The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Week COVID-19 Changed Everything With Malcolm Gladwell | The Bill Simmons Podcast

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

HBO and The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by best-selling author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell to discuss worst-case coronavirus scenarios, why America waited too long to react and didn’t listen to experts soon enough, what people can do to keep this from becoming even worse, and how long our favorite distractions (sports, movies, etc.) might be on hold until life starts to feel safe again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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From a sports standpoint, everything has been canceled, it seems like. It seems like we're in full sports shutdown for 30 days. It seems like movies aren't coming out. TV and streaming stuff seems like it's still going. So life does not seem, everyday life does not seem normal in any way. We're doing this self-quarantine thing. And even though Gladwell's in New York

and I'm in Los Angeles, I can't imagine our experiences are that much different right now. Just kind of hang out and go in hiding basically, right? Yeah, there's no, I mean, I've never, I don't think I've seen New York this, it looks like, you know, on Thanksgiving day when you walk around the city

and it looks like that right now in New York. It's just completely real. It's like, you know, on Thanksgiving day when you walk around the city and it looks like that right now in New York. It's just completely real. It's unreal. It's like it's Thursday afternoon and it looks like it's the slowest day of the year. Had you ever written in any of all the things you've written over the years about a possibility of a pandemic or just viruses or any of this stuff? Yeah, I wrote, it actually is one of the most interesting pieces I've ever written or ever reported. It was a piece about the 1918 flu.

I wrote it in 1997, but it quickly turned into a piece about could it ever happen again? And what was, what are the kinds of circumstances that could lead to something as catastrophic as that? And, you know, 20, I wrote it in 1997, so 23 years passed. And now we're, you know, it doesn't look like this is going to be as bad bad as 1918 but we are looking at something unprecedented in our lifetime um and it's you know people epidemiologists have been um predicting saying that this kind of thing was inevitable for a very very long time and it's you know finally it's finally happened when did it get on your radar where you started because i know how you work you

go deep dive you obsess over certain things when did when did this go on your radar where you started? Cause I know how you work. You go deep dive, you obsess over certain things. When did, when did this go on your radar as like, Oh my God, what is actually happening here? Well, you know, the, so the, the, the general rule is, um, you know, you look to China, all the epidemiologists look to China, right? Because China's where these things start for a variety of reasons, but mostly having to do with the heavy domestication of pigs. Because pigs are the transitional species between ducks and humans. Ducks are the ones who carry all of the flu viruses and it's in their feces. They poop it out over in ponds, in backyards, as they fly around. But humans don't have a

receptor for avian flu. So it has to have a transitional animal. And pigs are usually the transition animal. There's lots and lots and lots and lots of pigs in China. So that China is usually the place where these things start. It goes, it goes duck to pig to human. And so they always look in China. And usually what comes out of China is a variant of something that we have already seen. And so we can construct a vaccine in time. But coronavirus comes out and it emerges and we have no, there's no kind of, based on immunity against this kind of thing, we don't have time to make a vaccine in time for flu season. So when I started hearing, I remember from my, I covered HIV and I got to know all of these epidemiologists way back in the day. So I

remember all of these rules of epidemiology. So starting in January when the coronavirus stuff started coming out, I was like, oh, this is a little bit weird because we're unprepared. Usually we're prepared and we're not prepared for this one. Yeah. And so, you know, and then the question is, does it break out of China? And then if so, what does it look like? Who gets hit by it hardest? And we're now finding out.

Yeah, it didn't seem, last week you could feel it. I think I've mentioned it in some form in probably the last five pods I've done. And it definitely, you know, like we did a rewatchables on, we taped it on Friday about the movie Contagion and the real life similarities to what was going on with here. But it never felt real, real until I would say Tuesday. Even like on Sunday, my daughter played a soccer game. My wife and my son went to the Clippers-Lakers game and it was never a question of like, oh man, stay away. I think there was a

lack of education about just how bad it probably was to be in crowds. And then you read some of the stuff, especially like the conference in Boston, where there was over 50 cases just from one person who was infected. Yeah. You know, and you learn all this stuff about, yeah, actually the worst thing you can do is be around a lot of people. It's weird that it took us to Wednesday to all collectively realize, yeah, let's not do that. That's a bad idea. Well, we didn't, you know, there were all these puzzles. So I was, I had been emailing through it this entire time with a friend of mine named Mala, who knows a lot about

this kind of stuff. And so I would always, I always email my questions to Mala. She lives in London. And I just like a couple of days ago, I said to Mala, I don't understand Iran. Where are the deaths, right? So Iran was supposed to have this rapidly spiking rate of infections. And I kept waiting, but when you saw the numbers on how many people had died, they seemed really small for a country that supposedly had an out of control epidemic. So that made me, that was my little bit of skepticism. I was like, this is as bad as it is supposed to be. Why aren't we seeing bodies piling up in Iran? Then today, there's a story in the Washington Post about satellite photos showing the Iranians are digging mass graves.

So they're totally lying about how many deaths they had. And they're now digging trenches in open fields. Yeah. they had and they're now digging trenches in like open fields yeah so to me that was like oh okay now i understand why we weren't seeing the numbers coming out of deaths coming out of iran well and then china's same thing right they reported a certain amount but who knows what the actual number is because it's not like that's it's not like we have a hundred percent confident that confidence that they're going to tell us whatever the right thing was. Yeah, I think for me, when it became truly frightening was starting to read this stuff about what was going on in Italy, where they were, basically, they ran out of equipment and hospital beds.

And now they're picking and choosing between people who are suffering, who to help. And you start seeing that stuff and you're like, oh yeah, this is, if this gets here, this is at a whole other level because we're not prepared at all. We haven't done, you know, really anything. So there was a thing I read today, which was a bunch of experts at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco, the preeminent medical school in the country. They had a symposium of all of their top virology, epidemiology people. And so this is the most up-to-date sort of expert analysis I've seen. We're two weeks behind Italy.

