The Daily Beast Podcast - Rudy Giuliani Is in ‘Deep Shit’

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Rudy Giuliani insists the FBI raid on his apartment was a total miscarriage of justice. His Trumpy allies swear the feds had no reason at all to execute a search warrant on his home.George Conway, a former top Republican lawyer, has a slightly different take. “I think he's in deep shit,” Conway tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Then, science historian Steven Johnson—the man behind the new Extra Life Project—joins the pod to discuss the many lessons we’ve learned from the pandemic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned up day down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Kenan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

Today we have such a fun and informative episode. Stephen Johnson is going to join who you may know from his amazing books and series How We Got to Now, or his fantastic books on innovation. And he's going to talk to us about his new PBS series and book Extra Life, a short history of living longer, as well as lots of interesting points about the past and future of vaccines. But first, we have lawyer and Washington Post contributor and new abnormal returning guests, George Conway. Welcome back to the new abnormal George Conway. Thank you for having me back. It's a pleasure and an honor. It's so rare that I have the opportunity to speak to you. I know. Almost never. Right. It's like we hardly even know each other. Yes. So I don't know if you know about this, but there's been this thing called The Big Lie and it's not true. Have you heard about this?

That's probably because it's a lie. And let me guess. Okay. It was spread by somebody who we could call the big liar. Yes, I think we could call him the big liar. I mean, he's a former guy, but he's a present big liar. Yes, present big liar. Though right now he mostly just gives directions to the omelet bar.

Omlet bar, yes. And I think he's like a wedding DJ, but he doesn't spin any discs. Yes, he's basically a wedding DJ. at this point. So talk to me about the big, like, I feel like this morning, Liz Cheney, a Cheney is now the voice of reason in your Republican Party.

God bless you. I don't know how that happened. It's not my Republican Party. I remember, I signed off in March of 2018. So you don't want to go hunting with this family. Right. But you will trust them on election results. Liz Cheney is saying, it's a fucking lie. It's all lie. You guys are liars. I assumed it was.

an attack on her, but it really wasn't. It was just a statement by him that the fraudulently stolen election was the big lie. And in a sense, that's true, but he didn't mean it quite that way. He meant that it was a big lie that he lost the election, but we all, that's not what I mean by the big lie. And of course, he's the big liar. So here's a question. You have a Republican party that's led by probably one of the most cowardly. politicians ever. Representative McCarthy, right, who basically has never crossed Trump ever and thinks Trump, you know. Well, he briefly did for like, you know, 20 minutes the week after the insurrection. Right. For the most part, the man is a humongous sycophant. Correct. That's how he

survives. Right. And then you have Scalise, who is also a sycophant. And then you have Cheney who's like, Well, Trump didn't win the election, and that's why he's not president. And she basically was fed up. She was appalled. Right. And she's sticking to her guns. And what's really most impressive about her now is that she didn't have to tweet what she did today. She doesn't have to say much about this anymore because she's out there and she's on the record about it.

Right. And she's just, you know, she's in DGAF mode and she's just basically saying it whenever she feels like it. And she's out there showing, like, I'm not afraid to say it and do what you will with me. So that's sort of the impressive thing about her. About the others, you know, I mean, they know better, I'm sure, a lot of them. Right. But they want this to go away. They don't want him attacking them because it weakens them.

And they're trying to hold the ship together. And anything that sort of brings that back, you know, the ugliness of earlier this year back. is something they don't really want to talk about. Right. And then they have their, they have their ridiculous way of trying to, some of them, thread the needle between the big lie,

pretending that they're not advancing the big lie, which is to say many people have questions, many people have questions. Right. We need to take steps to enhance voter security. Many people have questions. Many people have questions. Many people have questions.

That's right. I don't know. It is, I feel like we are living in the upside down world. Yeah, well, a lot of people are. What do you think happens now? Honestly, I wonder whether, I mean, the real issue is what happens to Liz Cheney. Do these guys try to knock her out?

Anything is possible with this group? Because the problem for them is, one is they don't like what she's saying because it makes they have to listen to ginned up, you know, lie-laden constituents, you know, lie-besotted constituents, trash. them for not doing something about her. Right. They probably, some of them, even if they understand what she's saying and deep down understand that she's telling the truth, it makes their life more difficult.

