YouSaid · the spoken record

Bethany McLean

lines on the record: 97
first: 2023-10-20
most recent: 2023-10-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I wish I had understood that it wasn't just about numbers, that it's about people, it's about history, you have to understand psychology, you have to understand the past. That makes it so much more interesting and infinitely interesting. And I wish I had understood what we talked about earlier on the podcast, which is that that most important rule is a thing you used in kindergarten, which is use your imagination because anything can happen. And don't ever look at the world and say, no, no, no, that can't happen. Enron can't be a fraud. It's the most respected company in America. Or no, no, no. The big banks on Wall Street can't go bankrupt. Look at their multibillion dollar balance sheets and their gleaming headquarters. This can't happen. Or a pandemic can't shut down the United States for two or three years. God knows that can't happen. Everything can happen. So just remember, use your imagination.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Journalism, a career in journalism. I might say find something else where you can make money and then write on the side. No, seriously, I would say to anybody interested in anything, just do something. You never know where your path in life is going to take you. But if you don't do anything, then you know where it's going to take you, which is nowhere. And so if you're not sure what you want to do, just go do things. Go do interesting things. Go try to be around smart people doing interesting things. I began my career working at Goldman Sachs and I do something very different from that now, but I wouldn't have the career I have now if I hadn't started working at Goldman. And so just do things. And what you do will open up other doors that will take you someplace else.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But his ideas drove everything. Well, that's exactly. His prose is clunky and his characters are one-dimensional, but his ideas and the fact that he could see all of where we are today from when he was writing, I just think it's fascinating.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So do I. But back to things that I read as a child that I think are really interesting to reread now. I've been rereading a lot of Isaac Asimov. Unbelievable. I think in this era where we're talking about AI to realize how incredibly prophetic Asimov was with his three laws of robots and his thoughts about the world, he's a terrible writer and you have to struggle through his prose. But if you read it, yes, he is terrible.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's another, so I have a 14 year old daughter and a 12-year-old daughter, so I consume an inordinate amount of fantasy novels and I can't keep all the names straight because that's what my daughter reads. But right now I'm in the process of reading Some by a woman named Rissa Meyer, which are rewrites of fairy tales from a different perspective. And they are super interesting. And the last kind of like wicked, which...”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're as great as everybody says. The problem is now I can't watch the show because it's so stressful to read those books that you can't relive some of the high moments of high stress. You know.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early sci fi. So do I. Back to Tolkien, of course. Wow, that's a gimme. Yes, that's a gimme. Game of Thrones, of course, George R. Martin. I would like to”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do a podcast with a guy named Luigi Zengalis at the University of Chicago, and I think I have to read a ton for that as you do for this. It's a lot of work, right? But I think the books that I read for the podcast that have been most influential for me were two contradictory views on meritocracy, one by a professor at Harvard named Michael Sandell and the other by a professor at Oxford named Adrian Woldridge. And one is kind of a defense of meritocracy and the other is skepticism about meritocracy. What are the names? So Adrian Walderge's book is The Aristocracy of Talent, How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, and Michael Sandell's book is called The Tyranny of Merit Can We Find the Common Good? And I'd say Sandell's perspective on meritocracy is quite skeptical and Wolderge's book is more of a defense of meritocracy and there are really interesting juxtaposition. And then don't laugh. I am a huge consumer of fantasy novels and so I am also reading the Wheel of”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Joan Osara, who's my co-author on this book and my co-author on All the Devils are here and edited The Smartest Guys in the Room. He was my editor at Fortune for a lot of years and he taught me and still teaches me to this day a lot about writing and storytelling.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, we didn't even have one. My parents still don't have one. So I don't stream that much. I know. What about audio? I have some things that I've listened to that I love, but I default to a book when I'm left alone. Audio, I have been loving Huberman's podcast on health and longevity. He has a great podcast that just came out on meditation that makes you think really differently about meditation. Huberman. Yeah. I'm going to check that out, definitely.