culture and the evangelical church. and former senior advisor in the biden administration talks about the us response to the coronavirus pandemic. that starts tonight at 7:00 pm eastern. find more information on booktv.org or consult your program guide. ... >> welcome to another live talk. we invite you to visit and subscribe to our channel for over 300 conversations and follows on twitter facebook and instagram enter handle is live talks la and will discuss new books and politics of catastrophes. niall ferguson is the author of 16 books including civilizations, the great degeneration of kissinger 1923 - 1968 idealist and effective money. senior fellow at stanford university. and associate editor at the

financial times and also global economic analyst in her book includes makers and tigers and the rise of finance in the fall of ame and don't do evil, how big tech betrayed its founding principles and all of us. i'm telephone everyone different founder and producer of the series and they will talk and towards the end i will post some questions sent in from the audience. i will take it from here, rana. >> i'm incredibly jealous not just because you've written 16 books and i've written two so far. your timing is kind of unbelievable and that's a things in the publishing world, is your book going to come out at the right moment. history is catastrophe. i want to hear a little bit about the evolution of the book

and how you got the idea, whether that reshaped your thinking, did you have to change the beginning or ending? >> i don't recommend writing 16, that's probably too many books. too late now. i was thinking a lot about disaster before covid-19 struck. in fact, i had been plotting a book about the history of the future that was going to look at dystopias in science fiction going all the way back to mary shelley invented the genere. i couldn't get my editor to buy a book, history of the future and then i was saved by real

disaster that struck back in january. l i've been thinking about dystopian and disastrous scenarios. ready to spot there was a pandemic coming as soon as i heard about the change new virus inew wuhan. too many science fiction books have that plot line and i turned around and decided to write a general history of disaster because it suddenly hit me that we didn't have such a thing. we want the big that has it altogether in one roof. i wanted to attempt to -- i have this hunch that happy families, some levels were waying. >> yeah, yeah. one of the things i really love about the book, you take on the big picture and don't shy away

from it and it's not one of those many, things are going to change post pandemic. you're really sort of looking in a systematic way geo politically, financially, ecologically, historically, technologically at all disasters heand bringing a whole picture together and i want to tease out some of the meta takeaways and also how they really go against conventional wisdom and one of the points that i wanted to call out, as you go through history, it wasn't always people that have the science and the folks that were religious or middle ages, whatever it was did poorly. it kind of goes against the grin of today's narrative of a

postworld and talk about that? >> there's a narrative that's the interpretation of science and that i can't, which i said, most of us have in our heads, there's a past in which people are clueless and no idea what is hell is causing disease and they start like flies and we grand jury wally start to refigure it out. more brilliance men and women with microscopes bring us closer to understanding all of the different threats that we face, ultimately we achieve victory and we leave holdouts like cancer and i think that's the way a lot of us think about history at least when we ask ourselves the question, why did life expectancy over a period of hundred years. what i wanted to try and sure in

the book, technology did advance by leaps and bounds in 19th and 20th centuries and in our own. we were created networks on unprecedented scales. we would take two steps forward scientifically and one and a half steps back in terms of creating new vulnerabilities for ourselves as species and this happened in 19th century, huge problem in the 19th century because of scientific and technological advances that made industrial cities possible and allowed for higher levels of often cell phone everyone amp inform imp cell phone travel. we travel in unprecedented scale and that means that we are a lot more vulnerable to pathogens than we used to be and slightly

changes the story away from scientific advance to rather more complex story in which social networks which one level are great because n they propel the exchange of ideas are rather dangerous because they allow transmission. >> i'm remembering the lead of your book and the idea that -- davos,network of people thatl world ski locations afterwards and then we get the pandemic. let me go to this other point. you flipped that, network and network optimization.

we are talking about supply chain and geopolitical conflict with china. efficiency versus resiliency. a lot of problems actually and i covered in my first book, stem from the fact that the networks are m optimized in a certain wa. what should we take from your book right now about efficiency versus resiliency. >> i thinkte it's fair to say rana, people witnesses disaster, invasions of iraq and afghanistan.