And they're saying, they think we're too late behind Italy. And they're saying, they think we're too late to stop it. They think 40 to 70% of Americans will be infected in the next 12 to 18 months. And they're looking at in excess of a million, they think in excess of a million American deaths. So it's like, I mean, like, to get that from, normally these guys are, at this stage, are sort of super cautious about attaching numbers

to predictions like that. That sort of shook me a little bit when I realized, you know, those guys are lining up now and saying that we should expect something in that range. Now that is absent. They're saying that absent the dramatic emergence of some kind of treatment for those who are, you know, suffering the worst. So there's always a chance that, you know, one of some treatment out there,

we have some kind of Hail Mary treatment that we can use on the people who are worst affected. But absent that, it doesn't look pretty. And they were factoring that in even with, you know, assuming everybody gets their shit together now and we make testing free and drive-through and a lot of the stuff that like South Korea is doing, they still think it could be that bad. Well, we don't know. So the problem is that we're really, really late to the party on this. So if we've been doing, if we're really two weeks behind Italy,

that means we should have been doing social distancing a month ago. Yeah. And so that was the first thing they said in this note from the UCSF doctors is it's too late for containment. So containment is where you think you can kind of, you know, shut down a city and stop it from spreading. That's over. And because we haven't done any kind of major testing, we don't know what the prevalence rate is in the population. And the little hints that these guys were looking at would suggest that it's already everywhere.

So like you can slow it. Oh, the only reason we do social distancing is not because we think we can affect the overall number of infections. We're trying to slow the rate of infection to limit the stress on the healthcare system. So it's like, you're gonna, chances are you're going to get it.

They just rather you get it two months from now as opposed to next week along with everybody else. That's the reason we social distance. And that's the point that has been banged home. If you're online or you're reading this stuff, people keep banging that point home over and over again. We're not stopping this, but what we have to do is at least elongate it so that we don't overload our hospitals the same way what's happening in Northern Italy right now. And-

Yeah, that is the grade. And they made a, and this UCSF thing, they made this really interesting point about closing schools. It was really funny to see, closing public schools, to see this problem assessed from, so these are all doctors working in hospitals and they were like don't close the schools why because so many people working in

health care uh if their kids are home from school they won't be able to come to work right they were like you know all of our nurses they're making whatever they're making. Yeah. They don't have enough money to have babysitting. So, like, if I lose my nurse because her two-year-old and her six-year-old are, no, her six-year-old and her eight-year-old are home from school, that's worse from my perspective, right? That's what they were saying. I thought that was very interesting.

I hadn't even thought about that as a counter argument to closing the schools. But they think the core of the problem is going to be in hospitals. Do you see, I mean, I'm an optimistic person. I feel like we, I'd like to think we had the best country and we have a lot of the smartest people. Do you see any world in which all the smart people can really band together and figure this out? And do you see a world in which all the smart people can really band together and figure this out? And do you see a world in which the president who doesn't seem to be that interested in listening to anybody

would actually start listening to people? Well, I mean, I think that people will, the problem is that you, the first great opportunity we had to do something was a month ago or even more than that. And we've missed the easiest solution would have been was to jump in hard and early, do tons of testing, do social distancing from the beginning, shut down focuses of infection, but that ship sailed.

So the number of options on the table now are pretty meager. So the best, you know, like I said, the best we can hope for, it does seem like the private sector individuals are doing, you know, all of this kind of don't come into work. Don't, you know, the NBA shutting down game. I mean, all these are non-governmental bodies are doing the work of the government for it. Like they're now responding rationally to this. So, you know, where people are stepping in where the government has let us down. And so maybe that's the way it goes.

Maybe this just becomes a kind of the management of this epidemic is sort of outsourced to other institutions, to people other than the administration. It seems like everybody is still in a lot of denial. And you can even see it with the way the sports coverage is being disseminated right now, where, you know, they woke up this morning. I just assumed all the games are going to be canceled. I mean, anyone who's read anything over the last 48 hours would be like, yeah, what are you guys doing? Cancel the games. You wake up this morning and they're playing college basketball games. And they think they're going to do the second round of whatever tournament.

And it's like, what are you guys doing? There's no way this tournament is going to end. There's no way we're going to have March Madness. What point are we trying to prove here? Well, so let's, can we like talk about this? This is interesting. And this takes us slightly away from the insanely depressing facts of the epidemic.

But I want to kind of like devil's advocate on this. Yeah. So I was thinking about the, let's start with the NBA. It is 100% the case that there shouldn't be anyone in this stance. So I think we're all in agreement on that, right? Yeah. That the idea of people congregating, fans congregating, many of them older, in a small space is lunacy.

So then the question is, what about the games themselves? Can you play in empty arenas? I actually don't. What if we take a timeout? Every single player is tested. We wait long enough to make sure that we don't have any kind of incubating cases. And then we play in empty arenas. These guys are all, you know, the thing about this virus is that it's super age stratified.

25 year olds in perfect health are not dying of this disease. That's not who we're worried about, right? We're worried about their grandparents. So like, I don't see why if you did a, if you, everyone on every NBA roster was tested and semi-quarantined for two weeks. And then we said, okay, we're going to finish this season. And, but these guys are going to live And then we said, okay, we're going to finish this season. But these guys are going to live under a kind of protective seal

and we're going to test them every single day. That's, I don't see why that doesn't work, right? Does it? Am I wrong? I think the counter to that would be what happened yesterday with Rudy Gobert. Where you're- Yeah, but that's because he wasn't- I know, but you're about to play a game

and all of a sudden it comes out, somebody tested positive and the panic that happens. They don't want to go near that. And then it's a question of what's the upside? What's the upside of playing in empty stadiums? What's the upside of trying to entertain people when everybody's scared, et cetera, et cetera?

I think the upside versus the downside, there was no contest. I thought the same thing though. I mean, my daughter's team had two huge games this weekend. And as recently as yesterday and this morning, we're thinking, all right, well, if it's just their team and the other team, and it's just parents on the sidelines, it's not a crowd, how dangerous is that? And then you start thinking about it more and you're like, well, wait a second. Like ultimately who cares?