And that's what they care about. So, I mean, it's all a big kabuki dance. Right. It's an attempt to satisfy the urges of the former guy and the people who he's, you know, the diluted people who support him. So talk to me about this. what happened with Rudy because they did a search warrant on Wednesday. Rudy was on Tucker Carlson on Friday. Lots of excitement. Rudy's new lawyer is the one, the only close personal friend of Jeffrey

Epstein, Alan Dershowitz. Oh, it's hard to know where to begin about that. What is... Right? Well, the first thing to know about this is, of course, that everything that he says and Dershowitz says about this is bullshit. But Dershowitz, Dershowitz said, Dershowitz basically said you cannot, you know, you cannot execute a search warrant against the lawyer. Unless you think they're going to destroy evidence, wink, wink. That's completely untrue. And that's never been true, right?

That's just bullshit. I mean, there is the fact that the Justice Department doesn't like to execute search warrants on lawyers. Right. And the reason why they don't like that is because they, don't want to get into messy disputes about attorney-client privilege. Right. And they have respect for the adversarial system.

So they basically, if there's a way to get evidence without going to a lawyer, they're basically incumbent upon, it's incumbent upon them to do that. And if they ever seek to execute a search warrant on a lawyer, they have to go to remain justice and get permission from them from senior people in the criminal division on Pennsylvania Avenue. That tells you a lot here, because even though. there's a probable cause standard for any search warrant where you have to show that there was probable cause that a crime was committed and that there's a basis to believe that the

executing the search warrant will provide evidence of that crime. In this case, they had to do much, much more than that. They were seeking to get information from a lawyer, which they don't normally do, and there's basically a presumption against that within, as far as operating procedures in the Justice Department are concerned. And this guy was the former lawyer purportedly as acting as a lawyer to a former president in the United States and to a president of the United States while he was president. And that's just, I mean, they would not have authorized. The people in Maine Justice would not have authorized this search warrant unless there was a pretty good record. And I think someday we probably will see affidavit from the FBI agent that was submitted to the

magistrate judge who issued this warrant. So you think Rudy's not innocent? I think he's in deep shit. I mean, they just would not do this unless they had evidence that they were pretty sure was enough to prove a crime. From Igor and Lev. Igor, Lev, but they've talked to other people. There are reports that they've talked to a lot of other people, including in Ukraine. You know, they went, as Rudy complains, they went, they've got a lot of his electronic materials already, presumably. Right, his eye cloud. Claims they went to Apple, and they don't need to notify him to subpoena Apple for that stuff.

or whoever else. And, you know, he has this, you know, he acts like he's guilty, right? I mean, you see these reporters saying, you know, he changes his phone number every few weeks. He has multiple cell phones and gets them all confused. Well, you know, that's, that's the sign of somebody who's scared that people are learning about his activities. My sense is that hiring Alan Dershowitz is never a good luck. No. I mean, Dershowitz is a smart. guy, but he's off, you know, he's been off the rails for a long time. And, you know, when I clerked for a federal appeals judge in 1987, 88, you know, I remember listening to the judges talk about Dershowitz. Dershowitz used to take on these cases on appeal in the Second Circuit in New York. They didn't like him.

They thought he was basically just full of hot air. They liked his brother, Nathan Dershowitz, who was a criminal a solo practitioner, or actually not a solo practitioner, but he worked, he ran his own small criminal defense firm in the city. They thought, they thought pretty highly of Nathan Dershowitz. They did not like, they did not like Alan Dershowitz, who they felt was, you know, a blowhard. And he's off the rails. I mean, he's, he, in the set, in the first impeachment trial, Dershowitz made crazy arguments as to the effect that, you know, essentially the president, if the president does something, you know, it's for the benefit of the nation. And therefore, it can't be a crime. It can't be impeachable, which was just insane. I mean, that was his argument

about why Trump shouldn't have been impeached for what happened in Ukraine is while he was, basically he was the president. And that doesn't make any sense at all. And now he's arguing that lawyers are immune from the execution of a search warrant. And that's just not true either. Do you think that there are going to be more Trump issues that will drop? Because I've seen reporting that Trump world is, like, actually nervous that Rudy might flip on Trump. Well, they should be nervous because, you know, what Trump did was criminal in the Ukraine situation. I mean, because what he did was he was using his power over federal funds to extort or to bribe a foreign official into doing something that benefited not the United States, but him, Donald J. Trump, oh, God, I use his name, the former guy. personal. That can be considered bribery, that can be considered extortion, and that conspiracy, if it

happened, which I think it did, a central person in that conspiracy and conveying that extortive threat or the proposed trade or the bribe, it was Julianne. I mean, he was, he was central to that. His involvement was never fully explored in the impeachment hearings. in the House because the House made the determination that it was just better to proceed on the evidence that was easily obtainable and insufficient, I think, to warrant impeachment and removal rather than to seek information that would have required going to court and litigating for several months well into 2020. This is going to be fascinating. Do you think that we're going to see see more of these search warrants? And also Victoria Townsing also had a search warrant served, right?

