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

“wants to sue the vaccine manufacturers. It's a disgusting example of how the desire to win at politics can take on a life of its own and overcome common sense.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. But DeSantis obviously was the most prominent person who came out against lockdowns and Cuomo was very pro locking down. And so we thought it would set an interesting contrast. And when we started the book, we didn't know what the answer would be and whose answer would turn out to be right. And as it turns out, it's pretty murky, actually, who was right. But there's also the course of the book too, because I actually admired DeSantis for his stance early on in the pandemic. I think he did follow the science and I think he did do the work himself and I think it was not political. And then as he began to mount his presidential run, he became increasingly political and increasingly what I think I like to believe he once would have not liked these things done solely for the purpose of politics rather than things done because they're right. And he pushed the vaccines early on. And then he became the governor who”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because their policies were so different in the pandemic, although they actually personality wise they might be more alike than they are different.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps could have made it better. I still think the United States outcomes would have been terrible. And I think we need to look at these underlying conditions in order to have a chance of making it better the next time around. And so I think it's not only magical thinking, it's dangerous thinking to just say, oh, it's just all about Trump. Because then you miss the real problems.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm not to be clear, I'm not defending Trump. I think his failure of leadership was massive. And even if you are a Trump supporter and you hate Fauci, then you have to look at that and say, well, then why did Trump allow Fauci to attain the preeminence he did? Because Trump didn't want to take responsibility. It's terrible across the board. So I'm not. But at the very same time, it's possible to both believe that and to also believe what I do strongly, which is that it's magical thinking to say, oh, if only we had had a different president, everything would have been great.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, but this is going to make you mad. But I think a point that's in the introduction that I think is important is that I think it's magical thinking to believe that the course of the pandemic would have been radically different had we had a different president in the White House. And all you need to do to see that is to see that more people died in the first year of the Biden administration than they did under Trump. So I don't think it would have been that easy for any president. And I think a lot of that are these pre-existing conditions that we're talking about, not just that the virus hit people with pre-existing conditions particularly hard, but it hit a country, the United States, with pre-existing weaknesses very hard in a way that would have been difficult for any president to snap his or her fingers and fix those.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm going to protest that a little bit. I think for one thing that a lot of very competent people did start off in the Trump administration. They just didn't last, but they did start whose fault is that? Right. I think there were competent people in the Trump administration, even when the pandemic hit. Like Alex Azar, I think they just were fighting so many battles on so many fronts and there was so much internecine warfare that it made it difficult for competence to rise to the top. And I think it's...”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went with it, then that became de facto truth. And so it was such that that's why you saw a volume of leaks in the Trump administration that, man, isn't it striking to you to look at the contrast between the Obama administration and now the Biden administration on the number of leaks? Very, very few. And the ones that come out of the Biden administration are clearly orchestrated.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's kind of a loony. And so he wasn't taken seriously on the thing that he should have been taken seriously on. It's a little bit, it's a version of the boy who cried wolf. And so you had that broadly speaking throughout the administration where you had Bob Cadillac, for instance, coming up with his plan to distribute masks to every American household, but he too had lost credibility within the administration. So his plan to distribute masks went nowhere. The Trump administration was very atomized. And so you had these loyalties that existed and that dictated what could get done and who would be listened to in a way that is far more extreme than a normal administration and a lot of undermining of political rivals and leaking in an attempt to establish one superiority over one's rivals and because Trump was known as a president who, what was said in the press made it true, if you could get a story that was about a rival that was leaked to the press and the press”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there's this great quote in the book that the battle in the Trump administration was between those who wanted to do everything and those who wanted to do nothing. And unfortunately in Navarro is the best example of this. Sometimes those who wanted to do everything had lost credibility for other reasons. And so Navarro had become known as kind of...”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's another example of, to me, a failure of leadership and a failure of government to articulate why exactly are we doing this and what's the end game. And if you had done that, I don't think there would have been the same resistance to lockdowns that there was if it had been articulated what the endgame was.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once this virus was broadly seeded, it was transit, it's a highly infectious respiratory disease. And so what has always irritated me about the lockdown mantra is what's the end game? Is the endgame minimizing the strain on hospitals? Okay, then let's do that until hospitals aren't strained. Is the endgame getting eradicating COVID? Not going to happen. Not going to happen. And guess what? As soon as you lift the lockdown, COVID comes back. Look at what happened in China.