so we have seen disasters in different domains in the spaces over 20 years and strikes me that one of the common features of what we've witnessed is that although we think of ourselves as being well prepared for disaster, in practice when it strikes we seem to do quite badly and maybe worse than we are used to the pandemic it. if you think back in 2000 and certainly when i was writing about the money, the makes are highly regulated to date. , you are really an elaborate process in place. there were a thousand rules. they just kept getting longer every time they were revised. and yet when the financial crisis truck, and the regulations seemed to work. i can be exactly the same experience with covid-19 come in 2019, the u.s. was rated very

high and pandemic preparedness and on paper the u.s. in the uk had terrific pandemic preparedness. and i read some of them page after page after page of recommendations is just that when it happened, none of it worked. i think this is a very important theme which is we must be under the illusion of preparedness and a particular bureaucratic preparation and crisis over a process which is sufficient to lead different from the one that we ponder for. then they turn out to be futile. that is a think that i've been thinking a lot about because i sense is on a universal problem. because in taiwan and south korea, with disaster of covid-19 had the same consequences. in the response was different from ours. nobler quicker and leveraging technology and that's what i think we need to learn and the reason i wrote the book as soon

as the disaster was over. because were still at the end of the pandemic was the sense that we believe were the face of learning the wrong lessons even before it was at an end. >> that's very interesting . rana: but you're hitting is something important which is in some ways the tyranny of experts and their great but they also tended to not say that i don't know. and i think what you're advising her sounds like you are advising is this around and try to predict these things and trying to get out of the events of us like to have an entirely different way of viewing the disaster. niall: that's exactly right. use words like resiliency earlier. not only in the swan but anti- fragile. i also the central argument, we optimize and we build systems so

the financial system or public health system. that they really are optimized for efficiency and work 99 percent of the time. the problem is that the distribution and that 1 percent of the time, disaster strikes. that is the moment that suddenly the fertility is the optimize is revealed to predict that happens with the pandemic and other crisis printed but i guess the lessons from history seem this led and that we actually become somewhat more fragile over time. obviously will illustrate a . 1957, . big pandemic in the united states. not quite as deadly in the u.s. but globally, killed about proportion of the world population printed 0.04 percent. that was asian flow. i was a 57 in the experience in

the 19 express of the was different. one of the reasons that it was different is that there were in play for hospital beds than the population in the late 1960s and there are today. actually appreciated that until i was revisiting the story to write a piece of the vox publication presleep actually have this in the healthcare systems of the 1950s. all the beds were empty. and then fast-forward to to 2020. we have optimal systems. and there were other countries even more exposed that simply did not have the capacity to cope with the spike of illness and also probably calls for the excess mortality. so this is a talking point. so difficult world in which we sort of average disaster and we can think about risk the way we

think about, so very simple human height can essentially be distributed to distribute a distributed. the key and this is what i think the take away from the book is that disasters are not normally distributed it. you can if you are an exhaustive he, you will not get the future right predict and will you carefully try to build the model andd try the abilities everythig from a pandemic to birthweight to world war iii. it just won't t work the way the model says. so we gotta live with this and start seeking certainty. rule number two is being paranoid in a general way. rather meticulously deniers when you possibly might not get neither party to. >> interestingly i would tell my husband that become a very paranoid person.

a. rana: [laughter] niall: it doesn't mean they're out to get you. it is only in the original movies and an invite some script writer. but it is a great find and i have made it the main theme of the book. ultimately the reason i wanted to talk about south korea and israel did better than us is because of paranoid and for good reason. they don't know with the neighbors avoided tried next other much quicker and the drama something like a new coronavirus shows up rated. rana: is particularly fascinating paranoid yes, you've kinda met like china ready to panic and right next-door but also decentralize perspective on some of your previous books which are live, the power in the square this idea of decentralizing versus very centralized incentives and one of the truisms i think are at

least one of the storylines and geopolitics right now is going to be a goliath battle between the u.s. and china and you are saying no predict that everythingt you seen sing actually smaller might be better. niall: yes. although i wouldn't want to pin all my hopes on being in one of the small countries. you are a lot smaller than the goliath in thehe end but i think that we have a couple of mistakes last year. more than a couple but let me focus on to predict number one, we when things really started to turn in england, and mid-march we suddenly realize this thing was already spinning out of control. we decided the people's republic of china. in a drastic lockdown that they had done from january. but as it turns out there are two, college and different

spelling. and he said yes, the reason that we recommend the lockdowns of the chinese example you are sure if it would work in a non-communist setting. that was not the right to china for us to be talking, we should been copying of the republic of china. taiwan and looking at the ways in which they hadn't responded very quickly ramping up testing the digital contact tracing and then isolating the people infected. it did all that quickly. and really hardy and can hardly died like a dozen people as having died of covid-19. in their right next to china. if you think about our problem of centralization, it was illustrated by the way the testing went. i'll never know if i was a super spreader back in january and february because you could not find out. if you had covid-19.

