 find journalists in science, science writers, better generally in terms of their objectivity than kind of journalism out there that we're critical of? I think science journalism in general is better than the regular journalism, which often has so much to do with politics. But now we're seeing politics and science converge so much. It's almost hard to separate them anymore. The trouble with some science journalism is that it's very hard to telecompelling story when you're talking about science and lab work and really abstract concepts that are hard to understand if you're not trained. So I think that's something Leap's Mag is really good at and that's something we've built up as a capacity is making science and stories about science more engaging and accessible to a big audience. So there's always been an aspect of science that's been political. You mentioned stem cells, which is the obvious one under the Bush administration. And they also did a horrible study about life extension where they came out. Leon Cass, I think was the author of that one, against life extension. I hate Leon Cass. He's one of my all time. He was the inspiration for the villain in my first book. Oh good. I hate that guy. And he's still around and he still writes and he's still as evil as he was back then. And then, of course, climate change was politicized. But it seems, it feels right now that everything is politicized, that everything around us is particularly in science, particularly in COVID, but it's beyond COVID. It's like everything that people talk about feels like it has some political angle. What do you think brought that about? Why is it much worse now than it was 20 years ago? That's a really hard question to answer. I don't know if I have any particular expertise on how to answer that, but just as like a personal reflection on the question, I think probably the fact that our leadership has been so abhorrent in recent years that we fail as a country in many ways and disrespect of people's rights in so many ways that I think everything now comes down to either you're with us or you're against us because we can no longer afford to ignore politics as much as I wish we could. Yeah, it's become so tribal. And of course, yes, you get these pressure groups and everybody's fighting over this pie that the government's divvying up and it becomes us versus them about everything, including science. So let's talk about COVID and what's going on right now. So let's start with what your thoughts on how the media has covered this from the beginning and whether you think they've done a good job, a bad job and in what respect? I mean, the media is so broad. It's hard in a way to comment on just like that. One thing is it's so disparate and there's so many voices in platforms amplifying different types of stories. But I think some of the media was way ahead of the COVID crisis. The science outlets in particular that I follow every day were way ahead of all of this. I mean, in a way, I wish that the science writers and editors were the ones advising the government because they had it on their radar like January 1 that this was happening. Whereas maybe the rest of the media like the normal media wasn't as in on it. But for people in science media, this was like not a surprise at all. By the time this all happened like in March, we'd all been reporting. I had stories on coronavirus in January too. So I had actually interviewed a mesh at the end of February on this. No, at the beginning of February on this, the beginning of February. People were already talking about what was going on in China and it was a story. Yeah, it was a story that was far away. And I think the fact that we didn't quote see it coming and let it go on and on like undetected for so long is a true travesty of our leadership. But as far as the media, the media did some real damage earlier on because a lot of the earlier stories were about how this is just the flu and like everybody's panicking and don't panic and all that, which, you know, looking back on it, I'm sure they were well intentioned, but it really was very different still is very different and is really disingenuous to make it sound like the same thing. And so that was really bad and turned a lot of people off. And the right wing media especially is guilty of that like truly downplayed it taking the line from Trump that it's all going to go away and like all these silly things as a hoax like there's actually a study done comparing the viewership of Hannity and Tucker Carlson. And Hannity was like one of the worst offenders basically saying like this is nothing. Carlson actually took it really seriously and like warn people about their behavior and the way that this was happening really fast. The study looked at where their viewerships were and kind of correlated to what what these hosts were saying at the time, turned out that Hannity's viewership died at a higher rate than Carlson's viewership. Because they ignored the whole thing and didn't take any like precautions. So I think in that way the right wing media is like really corrupt. Yeah. And to what extent do you think though that the left wing media, if we can call them that CNN and the others were panicking people about it and made this out to be worse than what it actually is? It's hard for me to say that they were panicking and made it worse because you know you're looking back on the time and trying to do Monday morning quarterbacking. At the time we thought the death rate was three and a half percent. So of course the media is going to freak out when those statistics come to light by the WHO and other organizations and then people are going to say okay this is really really bad now we know it's you know way way less than that. But at the time I don't necessarily think that they were like clearly doing anything wrong by by making people alarmed about it. Yeah I think I mean to Amish's credit the first time I had him on he said he thought he was going to land up being about 0.6 and it's amazing because it's it's probably about 0.6 now. Yeah I mean I think the epidemiologists this is the thing about all this they understand this stuff they know this stuff and they had it pretty much right from the beginning it's just that nobody seemed to listen to them and there was this hysteria on the one hand and oh it's nonsense on the other hand and then everybody got into those tribes and you couldn't budge them you couldn't budge them from that. So what we need today what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect not by feelings wishes whims or mystic revelations any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. 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