 So let's examine how well some of their predictions about Sweden held up. And one kind of the premier example really is this Imperial College of London model, which that was the Neil Ferguson's operation that project. These were the projections that policymakers around the world were using to determine what kind of policy to implement. And what they predicted for Sweden, I just pulled some of the numbers from their projections. And again, as always, our sources are linked in the description of the video and at reason.com. But in green here, these are, this is their range of predictions if Sweden social distance the whole population using a lockdown strategy, the total deaths they project are between about 30,000 and 42,000. In red, this is the unmitigated strategy. This is, you know, Sweden doesn't do lockdowns, which is the policy they pursued. They're projecting between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths in Sweden. The reality here I pulled from the WHO's COVID-19 dashboard. By the way, this projection was for July 1st. So deaths by July 1st, 2020, deaths by July 2nd, 2020 were 14,633. So about half of the projection with a mitigation strategy. And then, you know, the total death rate was, you know, I think not even 30,000 at the end of day from COVID-19. Continuing through, like putting Sweden in the context of other countries, this is from your policy paper, a slide that I pulled you on. We see Sweden's COVID death rate is pretty much in the middle of the pack when you take all of Europe and the US into account with 2,322 deaths per million. And then this was the really striking one. You'll see Sweden at the very bottom of this chart, because Sweden's excess death rate during the pandemic was the lowest in Europe. What do we take from this fact right here? Do we have any theories as to why Sweden actually had fewer excess deaths than the rest of the continent? Yeah, this is a shocker that those numbers and it tells you, first of all, I think that don't put too much trust in models like that because they can't really make a serious forecast because it was all based on just two options. Shutting down societies or just business as usual and everybody lives exactly like they did before the pandemic, they didn't have room for people actually on a voluntary basis, doing things like working from home, trying to avoid public transportation if they could and so on. So that's obviously a major factor behind this data. And then when it comes to total excess deaths over the three pandemic years compared to the three previous years, the fact that Sweden actually had the lowest accrued excess death rate in Europe and less than half of America's, that comes as a surprise to most people. And let me just say that you can adjust those numbers in different ways according to the years to compare it to age structure, health structure in the population. According to some ways of doing this, Denmark beats us to first place, but we're almost the lowest excess death rates, much lower than countries like Finland, for example, who seem to be doing better during the pandemic. And that tells you that it's not necessarily this dramatic trade off between liberty and health. I do think one other thing that we should throw in there, because Zach and I were doing some research on this in preparing for this. But the median age, given that we know that COVID is especially higher mortality for the elderly versus the young, one thing we are interested in is, okay, could one explanation be that countries with higher excess mortality rates just had really, really old populations? And countries that were more successful are just young, healthy, spry. But in reality, I mean, the median age in a lot of parts of Scandinavia, Sweden included, and the United States, it's all roughly comparable. And so that's not a variable that is significantly different to some degree. You know, I think US median age is something like 38, and I believe it's the same in Sweden, maybe like 39. So that is commonality that I think it's important, like to some degree, we have sort of controlled for that variable in assessing this. I do want to ask, though, so explain more of the political culture and some of the characteristics of Sweden that led to, you know, this really, really high success. Like to some degree, I almost want to try to learn from this voluntary model. It does also seem, although I like your analysis, which is blame Italy a little bit for the spread of the coronavirus in Sweden, which I'm totally on board with blaming Italians as much as possible. There is an interesting thing that, you know, we should talk about, which is that the virus came to Stockholm very, very early on. And so tell me about that experience where coronavirus was coursing through Sweden. But to some degree, maybe that led to greater herd immunity earlier on before the vaccine was developed. Could you explain that to us? Yeah, that's right. We got it early February and full disclosure, I was on a flight from Austria that week, as well as family vacation. And I got a call from a doctor at one hospital who asked me, so were you on that plane in this seat? Yes, I was. Okay, in that case, you'd better check your health because I apparently sat next to someone who had the virus. So it appeared, I didn't get it at that moment in time, but many people did that early on. And I think it had two effects. Yes, probably more people were affected at an early stage and obviously that can help later on to create some sort of immunity against it. But also that it seemed like it was already too late to do anything about it. The virus was already here where some other countries like Norway and Denmark thought that, okay, it might be heading our way. But let's just shut everything down for a month or so. And that's why it seemed like Sweden was doing so much worse early on than others. And then there are other aspects of Swedish political culture if you want me to go into that. I think we do want to go into that. And I've got a good, there was another clip of Anders Tenjell that I think will broach that topic because Liz and I were watching this and it just struck us sort of, he's talking about herd immunity, which we just discussed a little bit, and his tone in discussing Sweden's policy approach, his humility was kind of interesting and a contrast to what we often experience here. So let's run that other Tenjell clip, Adam. Can you regard a situation in which your country has, getting on for 30,000 infections of COVID-19 in the population, has a death toll which is significantly higher than your neighbors standing at around three and a half thousand. Can you regard that as success or do you have to acknowledge that in some ways your strategy failed? Yeah, no, that's true. When it comes to the death toll, this didn't work out the way we hoped it. On the other hand, I mean the connection between our basic strategy in slowing down the spread. If that's really in the long run will affect the total death toll in the society or not, that is not clear yet. I mean we know that our neighboring countries by now have around one percent of the population who had some kind of immunity has had disease. We have at least 10, maybe 20 times higher level of immunity in the population. You're inviting me there to consider the long term significance of this notion, this concept of herd immunity. Now your own government says that the strategy that you implemented, the more moderate, the less strict emergency response to COVID-19 was not about establishing herd immunity. But you seem to be suggesting that actually it is about getting to that point where so many people in the general population have had COVID-19 and therefore we can assume have some resistance to getting it again that you have this concept of herd immunity in your population. Was that the working strategy or not? No, it was not. I'm just pointing out one way that shows that you cannot make this kind of easy comparisons at this stage because the epidemic has hit different countries in many different ways. So this strikes me as pretty humble, pretty measured and like he's actually being honest with people and allowing them to assess what they think of this strategy on their own given the data as well as being pretty clear about the timeframes that we're measuring. This is a stark contrast to what we've seen from Anthony Fauci in the United States. Explain these deeper differences in political culture and how this leads to trust or distrust in institutions. This is very interesting because I think that here Sweden is the outlier and it's partly a result of the kind of division of powers that exist in government in Sweden. So a person like Tengel and the public health authority in Sweden is not as politicized as they are in other places. It's not like the president appoints his sort of top health expert and then he's supposed to sort of be almost a politician having an agenda and defending it, whatever happens to date and whatever happens to the world. Those health authorities, other government agencies in Sweden are supposed for hundreds of years to be fairly independent. Now that's not always a good thing, but it might be in certain instances because it often means that they don't have to play politics. So the boss of an agency is appointed by the government, but on a longer mandate he's not replaced when there's a new government in town, a new prime minister, which means that they're supposed to be less about a political agenda, more about following the law and following the data wherever it goes. And this means that Tengel doesn't have to defend any particular ideology or a political program or anything like that. He tells you what he thinks the reading of the science is. And then the government is of course free to follow that advice or reject it, but by tradition they usually come pretty close. And my suspicion is that one reason is that if everything fails, they can blame Tengel for it, whereas that would be much more difficult in a system where they directly, they're part of the government. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Johan Norberg about Sweden's pandemic policies. You can watch the full conversation right here or another clip from that conversation right over here.