The Munk Debates Podcast - Malcolm Gladwell on the future of society after COVID-19

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, renowned author and thinker Malcolm Gladwell joins us for an in-depth conversation about the coronavirus pandemic and its long term impact on health care, refugees, and the economy.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode, we normally provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day, but our world as we know it has changed. And so will our format for the next few weeks. This episode is the first in a special series we're bringing you called The Monk Dialogues. We are inviting the sharpest minds and brightest thinkers for one-on-one conversations live on Facebook, to reflect on what our world will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic. These dialogues aim to provide you, the listener, with original insights into the pandemic's impact on everything from our shared values to politics, to the economy, to international affairs. First up, best-selling author, journalist, and past monk debater, Malcolm Gladwell, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths. This is an edited version of the live event recorded last week.

Hello and welcome to the Monk Dialogues. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, the moderator of the Monk debates and your host tonight. This is a project of the Aurea Foundation, the Peter Monk and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation. It's really an attempt to convene over a series of weeks conversations about what the world will look like after COVID-19. Look, we are in a difficult situation right now, but we know that at some point, point in the months, possibly next year, maybe longer, new therapeutics will be introduced. A vaccine, let's hope will be available. And the world will move from the state we're in now, this unparalleled global crisis, arguably the biggest crisis of many of our lifetimes, to a new reality, the reality

of a post-COVID world. So what we want to do through these monk dialogues this week and each week for a period of time is to encourage all of us to begin to think a bit about this experience that we're having right now, this experience we're having all together. What does it mean? What does it mean for our society? What does it mean for our politics? What does it mean for international relations and the state of our world? How will this change us? This week, we really wanted to start with a person that we consider one of the most versatile and creative thinkers. of our time. He's an internationally best-selling author and a passionate Canadian. So I want to welcome Malcolm Gladwell to the Monk Dialogues. Malcolm, great to have you on the program.

Thank you, Roger. It's my pleasure. Well, let's start by talking, pulling back a bit and kind of pressure testing you with what I think is the big question we want to explore on these dialogues, which is what's fundamentally in your view going to be different between the pre-COVID crisis world and that post-crisis world that let's hope we're going to move to sooner rather than later. And what do you think the biggest impact on our society, the biggest change that's going to occur between pre-COVID and the post-COVID reality that we're all going to inherit? Yeah. Well, I guess the first answer to that question is, do you want the best case scenario, or do you want the worst case scenario,

let me take a stab at the best case scenario, which is, and I would rephrase the question slightly, which is what could we, in the best case scenario, learn from this experience? And I think there is a really crucial lesson that I hope we learn from it. And this, as is always the case of me, explaining this, we will require a little bit of a detour.

So for the longest time, I have been fascinated by an observation that was made by these two economists, Chris Anderson and David Sally, who wrote a book about soccer. And they were trying to answer the question, a very basic question about soccer, which is, how do you make a soccer team better by upgrading its best player or its worst player? And their answer is, it's not even close. You make a soccer team better by upgrading its worst player because soccer is what they would call a weak link sport.

your team is only as good as its weakest link. And that's because soccer is highly interactive, right? One bad player means a botched pass and the efforts of everyone else in the field are going to waste. Everyone has to chip in and work together really well, even the weakest players on the team. So you make a team better by identifying your weakest link and making it stronger. That is in stark contrast to basketball, which is a strong link sport. If you want to make a basketball team better, you bring in Kauai Lange. Leonard, right? You bring in a superstar. That's a team where you're only as good as your best player.

And I think for the longest time in Western societies, we had been playing a strong-link game. And we've tried to be better by strengthening our strongest links. If you think about a country like Canada in the 19th century, or the first half of the 20th century, it was playing a strong-link game, It was, let's build some elite universities. Let's build strong central institutions. Let's have a core of very well-educated middle-aged white guys to run things. That's strong-linked thinking. Let's have McGill and University of Toronto be world-class institutions.

I could go on on that kind of. What I think has happened and what many people, myself among them, have argued over the last five or ten years, is that the world we live in now is increasingly a weak link. world. We are really only now as strong as our weakest link. And that's because the kind of world that we fashioned for ourselves is highly complicated and highly interconnected, right? We're now playing, we're not basketball where one player can take over. We're soccer, where you need to have everyone on the field to cooperate if you're going to score a goal. And what I think this crisis has brought home very

powerfully is how true that observation is. This is the classic weak-link crisis, right? This is the economies of the West essentially brought to a standstill because we don't have enough masks and gowns. That's, I mean, it's an incredible observation. For the lack of, for the want of a mask, the kingdom is being lost. It's not even in New York City, you know, where I live, the epicenter, so-called epicenter of the epidemic. We have 20,000 people in the hospital right now. That's not the problem. We've got 60,000 hospital beds in New York City.