just weren't available. and that was because the cdc and the prevention said at the outset that we would control testing and nobody is allowed to do an authorized testing. and then they set out a test that didn't work. and over centralized bureaucracy to speed things up. it meant that we miss the opportunity to do with the did many of the other countries which was to view the testing and tracing isolation to avoid the lockdown. and they have a lot in taiwan, and about the most relaxed regime of any developed country. rana: it is so interesting because there is another way in which conventional wisdom might have told you europe has the centralized national healthcare system in many countries maybe they'll do better. they are still on lockdown and going into round three. it's amazing.

thinking about the u.s. and china brings up another point in jamaica which is really was not about democracy versus hypocrisy in the u.s. got things wrong. mainland china got things wrong. and in some ways signed by the leader be a trump or exide but all the in the middle. this idea problems in the middle and in the middle of really resonated with me because some a thinking t about business and is always the mid level designers. they make some decision for a reason chemistry steps away and that's how you get to these places and can you tell us more about that. maybe give a couple of examples. niall: yes i've thought about this problem early last year and one of my most brilliant students said hey, you need to read this book and handed me a book about the challenges the space shuttle challenges disaster.ll

everybody should read it. it shows with the books failures were. i cover disasters large and small. partly because there's a gym to monterey. small disasters have a lot in common with the big ones. the findings showed that the nengineers at nasa knew there s a 1 percent chance, one in 100 chance of blowing up because of leaking fuel and the faulty brakes with the some bureaucrat and nasa turned that into 1,100,000 because it sounded better and hate you want to get the money flow cut off. to keep that space shuttle program was going to. i wonder by the person who made that change in the didn't multiple times because the engineers kept saying it's actually one in 100 and that guy in the management, throughout history and the place of failure

somewhere in the middle is always worth considering. last year, a lot of people for these reasons jump to the conclusion that we were having a disastrous enemy in the unites his biggest donald trump is maybe seal. dave sought present therefore we would have not had such a bad experience. and i wonder about that. the book shows significant mistakes the truck made and that were a dozen at least. but i honestly question whether it would've been eradicated with a different president because it wasn't trump who selling the cdc about the testing come they did that all by themselves. there was a guy whose job it was to be deputy secretary of preparedness produces one job. he ultimately is the guy. i came upon this amazing lecture than he did in 2018. he z said, we really don't do

something about getting up about the pandemiced preparedness rig. and it should have not have did this but the guy whose job it was and knew that the system would not actually work. can you delete saying this in a lecture. it is not like company of this so i think we must not tell her sell the very story. if it was a different president, none of this would've happened. that's crazy when i say this but i'm not defending him. he did really bad job. so did others. i guess what, really high excess mortality, try belgium. and disasters that you perú disaster. you can't blame it because of populism. we got away from the simple fairy story that it was all

wicked populist trump or johnson's fault and realize that it was lowered down, the chain of command. we need to recognize that because if we don't, we are not going to fix the problem and blindsided by the next disaster. >> yeah, it's a really important point about nuance. i think that presidents get too much credit and blame for almost everything. >> of course. >> i mean, trump's greatest mistake really to put himself front in center in something that he had no clue. if he was smart he would have donet like obama done with the ebola pandemic. e opioidh pandemic. one way of doing that is to recognize that we have a habit.

we want to blame the person at the top or give them the credit. we want to exaggerate their importance but they are only one note in the network and not necessarily the crucial one particularly when a disaster comes along and contagions. >> yeah, thinking about network, social networks, obviously played a big role in things good and bad around the pandemic is this time different. 's death and the breath of the networks that we are dealing with. social media but i am thinking about the pipeline disaster, just this week and the internet testing the fact that we now have friends and where attacks costly in hospitals and infrastructure. financial services. business time different in some fundamental way. niall: is definitely faster.