Like why, you know, why not be more safe than sorry? You know, what if they're playing somebody and somebody in the team, their dad got it and all of a sudden they may have it. Now our whole team, like it's just not worth it. And I think that's been one of the weirdest things about the last two days is as all this stuff gets canceled and it's such a big part of our lives, you know, and it's like, Oh, March madness is coming. I'm used to March madness. I'm used to the masters. I'm used to the NBA playoffs and figuring out what the

seeds are going to be in the MVP race and all of these beats that you have in the calendar that have just become part of our lives. Like, like anything else, like Thanksgiving, like Christmas, um, to have that removed, I think has, has really disoriented a lot of people, including me where you go, well, why can't we do this? Why? Well, what if, and then you just kind of realize, look, it's not happening. This is at least 30 days where nothing's going to happen.

We're going back to the basics. And I thought yesterday, I wasn't going to tweet. And then I did a tweet last night that I don't regret because I stand by it. I thought yesterday was the craziest day in the history of the NBA.

It was completely unbelievable. I always thought the Artest melee was going to be the watershed. I can't believe this is happening as I'm sitting in my- Or magic testing positive. Or magic. I always thought magic. I would say magic bias the melee with a one, two, three. And I think Kobe a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, Kobe. Yeah, I think And I think Kobe, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I think. Oh, Kobe, of course. Yeah, I think those were the kind of the four, oh my God, I remember where I was when I heard the news kind of moments. And yesterday was definitely like that for me. I came home, put all the TVs on. I wanted to see what they were going to do with the games. I had the OKC Jazz game on one of the TVs. And it was, and I was kind of And I was watching the ESPN coverage, and I was kind of glancing over, and it wasn't starting.

And then all of a sudden, there was a mascot shooting half-court shots. I'm like, what's going on? And then flip the TV, and they're going out, and they're like, and then you hear the whole thing. And it just became clear something massive was happening. And then Van Pelt is coming on ESPN and Woj is giving his updates and the whole thing.

And, you know, I mean, obviously completely different situation and I don't want to compare the two in any way other than this. It was the same feeling that I remember feeling at 9-11 where you just feel like it was the first time the virus really, it really hit me that everything was changing now. And whatever way of life we had before was now different and not just different, but up in the air. And, and I had no idea where I was

going to go. And that was what 9-11 was like. After that second plane, and then when the Pentagon, and there was that five, six hours where it was like, what's happening? Are we going to war? Are we under attack? Where does this happen next? You're just completely unsettled. And I felt that way last night

watching all that stuff, where it's like, a jazz player has the corona, and then it was like, Tom Hanks has the Corona virus. And it just felt like the wheels were coming off. It was an unbelievable three hours. And I'm not going to forget it anytime soon. We're about, you know, we're about to discover in the next two weeks, three weeks, just how many people have. I mean, you know, you realize the odds are your son has it, right?

He's a kid. Kids are usually the reservoirs for all manner of viruses and infections. In this case, we're lucky in that kids seem to be asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus. But I don't know if it's going to be anywhere and seems to be no shortage of people in California who have it. And probably he may be walking around with it right now. Like, I don't know, we're about to, we're going to undergo this massive social education over the next two weeks in viral spread.

Yeah, that's the part. Pretty hardy virus too. Yeah, that's the part where you hear this stuff and nobody really knows what they're talking about. But they're saying like, well, it only kills old people. Well, once the warm weather comes, it's going to die. And it's like nobody knows anything. We've never had a virus like this. It does, it clearly does seem like the older you are,

the more dangerous, terrible it is. It would have to mutate. So they always mutate. But remember the logic of, and there are exceptions to this, but in general, the evolutionary logic of contagious diseases is that weaker strains beat vicious strains. So the vicious strain is the one that once something keeps you at home in your bed on your back, that strain of virus can't propagate. It hits, you know, there's no more social contact.

You can't skip, it can maybe skip to a spouse or a, but the virus that lets you walk around and go to work is the one that spreads. So, you know, in general, you would think that over time, these viruses tend to, they tend to weaken because the weak ones win. Now, there's a bizarre exception to this in 1918 with the worst flu virus of all time, which is that it gets in, this is actually a totally

fascinating little historical, that the flu goes crazy in the trenches of the First World War on both sides. But the weird thing about the trenches is that First World War on both sides. But the weird thing about the trenches is that if you have a weak strain of the flu, you stay put and everyone around you has the flu. So it doesn't spread anywhere. But if you had a nasty strain of the virus back then, you were taken out of the trenches, put on an ambulance with a bunch of other sick people,

moved a hundred miles back to the back lines, and taken to a hospital full of really sick people. So for the first time, we made really sick people mobile. That's why that particular strain of virus is so unbelievably lethal, because there was this, in a wartime, you reverse the rules of the evolutionary rules and all of a sudden the most vicious strains are mobile right so that's like there can be these exceptions every now and again maybe there'll be an exception in this case but you know if the

normal pattern holds you would expect this to to get weaker not stronger stronger over time. And that's the one thing we can tell ourselves. And if we talk about 40 to 70% of us being infected, it is a reasonable expectation that most of those infections are gonna be relatively mild. But the stratification right now is like crazy. I mean, over 80, we're talking at 20% mortality rates. Under 40, we're looking at 0.1 or 0.2 fatality rates, something closer to what normal flu is.

It's like really a huge difference between those two. That's a hundredfold difference between those two fatality rates. It's huge. So Tom Haverstrow wrote a piece about being at the Sloan Conference in Boston on Friday night where the Celtics played

the Utah Jazz. And at the Sloan Conference, you've been to it. It's panels and stuff all day. And then there's a Celtic game that night. A lot of people usually go, including the NBA reporters that are there. And then the next day,

they have a whole bunch of more panels and stuff and then it ends. So Rudy Gobert played in that game. 9.7 rebounds, 33 minutes. Don't know if he was infected or contagious at that point. And Haverstraw wrote about, at that point, the media was, this is what he wrote, the media was free to visit with players in the locker room, visit they did. And then he writes, at least one Sloan attendee talked directly to Gobert up close on Friday and possibly more after that game.