The problem is it's literally that we don't have enough nurses to work around the clock to handle this. And we don't have enough gowns and gloves and masks to protect the frontline health care workers. That's why we've shut down New York City. And that's true wherever you go in the West right now. It's an extraordinary fact that we are now incurring trillions of dollars in economic damage because we don't have on hand millions of dollars of medical supplies. Right. And we didn't spend a couple million dollars pursuing the SARS, a potential SARS vaccine

because we defunded that group of researchers. Exactly. That was another, that's a classic. So that that idea that we, that our vulnerabilities now are numerous and scattered and hidden and that those vulnerabilities have the potential to bring down the rest of society, that is, that's soccer. I mean, you look at a soccer team that's doing badly, one player, they, you know, one bad player spells doom because the other team starts to pick on that player, you know, imagine a,

a weak defender who makes mistakes in his own end, it's over, right? That's exactly what we're. So my hope for a post-COVID-19 world is a world where we finally take weaklings seriously. Fascinating. And so Malcolm, and let's play with that a little bit. What does that lead us to practically? Does that lead us to a world where we see, let's say in the United States, stronger public health care? Is this a world where there is more government, that there is more collective intervention through the mechanisms and institutions of society to shore up these weak lengths and create some robustness or a pushback against this fragility that you're identifying? Yeah. Well, that's exactly right, I think. What this pandemic is exposing is that we've spent all of our time worrying about the 99.

percentile and not enough time worrying about the 50th percentile. So in the context of the United States, the highest end of the health care system has received extraordinary, unprecedented levels of support and funding over the last 25 years. We have built world-class facilities to handle the most at the highest level, you know, cancer or heart disease, what have you. What this disease has, what this pandemic has exposed is the weakness of the middle. So we don't, you know, all of That exotic machination isn't helping us right now. What we need is are more nurses. The world-class medical schools we built aren't helping us right now.

What we realize now we need are more community colleges that turn out nurses and nurses' aides and people capable of handling patients in this time of crisis. We spent millions, if not billions of dollars, buying exotic therapies, and we neglected to to have a stock pile of paper masks. So it's that kind of reorientation towards, or even on a more basic level, if you think about the way healthcare has been conducted, the healthcare strategy that Western countries

have followed over the last 20 years, it has been focused overwhelmingly on medical care and not focused nearly enough on the health of the citizens, which is a separate issue. And this pandemic is striking, though, the least healthy with the, the greatest ferocity, right? This is, there's an incredible chart I saw of those who have died,

a description of those who have died from COVID-19 in New York City. It broke them down by age, and what you saw was the most obvious thing that we've seen with this disease, which is it strikes the elderly, who are the most vulnerable, the greatest. But the second fascinating fact, and the thing I think that has been overlooked is, to some extent, is it listed the number of people who have died with underlying health complications. And I've forgotten the exact numbers, but something like 70 or 75% of those who have died have had some other underlying complication that's made them vulnerable. Anything from hypertension to diabetes, to obesity, to heart disease, to some kind of respiratory problem, asthma, those are these kind of garden variety elements that are a function

of people living in unhealthy environments and living unhealthy lifestyles, that is now coming back to haunt us. And those are the, like I said, garden variety things we have overlooked over the last 20 years because we have chosen to focus our attention on the more exotic and complicated and intellectually interesting facets of medical care. I'm going to go to questions in a second, Malcolm, and just for our friends watching right now on Facebook, we do have our question section open. I'm going to take some email questions first. We've had hundreds of questions from our friends at the Globe and Mail from the Monk Debates community. So if you are posting on Facebook, give us a sec. Malcolm, talk to us a little bit about your take on this incredible isolation

that we're all experiencing. I think one of the things I've enjoyed as a reader of you over the years and many people watching is your kind of astute observations on the human condition, the things that make us tick. What does this bizarre period of profound isolation due to a society that, up until this point, has just seemed hardwired for connection and connectivity? Do we come away with this with some new kind of shared characteristics, understandings of isolation, something that's positive,

or is this kind of traumatic for our society? something will be very difficult for us to get over. I'm less, I have to say, I am a little bit of a skeptic about whether this temporary social isolation has any kind of long-term effect, mostly because of duration. You know, we think of the Second World War as having an extraordinary impact on a population

because it lasted for five years, right? Or the depression, because the depression begins in 29 and doesn't really abate until 10 years later, until 39. those, you know, left enduring scars on populations, not just as a function of how the degree of hardship that people went through, but the duration of the hardship, we're three weeks in here. So, you know, I know I wouldn't be in any great hurry to speak about that aspect. But what concerns me far more is the economic damage.

