that i don't know. because even now there are still arguments about how do we code a covid death, like even within the scandinavian countries, norway disagrees with sweden as to what constitutes a covid. so so that is beyond my my pay grade. so what are you trying to do in this book? i am trying to show that the degree of certainty that the public health establishment had at the time about the effects of its mitigation measures was unjust. i find that i think people thought, in fact, i don't have to think it. i know that anthony, fauci said. you will see a distinct, a clear difference between the results of states that follow the guidelines and the restrictions and those that do not. but now we have the data and if you plot the 25 most stringent states versus 25 least stringent, the lines are identical. and this just goes on and on. i can look at california blue

state, nevada purple state, arizona, red, and they all track each other. and the problem was that the whole situation was lines like if your state has numbers that are falling, that means you're doing good things. but if the numbers go up, well then you're being bad. and the problem with that is that that requires me to believe that, for example, california, nevada, arizona were all at the same time and then not complying at the same and then complying again and then not complying. get it at the same time. that's not a that's not a useful explanation for the data that we're seeing. and so in case after case, like if i said to you, here are four and i can do this because i have the charts in the book. here are four counties in tennessee and one of them restricted, you know, restaurant occupant see to 25% and closed the bars. here are their charts, which is that which one is that? you cannot figure it out or this

place had a really, really severe mask mandate like in in bavaria and berlin. they even mandated n95s the super serious masks. if i plot bavaria in berlin against the rest of germany, you can't tell me which which. so my point is not i have all the answers. my point instead is let's have some humility and say maybe we just don't understand what's going on and we got a little glimpse of that a little glimpse in 2021 when andy was on msnbc, he was a white house covid adviser, and they asked him adjusting for age florida and seem about the same. and that doesn't seem possible. what do you think the explanation and i thought, oh my gosh, they actually asked him that question which you would think everyone would be asking. and his answer was underwhelming. it was, well, there are a lot of things about this virus that just continue to surprise us. sorry, that's not good enough. i mean, if you're decimating people's businesses and life savings and their dreams and postponing their surgeries and

and, you know, and you have more mental health problems and alcoholism and that's your answer. that's not good enough. so was spread of covid inevitable? and would any mitigation efforts work, in your opinion probably the best thing that could have been done and as the some people tried to do was to look at the people who were most likely to be vulnerable and have special provision for them, which in this case was easy to determine because of the thousandfold mortality difference between young and old. now we don't always have that luxury, but this time we did. and so i remember asking dr. bhattacharya from stanford, i said, i, i just don't understand. i said in, even i couldn't explain what was going on in florida, where i live, you know, i was going to comedy shows and 2021 they had concerts like everything was not entirely normal, pretty close to normal. and i said, does it seem like that shouldn't work, but why

does that work? and he said, it because in those places that are making the most provision for older people, that's where they're getting good results, where they're just focusing because we can't do everything you take the limited resources you have and you focus on the who are most likely to be in danger. and dr. jay bhattacharya wrote the foreword to this book, tell us who he is, dr. bhattacharya, is a holds a ph.d. but also an m.d. and he teaches at stanford, where he's been for quite a while. and he is he's a professor of medicine, but also a background in economics. so he can talk to you about health policy, but he can also talk to you about the medical side, which is, you know, balancing. not everybody can do very well. and until this all came along, he was a very mild mannered academic, very well respected and he wrote a great many academic papers. and he had absolutely if you've ever talked to him, had zero interest in being in the public eye.

that is the last thing on earth he wanted to do, but he felt like he got thrust into it. when something like this happens and of his work had to do with age and health policy and then covid comes along, how could he not write that? and he found that his colleagues were deserting him, were criticizing, i mean, criticism. criticism is one thing. but there were posters around campus smearing him, calling him a liar, even though he did his live air. it's just reporting his research. so jay bhattacharya, who had been a scholar at stanford for years, felt completely alienated by the experience that he had. he went from being a celebrated scholar to somebody on the fringes and his argument was everything i'm saying about the counterproductive nature of lockdowns and the collateral damage caused by lockdowns comes only from the standard preparedness playbook that we had had for a very long time. up, up 2010. i didn't invent a j on a chariot invented. i'm just telling you the