Gobert and his Utah teammates flew to Detroit and the writer returned to his hotel ahead of the next day's slate of Sloan events. On Saturday, the conference went on as planned. Several attendees been around the Jazz Night for mingling with hundreds of people, et cetera, et cetera. You think about that, like we were supposed to send three people to Sloan last week

and we decided not to. We had three people to Sloan last week and we decided not to, we, we, uh, we had people going to Sloan and a South by, and we just said, it's not worth it and didn't send them. But you see something like that,

all those people who were, you know, who went to Sloan or went to that Celtic game or freaking out. And I, I think going back to the original thing about whether they, you know, whether they should have played an empty arenas, all that stuff, to me, it goes back to that. Is it worth it? Is it worth it to be in a situation like that where you're like, oh my God, did I cross paths with that person? And I don't know. I'm okay with the shutdown. Yeah. What do you think the odds are that after 30 days, we see a resumption of some kind of NBA.

So I think there's a lot of denial going on right now. And I just don't think people have fully wrapped their head around this. And I don't think the leagues have either and the TV networks and all these people. So I think they're saying all the right things, saying that they postponed until further. We're going to reevaluate. It's going to be at least two weeks, at least three weeks, at least four weeks. Games could go on down the league, let's take the NBA. They're like, all right, cool. It's been four weeks. All of our players are clean. We're ready to start playing basketball again.

But meanwhile, Corona has spread in all of these different clusters in different parts of America and nobody's allowed to fly in and out. And it's basically a massive self-quarantine. I can't imagine they would come back. So I think this is going to be way longer than two to three to four weeks, whatever. I think... This is going to be the lost season? I think it's possible. I do.

And it's so crazy because even Priscilla and I on Sunday night, we lead the podcast talking about that Lakers Clippers game. And, you know, now we have a two person MVP race, LeBron and Giannis on that. So that was only four days ago, you know, and now it seems, now it seems pretty conceivable that if they come back, maybe just the playoffs start right away. If for some reason they decide six, seven, eight, nine, 10 weeks from now, whatever, that they're going to come back i what can't be lost is poor decisions are always made when lots of money is involved and you saw the ncaa until the bitter end not not wanting to cancel march madness because you talk about almost a billion dollars that they were ready to uh you know that

they would have had to give up. Same thing for South by. South by probably two days after everybody knew they probably should have thought about canceling it because so many people were backing out. They waited and then they finally did it. So I wonder if there's a roadmap when people feel like, hey, this is calmed down. Hey, we have this under control with the virus.

Oh, it's been contained. We figured out a whole process. It's time to start playing basketball again. What if it's not contained? What if we're not all the way there? Is that worth it? So my- Can I ask a non-medical question?

Just because part of me is anxious to move as far as possible from the incredibly depressing facts of this yeah do we know who so who do we know who takes the financial hit so how is the contract written these tv contracts for example yeah who so there are these force majeure majeure clauses in contracts which say any kind of act of God allows the contract to be voided, right? And the big, I know just from friends who are lawyers that not all contracts have force majeure clauses and not all contracts have, some of the force majeure clauses are written in such a way that would allow you to include something like a flu pandemic and others are not.

And, you know, the question, so it's not, is it like if I am the NBA and I have a ongoing TV contract with, you know, ESPN and whatever, what is the status of that money? Is that money, are the networks obliged to keep paying that even if the games are canceled? How is the contract written there? I don't know for sure. And I'm sure it's going to come out over the next couple of days. My guess would be that it's dependent on, you know, are you playing 82 games? Are you delivering games on time? Are you delivering playoff games on time? So if they don't, you know, if they deliver on 75% of the contract and that's it, or 70, whatever it is that they would give the other 30% back. I don't, you know, Bill, I, it might, it's a really open question. You know what I'm reminded

of? Do you know the famous story about Larry Silverstein and 9-11? So the developer who owns the trade towers, the two towers, this guy named Larry Silverstein, has insurance on the buildings, right? And the insurance says that they'll pay him in the event of some extraordinary act, such as burning down or blowing up or being hit by a plane. They get hit by a plane. And the question that comes up is whether the attack on the towers is one attack or two attacks. If it's two attacks, he gets paid twice.

If it's one attack, he gets paid once. So in the balance is billions of dollars, yeah and it goes to court it's in court for years and years years the reason i say this is they didn't stick that on something on a multi-billion dollar insurance contract involving two of the most iconic buildings in the united states the contract was fact, you know, did not stipulate whether both buildings being destroyed in some extraordinary act was constituted, one event or two events for insurance purposes. Like these contracts are not, they're not written to, to, uh, uh, people don't, you know, when you write these contracts, you don't necessarily have the imagination to conceive of every, every, uh, you know, outlandish, um, uh,

high, uh, low probability event. Yeah. Mike, you know, there's a distinct possibility that we don't know where the money is going, right? They didn't anticipate this. It's true. They don't have a, they have, they have a clause, which is vague. And they could be in court for the next 10 years on this. Well, Larry Silverstein, famous Reddit conspiracy guy too. Because he'd gotten all this insurance and people always tried to say there's some sort of- Oh, he's not. Oh, you see, he's a subject on Reddit.

Yeah, yeah. There's some sort of crazy correlation. I guarantee you right now, there are four really, really big deal Manhattan law firms where people are in a conference room right now on the phone and will be there for the next 48 hours, moving up for the next six months, pouring over the contracts, figuring out what happens here. Well, either way, the NBAba definitely they lose all the attendance

stuff game to game and then the all the playoff revenue and all that stuff so between that and what happened in china before the season um you know i mean this isn't certainly not one of the more important than some of the other stuff we're talking about but it's going to dramatically change the business of the league next year because the salary cap completely hinges on how much money was brought into the league the year before and if if you're going to get rid of the playoffs and the last fourth of the season plus what they lost in the china the china stuff it's it's they're they're going to have to figure out what to do and probably have to come up with some sort of some loophole rule or something like that. I want to talk- It's not this thing that we're talking about is actually not trivial.