positively i think that we as a species have been vulnerable to contagions for a remarkably long time, even independent of technology breeders really struck as of this writing the section ontr this. and it spread especially once it reached the more commercialized boxes of europe. and that was back in the 1340s. anything happens much faster. but with the spread of the asian flu in 1957, when most trouble was still bright sealable and plain but it was almost as fast. think we slightly exaggerate our climate but you did right about one thing. with the ways in which we use it is not just the e-mails but managing infrastructural has created a whole new vulnerability that really worked there before. mewhen people say to meet what s the next disaster a safe i can't

tell you. [laughter] but the second one is that we kind of wanted to be climate change because we don't know what else to talk about now. iis that is going to do this ad that so that kind of preferred disaster steadily massive cyber attack in the united states any major country is conceivable much faster than climate change. and i think the things of the country would be like and we have a massive antigen is using the pipeline story, as just a bunch of east europeans taking on a huge positive the infrastructure of the united states. so that's very important novelty about our times. and it illustrates what you made earlier, that we have ever larger and more optional lies network structures that weren't at the time but they're very fragile and it probably is our

biggest problems. and in the event of de-escalation between the u.s. and china. this will be a future of cold war unlike cold war one. rana: i have no doubt printed on that note i'm speaking to someone this last week government about food shortages and destroy bizarre situation post pandemic work suddenly every restaurant is shed it there are lines at grocery stores because there are two separate supply change the remaining in terms of the two got 90 percent of the country's food supply going to five different counties and we have be very poor counties without crises. financial risk and etc. all of these risk hubs seem to be emerging. if you aredv the biden administration, maybe they'll get your book. what are they doing right now. what can one do critically given that as you say, you don't know where the next problem is going to be. niall: i'm certainly unlikely to

be asked by the biden administration so let's just get that out of the way . dependence him strange parallel universe i work asked that question i would say will first of all, should you get the key network, people like nicholas who think about contagions . can you just get them involved. for small if you don't have enough pressure you don't, you need tork have that and it needs to be permanent. bunch of historians but the key thing that i would say would be if what happened in the cdc were to happen in our defense of infrastructure, we were to so screwed. in other words, you're looking at every part of the administered state of the federal government. apologies of bureaucratic dysfunction.

you'll find them because i i think one of the striking things in history is that in every domain, you find the same phenomenon that isen to say the illusion of a bureaucratic mindset that says if there is some risk, but we can attach someme probability, let's define it 836 page preparedness plan for it. and those plans exist and may be in to greet them all. i suspect that you need to do network science and rethink the problems that you have and then you need to actually look at the bureaucracy and asked, is any of this actually going to work. i suspect whether you look or less think back to katrina. all of the disasters we have seen in the last 20 years, the common factor sees me that the people knew they were nontrivial, not like they've

never been in this, they were black swans in the end it out that when the crisis came, the preparations preparedness work very very very defective. i feel that to be true everywhere. think about the earthquake and california scenario. we know that's the biggest hit in california will happen it california at some point . can you imagine california and 2021, dealing with the big one. this is a place they can even keep his publicc schools open. it is a place that there is going to be wildfire disaster annually.ld i live in california. kind of scared to think about how that will go given what we now know about states confidence in the face of a pandemic. rana: california throws a heck of a lot of money at problems but that hasn't necessarily fixed

them. that makes me wonder of incentives both public sector and private sector and we need to rethink incentive structures. we have touched on some of the problems in thech private sector that you have a system maximized for share value, efficiently that creates, do we need a whole different structure there? >> i was one piece of advice to the biden administration, send a bunch of people in tapai, critic of the government that they brought inside and said, okay, if you are so smart, you do something about it. and i think she's one of the most interesting people in the world. thinking about how you use technology to empower citizens and thisol is a key distinction

between what the republic of china does and people republic does. it significantly reduces the power and the opposite true in taiwan. i was in taiwan at the beginning of the year before the pandemic got going and i was learning so much about how they fought through and it was wonderful to see it work. they thought the problem was election sabotage, so when i was there, they were running up to the collection of january 2020 and the people i was talking to were concerned about chinese cyber-attacks on the electoral process which is difficult because they keep their electrical process simple and vote with pencil and paper. in -- and the pandemic came along and the same nibbledness

came along and i do think there's an answer to this question and it's a little bit about making the government accountable tohe its consumers o are citizens. that's the thing that we really don't do here i think that one of the comments and explained things in the story is whether big tech companies decided against doing contact tracing. if you think back and you may be notice that there were a couple of stories, when they were discussing contact tracing it. in a way quiet. i think decided it needs to be done on an international level. and decide that they should be done in the state level by state governments. now if you want to be caring of something that is what you do. i think that they killed contact