It strikes me that that is the recovery from that. And the fact that three weeks is a very long time. can't make rent. It is not a long time if you can't see your friends. Yeah. That's a good segue to a question we got from Dennis Sagan here, who picked up on the theme you were just talking about about World War II. He asked, in relation to Thomas Pickety, the French economist saying that after World War II, those remarkable decades, the glorious 30 years, we had this pushback against income inequality. In other words, a big kind of cultural shift towards redistribution. Do you see something like that coming out of this COVID shock? If you're identifying, again,

a need to play to the weakest link to shore these up, could we see the debate about inequality being kind of supercharged, maybe to a positive result as a result of this crisis? In the best case scenario, yes. And I sort of, I mean, perhaps this is an overly optimistic position to take at this point, but I sort of think we don't have any choice because the economic burdens of this are falling massively disproportionately on the bottom third of our society, the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Most middle and upper middle class people have the resources to wait out a month and a half, two months of disruption. They're not the ones that I'm worried about at the moment, but I think that we're going to emerge from this with a portion of the population who have been

devastated, economically devastated by what's happened. And we have no choice, I think, but to pay attention to redistribute wealth in their direction. And Malcolm, you're an astute observer of society and history. I mean, often when we've seen these big economic dislocations, we see political dislocations that flow from them. Bernie Sanders stood down his campaign today, effectively ending his call for a political revolution in America. Do you think that was just in a sense a precursor for a revolution that could come as a result of this crisis?

And as you say, the profound effects that it will have on the life expectancy, the quality of life of the bottom third of society. Yeah. Well, you know, I think the way you have to think about, the crucial question about the political fallout from crises is what is the quality of the political response during the crisis.

So if you look back, just to use, we've been talking about the Second World War, which is kind of a fascinating example. There is a, in the two major powers on the Allied side, you have Roosevelt in America and you have Churchill in England. You have, by sheerest good fortune, two extraordinary leaders at the time of greatest crisis. And as a result, you emerge from that World War,

in both those countries, with a renewed appreciation or strengthened appreciation among the population for the importance of public institutions, right? Faith in government is redeemed in both England and the United States by the Second World War. Why? Because they got lucky. They had two extraordinary leaders who used that crisis to strengthen public institutions. If you enter into a crisis with the opposite, with someone who, who, doesn't have either the wit or the ability or the inclination to strengthen public institutions, you could have a very different outcome, right? You could emerge from the crisis with the opposite, with people who have lost faith in the quality of collective action. You know, I don't need to name

any names here. I think you know who I'm talking about. It's not the occupant of 24th Sussex Drive. It's his counterpart to the South. I'm trying to think of an analogous situation where a major country has entered into a profound crisis with someone so sorely lacking at the helm. You know, let's not forget, even if you think that Neville Chamberlain was not up to the task in England, then he wasn't the strongest leader of all. He's gone, remember? He's gone before the, you know, before anything profoundly serious starts to happen in the Second World War. Trump is still around for the next foreseeable future. And that's, that is to me the great danger here. You're listening to a special series of the Monk Debates podcast, the Monk Dialogues, featuring Malcolm Gladwell.

If you're enjoying this dialogue, visit monkdebates.com slash dialogues to find out about upcoming speakers and topics in this new Monk debate series. Thoughtful, substantive conversation on how COVID-19 will change our world, all at monkdebates.com. Let's take another question that was emailed in to us from Eva Barrasso asking, we're all connecting virtually like never before. What do you envision will be the new normal in how we live, learn, and work? Will our future be a virtual future, Malcolm, or are we all going to kind of understand that homeschooling an eight-year-old as I'm trying right now with online learning tools doesn't really work?

and you actually need really good teachers in a classroom to educate children. Yeah. Yeah, I don't. Like I said, I don't see, I think the opposite's going to happen. We will be so thoroughly sick of each other by the end of this, that we will race back to the way things were before. You know, this is a, you know, I was trying to think of analogies for this. And the one that I always come back to is when refugees or immigrants leave the country

of their origin. and come to the new world, what do they do? They tend to reconstruct the best parts of the world they left behind, right? One interpretation would be, oh, things were so terrible in the old country. When you come to Canada, the United States, the first thing you would do is to become overnight, the most American of Americans or the most Canadians of Canadians. Actually, that's not what they do.

What they do is they take the best of what they left and they reconstruct it. If you drive around southern Ontario and you look at the architecture, you think you're in Scotland. Why is that? Because the Scots came to Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries and rebuilt houses that looked exactly like the houses they left behind in Scotland, right? That's what immigrants do. And I suspect that's what we're going to do. We're going to go back and rebuild the best parts of the life we had before. I don't think, I don't see homeschooling crowding out the public schools of North America. Okay, the Khan Academy is not going to take over

the world. Okay, let's go to a question from Emily Ames, who sent in the following few, Malcolm. I've been overwhelmingly inspired by the various caremongering groups, both in my community and in neighborhood ones. Will there be a major shift in recognizing the power of local and community-based problem solving? I think that's getting a bit to your analogy here of shoring up the weakest link. Yeah, yeah. I think that's interesting. I think, you know, one of the wonderful things that comes out of crises like this is a that they are opportunities to experiment. So I see this already, you know, a month or two months in,

