifices that you will be blamed for and you won't get the credit for whatever it is. i think that is a various point about the nature of the modern politics of the democratic

politics generally. my sense is that we have the resources and the government takes a pretty big chunk out of our paychecks but we do waste a colossal amount of the money and that is why i think the most important thing that we can do is to get our large government with its different agencies to change their mode of operation away from that bureaucratic process that we were talking about earlier that his nimble and more responsive and eases technology better. you can't prepare for everything warned about because there are hundreds of cassandra's predicting the end of the world and a host of different ways. it's better to get those responsible for each different domain of public service and say there is a range of different things that can go wrong in your

space and we do not expect you to take out and insurance policy that is so enormously expensive that it covers the risks. you've got to have a system in which you prioritize rapid reaction and i cannot emphasize that enough as we cannot predict disaster, we really can't. it's better to invest in the speed of your reaction and let me take another example from finance. he said we were no better at seeing this coming but when it came even faster and turned on the die am i think that is the spirit, turn on a dime when you get that first signal that there's another pathogen that should set the alarm bells and you should act like it could be the black death and that would be the plant that was made in

january of last year, just treat this like it could be the big one and that is the kind of frenzied activity at the beginning and if it turns out not to be so bad, you will not regret those early moves that you made. >> would you talk about the deployment of technology both in anticipating the disasters and managing the disasters and compare the u.s. versus globally? it seems to me the privacy concerns in the u.s. put us in a limited position and other countries. >> sorry, do we have privacy in the u.s.? that comes to news to me because all of our data belongs to mark zuckerberg and jeff bezos. we don't have privacy. when people say what about our privacy i'm like really, because we gave it all away years ago.

the only good news is that it doesn't get to the government at least we don't think so. the government seems to get access when there is more difficulty than the party gets access to. we've got to stop kidding ourselves. the problem we have and we have not confronted it is that our personal data doesn't belong to us anymore and getting it back will be difficult. though i think we should strive for that. one of the things i loved in taiwan as the guy he explained it to me, we can create a block chain that keeps the appointed data and it is private. why didn't we think of that ten years ago when i first came on the scene. we've got to stop kidding ourselves. it's deeply shocking and we've

been in denial about this for years. the situation isn't far too much power and we did nothing at all and we reached the point at which these platforms know our every move and have the power to cancel the president of the united states if they feel like it. this is not okay even if you loathe trump to be cheering if you companies for deleting the elected president of the united states. this one you've already briefly addressed about let's go into it a little more. the management of disasters from the state level versus

federally. when did it work and how could it work better? >> it has many benefits. it isn't the best system in the major emergency i think one of the obvious things that we didn't really get right was the completely failure to make meaningful use of travel restrictions early on in the pandemic. by doing zero to limit the spread from the places where the virus was initially established but that was a pretty expensive mistake to make in terms of human life. the federal system showed its strength when some states did really dumb things.

california did some of the dumbest things i have to say. it's finally being admitted. i remember reading the papers showing that there were no cases of this. all the data was showing over a year ago that it's spread through these events like the resort indoors. that was disastrous it sadly prevailed and there were fewer restrictions on what one could

do it meant we couldn't have the policy nationwide which really would have been disastrous more than california. they ended up with similar outcomes in terms of public health including far less constrained so i think that ultimately i am a fan of the decentralization. there are many things that are better than. the trick of good governance is to get it right. which things are appropriate for the federal government to do and which are to be done at a more subdued level and i think that is going to be one of the superpowers if we can only leverage it. at some point the system's systs malfunction. indeed it did malfunction you had the state that couldn't deal

with the outbreak. it was like chernobyl on steroids. i am convinced the decentralization is the way to go in the world of technology such as the one we have today. we shouldn't delude ourselves about that. >> any medical researcher would tell you how in perfect it really is and typically most of the discourse is taking place in the confines of the medical community. everything came out in the open. on the one hand making medical researchers look and act and on the other hand making those spreading the various articles and story about it contributing to not a solution but noise.

would you comment about that? >> if there's one thing that gave me hope in the last year and a half it was the extraordinary way in which scientists around the world in multiple different fields worked collaboratively to try to figure out what was happening. and it was ultimately a deeply impressive thing to witness. i tried my best to drink from the fire hose. i worked closely with the right kind of expertise and an oncologist is an omnivore in terms of consuming medical science literature but what it convinced me of is there was no such thing as the science and this phrase should be abandoned because there are multiple

sciences and often collision. the epidemiologists were not in agreement with people working on the viral side of the problem and you need to recognize it is highly dynamic, highly competitive and there are often wrong papers that appear as pre- parents and those are the scrutiny of the peer review and therefore you have to pick your way very carefully through this incredible jungle of research. much of it brilliant, some of it wildly wrong and a bunch of stuff in the middle that is just mediocre. i think that this is a very important lesson for us. i don't think that the media with all due respect is a brilliant job of covering this. not only the people kind of beat with science reporting.

you really did need to get to the firehose and try your best to keep hold of the rapidly changing picture of the disease. but what makes it cool is that it is fiercely competitive and there are rigorous standards and when something is wrong, then you have to admit that it's wrong. the concept during the past year to assert certainty and high confidence in statements that were innately provisional about something studied on the move i thought it did a great deal of harm and ended up confusing the public. >> thank you very much. again, neil ferguson's book is doom the politics of catastrophe and it is available wherever books are sold.ch over past programs anytime a booktv.org.

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