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is going to make you unhappy, but I grew up without a TV set, and I still did I. I did also. amazing we might be the only two people in the world who can say that we had a TV”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To hang you on with this. It might be true. I mean, I'm still going to defend capitalism as a version of Winston Churchill's quote about democracy, the worst possible system with the possible exception of everything else out there. But I do think we need to have a discussion about where capitalism is appropriate and where it's not and what spheres of life it should be contained to and what its limitations are.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Following quarter. Yeah, the Department of Defense has done this report, the Industrial Capabilities Report every year, and it's pointed out that due to shareholder pressure to generate earnings, that all these critical aspects of manufacturing have gone overseas. And so it's easy to not pay any attention to that if you're just focused on this quarter's earnings or this year's earnings. But if you're actually focused on what the United States needs to do to be strong, you need to have a different set of values at work.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This whole idea of capitalism in the market and its pure, well, it isn't. And so that was one of my big takeaways from this is if all sorts of industries have to have taxpayer support when time's turn tough, don't we need to rethink the contract between companies and society?”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the train has left the station on semiconductor manufacturing when you look even at the billions in the Chips Act, but you compare it to Taiwan semiconductor's annual CapEx budget. There's no catching up. That doesn't mean we couldn't have manufacturing of some critical chips here in the US as a just-in-case backup. But I think the idea that we're ever going to become a manufacturing powerhouse of semiconductor chips ever again, I think we let that go. And again, I'd blame a monomaniacal focus on the bottom line. Hey, they can do it cheaper over there. Let's go do it cheaper over there without any thoughts about the long term. I also think, though, it raises another question that to me is interesting, which is, do you remember the whole fur in the global financial crisis? Banks, too big to fail. They've got taxpayer support. Well, what about hospitals? They've got taxpayer support. What about semiconductor manufacturing now with the Chips Act? They've got taxpayer support.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was just the increased demand combined with the increased time to ship. One CEO of a company told me it was like lost in translation. You just couldn't figure out where your stuff was getting shipped from China. And so again, it's this idea that we could, and it's obviously stressed by the geopolitical tensions over Taiwan, but this idea that we could just mindlessly outsource everything that was critical to a very far away country and not maintain any capacity to do it here in the United States. And that was all going to be just peachy keen. It just, I think the pandemic showed us that it's not that simple. And so now we're trying to figure out how to deal with that, especially with the geopolitical tensions over Taiwan when you realize the United States literally can't break down if Taiwan's semiconductor goes away because we've outsourced all of the critical manufacturing of semiconductors.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I agree, and it seems that everything we've done from the financial crisis through to the pandemic response has helped the wealthy at the expense. What a shocker at the expense of the poor. And that's why I very much like the subtitle of our Who Gets Left Behind of our book? Who's getting left behind? And that it's true that fiscal stimulus has done miracles for people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. So I don't want to discount that. It was really important. You reduced poverty for children. It had wild effects. Enormously effective. Nonetheless, a lot of the gains in wages have been eaten up by inflation. So once again, it's the people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who are left, who face the most pain from just about any policy we have.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But huge, huge, huge explosive boom. Everything was a screaming by, and that benefits the segment of the American population that has exposure to assets. About 10%? Not the bottom. And then the bottom is left to fend for itself when not to fend for itself, but the bottom is left to pick up the pieces when inflation kicks in because guess who inflation hurts more, the less well off.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly, whereas monetary stimulus made the rich richer. I mean, people said when the Fed began throwing everything it could at the wall basically in the spring of 2020.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the Fed for that decade between the financial crisis and the pandemic that decade plus felt the title of Mohammed Alarian's great book that they were the only game in town. They were the only ones who could try to fix the economy. But that to me is a little bit analogous to Fauci, just like maybe Fauci shouldn't have been in the position he was in. The feds shouldn't have been in the position it was in. That's Congress's job. Again, it's a failure of government. It's a failure of Congress to default to the Fed as the people who are supposed to fix the economy. It's not just the Fed's job. They've got one tool. They've got the most limited toolbox of anybody in Washington to try to fix the economy, and yet they were the only game in town. And because interest rates were so low for that decade and there was so much bond buying, it left the Fed in a weaker position to counteract the effects of the pandemic than they would otherwise have been in. And I think it's important to understand that. Again, these things have antecedents. They don't come out of nowhere.