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's hard to know what the numbers were on infections because so many kids who got COVID were asymptomatic. I think you can look at the deaths, which are vanishingly small for people under 20. And so that's the key measure, that this was not influenza, which again, back to your point about unforest errors, it is very hard to be prepared for a pandemic because every pandemic is different. And so if you followed an influenza playbook, you would have done things that didn't make sense in COVID. So it's just really hard. you have to maintain a degree of flexibility and a degree to see what's happening and react to what's actually happening. I happen to believe the Red Dawn Grub's emphasis on lockdowns that if only we had lockdowns sooner, there's some truth to that. If we had locked down before the virus got here, maybe we could have prevented it from ever coming. But honestly, if there was no will, and if the rest of the world didn't lock down, then at some point, what are you going to do? I mean,”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the kids who dropped out now somehow come back. And the kids who lost their path in life. And I think it's just devastating.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But these are the privileged kids you're talking about, the ones with parents who could homeschool them or who had a parent at home so that they could at least have supervision while they did. With computers in high-speed while they did Zoom schooling, it's the least privileged kids in our society, the very ones that we're supposed to protect who got the most screwed by this, the ones whose parents were essential workers and had to go to school and had to leave the kids at home to try to manage on Zoom. The many inner city kids without access to high speed internet and without a computer to do Zoom schools. I mean, the numbers are shocking and school districts like New York and Chicago and LA the percentage of absenteeism, the kids who just dropped out, the test score showing how far behind kids are, you can argue kids are going to catch up. They're resilient. Maybe. Really? And that's a very tough proposition.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody did, but very, very few of vanishingly small number of healthy young people got sick from COVID. And as I said, the spread in schools was lower than in the communities. That's why other places in Europe, for example, open their schools. And I think the fact that we kept our schools closed has probably done more damage than just about anything in the pandemic because you've lost a generation of young people who have lost their hopes for life.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest reason, and this is not a scientific answer, it's a practical answer. The biggest difference is that influenza schools are super spreading zones. With the coronavirus, they are not. In fact, it's been documented over and over again that the spread in schools is lower than that in the community. And so that playbook became, I think, part of the excuse for keeping schools closed in the United States in a way that did not happen in other countries.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think critical is too strong a word. I think the idea that the influenza playbook would work with COVID is it was flawed and I think it did a lot of damage when it came to it. Explain why.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. You didn't have to oversell it. But there was this belief that we wanted to get to hurt immunity, so you had to encourage everybody to take the vaccine. And so overselling it and say you saying people wouldn't get it. It was wishful thinking in the most generous of interpretations. It was wishful thinking. But I think it did damage.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was more than a decade in the works. But the clinical trials that proved the efficacy of the original vaccines did not measure whether or not they affected transmission. And so when public health officials went out there and said, if you take this vaccine, you can't pass this on, you won't transmit. This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. It was wrong. And so when you oversell to people based on something you don't know that you just hope is true, and then it turns out that's not true, you cause a lack of trust that then broadly undermines everything else you're saying. So again, another unforced error on the part of the government. They could have sold the vaccines as doing what they did miraculously well. They protect you against severe outcomes. They protect most of us against hospitalization and death. Isn't that phenomenal instead of saying you won't get this if you take this vaccine?”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think though the government has shot itself in the foot once again in one of the other themes in our book is this loss of trust, broadly speaking, that had been taking place before the pandemic happened, of course, but the pandemic really exacerbated it. And I think the government, public health officials did not do themselves any favors by overselling the vaccines. The original vaccines miracle, basically a miracle.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one of the things we chronicle in the book that I found interesting is that the anti-vax sentiment did start under Democrats when they were the Trump vaccines. And so you had Democrats like Cuomo saying, I don't know about these things. They're being rushed by Trump. And you had a lot of skepticism about the vaccines being generated by Democrats before the vaccines were even produced. And then once they were produced and once the Biden administration started pushing them, it's as if as soon as Biden said that these vaccines are good, the anti-vaccine sentiment shifted to the right because heaven forbid that Biden was saying and Democrats were saying something was good, then it had to be bad. And it just, it really is just profoundly depressing and upsetting.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's fascinating, right? Because there is no way that in any kind of logical world, your beliefs about how you respond to a pandemic should have nothing to do with your political beliefs. In other words, it should be possible to be anti-lockdowns. It could even be possible to be anti-masking and to be a strident Democrat. And yet we conflated everything and it became that if you were a good Democrat, then you believed in masking and lockdowns. And if you were a good Republican, then you did not believe in any of this. And it's an insane example of how we're searching for polarization and we're searching for ways to turn against each other instead of ways to learn from each other and respect each other.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why they protect people in hospitals. They're not taking them on and off and using dirty hands and removing them to take a bite of something. And so to extrapolate from whether or not masks work in a hospital setting to whether or not they work in a population at large, you can't. It's two different things.