she's part of this whole thing. Yeah, I mean, she's part of, I guess, I mean, she has knowledge as to some of the dealings. I mean, she represented one of the Ukrainians that they were dealing with. I don't know exactly how she fits into this puzzle. I mean, it seems like one of the major charges potentially against Giuliani would be a foreign agents registration act charge because he, quite possibly, or it seems that's what he was doing. He was lobbying. the president of the United States and other people in the U.S. government on behalf of either foreign officials or foreign people without registering to that effect. He was lobbying them for the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch. Right. So it's possible that Marie Yovanovitch brings them

all down, which would be the amazing cinematic ending that we would all love. Absolutely. I mean, that's one irony about this. You know, the irony is that, us, he's going to go through some things to borrow the famous line that Trump used about Yovanovitch. But the other irony about this, to my mind, is what happened at the Justice Department last year. It seems that this subpoena was in the works. The Southern District wanted to issue it and execute it. And the justice, senior people at the Justice Department, maybe Barr, or certainly maybe the head of the criminal division, some senior people. at the Justice Department said, no, you can't do this because it's too close to an election.

And there is, in their defense, a general rule in the DOJ manual that you don't do things that have possible electoral consequences within 60 days of an election. Someone tell James Comey. Yeah. But the problem was after the election, they didn't allow the search warrant to be issued either. And remember, also, there's this curious incident last. fall where Bill Barr tried to get rid of and he ultimately succeeded, but in getting rid of the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, and tried to install somebody in his place but didn't

get the person he wanted installed because it became such a huge controversy. So you wonder that if it really was the intervention of Barr or other political appointees at the Justice Department that kept this search warrant from being issued and executed before January 20 of this year, you wonder if that's going to end up backfiring. Because if they had issued, if that search had happened last year before January 20th, I just have no doubt that the former guy would have pardoned Rudy. Yeah, no question. Because it would have been in his interest to pardon Rudy because he knows that Rudy could do him some harm.

And in fact, remember that curious incident where Rudy talked about how he had insurance? And everybody wondered, well, does that mean it's like insurance because he's got stuff on the former guy? So the former guy's got to protect him? I don't know. And you wonder about that. But the irony here is that efforts to keep this guy from getting subpoenaed may end up putting him in jail. Can we talk for a minute about the Dominion lawsuit? There's like so much weird legal stuff here.

So Newsmax settled with Dominion. Yes, they did. One of the Dominion officials, I think, personally got an apology, right? Right. What does that mean? I think it means a couple of things. One is they realized that they were going to get killed in a lawsuit. Right. And they didn't want to spend the money defending it. And I think it also probably means from Dominion's standpoint that Newsmax wasn't a deep enough pocket to, you know, seek damages from. Right. If they had a lot of, you know, if it were a company that actually made a lot of money and had money and had assets, you wonder whether or not Dominion would have said, okay, you can apologize. That's fine that you made that offer in settlement talks, but we want cash. And we're going to litigate until you write us a check.

But that could be coming for other people. Yes, there are some other people who apparently may have money, who claim to be billionaires, who liable. minion. I mean, I've heard indirectly that that case may be coming. So that's Trump or that's the Murdox? Actually, I was, I was thinking of the, the big liar, the former guy. Right. Yeah, I think that's, that's the case probably with Fox News. Fox News will not get off with a simple apology. That's kind of cool. Nor will it's personalities who have been sued. Oh. Who are probably indemnified or indemnifiable by the company. There are significant damages here. I mean, yes.

Because from what I've heard, and I haven't read the damages allegations in the pleadings, but, you know, they cannot get business in red states anymore. Wow. Because you think about it, you're the Republican secretary of state of, you know, red state. Why? Right. Why should you, even if you think that the allegations made against Dominion are ridiculous. A ridiculous.