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there wasn't a lot of thinking about the impact of fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus, right? And together. And so you're right. We didn't have that in the financial crisis. And I think it was a mistake. We had a very limited amount of fiscal stimulus because the idea was, oh my God, the deficit and what are we doing? And so there was very quickly the Tea Party and the calls for austerity. And so we didn't do that much fiscal stimulus.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“today with inflation. And that's such a critical part of our economic lives now and such a critical part of inequality in terms of who inflation affects the most. And that's the Fed. And so you have to understand that as part of looking at the pandemic.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you can't look at the pandemic without looking at the Federal Reserve, and for all sorts of reasons. One is that if it hadn't been for the Fed's actions in the spring of 2020, the world literally might have shut down. Markets are not incidental to life. They're part of our life. That said, some of the problems that the Fed had to fix were of the Fed's own making. Such as what a couple of decades of very low interest rates had done to our markets, such as the ongoing fragility of the system due to the shadow banking system, an ongoing kind of inability to deal with instability in the treasury market. One of the scariest things that happened in that spring of 2020 was that the Treasury market almost stopped functioning. And that's people were aware even before the pandemic hit that there were these structural weaknesses within the Treasury market. And then I think you have to look at the Fed because of where we are.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even more so, you can't get shareholders to back vaccine development because too many times governments are the buyers of vaccines. The profits aren't big enough. And the need for the vaccines comes and goes. And so shareholders don't want anything to do with it because it's not sustainable earnings growth. And so you have to be aware of where capitalism works and where it doesn't work. And that's one of the themes of the book. The WHO, I think initially you would give them bad marks for going along with China's view of the world and not being more independently minded. But it's hard to say over the course of the pandemic. I think the WHO has been able to acknowledge failing. So I'd give them and the NIH pretty decent remarks.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's hard because they all did different things. I think the CDC is at the bottom. I think it's hard. And even the CDC, I think, would say that. Rochelle Walensky, when she was running the CDC, came out with this report, basically, that said the CDC has failed and lost a lot of trust. The NIH Not terrible. No. It's the NIH that funded a lot of the development of mRNA that led us to.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's some company of both. And again, I don't think anybody's done the work, nor I think is it possible to actually do the work and break it down. What percent of the problem came from people in red states being less willing to get vaccinated? And what percentage of the problem came from the fact that pre-existing health conditions that led one to terrible COVID outcomes were worse in many of those states? Which brings us back to access to health care.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing. It's actually tragic that we even have to ask this question. Because why should a vaccine be a Trump vaccine or a Biden vaccine? It's insane. It's insane.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until they've been tested for safety. Not smart. If Trump had pushed them and called them the Trump vaccines, would you have had exactly the response from Democrats that we instead got from Republicans, given how ridiculously polarized we are? Would you then have had Republicans taking the vaccines and celebrating them and Democrats saying, I'm not taking a Trump vaccine?”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I'm not sure that's true because the vaccines weren't approved. The data about the vaccines didn't come out until after the election because Trump had started to make some noises about having the vaccines ready before the election. And so the FDA pushed back and basically the leaders of the pharmaceutical company said this is not going to be political. And all of that was really important. And so to me, one of Trump's biggest failings was starting to make the vaccines political, such that then you had to have pushback so that people would try to trust them. I absolutely would be able to trust them. I absolutely agree that if Trump had said these vaccines are marvelous, they're lifesaving. That could have changed some of the courses. It would have been truly changed. It could have been for his election. But it would have been too late for his election. Fair enough. But that said, you have to ask the flip side of the question, given that you had Democrats, including Cuomo and Kamala Harris, coming out and saying, I'm not taking these Trump vaccines.