I see numerous examples on many different fronts of a willingness to try ideas that we're not being talked about before all this. So the reader's question, listeners question, is one of those, is that I think people are experimenting at a local level to see what can be done. It's been fascinating for me to see in North America the resurgence in the role of mayors

and governors taking the lead in, you know, more people seem to be listening closely and being impressed by Governor Como of New York City than the President of the United States. That seems, that's a really interesting thing. That was not true in December, right? There are many, many New York presidents of New York State who were barely aware their governor was Andrew Cuomo in December. Now they're understanding how important those local levels of government are. More interestingly, almost to me is what's happening in the scientific community is when we face a crisis like this. And I remember I was covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post back in the early 1990s, really in the early stages of our response to it. When we were as terrified of HIV then as we are of

more so than we are of COVID-19 now, I mean, remember HIV had 100% mortality rate, not a 1% mortality rate. And watching the most extraordinary things. about the early 90s was watching the way in which the medical community and the scientific community responded, just kind of turned on a dime, abandoned all kinds of old ways that didn't work, experimented with new ways, entered into partnerships that would have thought that we would have thought were unthinkable, and resolved, from a scientific standpoint, resolved the problem in what was an extraordinarily short time, or partially resolved the problem. And I've seen, now we're on a kind of much more expedited time frame, but I'm seeing that.

You know, Bill Gates talking about building multiple manufacturing facilities for various vaccine ideas. So when the time comes and we find one that works, we can get off the ground instantly. You know, that's like, no one's talking about that in December. That's kind of fascinating that people would be willing to try different approaches. Let's talk about different approaches. Go to a question from Josh Jensen, also from Toronto. gets this idea of experimenting. It says, as governments distribute funds directly to citizens, is this a form of universal basic income? And could it be a permanent fixture of a post-COVID world? Malcolm, we're seeing this again across the developed world, these direct cash payments to citizens.

Do you see this as a good thing? Is this a type of, again, innovation that we never would have considered before? Certainly not on this scale. And do you see it becoming now a future of of work and I guess our perceptions of productivity. Yeah, I mean, when I think about the long-term impacts of this, not just me, people who think about the long-term impacts of this, the first thing that comes to mind is consumer debt. I mean, we entered into this crisis off one of the longest economic booms in living memory. And even given that, we had among the poor parts of the population very high and unsustainable

levels of consumer debt. That problem has just got a lot worse. And one of the first issues we're going to have to face after this crisis is resolved is what are we going to do about those debt problems? What are you going to do about people who have credit card debt at 18%? Right? That's going to take a very difficult conversation with the credit card company, a very difficult conversation with the bondholders of the banks that are holding some of these loans. And also to the To the listeners question, how are we going to get very fast, effective, fair relief to the people who are going to be overwhelmingly burdened? And yes, I mean, if the conversation, I was surprised by how much traction the conversation about a universal basic income was getting before this hit. We're still in the midst of this magical boom.

Now I would imagine that would be turbocharged. Let's go to a question from Jeff Davis. Jeff is writing from Wimberley, Texas. Will this singular event once and for all dispel the American myth of the bootstrapped, self-made rags to riches American dream? Malcolm, do you give some credence that American exceptionalism will be blunted by this crisis or not? Nothing will ever blunt American exceptionalism. I've lived here long enough to understand that that is the one great constant in American life.

They will emerge from this with a narrative that paints them all as heroes, trust me. It's just it might be a different hero, right? They'll find a hero. That's what they always do. It just might not be who you expect. Dr. Fauci, maybe. Yes. I mean, it's funny, I remember, it's funny that when I think back to my days covering HIV

when I was working for the Washington Post, who was the person that I talk to all the time, Fauci? Anthony Fauci, yeah. I knew Fauci in the 90s. already he was like 60 years old. I mean, I can't believe how old he is. Yeah, he seemed to ageless back then, and he seems unchanged now. I don't know. But he was exactly the same person.

He was this calm, calm, rational, supremely organized, confident, warm, heart. I mean, he's like, we worshipped him back then. I couldn't imagine how we could have fought HIV without Fauci back in the 90s. And then here he is, you know. He's quite an extraordinary. individual. Malcolm, maybe just kind of continue in this mood of our conversation. What are you optimistic about in terms of what could come of this crisis? I mean, shoring up the weakest link, I get that. It's important. I can see the kind of sociological reason for doing that. But are

there other things that are happening in terms of how you see people behaving at this moment that kind of, I don't know, gives you a renewed faith in the human condition, that you see something that could grow out of that that could have greater significance. That could make all. all this seemingly means something to us? Yeah. Well, I mean, on a fundamental level, I am optimistic that this will prove such a learning experience that when the next pandemic comes,

we will be prepared. You know, the best case scenario from the beginning was that this was the training run for the really, really big one. Let's not forget that this is not the worst that we can, this is not the worst that a viral epidemic could be, right? This is a virus which is reasonably contagious, not in the grand scheme of things, not terribly lethal. I mean, when I say that I'm talking about in the grand scheme, in the kind of scientific epidemiological sense, it is not terribly lethal. It is going to leave a devastating imprint on the society that touches.