Why are you going to sign a contract with? dominion and take abuse for them. Right. You're not. Why do you care? From your constituents. It's just not worth it to you. The easy thing to do is to find some competitor of dominions and use them instead and not get into that. So basically, I mean, from what I understand, their, dominion is shut out of a large number of states now. And that's real money to them. And that's why basically they've decided, hey, look, we're going to, we're, part of their business plan is going to be, well, we can't sell in those states. just get damages for those states. Is that a free speech issue? Like, we all like it because this is the bad guys, but will this ultimately be a free speech issue for us? No, because we have the most free speech

protective libel laws probably in the world. Okay. This is a matter, because this is a matter, these are matters of public concern. And frankly, the defendants, some of the defendants, I think, will be, like Trump, will be public figures. For either reason, the New York Times against Sullivan standard applies. And that's extremely, as we all know, speech protective. It basically means that, you know, in ordinary libel law, if I say something terrible about somebody who's not a public figure, and it's not a matter of public concern, I just malign them, you know, in a small town, that person only has to, the plaintiff only has to, you know, meet the standards of the common law, which is he or she has to prove by a preponderance of the evidence, like 51-49, basically,

that I said something false about that person and that it was harmful to the person's reputation. And that's the basic rule in libel law. But with the New York Times against Sullivan First Amendment overlay, under the Supreme Court precedents applying that and interpreting that, if I liable a public figure, that public figure has to show by a much stronger, evidentiary standard, clear and convincing evidence. I don't know what percentage you would call that, but it's got to be better than 50-50. Right. You know, not just that I liable him, but I liable him by saying something, stating facts that I either knew to be false or entertained serious doubts as to their truth.

Yeah, but of course, if you say that the secretary of state podunk, you know, counted the votes incorrectly because he wanted Joe Biden to win, well, that that would be a libel. This was so fascinating and I'm so even more worried than I was before, which is like every day when we do this podcast. I thought I was soothing and comforting. I mean, I don't know. Is it soothing, Jesse? I mean, some of it, but not much. Hey, folks, if you haven't heard every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soul

Oladad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner, and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to newabnormal.

That's new abnormal. That's new abnormal. the daily beast.com. Stephen Johnson is the author of books like Ghostmap and one of my favorite. books ever where good ideas come from. But you may know him from his amazing PBS series, How We Got to Now. And if you know him from that, there's great news.

He has a new series called Extra Life, a short history of living longer coming on PBS this coming week, as well as a book by the same name. So, Stephen, you did this fascinating podcast called Fighting Coronavirus about the race to develop the vaccine. Can you talk about what you learned there and how it led to your new book? Well, you know, I had been actually on this topic of vaccines and the history of human health for years and years and years.

I mean, I've been working on the life expectancy project for four years. I had always thought of it as something that was going to be, in a sense, kind of pegged to the 100-year anniversary of the end of the Spanish flu, the great influenza. And so I thought, you know, this will be interesting. The book, and the show will probably come out in 2020, and that'll be 100 years from the end of the Spanish flu, and that'll make a lot of sense. I was in the middle of all this stuff without any idea that there was this terrible pandemic that was about to erupt. And I'd actually finished most of the book as COVID was becoming,

you know, in kind of February and early March. And it was, you know, of last year, is becoming clear that this was going to be a world transforming event. We decided to create this podcast where I could just kind of have these conversations with people. And then a number of those people ended up being helpful to, not so much to the book, but to the PBS series, Extra Life. There are a few folks that we interviewed for that, that were originally interviewed in fighting coronavirus. Nancy Bristow, who's an historian at University of Puget Sound, who's an expert in the 1918 outbreak. And so we have a whole episode about kind of behavior change in driving positive health outcomes, right?

It's not just about vaccines. It's not just about, you know, penicillin. It's also about getting people to wash their hands or getting people to wear masks. And, you know, there's this whole fascinating kind of prehistory of all this stuff in what happened in 1918, including, you know, anti-mask movements. I mean, we've lived through this before. I mean, I'm in, like, super neurotic, so that explains it. But, like, I thought this is going to be bad. Like, when I heard that woman, do you remember the public health expert?

I can't remember who, where she said everything is going to change. I, it's so interesting to look back at that period. So, Larry Brilliant, who's one of the people who fought smallpox eradication, which is one of the major stories that we tell. And I'm friends with Larry, and I saw him in California. in January, like on Martin Luther King weekend, in January 21st or something, 2020. And the first thing he said to me was, are you tracking this Wuhan virus? Right. And I was like, this was at the point where there was kind of like, it wasn't clear whether

there was human to human transmission, you know, in those really early days, right? And I said, yeah, I was, but I thought it was unclear whether there was sexual human, human transmission. And he was like, no, there is. There is. This is a real deal. And so that planted a seed of fear in my mind. I think that other interesting thing, there was a long period of time where I kept looking at the mortality numbers.