It actually goes to the central problem with these things, which is these are just examples. They're all examples of this. The contracts that we're talking about, the Larry Silverstein thing, the salary cap implications are all of a piece with the failure to adequately prepare for this virus from a public health standpoint, which is we have a great deal of difficulty imagining these rare events, right? This was, I don't know if you remember, a guy named Nassim Taleb wrote a very famous book called The Black Swan, which is basically an argument about this. The argument of The Black Swan was that we underprice rare events. He was saying, Wall Street always assumes that the likelihood of something catastrophic happening is so small as to be almost not even worth worrying about. His whole point is no.

The thing about rare events is they eventually happen. And you have to kind of, you know, these catastrophic events are, they're not, they will almost certainly happen in your lifetime if you look at sort of the, and that's the same, we're talking about exactly the same phenomenon, that we don't, we haven't kind of priced in the likelihood of these catastrophic events into our models of the world. One very serious version of that is

the inability in January to understand that, oh my God, this could get very serious. We need to act now. And another more trivial one is my very, very strong assumption that, or guess, speculation, that the contracts on this are vague. Same problem. They wouldn't be specific on this. No one would have conceived of this. Well, and then the other piece is that the ESPN and TNT specifically, they, you know,

they lose a ton of ad revenue from all the games that they're not showing. So there's that too. And there again, I'm sure you have, so I'm going to guess that ESPN had pre-sold advertising through the playoffs. Yeah. And there again, it's going to come down to

what does that clause in the contract say? Right. Right? So here's, one of the weirdest things to me is on Monday, I heard from a couple of different people that on Wednesday they were going to announce that they were going to play games without fans. And I'm not sure what happened over those next 48 hours,

why they had to slow play it like that. But that was why on Tuesday night, on a podcast that I taped with House at one in the afternoon, we led the podcast with what are NBA games going to be like with no fans in the arenas because I was confident that that was what they were going to announce on Wednesday. I think they were waiting for the board of governors meeting to officially decide whether they're doing this or we're postponing. It's strange to me that they didn't just kind of proactively move on Monday. And I'm not really sure what the reasons were for that. You're talking about a lot, you know,

you're talking about 30 rich guys and a lot of money at stake and TV networks and, um, you know, all the things that are going into place. But all of this, all of this was in full motion on Monday from, you know, let's just take the NBA side.

We could talk about any sport, but we'll just use the NBA for the model here. They're talking about on the NBA side, what about no fans in the arenas? What does that look like? Should we do that? From the ESPN TNT side, they're talking about how are we going to broadcast these games? What happens if they shut down travel in different cities? How do we get announcers from city to city? And that would be, I guess, why they slow played it because there were so many moving pieces. I think they wanted to take the two days to figure it out, but I think they knew they were doing this

on Monday. I'm pretty confident. Oh, really? Yeah, I do. I think they knew they were doing this on Monday. I'm pretty confident. And yeah, I do. I think they knew they were at least going to no fans. And then when the Gobert thing happened, which is just one of the all-time craziest things that's ever happened in the history of the league, the doctor running out before the game to stop it, that was the worst case scenario, right? That's why you talk for two, three days in a row about what do we do? Should we not have fans at the arenas? Now going forward, I'm not even ready to,

I can't wrap my head around all the basketball implications, but the reason it was the craziest day of all time on top of the Gobert thing and all these other things and Sacramento canceling the game at the last second, basically because the referee had been in the Utah Jazz game earlier. I think that was really the only reason. We've just never seen a season stop like this in basketball. We saw it in baseball. And that was the 94 when the season just ended after 100 plus games.

We never had a playoffs. We never had, you know, we just never had anything. And now it's like this lost season that you just look back at and go, what the hell? I think with the NBA, you know, on top of all the other things, this is so bonkers. This was such a good season. And there were so many good subplots. And you had this LA versus LA thing. And you had the MVP thing.

And the East was wide open and et cetera, et cetera. And we're all so caught up in that. And then it just ends. And now it's, whether it comes back or not, I think best case scenario, you could say they shut down for six, seven weeks and maybe figure out a way to keep going. But, you know, if you're right and we're headed toward, you know, this just getting so much worse because our country is so unprepared for it, Um, it's just hard to imagine people like, Hey, come to, come to an NBA arena tonight. I just don't see it. Do you see that?

Like, do you see, do you see the NBA just starting up as people are dying in various cities? I actually do. Uh, I, for some, I, I, I would say this, I, I did in my two books ago in David and Glythe, I did a chapter on the blitz, the London, the bombing of London in 19, uh, by the, by the Nazis at the beginning of the second world war. And it's an incredibly interesting story for a number of reasons. The principle one is that the English government assumed that the effect of, they had completely inadequate air defenses. So they knew they were going to get bombed. They knew exactly what was going to happen. And they assumed what would happen would be panic and that the population of London would empty out. And they made all of these contingencies

to deal with the fact that everyone would be running for their lives. And nothing happened. So the bombers came in, did enormous damage, all kinds of people died, and there was no panic. And it's super interesting, and it's super interesting on a number of levels, but what it's really about is how quickly we readjust our sense of what normal is. Yeah. That we, you know, human beings will get back to baseline really quickly. And with viral epidemics, what happens particularly, as well as a biological component, which is once enough people get infected, you get herd immunity, right?

So if we get to seven, I think in this thing I was reading this morning from UCSF, they were saying, if you got to 70% of Americans having been at one point infected, then you have herd immunity and that's the end of this particular strain of coronavirus. And so there is a natural endpoint. Now, you're going to lose hundreds of thousands of lives along the way. It's going to be really, really brutal. But there's a point where it goes away. And people, the history of humans is that we adjust insanely quickly

to these kind of cataclysms you know similarly i had this fascinating conversation for one of my podcasts last week with a guy who was in the uh in the fashion industry he was gay and he was talking about new york in the 80s in the gay community in his world where every you, you know, basically everyone, some huge percentage of everyone he knew of his friendship circle died in the space of four or five years. And he said, you know, the incredible thing looking back

was in the midst of that unbelievable tragedy was one of the greatest bursts of creativity that he can imagine. Like he said, in all these fields in fashion and art, there was this unbelievable flowering of greatness amidst this unbelievable tragedy. And it's the same kind of point, is that people will surprise you