But 1% mortality, viruses can do a lot worse than that, right? HV was 100. Ebola was pretty close to 100. So it could get worse. And so the one bit of optimism I have is I have a feeling that we will be better prepared next time around. You know, we won't make the mistake. We started with the last SARS epidemic. We've started all of these programs to try and understand this class of viruses.

They continued in the interim. I mean, there are people who have come forward and talked about all the work. So we're reasonably prepared. It's just that we didn't, I think, take the task of preparation seriously enough. I really doubt we'll do that again. Yes, let's hope. Okay, let's go to some Facebook questions. I know we've got a few of them queued up now.

So we've got William Cowper. Does this universally experienced crisis present a challenged world peace setting up new conflicts that could play out with unintended consequences? I think he's pursuing a military dimension. It is an interesting question, Malcolm, whether this is destabilizing. to geopolitics, it certainly could seem that way, yet at the same time, this is the very moment that we need to come together to confront a common threat and have public health coordination, not just within borders, but between borders and between nations.

Yeah. Well, a lot depends on the path that the virus takes in the coming months. Right now, the bulk of the damage has been confined to more developed parts of the world. if you already have sort of radical population and stability in many parts of the developing world, if we add to that a major viral epidemic, then you're only going to see more refugees going to Europe and more refugees, you know, it's going to make, it's going to be one more factor to lead to a continuation, if not an acceleration of these kinds of migratory movements we've seen in recent years. I wouldn't say that it necessarily accentuates conflict so much as it changes conflict. It just changes the terms.

It changes the kinds of people who come into conflict and the things that they're arguing about. If you think about it on an economic basis, I read a really fascinating article today in The New Yorker, the magazine for which I... If I'm going to plug it, about whether this, the long-term consequences for the oil industry of something like this. And does this speed up our move away from oil for a variety of reasons? that's, you know, if oil goes away as a kind of central player in world politics and the world's economy, that's hugely destabilizing, creates a whole new class of winners and losers. So I do think there are some, depending on how long this disruption lasts, there are a potential for a kind of scrambling of the power structure of the world.

Fascinating. Let's go on to another question from our audience right now. Rachel Atkins, Malcolm is asking you, if you were given a math, What are the top three things you would make happen right now in order to minimize the negative and optimize the positive for both human and the economic impact of this COVID-19 crisis? How do we all come out of this better? Well, that's it. That's it. Are you saving up the hardest questions? We're just getting started.

We're just getting started. I mean, I remain, I mean, I was talking about early about my. my experience with covering HIV back in the 90s when the pessimism was even greater than it is now and how surprised I was at the speed and effectiveness of the medical and scientific response. So I would divide my answer up into several. The one thing I think that I have no doubt in my mind that by the end of the summer, we're going to have a vastly improved medical response to this virus. So right now, what is it?

I don't know what the exact number is. Half of those who are on ventilators die, don't make it. I would be very surprised if that number was that high by the end of August. I think we're going to get much smarter about what the best medical protocols are and whether we're going to, I think there are going to be some therapies that are going to emerge, that will really help us solve that problem inside the hospital. I'm a little less optimistic about our ability to contain the spread of this. I'm in the general population.

For the simple reason is, I don't know how long we can go with an economic shutdown. I mean, there is a point at which it just doesn't, I mean, it's a non-sustainable, that it becomes, you know, the estimates of the economic cost of the shutdown through three weeks in North America and Europe for a month, they're just mind-blowing. I mean, they're kind of, they're almost too large to make sense of. And I just don't know how much longer, can we really sustain this into May? And if we can't, if we have to kind of lift it, it's going to, the virus is going to come back. I mean, I think we're going to have to live with the fact that, you know, there was something that was said, the very beginning of the epidemic by many epidemiologists, which is the point of this shutdown is not to prevent you from getting infected. You probably will get infected. The point of this is just to buy some time for the health care system. And I think people, may have been indulging in a fantasy in the last couple of weeks that they can avoid infection at some point. Maybe we can't. I mean, maybe we should just accept the fact that at some point, most of us are going to get it.