You know, there was this kind of early thing of like, oh, it looks like, you know, 6% of the people are getting it or dying. And it seemed like, well, that can't be right. And if you look at the numbers, it seems like it's greatly overstating it. And so I spent some time in February convincing myself, I think, that it wasn't going to be as bad as it turned out to be, because I thought that the like case fatality numbers were too high that we were seeing. And that turned out to be true. Actually, they were higher by an order of magnitude. The problem was what wasn't visible there was just how incredibly contagious it was. And particularly the asymptomatic spread. I interviewed Fauci for the show, and kind of at the end of the conversation, it's actually not in the show.

It's in, you know, an exchange we had. I said, you know, this is the thing, you know, the asymptomatic spread, this is the thing that really makes this particular virus so dangerous. And he's like, absolutely. Normally you get a virus that, you know, can kill you. It makes most people really sick. Right. But this combination of like most people are totally unaffected by it but can transmit it. And then a small portion of people just die.

Right. That was the thing that just wasn't visible until, you know, March, I think, for at least for me. Because I remember when it was happening, having that same thought, like thinking these death. numbers are like, they can't be right. And then, and then, like, realizing in horror that it meant that there were actually many, many, many more people who had this. You're in New York, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. So I'm in Brooklyn, right? And we live in an apartment building here in Brooklyn. So much of this whole thing, from start to finish, continuing to this day, except it's now about vaccines, so much of this whole thing has been about risk assessment. And, you know, your ability to

build these kind of on-the-fly calculations of how much risk am I in in this? particular situation. And for a while there in March, the single most complicated and important question for the health of my family was, what is the risk of taking a 15-story elevator ride? You know, like that was that we could, we felt like we could keep ourselves relatively safe because we were just kind of locked down at a certain point. We stopped doing anything other than walk the dog, you know, but we couldn't escape the elevator. And what it does is it makes you realize how much of risk is, in a sense, pre-computed for you in ordinary conditions, right? Someone has done the calculations that says you need to wear the seatbelt.

And it's better to do that. And it's better to not do this. And don't take this when you're pregnant and do that. You know, all those calculations have been done. But, and we live with the benefit. I mean, this is the big theme of extra life. It's like we're living with the benefits of all these incredible advances that we forget about because we don't die.

We don't get sick, right? But suddenly when you have a crisis like COVID-19, where all those risk calculations have to be run for the first time because no one's confronted this particular virus in this particular situation, you realize how thorny those decisions are. Yeah, I mean, I definitely had a lot of like, is this worth dying to go to the this? I mean, pretty freaky. So, Stephen, you're an expert on innovation. I found out this weekend my aunt refuses to get the vaccine and that like so many of these people, they think it's. was developed too fast. Can you talk a little bit about innovation and why this is silly?

To persuade your aunt. Well, I doubt she's going to listen. You know, podcasts, I think are a hair above her technological know-how. But for the listeners who may have someone like my aunt. Right. These vaccines are a miracle. The day we interviewed Fauci was the day they got the efficacy numbers back from the final clinical trials.

And he was dancing. He was just like, you have no, we would have taken 60%. in a heartbeat, like 95, that's insane. It's so good. And, you know, others have said this, but like, on some level, man, we're lucky that this didn't happen 15 years ago. I mean, we just would have imagined COVID where it takes four years to develop the vaccine. Like, and that's what life would have been like if this had happened in, you know, 2005 or

something like that. So it's unprecedented how quickly it was developed. And look, I mean, the crazy thing about this is that they really had the basic architecture of the MRNA vaccine, you know, in January. I mean, they really developed it more or less than a weekend. They knew what they were going to do. And so there is some kind of production ramp. And then, of course, there's just, you know, the three phases of the clinical trials that really, you know, slowed it down. But the important thing, you know, from an innovation kind of safety point of view is that the,

The key phase there of the clinical trials was really not accelerated. They accelerated everything else, but they didn't really go. They could have done a pastor. They could have released it. There's an ethical argument that they should have maybe approved. Just done it right away. Yeah. Just knowing the number of lives that were lost, it's unlikely that if you could have saved,

you know, 300,000 just American lives by releasing it in, you know, in August. Like, what are the odds that there would have been a side effect? You know, there was so severe. that it would have cost a thousand lives. Right. Who cares? Yeah. But the problem is, I think, fundamentally Americans are, there's a high propensity towards

vaccine hesitancy. I mean, not like in France or something, but it's still a problem. And so I think it was smart to send it through the regular channels. I think that's right. And, and, you know, I mean, this is one of the things that has been interesting going through this material kind of in a historian mode is anti-vax movement. are as old as vaccination itself. And in fact, they were rampant in the 19th century.