playbook. we always went back and in his forward he refers to the tyrannical public health response. yes. now that's provocative language. but if you don't like provocative language, this is not book for you. but it was it was also the the arbitrariness. it like i'm in florida and in alachua a county, you know, this is i realized this is a small trivial thing. but i think it's it's illustrative of what happened. we found. i don't know if it was like the towns of the board or whatever. i don't live there, but they came up with a rule that said retail establishment can have one person per thousand square feet. and when they were finally asked, well, how did you come up with that figure? the answer was, well, we just thought it would be simple math for everybody to do it. but yet the impression was being given that, no, no, no, i mean, we've been locked away in lab coats with test tubes. we've come to this conclusion. but a lot of it was just arbitrary and it should have been obvious as as time went on, got the data like we had google mobility data early so we could

see people who are moving around and people who aren't. it doesn't seem to matter like the things that where the virus is just doing what it wants, laughing at our feeble efforts. but it just doesn't seem to do anything. and so if i look japan and south korea, i have a graph in there the final quarter of 2020, japan versus korea, japan, south korea had very different. but their project trees are identical. so again, unless i'm supposed to believe that they all complied and then didn't comply. and then the other thing is that goes to the psychosis language because when around april of 2020, it was clear that japan was not undertaking as severe a response as other asian countries. and so the headlines and i wrote them all down, the headlines were in effect, japan is going to get what's coming to it, you know, and it was almost like it wasn't like, you know, japan's doing something wrong and let's pray that it all works out for them. that was not the tone of these

articles. it was they they're going to get what's going on mean. that is not that's not humane. but the fact is they had a fairly lackluster lockdown and they were they have a very high elderly too. and yet somehow their results are drastically better than ours and on par south korea's even though they had completely different policies. why doesn't this at least make us say that's curious. i wonder why that is. maybe we shouldn't have this absolute certainty that we know exactly what's happening and what to do in japan. they were actually saying, look, the experts here are stumped. we really don't understand. that's all i wanted was some some humility. instead of your you know, your brother's a bad person because he went to you know, he went to this motor cycle festival or something that had no discernible effect on anything. but meanwhile, people are dying without the presence of loved ones. people are missing surgeries. i have an acquaintance who had

cancer and they actually said for more, just hang on. what? it's not urgent. we'll come back to you. he finally gets to the hospital. this was in the uk and they say, oh, sorry. at stage four. i mean, you can't do that, you know, and there are so numbers now that are baked into the cake, cancer deaths that will occur because the screenings happen. the new york times said that about 2 million extra people are going to die from hiv, malaria and tuberculosis because of lockdown related reasons. we have maybe a million deaths related to all the unemployment because that has effects as well we're hearing that in the developing world, people like in myanmar were reporting that people were reduced to eating rats and snakes. and if you can't, there were parts of the of the world where there was no education, not not just, you know, online, none for two years. none unless you can those numbers better jump off that

graph. i better be able to tell which one of these places did this. and one didn't. and in fact, of my last little story will be my faith. one of my people in the world is who's at this conference, catherine hewitt. she went the ohio legislature and she said, i've got a graph, but i haven't the timeline, it's just a graph of covid deaths. and given that these policies were supposed to be so effective, i'd like you to tell me when where on graph did the curfew go into effect? where did the mask mandate go into effect? where was it lifted? where's thanksgiving on this graph? because thanksgiving we should see a spike after that. and of the legislators couldn't pick out anything because the graph is entirely random. so all i'm saying is we need to try to figure out why is it random? this stuff didn't do anything other than decimate extremely vulnerable populations around the world. thomas woods what what's your background in writing about the covid virus? i'm writing this in capacity as a u.s. historian, and so so in

the book, it's overwhelming an american point of view which means, by the way, i lost a translation deal. the polish we're to translate my book. and then they looked at it and they this is all u.s. forget it. so i had to give them the money back. but that's okay. but so so do this as a u.s. historian. but i do that. i'm not making medical claims in the book. i'm not saying, well, this treatment works better than that one. that's not my place to say, but it is my place to say. they said x would happen, but x didn't happen. they said, if i compare this and this, i'll see a big difference. but i don't. i'm a smart guy who can read charts. i have a ph.d. in history from columbia. so, you know, i know what i'm doing and the results weren't what were promised. why do you think it took on a moralizing tone and do you see anything in history that's comparable for now? that's a good, i think in part, and i hate to be unfair to, but i really do even though i can be a provocative writer, i hate to be uncharitable, but it does seem like there were an awful lot of who felt like, here's my