tracing the u.s. for reasons i can't fathom. maybe they thought there was too much risk at a time when they were already the spotlight for the other respect, this idea and until we learn how to use technology to empower our citizens make government accountable, and these bureaucratic pathologies will continue. rana: that's interesting i suspect that you are right that they knew that the contact tracing linda make them see you are more powerful but actually be quite powerful and bring up issues of data ownership in all things that they work already struggling with. but the one about an eight completely agree with what you say she isha so interesting. she made the point to be that the way that taiwan works is really about a cycle trust where the government is trusting the citizens to report things very much and governments and then

when things go well, that they will trust in the government which allows more freedom to maneuver and print is sort of the opposite of what we have in the u.s. the moment when the polarization and party system and primaries and kind of extremes that are rewarded in our political system i think partied. niall: everything gets put to the side. it becomes a part of an issue. it is very very cynical to arrive at a consensus. and remember the united states was not always like this, in the 1950s when the u.s..s landed the world in vaccines technology, everybody was happy about the fact that the u.s. was doing this developing vaccine. that was one reason that the asian flu pandemic was so well-managed. fascinating figure got the vaccine and then they got it distributed faster than what we've been able to do with the

covid-19 vaccine. something changed, the u.s. was a society based on some issues capable of putting those divisions society. i wrote a little bit about the ways in which the internet seems a tendency into hostile artists and groups. it but think that 2020 revealed that this is a major problem because if you stop wearing facemasks and to the vaccines, and hearing public policy becomes possible to directly mention the safety. so trusted by the public. that's a problem for any society. it. coming as he just before we gois to audience questions. a couple more things. lots of talk in office and the monks the jobless class about we

see many changes those covid-19f will be permanent, work from home shifting the real estate markets, the nature of capitalism. are we seeing a shift from capitol labor are needed anything, any debts in your research. niall: this leads us to expect not much change it seems that imaginable. because there's a reversion that happens after much worse place than this. this one of the things that i got from looking at the british experience with the current problems in the 30s and 40s and to the 60 and 101660s. you have a tremendous piece of mortality then london would turn on predict the behavior would revert. handshakes and hugs have already started to come back here in california. faster than you would expect it said that is interesting so i think the mass will soon be in the drawers of our desks and

will only come out if we get some for the way in the winter. the working from home and i agree that this was already detectable prior to the pandemic. and it transitioned proportional partied the cities and the ways that the people live. i can see that being one of the changes there's a bunch of other stuff which maybe is less obvious. his quickly that we are going to have trouble going back to globalization as it was we've only vaccinated the developed countries of the west. and if you think about latin american south asia that will make it difficult to get rid of this rather rapidly mutating virus so i think that we should assume that it will be quite

different quite slow to come back. then i think that we have to take step back. what was really necessary to do such drastic lockdowns and then such offsetting measures like it was a financial crisis. we are in the midst of it strange economic history with extraordinary growth being a driven by vaccinations and on top of that, the kerosene is being reported in the with wild abandon. ... ...

in the second half of the 1960s. >> well that's a really good point. i think about the idea that we are at some point goingre to hae to choose between it and i personally don't believe throwing money at the problem indefinitely and it's going to be some tough choices. let me ask you a final question. how would things change for you personally in the last year? >> it'ss been wonderful. i hated all that travel and don't intend to return to it. as monday year with my wife and twoo small younger children in montana reading and writing this book. i am in fact a repressed misanthrope.

so it's all been rather wonderful and i'm ashamed to admit it. i have been one of the lucky ones. i wasn't just able to carry on doing my book he was much improved by getting off the circuit and sitting in one place without jet lag reading and thinking and writing. it's been unmitigated joy to be able to do that barely traveling more than five miles an returning to california. >> it's been wonderful to have more time to read books like yours. ted i'm going to have it back to you. i think you have a feww questions. >> yes i do thank you rana. the first question a gentleman ask can you tell me that the cover of your book and how it

was chosen? >> well that was my choice in case you were wondering. i saw thisrs photograph in 2017n oregon. there was a wildfire raging behind me. it was a the metaphor that i had been looking for four trump's america and i'm amazed that more people haven't made use of this wonderful image. we were arguing back and forth about the jacket and they wanted the history jacket. the british history books should look like a history book but this is america and history is innately warring. i wanted to signal that is not a book about covid but disaster in all its form and their strange relationship to it which we were