And there is something fundamental about the intervention of a vaccine of, you know, giving someone who was not sick. And particularly in the old days when I was like, here, we're going to give you just a dormant or a kind of neutered version of this very dangerous virus, even though you're not sick at all. There's something about that that is just intrinsically challenging to persuade people to do. You know, it's not like this is, you know, there are different flavors to anti-vax movements, but it's been a pretty consistent position for the last 200 years.

The reason that this vaccine was made so quickly is also because of the SARS vaccine, right? The first thing that accelerated the whole process is that they were able to sequence the genome of the novel coronavirus three weeks after it was identified. Right. And share that information all around the world. I mean, that alone was a tremendous accelerating. process. So they knew, they actually knew it's kind of genetic structure and they were able to identify the spike protein and figure out, okay, this is... Why was that? This is the advanced in, you know, kind of genetic sequencing. I kind of think of the human genome project, right, is

Clinton era kind of breakthrough, right? It's a great example of kind of lags in innovation. There's been a lot happening with genetics and things like CRISPR. But I feel like the development of the vaccines is the first, like, global payoff, just something that was just radically redefined by the ability to genetically sequence something and share that information globally as fast as we're able to do. And so that's something you often see is, like, there's a big breakthrough. Everybody gets excited about it. And then you don't really see the results in everyday life for 20 years. And suddenly you're like, oh, that's what this is.

That's a way I think of it. I mean, there's also the MRNA platform itself and that way of kind of designing a virus. which is related, obviously because of the RNA component of it, it's related to the genetics revolution. We poured a lot of money and energy into vaccines in the last year. Do you think we're going to have like a golden age of vaccines? And I'm thinking of cancer vaccines, et cetera. I actually don't know that much about actual application of MRNA to cancer. It is definitely, I mean, look, they're talking about malaria, which would be just tremendous

its lifesaver, right? I mean, it is, you know, the mosquito is the most deadly animal on the planet, organism on the planet. Look, we are in the middle of a fascinating revolution with cancer, I think probably the most promising in the history of the war in cancer in the form of immunotherapy, which is, you know, and all these things, in a sense, they have a shared property in that they're about supercharging your immune system, right? Right. Which is, I think, has this kind of lovely symmetry to it because it's really like the first, the first intervention that really made a difference in terms of medical health was the original, originally variolation and then vaccination in the 1700s and 1800s, which is about, you know, getting your immune system

to fight off the virus. And immunotherapy is the same thing. Like instead of bombarding the cancer with radiation or chemotherapy, let's just train your immune system to go in and find those cancer cells, which it already does all the time with normal cells that start to replicate. get out of control. You know, if you can train your own body's defenses to defeat this internal foe, it's a much cleaner, you know, more efficient process. That seems to be, you know, I haven't studied this credibly closely, but it seems to be really, really promising. What's changed over the last 50 or 60 years is that, you know, as older killers like smallpox and cholera and typhoid and tuberculosis and things like that that used to kill people, particularly when they were younger,

Now the leading causes of deaf are kind of these end-of-life diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's and things like that. And so that's where we may, you know, we may start to make a lot of progress. We made a lot of huge amount of progress in the 19th century and early 20th century with childhood diseases. Right. That's a big, you know, this is one of the things that people forget. Like, if you read, just read the novels of the 19th century, childhood was an incredibly dangerous time. It was just, you know, two out of five of your kids would die. And that was the norm. That was the statistical norm.

And, you know, we really, really transformed that. You talked a lot about life expectancy rates and how they plummeted in America after increasing for so long and how some of that has to do with the childhood, but it has some other factors. Could you talk about that a little? This whole extra life project, the book and the show, is really fundamentally about that one number, right? That we really globally doubled life expectancy over the last 100 years, 120 years, depending on how you measure. One of the things I think it's fascinating about this is until around 1750, there was no real inequality in lifespan.