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Azar was a secretary of health and human services and not a well-liked figure within the Trump administration for reasons both good and bad. He developed a reputation for being hierarchical, being thin-skinned, being a politician, but he was also an old school Republican in an administration where that was a very bad thing to be. I think it is impossible to look at Alex Cazar and not see a highly principled person who wanted to do the right thing. And Warp Speed is we have Azar in part to thank for Warp Speed. And if it hadn't been for Azar getting behind warp speed and pushing it, again, warp speed had several fathers, but Azar was definitely one of them. And so I think if you look at people's performance and you give them some dings but some positives, I think ultimately I came out positive on Azar.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when Mike Pence, when Alex Azar was kicked off basically running the task force, and Mike Pence was put in charge, it's hard to think of anything that happened at the coronavirus task force after that other than Mike Pence's op-ed in the spring of 2020 saying there won't be a second wave. I think most people see him as the ultimate politician in that he was more focused on his own chances for a presidential run than he was on actually doing anything about the pandemic. That said, you have to have a little bit of admiration for Mike Pence post-January. Post-January.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Kushner, I don't think the task force that he set up to get PPE did that much. However, it's worth noting that some of the people running Warp Speed came away who were utterly opposed to Trump and to Trump's administration came away supportive of Kushner because they thought that it was Kushner's support that guaranteed warp speed success and it was Kushner who ultimately protected Warp Speed. And both Monsef Slawy, who is about as far from a Trumpian Republican as one could possibly be, actually said that he came away from this with a lot of respect for Kushner. So I think that it's possible to look at him as a mixed bag.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People can figure out their own information. There's enough out there running counter to that. So I think it's a really tricky issue, but I think the pandemic, if anything, made me feel that we are very, very quick to label things misinformation when we just don't like it.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a spectrum. I think it's a long way away. And I think that when there is so much information out there to the counter about that, you actually do more damage by shutting people down and saying you can't say that than you do by saying go ahead and say it. Sound crazy. Literally.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really difficult because the line between misinformation and information that we don't want to hear can be a very fine line sometimes and sometimes things that we label misinformation in a moment come back to perhaps maybe be something that we should have listened to. I guess my view on free speech is that if we believe in free speech, we should believe in free speech. Hate speech is a different matter.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think the Great Barrington Declaration said much about masking. Was that the compromise? It was about the Great Barrington Declaration was about focus protection for the elderly. It was against lockdowns. I want to think of the other stuff. And I think in a free society where polarization doesn't dictate what one is allowed to say and one is not allowed to say, there should have been a debate about that. And the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration were not French scientists, epidemiologists. Harvard, epidemiologist at Stanford, epidemiologist at Oxford, highly respected people. Why is it so offensive to listen to them and to listen to what their plan is? It shouldn't be. And so I don't love that Fauci was part of shutting that down and trying to discredit them.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have a clue, but what I do know is that because the lines of inquiry were shut down early on, we probably never will know for sure. And I think that that's not a great outcome. And I think shutting down lines of inquiry or shutting down people with different opinions is just there's a line between that and quote misinformation. And I'm not really sure in a free society what we want to label misinformation. I detest that word. I think the other thing Fauci tried to shut down were the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration. And again, I happen to be a believer in most forms of free speech.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did that pass? But back to Fauciet, I think there are a couple of things that I don't understand why Fauci did them either. The mask thing, to say the least. The mask thing, the shutting down of any inquiry about the origins of the pandemic, which in a way I don't really care where this thing came from, but the fact that we weren't allowed to discuss where it came from reflects well on nobody. The idea that you couldn't say that it might have been from inside a lab without being accused of being racist and Fauci was part of shutting down that line of questioning. Well, whether it came from a laboratory.