completely ignoring it just like they were ignoring the wildfire. let me tell you the story about that. >> i next question correct me if i'm mistaken but you lean conservative. am i right back my question is how do you feel about the conservative movement in the united states right now and compare that to the conservative movement globally. >> -ever been a member of the heconservative party and i'm noa registered republican. i am conservative when it comes to academics but academia is so far to the left that you don't have to try very hard being conservative. i'm a classical liberal steeped in the principles of the scottish enlightenment more than conservativism. when i'm confronted in all its

lunacy then i turned conservative. conservatism in the united states is a contradiction in terms. i've been a revolutionary republic which is committed to fundamental principles derived from the enlightenment. it's a revolutionary project and the outset. american conservativesme are the strange community and they have to do s ultimately what william. oakley said which is to stand in front of the progressive united states and say stop or at least slow down and try not to get run over. that's really the story of american conservatism. it's always had its side and if you read buckleys biography he relies william f. oakley was trying to get the crazy right

out of conservatism and have a respectable conservatism to identify with opposition as a civil right in that uneasy relationship we twain respectable conservatism as the thing we not respectable conservatism came back into the open when donald trump ran for the republican and not nominationon. they rushed to his standard and trampled the respectable conservative values. ambivalence doesn't capture it. i could understand why and 2016 they did like britain voted for brexit but it was hard for me to see anything but a bad ending for the trump story. my own anklet nation i said to

my wife at the end of 2016 after it was a transition that this will and in litigation was my prediction and that litigation is not yet over but that's pretty much how it ended so i found the last four years painful in many ways and i continue to find them painful until conservatism has managed to regain some control over the republican party and that will take some time for obvious reasons. globally i think you see the same problem. there have been a number t of countries where the populace right seem to be taking over from what has been a relatively centrist conservative tradition so someone who came of age in britain in the 1980s and was attracted to that because so

much was wrong with socialism in britain i am not in a comfortable place in american politics. you just end up getting hated by the left and the trump is to right. it can be harrowing as an experience. c another question on preparedness for disasters. the gentleman says allocating resources and time toward something that hasn't happened is competing for resource against thingspe that are happening. would you comment on how the case for that is made and how it's handicapped against the electoral timetable of when is a good andnd not good. >> that's a great question. when i was writing the first volume of the biography i came

across the problem of conjecture which essentially says in the democratic alosi the politician statesman has a choice between doing the thing that requires the least effort what we would now call kicking the can down the road in the hopes that nothing goes wrong and then do something that requires them to avert some disaster and if kissinger says there are no rewards for reverting to that because no one is grateful for a disaster that didn't happen. it leads you to kick the can down the road rather than make sacrifices that you'll be blamed for and you won't get the credit. i think that's the nature of modern politics and demographic politics generally. my sense is that's we have abundant resources. the government takes a pretty good chunk out of our paychecks so we do waste a colossal amount

of the money and that's why i think the most important thing we can do is to get our large government in different agencies to change their mode of operation away from that year democratic process that we were talking about earlier to something more taiwan like something that his number and more responsive and uses technology better. you can't prepare for every single thing that every cassandra warns about because there are hundreds of cassandra's and a host of different ways. the governmentnt is responsible for each service and there's a range of different things that can go wrong in your space and we do not expect you to take out an insurance policy that is so expensive that it covers all risks. you've got to have a system in

which you calibrate your responsiveness and prioritize rapid reaction and i can't emphasize that enough. you cannot predict disaster, you really really can't. it's much better to get better in the speed of your reaction let me give you an example. he once said to me we were no smarter than the other investors and we were no better at seeing this coming but when it came to it we were faster and turned on sa dime that's the spirit. turning on a dime when you get that first signal that there's another pathogen in wuhan. that should set the alarm and from that moment on you should like it could be the black death and in january of last year to treat this like it could be the big one and that's the time for friendly at the beginning and if

it turns out not to be so bad you won't regret those early moves that you made. >> would you talk about the deployment of technology both in anticipating disaster and managing disasters in the u.s. versus globally. seems to me the privacy concerns in the u.s. put us in a limited position and other countries -- c sorry, do we have privacy in the u.s.? that comes as news to me because in fact we don't. mark zuckerberg and jeff bezos have better prices so when people say that, you have privacy because we gave it all away years ago. the good news is it doesn't get along to the government or at least the government has an good deal more difficulty than the

chinese communist party has. the problem we have and we have not confronted is our personal data doesn't belong to us anymore and getting it back would be really difficult so i think we should strive for that in one of the things i learned when i was in taiwan we can create a blockchain phone that keeps your private data and it's really private and i'm like yes why didn't we think of that 10 years ago when the threat first came on the scene so we have got to stop kidding ourselves. we don't have privacy. we have been in denial about this. we have to do something about internet regulationsye.