with their reactions to these kinds of catastrophic events. And so I do, you know, would I be surprised if we found a way to cobble back together all kinds of things, not just NBA, but I think we'll figure out a way to put them back together. And I think we should. I mean, I think it's really important that I actually, I am, I think there is a very strong moral case to be made for someone like, if I was in Adam Silver's shoes, it is really important for him to try and bring his world back to normalcy as soon as is prudently possible. You have to do that. That's how human societies respond, are supposed to respond to these kinds of challenges, right? That's his job. And I, you know, I, God wish him

all the luck in the world, but I really hope that 45 days from now, we're looking at something, some form of this back on the screen. Well, it's funny, we're talking about what he should do. And, you know, I think there's two things that are particularly unique about everything that's happened here. One is just we've never in our lifetime seen the potential of a virus like this. really nothing since what you talked about in 1918, where it's just completely wiping out an incredible number of people. And then the other piece is, we've never been in a situation like this before where we have a president that just is looking,

almost seems like he's looking at this like, well, how is this gonna affect my legacy over, I'm in charge of all of these people. I have to make them feel better about this and I have to come up with a plan to fix it. And he doesn't seem interested in doing it. And listen, I don't want to turn this into, I'm really careful about not getting too political on this podcast. I know people get plenty of places to listen to that from whoever. But if you're just talking about being, you know, just pure leadership, this is one of those scenarios where we kind of need a leader. You know, you need somebody. We have, you know, what's amazing with this guy who, the guy who runs the Institute of Infectious Diseases at NIH is a guy named Tony Fauci, who all of us who covered HIV back in the 90s remember Tony Fauci. He was, that's when he first took that job. And he was, he was the guy

who shepherded the United States through the last version of a catastrophic viral event, the AIDS, the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. He, so he's one of the most respected people in his field in the world. He has enormous experience in handling these social cataclysms. In any other universe, the minute we... First of all, and he was shouting from the rooftops about coronavirus from way back when. In any other universe, when you start to build a strategy to combat this, he's the guy you call. You don't put Mike Pence in charge. You go to the guy who has a proven track record and deep knowledge of this, and you say, it's your show, right? Tell us what to do. Instead, we had this crazy

situation where as recently as earlier this week, you have press conferences where Fauci has to step in after Pence and other administration officials have said stuff and essentially contradict them, correct them. I mean, it's like bananas. It's like, you know, there is, it's not like we lack for expertise in this. You've got a guy working for your government who knows, you know, what to do and handle this. And you're, you're like, you're at one point earlier, a couple of weeks ago, he was forbidden from, he was from talking to the press. Right. Right? I mean, the idea that you wouldn't let Tony Fauci be the, it's just insane. Well, it seems like, you know, if it was a normal, rational person who had the job of President of the United States, you would think the immediate move would be like, I'm

going to create a task force. I have all these unbelievably smart minds in this country. I'll get aid of them and I'm going to put them in charge of this and they can tell me what to do. And as soon as they give their recommendations, I'm going to do the recommendations and spend whatever it takes because it would really, really, really be awful if this virus spread in our country. And that unfortunately did not happen. But I mean, I mean, that's like basic problem solving 101, right? This is no different than if, if some great athlete, you know, blows out their knee and they want to get like a dream team of four knee, the four best knee surgeons to get advice on what to do.

You just go to the best and they tell you what to do. I don't understand why that didn't happen here. And it was ridiculous as it was happening. And, you know, I think unfortunately with the way the last few years have gone and how social media has turned into, you know, people defaulting to hysteria at all times. This was a case where there, you know, there was real reasons for people freaking out and it just seemed to blend in with everything else for a couple of weeks until really Sunday and Monday. Um, and you know, that's nobody's fault other than who was in charge. But man, it's just weird to me. I mean, honestly, how many highest of the high level smart people do we have in this country right now who could

have talked about this in detail and explained what to do? Like 25, 50? What's the number? Oh, I mean, more than that. I mean, you could go to any major teaching hospital in this country and assemble a group of 10 people. That's what the thing at UCSF that I was talking about today, that's essentially what they did. They just went to their staff and took their top infectious disease guy

and their top epidemiologists and their top whatever, and they just, and and you could do, you can find similar incredibly qualified people at any teaching hospital, any research hospital anywhere in the United States. So you're talking about hundreds of people who were very clear-eyed.

I mean, there's a playbook, a well-known playbook for dealing with these kinds of, there's something called the, I once went to it, there's a thing called the flu meeting. I think it's in the spring where basically all of the top experts in the world get together.

Usually it's at FDA in Maryland. Everyone gets together in a room and they review all the data on what are all the weird things that are out there? What do we know from our, they have remote testing sites throughout the world, right? They'll have, they have clinics set up across China and across parts of Africa. And they come back and they say, this is what we're seeing. And they'll give you the exact breakdown of the viruses that are sprouting up. And they discuss what can, what kind of, what is the one that we think was going to win? So what's, that's the one that we should build a vaccine for.

There's a whole mechanism in place. And when they see something that's really out of the box that they don't have a vaccine strategy for, they sound the alarm, right? My point is, you would think, in looking at the administration's response, that we're dealing with something for which we have no kind of institutional mechanism for dealing with. No, no, no. We've set up these institutions

years and years ago. They function. You just have to pay attention to them and empower the people who are in charge. Maybe we should require every future presidential candidate to attend the flu meeting. They should go to at least one. So they understand, oh, you know, like it's a very big deal. Like you see some weird thing coming out of Wuhan, you know, and you should be aware that there are consequences if you ignore that kind of intelligence. Well, you look at, somebody sent me a list of all the things Taiwan did just since mid-January, where basically from January 20th on, they were moving. They had widespread testing by January 24th. They were making way more masks, 10 million masks a day by February 2nd. They had subsidies going by mid-February. They had travelers being tested left and right by mid-February and et cetera, et cetera.

And this was all in the span of four weeks. But we're talking January 20th. That's nine weeks ago. And where we are here, it feels like we're just getting going now where it's like, hey, here's the stuff that's bad for you. It's also, you know, we always talked about what would this event be like in the Twitter era? What would that event be like?