chance to be involved in something that matters. and all i have to do is stay in my house. stay in my house, and render moral judgment on everybody else. look at me. you're right. i'm sitting at my house and i'm saving, you know, 11 gajillion lives or something i think that's very, very tempting for me. you know, like death of a salesman. everybody wants to be somebody everybody wants to have a legacy, you know, everybody wants to feel like they contribute into something. and this was handed to them on a silver platter. so now if i had more leisure, i no doubt i could come up with historical examples. we were told, throughout the pandemic to follow the science. do think that we did? i think we followed people who were held up to us as the official experts. but i don't think that's helpful because i think especially a time could you imagine like i don't care your political stance is or what you thought about the covid policy if we're in in an

unprecedented why would we know i understand you know some somebody who has no business saying anything you would listen to him but we have seer mostly accomplished people in many many of people signed that great barrington declaration. what don't you think it would be a good idea for us to let them talk it out? just let them freely talk. like the thing about the ventilators early on in new york, they were saying we got to get everybody on the ventilators. it was lone doctor who made extremely amateurish youtube video saying, i think these ventilator is are actually counterproductive. now if had all said banish him because he's not part of the consensus about ventilators. a lot of bad stuff would happen because of his video. people took a second look at it and said we should be them on ventilators like this. so that's my point. you know, some people will be wrong, but that's how science proceeds. it always proceeds by making mistakes. it's clumsy and it's messy but eventually we reach a consensus on something. i think the consensus was

premature early declared. this is a chart from your diary of a psychosis. can you walk us through what we're looking at there? yes. so this is a chart of the statistic known as excess deaths. so that is to say, we look at a of where we would expect the death numbers to be based on past experience in various countries. and the the the issue is we are curious know of the various country now this is mostly europe but you can see there are several countries outside of europe. which country did best in terms of excess. and the reason that this is helpful is that this includes not just covid deaths, but there are some people who died because of the mitigation measures mean that was unavoidable, that that would happen. but there's also the problem of how do you decide if something is a covid or not? and norway and sweden right. you know, practically, you know, feet away from each other actually have different ways of

deciding if something should be classified, a covid death or not. this gets rid of all those complications because we're just looking at deaths in general. so you eliminate all the confusion. and what we see is that sweden had the low list excess death percentage. now, if we had said in march 20, if sweden doesn't do this stuff, where do you think it'll be on this on this chart? well, a lot of people said, well, dead last. obviously be the worst one. and it'll be an absolute catastrophe. and in for three years, the main epidemiologist in anders tegnell was condemned and vilified by experts all over the world and. yet so unlike anthony fauci, who is welcomed and fed it and celebrated at every turn, this guy was smeared and called a killer for three saw it years and he said, i'm going to be vindicated. it's going to take three years because you imagine having the you know, what's to go three years, not being vindicated and

having the worst things on earth said about you. but he had the guts to do that and he was vindicated. now that should make us say if something like this happens again, we have more data now and it's not as as we thought. no one who favored the alleged mitigation measures would have predicted sweden would have such a favorable. none of them would have predicted it. so better have learned something. and what can we learn from? the countries at the bottom? well, in some cases it it's hard to understand why like for example brazil and brazil was more laissez faire. peru had a brutal lockdown and they had almost the same results. bad result in both places. so it's not a policy difference. or, for example, in japan and i mentioned japan had a good result cambodia had a pretty good result. south korea had a pretty good result. so that's led some people to think that for some reason,

maybe in some parts of asia, maybe there was some preexisting immunity to it because no matter what policy you implemented, you got a pretty good result. aj calls it policy invariants. like no matter what you do you get a pretty good result. but i would be willing to bet that at least of the explanation has to do with the age difference in the countries if you're not correcting for that. but also, we haven't corrected for obesity levels because we know obesity was another marker for this and the us has a big problem with that. as we know. professor woods, did you get the. i did not. why i had covid in 2021. and i think now more or less conceded by everybody that that was better protection than i could have gotten any other way. what do you people to know when they pick up diary of a psychosis definition of of what tends to happen is that we we have a crisis in america and

then a narrative gets attached to it. so whether it's the great depression, well, there's a narrative about that capitalism run amok or whatever narrative is. but there's always another way of looking at these and but the other way is the one that i hold. and it tends to get trampled by the official version. and the official version is that we have a crisis and the wise come along and solve it for us and so next time you stupid rubes better listen to the experts, i would say hold your horses a little bit. the experts could stand a little bit more humility because this one, they got dead wrong. thomas woods is the author of a psychosis how public health disgraced itself during mania is the book. thank you for your time. pleasure'sthe book is called cey trap. the author, university of illinois, alan redstone. the subtitle why need to question ourselves more and how we can judge others less.