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even as the pandemic wore on the communication about masking was not great, there was this for a long time we all believed that those terrible little paper and cloth masks that people wore protected us, and they don't, not really a better mask protects you more, and it wasn't until a long time into the pandemic that everybody was finally clear. Yeah, if you really want to protect yourself, wear a KN95. And if you really, really need to protect yourself, wear an N95. These little paper masks that we wear and we take them on and off and we don't do what people in hospitals do, doctors and nurses where you take them off with clean hands in a clean room and put them on. That's why I brought.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there was a lack of recognition early on, a lack of knowledge, I won't call it recognition, because I don't think it was there to be known about how the virus actually spread. So I think that's part of it. I think Fauci has explained his initial comment about against masking as an attempt to preserve PPE for doctors and nurses. But I do also think...”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ref Right, and you just hope that there's a lesson taken from that. And again, it's something that we just don't do well because I think we have this blind belief in the market and that the market forces are going to take care of issues like this without the recognition that there are a couple things that can go wrong in modern day capitalism, that the focus on profits, pleasing shareholders, and on profits that can be sustainable means that the response in a pandemic isn't going to be what you think. And then because of this need to minimize costs in order to boost profits, this ongoing pressure for outsourcing of all sorts of critical infrastructure that then makes it really difficult when you actually need something when the rest of the world needs it too.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a very good way of putting it. And I think there was also a failure to realize that things that we had put in place then made it difficult to roll out testing. So once an emergency was declared, then the FDA has to approve tests. It's put in place so that you don't have shoddy test manufacturers running around selling tests that don't actually work. But when you need to get tests out the door quickly, these things that are put in place to protect people can backfire.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While that may seem like a failure, I'm not really sure that could have been done any differently. I think the bigger problem was the ongoing use of lockdowns without a clearly defined endpoint and without a clearly defined, what are we doing this floor?”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ongoing need for sustainable earnings such that if you do rush to develop tests and you sell them, but then demand goes away in two years, you don't get rewarded for that. And so I think a lot about where I thought a lot in the process of writing this book about where capitalism works and where it doesn't work. I'm a little more nuanced than maybe the book conveys about whether lockdowns could have been done any more swiftly or the extent to which they should have been done. And I think the book conveys that second point very, very well. I'm not sure if you had told Americans in February, in January, we need to stay at home. Nobody would have listened to you. Nobody would have believed you. Lockdowns can only be effective if you lockdown before the virus is widely seated, right? That's the only way it works. But yet locking down before people know that the virus is, how do you possibly pull that off, especially in a country like the United States?”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the CDC has a culture that is arrogant and perfectionist and believes that they should be in charge. But even more broadly than that, even if the CDC test had worked, that should never have been the sun and moon and stars upon which America's testing strategy hung, because we needed tests to be broadly available everywhere. And I think there's an intersection of interesting things there that we turn to the private market in a situation like this. And so part of one of the deeper themes of the book to me is when the private market works and when it doesn't. And we turned the private market in a situation like this and say, well, aren't companies going to manufacture tests because they can sell them without any awareness of a couple of factors, which are the times in the past where companies have rushed to manufacture test only to have demand not materialized, and then they have to explain to their shareholders, oh, we invested all this money in this and it didn't actually happen. And then in modern-day capitalism,”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think testing is atop the list of the things that were mishandled. And there was the CDC took control of the test and could not design a test that worked.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and the doctor and Wuhan, who was on the front lines of this, alerted her superiors in, I think, late December that she thought human to human transmission was happening. And so you think about that and how the whole course of the pandemic would have been different if that knowledge had been out there from the very beginning.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think China, I don't think there's much question now that China understood what was happening and did not want to let the rest of the world know. And it's really frightening because the whole system relies on countries being honest when they've discovered something so that the rest of the world has a chance of protecting itself. But particularly, I think the part that was the most devastating to me was the idea that China had a pretty good idea from the beginning that there was human to human transmission taking place. And even the WHO, because China told them it wasn't happening or there wasn't evidence. And so it took us much longer than it was necessary to understand that human-to-human transmission was happening.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private citizens doing their jobs. But that whole list is all public officials, and I think some part of it is just a failure of leadership, a failure of anybody to really want to be accountable and to say the buck stops here in the way that General Perna actually did during Operation Warp speed. And it's why I love the story of Operation Warp Speed so much because I think it stands as a contrast to so much that happened elsewhere. It is an example of competence. It's an example of people saying the buck stops here, this is it, this is me. I'm the one responsible for this and I'm going to make it happen. And when you look at so many other people, it wasn't that. It was deferral of responsibility, pushing things off on other people, or a failure to putting out their rules and then a failure to live by them yourself.