And, you know, in real time, especially now people have way more time to kill because either they're working from home or their school got let out early, et cetera, et cetera. There's just way more discourse online about this. And I actually think, I went from thinking it was causing more panic and stuff and hysteria and kind of playing all the buttons that are the worst things about social media. But I think in the last three, four days, I actually think it's been pretty

helpful and it's been really educational. And it's, if you're, if you're going to talk about what is the best version of what we can get out of Twitter, um, a lot of the news stories, um, I thought the Atlantic and the New York times and the New Yorker wrote some really good pieces. A couple of them lifted their paywalls so more people could read them. And, uh, and I just, I felt the most informed. Whereas like if this was happening 20 years ago, I don't really know what the process would have been.

I guess we just would have waited to read the newspapers and we would have watched the nightly news. What else would we have done? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I feel more educated. So the social part of this, which I know you love to study behavior and stuff like that. All of these people now self-quarantining and we're just going to have families receding into their houses,

basically, for the most part. What do the next 30 days look like? I mean, we've never seen anything like this. Any predictions? What do you think? How is this going to play out? Well, I have, I mean, this what would he any predictions what do you think how is this going to play out well i have i mean there's a there's a couple of things that i have been uh uh that are sort of top of mind one is some people can't do that and that's my that would be my first concern so you know the mo if

you think about who are the most vulnerable people, they are people who can't afford to self-quarantine. Yeah, true. Or like, how about retail workers and people that work in stores or people in restaurants? People make the minimum wage. Restaurants haven't shut down yet. Yeah, postmates, drivers. Yeah. The second thing would be, the most vulnerable would be the homeless.

Yeah. Who, and I think, you know, my guess is at the end of the day, what we're going to see is, and what is really going to be morally shocking is we're going to see nursing home populations and homeless populations, like absolutely devastated by this because they, you know, those are,

in one case, people are physically incredibly vulnerable with a lot of other physically vulnerable place, people in a place that, you know, many of those nursing homes do not have the resources to protect against something as highly infectious as this. And then in the case of the homeless, where are they going to go? They're, you know, they got nowhere to go to. That's the whole problem, right? And they are, and they themselves are physically compromised in many ways. So it's like, that's what, that would be my first thing, that we're going to see these catastrophic impacts on really vulnerable, those three

vulnerable populations. But then the secondary question is what are we going to do with ourselves? It's like, what's the ringer going to write about without any bad basketball? You've got like 19 basketball writers. I know. I think there's going to be more book reading. I think it's going to feel kind of old school. I remember you were in Canada when this happened, learning about sports while reading Sports Illustrated. Yeah, I don't even think you had TV. But in 1981, when they had the baseball strike, and there just was not a lot going on in 1981.

We barely had video games yet at that point. We had, I don't know, 10 cable channels and books and newspapers. And that was about it. And then you played outside with your friends and you went to the dump to look for baseball cards or whatever floated your boat in 1981. And baseball was such a huge part of the day-to-day, just even like reading the box scores and, you know, watching your team, et cetera, et cetera. And then when that

was gone and it just was like a chasm, it was like, oh my God, what do we do? At least we had like movies to go to. That's another thing we didn't talk about. Are people going to go to movies? Are people going to go to restaurants? Like somebody asked me to go to dinner tonight. Do I go? Should I go to dinner Rite Aid with my daughter to get a couple of things this morning and it was eerie. It was like being in a science fiction movie and everybody's afraid to touch and paying my credit card with being afraid to touch anything.

And it was just, I guess that's just what life's going to be like. Yeah, yeah. Netflix is, you know, I guess Netflix is the winner the other day for all this, right? That's what people's going to be like. Yeah. Yeah. Netflix is, you know, I guess Netflix is the winner the other day for all this, right? That's what we're going to, people are going to be doing is sitting on the streaming service.

Well, let's ask Kyle, is your mic on? Kyle, what are you going to do? Because you're, you're a guy who likes to partake in a cocktail from time to time. It's frequent in a couple of bars in your day.

Yeah. But now it's like, I'll do my drinking from home and maybe i'll revisit mad men or something you know i'm cool i got xbox yeah i think that's where that's probably where i'm going with the pot it's it's you probably just start going backwards maybe i'll have to re-watch a show or something got it got to do something can't there's gonna be nothing to talk about other than other than hoping this doesn't get a lot worse. I don't really know. There's a lot of shtick for you and Rosillo. You're going to have,

you're going to tell more Boston stories. That's all you got left is doing your imitations of Sully. I'll tell you this. We're not worried. The one thing I'm not worried about is whether Rosillo and I can fill 90 minutes on our podcast. We have a lot of plans. We might rank the all-time greatest generals and just do all kinds of really crazy stuff. We definitely could do more reading.

Do you have any book recommendations for the listeners? I just went out and bought on Amazon all of Errol McDonald's, or I'm saying Errol Morris's books. Oh. Because I was watching, I went back and watched Fog of War and it's so good. And I'm realizing I somehow like in my kind of understanding of who are the to my mind there are three great non-fiction storytellers of my generation um janet malcolm michael lewis and i realized the third is

daryl morris guys like those documentaries have you watched them blue line yeah i've watched all of them um they're just they're so good it's like it's and his books turn out to be incredibly interesting as well the man is just his mind is so extraordinary like i can't believe i never read any of his books i actually was reading one i started reading one of them last night and i was like i'm completely hooked they all came in the mail today so i'm very happy i'm gonna read a lot of of errol morris that's my um that's my goal over the next uh, over by self-quarantine. Yeah, this podcast is going to get super weird. And believe me, I'm not afraid of it.

I'm ready to do a 20 greatest basketball books of all time podcast. Like, hey, we're just going to get, you know, you got to do what you got to do. And to be honest, like, I'm one of those people that I have to work. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. So we'll have to come up with, I know we're going to do more rewatchables and stuff like that, but you know. It just occurred to me, are we going to have the Olympics? I felt like the Olympics, if you told me four weeks ago,

what are we not having? That would have been my number one draft pick. I just assumed that wasn't going to happen. And now it's like, there's no way. I feel like there's no way that'll happen. I would say 0% chance. I think the move would be just to move it one year to 2021, right? Just postpone it a year. But wait, I mean, because my assumption was that this is, this thing starts to burn itself out in, I don't, I have no, I'm not, you know, what I'm about to say,

I have no basis for, but I've all along assumed that come summer, this is gonna, well, this will go away the way that the flu was. It's a seasonal, this is a seasonal viral contagion. And by August, it'll be fine again. But now that I'm thinking about it, the problem is that there's

so much preparatory stuff that will be leading up to the games that will be compromised. It maybe just becomes logistically impossible to pull it off. Well, I have something for you. I have a streaming thing for you. For you to power through. You'll probably have some spare time.