And let's just try and make that experience as manageable as possible. Yeah. And again, I think important to note that what we're doing now in terms of isolation and social distancing is critical to try to bend that curve. So while the total infection rate at the end may be quite high, it may hit that 50s. to 70% that experts said, we want to get there with a fully functioning healthcare system that can deal with the critically ill, not only from COVID-19, but the critically ill generally in our population who require that kind of intensive care. Yeah, that's right.

Okay, let's go to another question from our audience watching online on Facebook. Julia is asking, what is the ethical framework we should be using? This is interesting. As far as who gets the vaccine first when they come out, you know, Malcolm, there's been a lot of speculation here that governments will, you know, rush to control this vaccine. There could be some very, very ugly power politics around how the vaccine is deployed. What's your guess as to how that will play out? Well, Fauci has said that one of his big concerns is there will not be in the early stages enough vaccine to go. around. So the questioner is absolutely right. There's going to be have to be some kind of protocol

for who gets it first. And I think that by the time we get a vaccine a year or a year and a half from now, whenever it is, we'll have a very, very clear understanding of who the most vulnerable people in the population are. When I say a very clear understanding, I was listening, there's a podcast called This Week in Virology, which I cannot recommend enough. It's been going on for 20 It's the nerdiest, most fascinating. It's just a bunch of these old school virologists, some of them retired, who get together every week and just kind of chat about things that touch

on the world of virology. And so when this hit, they were, these are the perfect guys. So they, you know, everyone who's dealing with COVID-19, these are their old friends from old scientific meetings and they call up all their friends and they have these incredible conversations. So in one of the recent ones I was listening to, they were talking about how,

Even now, if you talk to clinicians, they can describe quite precisely the things that allow them to know whether someone is at risk of a very serious outcome with this. You present at the hospital, they can tell, you know, after an initial round of relatively brief tests, who the problematic patient is and who's the one who's likely to make it. So I imagine a year from now, we'll have an even clearer understanding of who's most at risk. And if we give the virus first to anyone other than those most at risk, I will be, I will pray for our mortal souls. Malcolm, there's been reports in the last number of days that the African American community in the United States has been especially hard hit by this virus due to the significant number of comorbidities amongst that group. Often they correlate with poverty.

If you don't have enough food, if you're not eating the right clobitities. kinds of food, you develop these diseases like diabetes, obesity, and such. I mean, this seems to be just a horrible new dimension to this. And it gets to this question of equity. And how do we respond with equity to this crisis? Well, you know, I will point out that this is, it's not like this is a new observation. All the, all this pandemic is doing is accentuating and exaggerating a problem. problem that already exists. It has always been the case in the United States, and I'm sure in

Canada as well, that the disease burden falls disproportionately on the poor, right? The first lesson of any kind of epidemiology is that you see anything bad is most concentrated at the bottom of the economic ladder among those with the least education living in the most impoverished communities. What COVID-19 tells us is not anything new. It's just reminding of something that we choose to conveniently forget half the time. So, you know, part of me kind of, you know, there have been voices crying in the wilderness for years and years and years that say our priorities as a society are all wrong, that we should be spending our time and attention and dollars where the diseases are,

not where people are waving their hands or talking the loudest, right? And this pandemic simply reinforces that. You pay your attention and spend your money where they're, the problem is, and the problem here, as has been the case for millennia, is at the bottom, right? It says that to a certain extent, we have been solving the wrong problem in the medical system for the last 50 years. You're listening to the Monk Dialogues, a special series of the Monk Debates podcast. Each week, for the next few weeks, we'll bring you one-on-one conversations with the sharpest minds and the brightest thinkers

reflecting on how COVID-19 will change the world as we know it. If you're enjoying this podcast, write a review on iTunes. Check us out on Twitter or Facebook for the date of our next live monk dialogues. And send us your questions for our guest in advance at dialogues at monkdebates.com. Now, back to the episode. Let's go to another Facebook question. Joryita has the following view, Malcolm. If some human behavior does not fundamentally change as a result of this virus,

do you believe that a worst crisis lies ahead of us? And maybe just to stick a parentheses around that, Malcolm, it is kind of interesting to think back that we seem to be as a civilization more and more prone to crises. I mean, the financial crisis in 2008, very, very different, doesn't have a virus, but it's still a crisis of complexity. It's a crisis that hits the poorest and weakest in society hardest. You were part of a very memorable debate that we had at the Monk debates here in Toronto on progress, and was it inevitable. You spoke against that resolution with Alain de Botton against Matt Ridley and Pinker. what's your feeling about this?

Is this somehow symptomatic with this virus of a bigger crisis of fragility that the civilized world faces? Well, interesting. I mean, thinking back on that debate, first of all, would that debate replayed tomorrow, you know, as you will remember, my side lost. If we did it tomorrow, we would win, right? I think so. I mean, it wouldn't even. So should you wish, budget, to reschedule? Yes, let's do that.