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think anybody intended to do a bad job. And people were placed into a difficult situation. It was hard when you look back at the terrible beginning of this in January and February of 2020. If anybody had told you about it,”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was fascinating and this was highlighted or first written about in a really good New Yorker piece about what San Francisco was doing and why its numbers were so low. And the idea was you can't just lock down and leave the most offenseless parts of our population defend for themselves under a lockdown, meaning essential workers who still have to go out and do their jobs and then potentially bring the illness home to their communities. And because San Francisco had this infrastructure that was put in place, they knew how to reach all these marginalized populations. And because they knew how to reach them all, they were able to keep them healthier. And I think what that pointed at to us was lockdowns were in many ways both an example of inequality and of furtherance of it and that the very people who could lock down were the well off.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also excess death captures things other than death from COVID too, and the deaths of despair in this country and the deaths from opioid overdoses and lack of access to healthcare for other conditions, not COVID, are some portion of that too. We are a sicker country.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were. The economist has done a very good log of keeping track of excess deaths. And I think a couple of things account for that. I think our two-tiered healthcare system, and I think some of what happened in COVID was that coming home to roost in the sense that COVID preyed upon people with pre-existing health conditions and pre-existing health conditions are in some ways a byproduct of a healthcare system that doesn't take care of a lot of people. You mentioned”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the only counterpoint and it's so difficult you can't go back and hit rewind and see how things could play out differently. The only counterpoint to that is that a different president might have been all over Warp Speed from the beginning and might have made it very difficult for Warp Speed to function because politics might have been injected in it. And Trump, because he was so hands off, actually allowed warp speed to be run by Monsef Slowy and General Perna. And that it worked. And so.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's more nuanced than that. I think Trump did support warp speed, but somebody who was close to it said to me that warp speed could never have succeeded in any administration but under Trump, precisely because Trump was so hands off.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We used to be, and we exist from day to day, driven by politics and polarization, and it makes it very difficult to have anything that involves the long term. And I think that's broadly true, not just about pandemics, but we saw that come home to roost in the pandemic.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think because it is beyond the human capacity to imagine that these things could actually happen. And I was thinking about this because I've said in the context of business disasters in the past that the old lesson from kindergarten, use your imagination, is one of the most important lessons you can possibly learn because if anybody ever says to you, oh, that can't happen. Well, actually, it can. And just look at the last couple of decades for instruction into this idea that, yeah, it can happen. And so I think we all have a failure to use our imagination. And I think we're not good in this country at any kind of long term, anything. And so we...”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I think lots of institutions did fail, and I think there are multiple reasons for that. I think one part of it is that pandemics had largely bypassed the U.S. in the past, and we just simply weren't thinking that way. But I think a lot of our structures were also breaking even before the pandemic hit, such as our healthcare system, such as the way inequality has taken a toll on people's health and left people with pre-existing conditions that made them more vulnerable, and then made us all more vulnerable. And I think before the pandemic, you could say that's them and this is us. And the pandemic made you realize there's this great, great quote from Lyndon Johnson when he enacted Medicare and Medicaid, and it was basically the health of our country is everything, because without a healthy population, what can we hope to achieve? And I'm butchering it a little bit. But that's the idea that if we aren't all healthy, we don't all have access to health, then what can we do?”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and no, I think the book probably does convey that, but then I think there are people that very much have their act together. I happen to think, and the book, I think, expresses that Operation Warp Speed is a tremendous success and a tremendous act of competence.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had some loose ideas that ended up becoming part of the book, but I'd be lying if I said that it all hung together from moment one. I mean, I was passionately interested in the spring of 2020 in the healthcare system and the effect of private equity in healthcare. I was interested in the Federal Reserve and how we thought about the Fed's response. And we were both interested in globalization and supply chains and what that had done to PPE. So we had these loose ideas as to how they were going to come together into a coherent book, which I hope we've produced. No. Oh, no.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disaster porn, right? I don't know. I swear I'm a happy person. Maybe this is my way of unleashing my inner demons. No, seriously, I always think when something goes wrong, there's always a story about how and why it went wrong. And it's a story that is so much more than numbers. It's people. It's history. It's predilections. It's all these things. And I think trying to figure out what that mix is and what has happened is just a fascinating puzzle.”
2023-10-20 · Masters in Business · Bethany McLean on the Pandemic's Big Fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source