The average life of the average human was 35, and 40% of your kids died before they became adults, which dragged the average overall life expectancy number down because so many kids died at two or two months. And it didn't matter whether you were the richest person in Europe or, you know, hunter-gatherer. Like, that was the outcomes. And then as people started to live longer, in part because of vaccines and then because of public health and clean drinking water and things like that. It opened up this gap for the first time. And so you had progress, but you also had, in a sense, rising inequality and health. And that gap

has narrowed a lot over the last 50 years, but it's still there. You can go three stops on the subway here in Brooklyn, and average life expectancy in the neighborhood will drop by 10 years. You talked about the difference between where you live versus Brownsville, which for people is like one of the most crime-ridden, impoverished places where Mike Tyson came from. My grandfather grew up there, too. Really? Wow. Yeah, Brownsville, Brooklyn. Yeah. Yeah, there's a, I mean, there's just a huge, there's a piece in the Times Magazine that

Linda Villarosa wrote this weekend, she's talking about the neighborhood where her parents or her mother grew up in Chicago. And there are two neighborhoods in Chicago that are nine miles apart. And in one of them, average life expectancy is pushing 90. And the other, it's still trapped at 60. It's the biggest gap in the United States. You know, that's the kind of, it's the kind of the curse and the blessing. of the progress we've made and that, you know, on average, people are doing better, but there is,

but it did open up this gap. And the gap has to be, I think, our, I think the gap needs to be much more of our focus than trying to figure out how to live to 150. Yeah. How can we fix this? One of the things that has been really interesting to see, and I'm not an expert in this, but there was a bunch written about this last year, is this idea of weathering, right? Which is this idea that one of the reasons. why you see such a big gap between African-Americans and whites in the U.S. is on some level, their kind of environment that they're in and their access to health care and things like that.

But there's also this argument that basically exposure to, you know, systematic inequalities in your society creates a kind of chronic stress response in the body. Right. When you're constantly in this state of stress, whether it's economic stress, whether it's stress discrimination, whether it's the stress of living in a dangerous neighborhood. We know that chronic stress is just incredibly bad for the body over time. Like small targeted stress responses are very adaptive and a good thing, but constant background stress is really terrible. And so there's been some just really good work starting to understand like how that, like this is the kind of like the biological kind of impact of that kind of stress. And I hope that to me that's so much.

much of Black Lives Matter was focused on kind of police violence and the threat to black lives from that kind of things. But if you look at the actual numbers in terms of African-American mortality in the United States, the real cost is things like weathering and kind of background chronic stress and not so much, you know, these isolated moments of police violence as tragic as those are. It does seem to me that also the inherent racism of medicine and the way doctors approach African-Americans is also a larger issue. Yeah, I think that's true, too. Steve, one of the last things you talk about in the book is how we prevent the next global

health crisis. Could you talk to us a little bit about that? Well, one thing that has come up, I think, in looking at our response to COVID, I think with COVID we have hopefully at least a significant number of people have reached the realization that pandemics are real and they're bad. One would hope. A huge step. Do we have 60% of the population understanding that now?

I hope. You would have thought it was 100. But, you know, I do think there was a sense, you know, in Europe and the United States that these kinds of things, you know, happened. There was a kind of orientalist idea here that these were the kinds of things

that, yes, they happened in China, but they didn't really escape out of China. And, you know, here in the West, we're not vulnerable to these kinds of outbreaks. And I think we've learned that that just is not the case. I mean, God, you know, Europe has just been so, I mean, obviously, we're in a much worse situation in India right now, but just think about, you know, Spain and Italy and the UK. So the question is, does that create enough of an awareness and enough of a kind of infrastructure

to create a kind of pandemic mode that a society could go into very quickly? One thing that I think probably is likely to happen is that PCR-style testing is just going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. It may be that eventually one has like a home PCR like test. I don't know, you know, it might not actually be based on PCR, but it might be based on something comparable. And it would just be programmable, right? So whatever the new emergent strain is, you would, you know, you would download the instructions for identifying it to your little home lab. And this would be like having a you know, internet-connected thermometers, something like that, like not a particularly complicated or expensive thing.

And then, you know, from the very beginning, as soon as there was a new emerging strain somewhere, everybody would download the, you know, the genetic profile of it, and they would just, you'd just be able to do a test right there in your bathroom every morning. Right. And that, you know, right there, if we'd had that, I mean, you know, that they think that basically, they think like a quarter of New York was infected.