Let's get Stephen Pinker up next. I was, you know, I'm of two minds about this. One is that I kind of agree with the general proposition that we, there is a march towards progress in human history. You know, I don't think we're more crisis prone. I'm going to give one exception to this in a moment. I don't think we're more crisis prone in the modern world than we were in the past. Things were so much worse, 75 years ago, 100 years ago, that it's not even, I mean, if you

were a parent in 1910, you woke up every morning in deadly fear that your kids are going to die of any number of epidemic diseases, from measles to chickenpox, to diphtheria, to I could go on and on and on, things that have just disappeared. Polio, the 1918 flu epidemic was an order of magnitude worse than anything COVID-19 will throw at us. The Second World War, or the First World War was, you know, a war of a kind of a moral and human disaster of the sort we haven't seen since. I mean, I can't even, there's just no comparison between, so, you know, let's not, I think it's important for us to put this in perspective. Our grandparents and great grandparents had it way, way, way, way worse than we do right now. This is a, you know,

there is no doubt in my mind that we're going to come out of this pandemic eventually, still better off. that people did in 1918 or any of those previous cases. That said, we have moved to a different kind of vulnerability, whereas the vulnerabilities in the, you know, 100 years ago, our great-grandparents dealt with multiple problems, multiple predictably, predictable problems that had devastating but not overwhelming consequences. We've now moved to very, very rare crises that have absolutely devastating.

consequences. I'm still far more concerned about global warming than I am about viral pandemics. I mean, I don't even think that's an argument. I would still... But Malcolm, that's an important point to jump in on, because many people have rightly brought up the existential threat that climate change represents, but you know, you do not see a societal response like the one that we're seeing now. In fact, you see a lot of resistance to accepting the consequences of man-made climate change and the policy responses that arguably are needed to address it. Yeah. Yeah, that's, you know, it was fascinating to watch the, with this pandemic, to watch the trajectories of denial that happened in the first, let's say, a month.

So you had a group of people who were way out front and saying, this is serious, right, in the scientific world. And then you have, as you move further and further away from the scientific world, what you see are various levels of denial. So the epidemiologists who came back from Wuhan in the middle of January and said, oh, no, right? They initially were met with shrugs, even on my beloved This Week in virology, one of the main biologists. He was initially skeptical. He was like, I don't think this one's going to spread, right? And then he changes his mind like two weeks later. And then two weeks after that, you get the next wave of people who changed of mind and finally accept that something serious is happening. And then you see, if you look across

various political jurisdictions, you know, the governor of California is sounding the alarm well before the mayor of New York, who in turn is sounding the alarm well before the Trump administration. And in the media, you see the same kind of thing, this kind of staggered acceptance of risk. What you see with climate change, I think, is a kind of elaborated, elongated version of that same staggered acceptance of risk. So the scientific community is, you now almost entirely on board with the risk of climate change, and they are slowly converting the lay population, beginning with kind of activists and scientifically literate lay people slowly working its way through the political arena. But, you know, so you see, there's no way

around that. There's no model. There's no way, there's no conceivable scenario where absolutely every corner of society changes its mind and accepts a new truth at the same time. And by the way, we don't want to live in a world that looks like that. That world is also terrifying for wholly different reasons. We just have to accept the fact that in a free society that has thrived for and survived as long as it has precisely because it does have a diversity of opinion, right? The reason we can tackle big problems is we have these vigorous debates which push every side to justify themselves to think more deeply about what they're doing. That is our strongest card is the fact that we have this kind of vigorous debate about things. The price of

that, though, and it's a small price, the price of that is you're never going to get an immediate acceptance of some new reality. It's always going to be staggered. That's a good point. Okay, let's conscious of our time here, Malcolm, so I want to get some more questions in from our friends on Facebook. David Goodman, what do you think will be the best thing coming out of this? Is there a single transformation, a political consequence. Give us your thoughts on the fall election in the United States. How does this play out in the context of that campaign? Yeah. Well, I know better than to prognosticate about politics. Everything people predict about politics turns out to be false, as far as I can tell. If I had to identify the best thing that can come out of this is a

a resurgence in the profile and importance of the public health community. So we had, if you look back on the 20th, what is the great success story of the 20th century? It is public health, right? It dwarfs every other thing we invented in the 20th century. The 20th century is the century where group of public health professionals stepped forward, took control of the way we live our lives and managed to eradicate a whole raft of extraordinary diseases fundamentally change the health profile of billions of people around the world permanently make lives better for untold people in every corner of the planet. The 20th century is, to me, that's the story. The successes were so swift and so dramatic that I think we began to take them for granted. And we pushed the public health world aside.