professor redstone, what is the certainty trap? well, thank you so much for having me. the certainty trap is the problem. it's a problem in how we that shapes how we view world and how we view other people. in particular, it drives our sense of moral righteous indignation and when it comes to political topics, in particular contempt and contempt for people who disagree. and it does that in two ways. one is certainty. certainty tells us that our knowledge is definitive rather than provisional. so in the sense of, you know, what is the relationship, gender and biology or is immigration good or bad for low skilled workers or, you know, or even something like, you know, does having a baby during high school lead to lower earnings age 40? all of these kinds of questions that relate to social problems

have that don't come with definitive answers. now, when you talk about the provisional nature of knowledge, you can into some philosophical weeds pretty quickly, which i do a little bit in the book. but that's one part of what the certainty trap does. the other thing that certainty does is it leads to be really sloppy in our thinking, in the sense that we treat our values goals, beliefs, etc. as and like they don't need to be said out loud and that actually creates all kinds of problems. is this a term that you coined? is it a term that's been around for a while? i'm always i'm not i mean, there was i think there was a book called the certainty trap at one point that had something to do with christianity or i'm not sure it was. when i was looking at titles. so i came up with it in world, i came up with it whether it existed ever had it ever been uttered by anyone, i don't know. a lot of redstone from your book, we are most prone to falling into the certainty trap.

we are confronted with something that we find from a moral, ethical standpoint. but even then we can and should avoid it. for example, when uganda passed of the world's strictest laws in the world against homosexuality, i wrote a piece called the problem with calling law homophobic. in it, i argued that, calling the law homophobic was a way of giving yourself permission to simply dismiss its supporters with a wave. the hand. can you expound on that? yeah i mean, i think it's so what i was when that law passed and it must have just a kind of contextualize this a little bit most of my work actually ends up focusing on the united states. this example came up because i thought it was so it seemed like it made it it made for a sort of an illustrative example. so when the law was passed and i was thinking like, okay, here's a law that, it's not only sort

of objectively, it's one of the strictest against some the sexuality in the world and something that i would personally disagree with. and was thinking, well, okay, there's going to be an impulse to say, well, this is homophobic, etc. and what would happen if i. what would a conversation look like if i were and having having a conversation with the president of uganda and what would that look like? and what would happen if i told him? well, that's the most homophobic thing i've ever heard. and where would that go? and so challenge i was trying to think for myself the answer to this question, which comes up a lot in the context of the certainty trap, which is what is the what is the version that actually this sort of two pieces. one is what is the version of the argument that would make sense to me that i can't that i can't sort of hang on my assumption about the person's intent or an assumption about that they just don't have the right information. right. so like how can i disagree in a

way that doesn't hang an argument on either of those things. and so i don't get to say, well, you're just homophobic. right. and so what is the thing? what is the principle for me that's being violated when i have when i disagree with that law and it might be something like i think people should be allowed to love who they want. i think to consenting adults should be allowed to do you know what they want in the privacy of their own home, whatever. right. it could be some sign of like that. but but whatever. however, i words to it, i've not hung my argument on my assumption about the other person's intent. now the corollary to that and avoiding the certainty trap is that there are no beliefs, values etc. that are exempt from criticism, questioning or examination. so that means if i say that, and you're the president of uganda, you get to say to me, if you will, if you want. okay. you think people should love who they want?