Yeah. You know, in March. in April, right? Like, everybody's just walking around with this. And we were so far away from, you know, there were mistakes made, but the ability to just ramp up a testing infrastructure for a new pathogen is hard. And so maybe what we need is a kind of, you know, existing in place at home testing infrastructure that can be just updated with new, you know, new organisms as they arise. And that's what's going to happen with vaccines too, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, the other argument is, you know, there's some interesting work being done.

on very early stage. I've been talking to folks about this for a while now, about universal vaccines, right? Right. And isn't there a universal COVID vaccine in the works? It would be a universal coronavirus vaccine. Yes, that's what I mean. Yeah, it would be, with that whole kind of class would be protected under it. And probably in a funny way, not funny at all, but in a serious way, the more important one would be a universal influenza vaccine. Yeah. That is still, I mean, again, you know, if you look at 1918, you know, what's so different is not just the magnitude. I mean, so many more people died at 1918 and such a higher proportion of the world died. But so many young people die, right? That's one of the reasons why life expectancy plummeted so much of just so many 25-year-olds who were dying. Right. So imagine, again, you know, as tragic as COVID has been, imagine COVID where you're five-year-olds are at the most of risk, which is what normally happens. these things. No, we got very lucky in a certain way with this pandemic as much as no one wants to say

that. And influenza would be, you know, would be the kind of thing that's like generally, the flu kills the very young and the very old. And so, you know, if we can have a universal influenza vaccine, we might be able to prevent, you know, an even bigger pandemic that could come down. Are we prepared for the next pandemic? Well, look, I think we're more prepared than we were. And I think particularly the United States and Europe are more prepared and have the sense that, you know, it can hit here. Because it did. Between the vaccines and the testing infrastructure, there are a lot of things that we learn from this. There's going to be a kind of post-pandemic peace dividend kind of thing that we're going to get out of this for sure. The riskiest period is going to be

the next 10 or 20 years because we probably will be able to develop those more kind of universal vaccines, I would think, you know, a decade or two from now. But the world's going to get more populated. It's going to get more interconnected between now and then. And, you know, if something arose that had that combination of the stealthy, asymptomatic spread of COVID. But with a higher kind of body count and particularly a younger body count, that would be pretty scary. And I don't think we have enough defenses yet. But, you know, I think we have more than we did a year and a half ago. Yeah. Oh, it's so scary. So stressed out. I took my son, my middle son, to the Javitt Center on Sunday to get his second goes. And I was like, here it is, that classic father-son ritual where you go to the convention center to get your vaccination. Do you, I know, we took one of my kids, we took woke teenage son over there to Mount Sonic. Do you have any suggestions? Do you have any suggestions? and how to get the Republicans to take the vaccine? As much as it would have personally annoyed me, I so wish they had just officially branded them, the Trump vaccine. They could have had a nice big gold logo on the side of them.

And like anything, I would have totally taken it. I would have spread the meme, you know, yes, to get your Trump vaccine. And on that note. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Texas. Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams,

new podcasts from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer, checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com, slash podcasts,

or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get. your podcasts. Hello, Jesse Cannon. Hi, Molly Junkfest. So, who's your fuck that guy?

My fuck that guy today is someone who has been fuck that guy before, but he hasn't been in a long time, probably since around January 6th. Can you guess who it is? I'm getting some clarity. Why don't you let me in? Donald J. Trump. Mm, mm. What could this fellow have done?

He's such a nice fellow. Yes. He spends a lot of time. directing traffic around Mar-a-Lago, telling people where the omelette station is. But besides that, the reason why he's my fuck-that guy is because we are starting to hit a point where everyone who wants the vaccine is vaccinated. And this last holdout group is the Trump supporters. So we're in a situation where two people could do a lot of, three people, Locke and Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, okay, it's going to be a couple of people. Here are

list of people who I want to say fuck you do because I know they won't but they should Tucker Carlson, Lockland Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Joe Rogan. Oh yes. You guys have a real chance to get people to get vaccinated. I know you won't take it. And for that you are all my fuck that guy's. Thank you. That's it. That's all I have. Well done. Mine is like kind of a layup on what you're saying here, which is my fuck that guy is one doofus Kevin McCarthy. Ah, uh, the dumbest of the dumb.

You know, the big lie today got a lot worse with Trump trying to really rearrange the messaging here. And Kevin McCarthy has had the chance to be the responsible adult in the room and not ruin the integrity of every election in America to come forever. But instead, he has said, my party's dead. Our ideas are dead.

the only thing we have to run on is banking on that everybody who follows us is the biggest fucking idiot or just being a reactionary and he's going that way and he's going to keep pretending that this election was stolen. So for that, for not being an adult in the room

and which shows whenever you look at how bad his suits fit, I say fuck you, Kevin McCarthy. Ladies and gentlemen, very nice, very good. On that note, wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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