And we went on to other things, right? You know, we fell in love with fancy technologies and we fell in love with the internet and we fell in love with all kinds of others. And we let those, we silenced and marginalized all of those voices to our enduring discredit. And what I think, what I hope happens out of this is that we invite public health folks back to the center of the conversation. And we say, you know what? You know who should be leading the conversation about the health of our population? The public health people. They're the ones. They have the most important lessons to teach us. They're the ones whose priorities are in order. They're the ones who are looking for, you know, for resurgent viruses coming out of some distant corner of China. You know,

I hope we're going to invite them back to center stage and I hope they remain there for a good long time. Great point. Okay. Jenny has a question. Could you see this crisis bringing about a permanent shift towards working from home? We've talked a little bit about school, but look, you're a writer. you spend a lot of your time at your home working in a study. So maybe this isn't as big a transition for you, but what do you think about? I do not work from my study at home. Okay. I've worked in coffee shops. I'm, I cannot wait to return to the coffee shops of New York City. Please let me out. Let me out my home. No, I think this will, my, I think the exact opposite, this is going to set back working from home a generation. People won nothing.

more, I think, than to get on the bus in the morning and go to an office. Yeah, and speak to each other face-to-face, that human dimension. Okay, let's take another quick question here. Nadine said, what was the tipping point for this pandemic? I guess a riff off one of your internationally best-selling books? Well, I mean, I'm not sure that we know exactly. I mean, the three places where this pandemic took first deepest roots were, you know, Northern Italy, Wuhan and China and New York City, which are just all traveled, places where

there was a lot of travel, international travel in February, right? I mean, so I think those are, that's a kind of obvious tipping point. One of the fascinating things that we will learn, which is always true of epidemics, epidemics are profoundly, particularly viral epidemics, are profoundly asymmetrical phenomenon that an enormous amount of the work in spreading them is done by a very, very small percentage of the population. And it took us years with HIV to understand who those super spreaders were. And the answer was not the, they were not the same people we thought going in.

And I think we're going to learn something quite profound about this disease. Why is it that some people are far more contagious than others? Because there does seem to be the same radical asymmetry with this virus as with others. And that will give us a much better handle on what we mean, what constitutes the tipping point in the growth of it and how we can prevent that kind of exponential growth in the future. Before we get in the last question, Malcolm, I am going to just take my privileges moderator. Your latest book, Talking to Strangers, I enjoyed it. It's had a really kind of intense following around the insights that you drew out of that book.

For this experience that we're going through now and what may come next, What do you think some of the key lessons that we can pull away from talking to strangers in this moment? And again, I urge our audience to, if they haven't read it already, to break the spine on it in the moments we have now, quietly in our homes, self-isolating. It's a great read. Well, that's very nice if you, first of all. What are the lessons? Well, you know, the great lesson of talking to strangers is that for better, for largely better and not so largely worse, we are trusting. machines. The reason human beings have thrived for as long as we have is that we have an overwhelming

desire, compulsion to trust others and believe what we're told. That means that we are occasionally easily victimized by liars and frauds, but it means that 99% of the time we're able to get along with others, construct meaningful relationships, build institutions that work and flourish. And that that desire, that impulse to trust is not some kind of recent cultural acquisition. It's something built into our DNA. It's why we among all species rose to the top of the heap. And I think that's in a time like this where we may feel that our ability to trust others is shaken by this virus. It's very important for us to realize that it can't be.

Nothing can shape the fundamental desire and compulsion of human beings to want, to trust other human beings. Even if this madness lasts another year, it will not shake that desire. Nothing can. Malcolm, that's a lovely note for us to end on. I just really want to thank you for kicking off these weekly monk dialogues. I wanted you to be our first presenter because of the range and breadth of ideas and issues that you think about. And you've approached this topic as you do with all your writing with real humility and humanity. So thank you for coming on the Monk Dialogues tonight and spending this time with our audience. My pleasure, Roger.

Great. Thank you. Well, audience, that concludes our first weekly monk dialogue. We're committed to doing these for the next period of time. Our goal is really to bring to you people that we consider to be some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. And on that score, I think we've checked a box for you next week. We've got CNN's Fareed Zakaria coming on the following week. We have also Mohamed Elarion, a fascinating economist, thinking big on some of these large structural changes that are going on in our own economies and globally.

That's just the beginning of the monk dialogues. I want to thank our partners, the Globe and Mail, WNED PBS Buffalo, who is also participating in this project. and our friends at Facebook Canada, who are helping us bring these dialogues to a Canadian audience as a public service. And finally, to the Monk Debates, the Oriah Foundation,

and the Peter and Melanie Monk Foundation who make all of this possible. This initiative is funded entirely through the charitable generosity of the Aurea Foundation and the Monk Foundation. And again, I thank you for listening. I'm Rudiudh Gryphus, your host. We'll do this all again next week with Fried Zakaria.

Stay safe. Stay sane. Let's keep the dialogue going. Let's have a conversation about what the world will look like after COVID-19. We will get through this. Let's imagine a new collective future together. The Monk debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Redyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Korn.

Cox, be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.