Although, who knows with you? You're probably writing some book that you haven't told anybody about. I never know what's going on with you. I actually am. Yeah, all right. You're just going to go in the bunker and just write another book.

No, I'm all about audiobooks now. I don't do... I'm doing... I'm going to turn a bunch of episodes of my podcast into an, uh, uh, I'm going to double the length and turn it into an audio book. Oh, okay. That sounds fun. Really, really cool idea. Well, and I've done all the reporting already, so I'm, I can sit at home and do that. Well, I know that, I know you love the show. So I'm going to put this on your radar. The CBS All Access app.

I don't know if you are aware of that. They have all the CBS content, but CBS like weirdly owns a lot of shows from the old days, including 90210 and Melrose Place. All the Melrose Places are on the CBS All Access app. Do you really think they're watchable in 2020? Let me tell you something.

The answer is yes, because I started watching from when Heather Locklear showed up and now I just finished season two. Kimberly just pulled her wig off and had the giant alien scar underneath it. It's been great to relive. It's one of those shows you can kind of half watch as you're doing something else

or you watch as you're about to fall asleep. Do you know about my history with Melrose Place? Yeah, tell the audience. I do know about it, but tell them again. Because back in the very beginning of the internet, I don't forgot what season of Melrose Place it was. I began to write this emailed, I forgot what day. It was a Monday. Yeah, it was a Monday. It was a Monday? Yeah. So on Wednesday, I would put out an emailed synopsis,

tongue-in-cheek synopsis of that week's episode and it started getting passed around and i i think my understanding was they began to make their way to the writers of melrose place really it was like but they were like i would email it to like 20 people who would then in turn email it to you know what i mean it was this and it like there wasn't a lot of that kind of stuff online back then so there was this it was this and i when merrill's place finally ended i wrote a uh an obit for the new yorker on talking about what i thought was the greatest um uh merrill's place moment of all time which is um what i'm trying to remember it's this thing where kimberly is being treated is a remember she's like i she she has a she's being treated by scott something is that the doctor michael mancini who's

simultaneously there's a situation where kimberly burns kimberly burns who was the psycho, was in a relationship, simultaneously in a relationship with Scott Burns or whatever the doctor's name was, his patient and also his roommate. Okay. okay so it's like it was like it was an absurd and you know it was like they had departed so far from kind of real life and they they the way that doctors i was always fascinated by the way that the doctors on maril's place behaved because there was literally zero correlation between what a doctor looked like on maril's place and what a doctor did in real life. And also the other hilarious thing was, there was something that I was like, you could be a doctor on Meryl's Place and what your job was would change from week to week.

One week you would do surgery and the next week you were a psychiatrist treating someone. Or you're in the ER, yeah. You're in the ER. There was like all these bananas. And for some reason, like we were totally fine with that. Like, in retrospect, how do you, if someone pulled that today on a primetime television show, the internet would go insane. It would crucify the show, right?

Like, post-ER, the standards for sort of the way professions are represented in media went way up. Like you had to have a level of like, you know, of specificity and authenticity and you couldn't, and if you violated those, you could only do those in sort of subtle ways. Melrose Place was like, it wasn't clear that anyone who wrote for Melrose Place had the slightest clue about what a doctor did. Or people who worked in advertising or anything.

It's a very now politically incorrect show, which is also kind of mesmerizing to watch. They have a whole drunk driving subplot with Michael where they have to change the blood alcohol results. They have an eight episode arc that finds that where Alison finds out that her dad was molesting her as a kid that

pays off in the season finale. It's like, there was no way anyone would do any of this stuff now. And, and people are just jumping from relationship to relationship and, and nobody has cell phones or the internet. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. It was Peter Burns and Kimberly Shaw. Oh, yeah, yeah, that was later on, yeah. They were in, he was her doctor, her boyfriend, and her landlord simultaneously. It was like the most extraordinary act

of conflict of interest in the kind of history of television. It was just fantastic. Well, the first two seasons are really kind of them trying to capitalize on Gen X and the whole concept, which also the movie Singles did, where just everybody's living in one apartment complex

and you could be making all different kinds of money. It doesn't matter. You know, Amanda's a high powered executive. She's for some reason living above Jake who doesn't have a job. What is she still doing? Yeah. What is she still doing?

It just doesn't seem to matter. People have roommates that would never have a roommate, but yeah, there are different rules back then. So yeah, sorry. All right, we're going to wrap up. I had to end on at least one silly note because this was probably the most somber podcast we've ever recorded.

Good luck with your book. Good luck staying safe out there. And for everybody out there, good luck, Godspeed, stay safe. Don't do anything radical. And I would say read up as much as you possibly can and listen to the experts

the experts are out there and they're telling us what to do so Gladwell pleasure as always, thank you thanks Bill alright thanks to ZipRecruiter thanks to our engineer producer Kyle Creighton

thanks to Norton Secure VPN. Norton 360 with LifeLock is an all-in-one membership for your cyber safety. If there's an identity theft problem, they have specialists who will work to fix it. No one can prevent all cyber crime and identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But Norton 360 with LifeLock is a powerful ally for your cyber safety. Sign up today. Save 25% or more off your first year. Go to norton.com slash Simmons for 25% off.

We'll be back on Sunday night with Rosillo. We are going to do our best to try to, I don't know, put stuff in perspective, but also lighten the mood and have dumb arguments about stuff because I think distractions are good right now. Stay safe out there. Good luck and hopefully get through the weekend. See you on Sunday. I feel it's within On the wayside

I'm a person never lost And I don't have to ever