are there limits to that? like, should you polygamy be legal? i don't know if it is legal in uganda or not right now. i said, what about if i want to marry my dog? i mean, whatever. like they can i get to that person to challenge me because there's nothing that's there's nothing that gets a free pass on being challenged. but as long as i'm willing to do that, i can stand right? i was before disagreeing with him about this law, but i've done it in a way that is not making an assumption about his intent. does that make sense? you didn't start your question to him with how could you possibly think that right, right? yeah. how could you possibly think that? you know, and it be like if you asked me if you asked me, for example, is there a version of that argument, an anti-homosexuality law, that would make sense to me? could i come up with could i think through a version of that justification for that law would make sense to me? yeah, i could. does that mean that i get behind

the law and i'm just using this law as an example. no, it does in this for me. it doesn't. but but it but if the question is, can come up with a version that would make sense to me, someone that i think someone could justify. yes, of course i could. and that makes it that the contempt piece a lot harder to get. can i add one? so one of the things one of the reasons that i if i can just back up for a second, one of the reasons that i would focus so much on the problem of contempt is we tend to think when think about and particularly at this time with the election coming up in november, we think about democratic stability. and we think threats to democracy and people mean different by that. but i mean sort of anything that really threatens the social fabric, that threatens the stability, our democratic of our institutions, etc. and we tend to think of those as coming from the left or the right. and so you get into arguments about whether it's wokeness or it's election denial or

whatever. and people are focused on defending their side, explaining why the other side worse, there's actually a different model that i would argue fits better for how we should think about threats to democracy. so if you think about instead, instead of this left right spectrum, you think about almost three blocks, just picture three blocks stacked on top of one another and if the ones underneath fall break or whatever, the whole thing comes down. so the block at the top is the machinery democracy. that means free and fair elections that means the separation of power. it means limits on executive power. all of things that we think of that make democracy go the middle block is a commitment and unwavering commitment to political pluralism. right. so if that block sales, the rest of the top one doesn't it doesn't really matter underneath that block, underneath that commitment to political pluralism is the absence of contempt for people who disagree. uncertainty is what drives.

so i'm focused on that bottom block when i talk about the certainty trap, does that make sense? what kind of feedback did get from that article about the uganda homosexuality law? i think so. that was just on a i think that was actually a substack piece. and i remember one of the comments was something like, you know. yeah, but stakes are really high. like, you know, something, some kind of comment about how the stakes really high and they're talking about people's lives, etc. but what i would say to that, it's actually because the stakes are high that what i'm saying matters. it's not only when the stakes are low, like how we interact with people matters more, matters because the stakes are high. yeah. back your book. yeah. the certainty trap. when we're righteous, we morally virtuous and justified.

and when we feel morally virtuous, virtuous and justified, we see the person who doesn't agree as inherently morally flawed and unjustified. we find the person's positions threatening and in need of a swift, strong and unambiguous condemnation. yeah. mean this is again like so if you get this is at that bottom block this is this is and this is this lays behind when you hear people talk about concerns about free speech, concerns about lack of viewpoint, diversity, a lack of submissive discourse, political polarization, frankly, even just to some extent, trust in institutions around higher education around the media. you're talking about each of those. you can follow a thread back to the problem of certainty and the problem of how we communicate and how we fundamentally think about what we know and the assumptions that we make in the in the book i talk about three

different fallacies. one is the subtle question fallacy, which is just what it sounds like we this idea of treating the word and we think the answers are obvious and simple and we don't make our assumptions clear when we treat knowledge as definitive that to lead to i call the fallacy of equal knowledge. and so the fallacy of equal knowledge is the idea that. if you and i disagree on policing right that the thing that keeps apart is that you don't have the right information and that if you knew what i knew you would have the right opinion, you would agree with me. right. and this drives this assumption this fallacy drives an enormous amount programing and education, etc. right. so that's but it's a fallacy because the underlying assumption not i'm not saying that education doesn't matter. i'm not saying information doesn't matter. i'm making a narro i'm not saying education doesn't matter. another thing information doesn't matter. i'm making an error claim that even if we have come if we all have the samef information, we

still would all agree on abortion, emigration, black lives matter, you know whatever good down the line, whatever. the third fallacy isof the fally of known content. a lot of times in the fallacy of equal knowledge fails so like let's say peter has a wrong opinion about immigration, he doesn't know any better at than you and i talk in either one of two things happen. either you demonstrate to me you have come to know something about immigration and i can no longer blame your wrong opinion on your ignorance. or i' the om information and you don't change your mind. right? either way but now he has all information light as he saw this opinion? its custody yes some hateful, he's got some hateful intent. so those are the three fallacies that sort of work together to form a certainty trap. .. is it popular it's