the platforms have way too much power. we have reached the point which they know our every move and have the power to cancel the president of the united states. this n is not okay. eseven if you are deleting the elected president of the united states it's all a bit crazy and i think we are all then denial about the nature of our technology. >> a few more questions in this one you have addressed but let's go into it a little more. the management of disasters in the handling of disasters from the statef level versus federaly windows at work and how can it work better? >> the federal system has many outfits. it's not the best system in a

major emergency. you wouldn't want each state doing its own thing. i think one of the obvious things that we didn't really get right was the completely failed to make any meaningful use of travel restrictions early on in the pandemic and in the united states we allow the virus to spread to every state. we didn't limit the spread from the places that the virus initially was spreading. that was a pretty expensive mistake to make in terms of human life. i do think though that the federal system -- some states did really things. california did some of the dumbest things i have to say. the dumbest of being the closure of the parks and beaches. it's finally being at edited by the cdc that few caught covid-19

outdoors and that was obvious from the chinese data. i remember reading the papers and china showing there were no cases of outdoor spread, like none in wuhan and all the data was showing over year ago the covid spread through spreader event like indoors like indoor restaurants in indoors and cruise ships. we knew that and they let them decide because they like to restrict doing. one of the reasons is i got my family out of montana's because in montana there were many fewer restrictions on what one could do. we didn't have the california policy nationwide which really would have been disastrous. they ended up with similar

outcomes in terms of their health but florida was far less constrained. i think ultimately i'm a fan of -- i think there are many things that are better done at the state level but also at the lake will -- local level could the trick of government is to get it right which things are appropriate for the federal government to do and which are appropriate to be done at a higher level and that's going to be important. the chai's -- chinese have an excessively centralized system and indeed it did not function that's where the pandemic again. one party couldn't deal with the outbreak we had without lying and lying. it was like chernobyl on steroids so i'm convinced the decentralization is the way to go particularly in the world of

technology such as the one we have today that there are times in emergencies when certain things need to be done at the national level and even at the international level. wewe shouldn't kid ourselves abt that. >> our final question and a medical researcher would tell you how imperfect medical research really is and typically most of that discourse is taking place in the confines of the medical community. with the coronavirus everything came out in the open. on the one hand making medical researchers look inept and on the other hand those spreading various articles and stories contributing not to a solution but noise. >> i think if there's one thing they gave me hope in the last year and a half it was the way in which scientists around the world in multiple different

fields worked collaboratively to try to figure out what the hell was happening and it was ultimately a deeply impressive thing to witness. i tried my best not to use a fire hose and epidemiologists and not any kind of doctor other than philosophy. i work closely with people with the right kind of expertise. my dear friend are brilliant oncologist who is in omnivore in terms of consuming medical science literature was my guide through the highways and byways but i think what it convinced me of there's no such thing as -- and this should be abandoned because there multiple scientists and epidemiologists were not necessarily in agreement people working on the virology side of the problem and we need to recognize as a

citizen that science is highly competitive and they are often wrong papers that appear and those that survive the scrutiny of peer review and therefore you have to pick your way very carefully to this incredible jungle of research much of a brilliant and some of it wildly wrong and a spot in the middle that's just mediocre. i think this is a very important lesson for us. i don't think the media with all due respect to rana's position to understand what was happening you did need to get to the fire hose and try your best to keep a hold of the rapidly changing picture of the nature of the disease. i thought it was humbling and it

was a reminder to those of us who worked with humanity is what makes it cool it's fiercely competitive and there are standards and when something is wrong they will have to admit it's wrong and the attempt to assert certain days in statements that were innately provisional about something we are studying on the move did a great deal of harm and ended up confusing the public. >> thank you >> well, thank you very much, niall. thank you, rana, niall ferguson's book is doom, the politics of catastrophe, thanks and go on gently.

>> i want to wish you all a very, very warm welcome from houston, texas, i'm the senior director of health engagement here and i'm excited of the program here, preventing the next pandemic, conversation with helen and dr. peter hotez, helen is a senior writer at the staten news organization. she's coming to us this morning out of