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did. Which was to me the highlight of the pandemic. I think you sent me one of those early on. And it was. I think it might have been the highlight of the pandemic. Really just like...”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he got great media reviews. If you're putting someone out there whose views you don't agree with and then sort of ducking and saying, oh, look at what that guy is saying, I mean, it's just, it's terrible. Be accountable. Say then I'm going to be the person speaking to the American public. It makes me angry because putting someone in a role that maybe they shouldn't be in and then criticizing that person for being in that role seems to me to be one of the most hypocritical things you can do.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my co-author and I might have a little bit of a split on this. I'm probably more sympathetic to Fauci than Joe might be. I view any criticism of Fauci as misplaced because it was the job of the president not to have Fauci in that role if he didn't want him in that role. But he had great.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is one possible reason for it, which is that they were really worried about hospital space, right? So there's this thinking we'll free up hospital beds. Put them on an ice flow, send them out to sea. But then two things have to happen. One, you have to be able to protect those people and protect the people around them when they get back to the nursing home. And secondly, you don't lie about it. And so those were the two big problems. And that old adage, right, the cover-up is worse than the crime. If Guumbo had just told the truth.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“so that even after the New York Department of Health, which is in the city's department, which are really well respected institutions, we're saying we're seeing these upticks and all these measures that are alarming. This feud between Cuomo and DeBlasio kept either from doing anything for way too long. And so, of course, on top of it, Cuomo's policy of sending sick people backing home. So that's my question, which he blamed on the federal government. But look, if this were a federal government requirement, then it would have happened in every state.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What did you say to this? The apps, they were absolutely required viewing. And I think that points to two things. I think it points to the earlier part of our”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right, and let's, I know you don't want to put things on a continuum. I'm going to put things on a continuum. Go ahead. That came later. And there's nothing about DeSantis's current stance on the vaccines that I think is defendable. I think it's morally reprehensible. So let's be clear.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was kind of. But she turns out to be. And so if you read, not only a little wacky, the whole thing turns out to be made up. And by the way, the press was all over that celebrating her glowing articles everywhere without ever, and this is ever looking at some of the facts underneath them. Should we really be celebrating this person? And so there was such an effort to get DeSantis early on. What about his surgeon general? Then that contributes to some of his crazy.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure that's fair. So I think that the risk of dying from COVID goes up so dramatically when you're over 65 and over 80. What does taking care of your elderly mean? DeSantis moved aggressively to try to protect people in nursing homes in a way that, by the way, New York, by the way, New York did not. I think it remains an open question about COVID and protecting the elderly, what you can actually do. Because look, we all know people who lock down, who stayed home, who didn't do anything, who still got it. So if you're elderly and you're going to get it and then you're probably going to die from it because you're elderly, to then blame the governor of a state with a lot of elderly for not being able to save. I'm not sure about that. All right. I blamed DeSantis for a lot and for how crazy he's become. I'm probably more pro his original strategy than you are.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your own Justin Fox did an analysis of the deaths coming out of Florida and California. And when you adjust it for age, which you have to because COVID kills the elderly, the numbers aren't that different.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But safer. And by the way, some of the terrible things that happened in the pandemic came from keeping people cooped up in their houses, elderly people who didn't get out for years whose dementia exacerbated. So you have to weigh, if you're a leader, you have to weigh some of these things against each other. Safer to be outside? Yes. Worth it to get people outdoors, exercising, being able to see other human beings. Yeah, maybe. I'm a little less opposed to that aspect of DeSantis than you are.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not sure the extent to which that was a super spreader event. I also think that some of what DeSantis insisted on early in the pandemic, which was that the evidence shows that it's safer outside and that it's safe to have the beaches open, he was right. And the people criticizing him were wrong. Safer, not safer.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source