Epidemics and Other Delusions | Dr. Steve Templeton | EP 366

It wasn't just safety or keeping kids safe. It was the appearance of it. You know, people can remain ignorant about what their real risks are and still have a lot of control over these things just in the name of safety, but not real safety—just an illusion of it.

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Hello everyone. I'm speaking today with Steve Templeton. He wrote a recent book very relevant to the times entitled "Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germaphobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe."

Yeah, well it seems to me that a safety culture, all things considered, probably makes us globally less safe. But that seems particularly the case in relation, let's say, to germaphobic safety culture given what happened in the pandemic. So what specifically motivated you to write this book? When did you start writing it? What did you see happening?

Yeah, so first of all, thank you for having me on your show, on your podcast. I'm very grateful to be here. I've been a fan since "12 Rules for Life," so thanks so much for having me on. But you know, what originally happened was just like anyone else, the pandemic took me by shock, to surprise. I didn't anticipate how we would respond to the pandemic, and I didn't anticipate the appetite of people for being able to have their lives completely shut down and controlled by politicians and other public health experts.

So I was really floored by the type of response and the way that people were behaving, and it made me think, you know, they don't really have an idea of their microbial environment. You're seeing things like people wearing masks outside, you're seeing playgrounds being shut down, hiking trails—things like that. There was absolutely no evidence that there'd be any sort of risk to those activities, and I was really floored by how widespread that was.

I mean, people really bought into it. You know, I saw a single child at a playground that was shut down. I mean, this was probably a teenager, and someone came up and berated him for being on a playground by himself after it had been shut down. So this type of behavior was really eye-opening for me; it was something that I didn't expect. I really started to think, why is this happening? I know as an immunologist, there are going to be pandemics. This one particularly seemed to be age-stratified in terms of mortality; children weren't really affected. These were all things that we knew very early on, and I was really surprised by that response.

I started thinking about how to explain it in a way that I could understand, so I've kind of been interested in writing a book, and this theme sort of kept popping into my head of, you know, all these things that weren't necessarily controversial three years ago then all of a sudden became controversial. And so that was kind of the impetus for writing the book.

Well, it's interesting because your training is in immunology, but what you're describing here is the fact that you're actually struck by the social and political response—psychological, social, and political response. So I've got a couple of questions about that.

The first is, psychologists have started to outline, and I don't know if this is research that overlaps with what you study, the operations of what's called the behavioral immune system. And I suppose part of the behavioral immune system is the disgust response, right? It has a physiological basis. The gag reflex, for example, is part of that—the fact that poisons taste bitter to us, the fact that we sneeze; the fact that disgust will evoke a defensive and avoidance reaction; the fact that we'll regard things as contaminated—those are all parts of the behavioral immune response.

And one way of conceptualizing what happened with regard to the pandemic was that it was an—you can get an immune response that goes out of control, like a cytokine storm, but this looked to me like it was the equivalent of a cytokine storm on the behavioral immune front. And what do you think of that line of theorizing? Does that strike you as plausible?

Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, I've written about the connection—or at least the metaphor—of an immune response to our own pandemic response because in an immune response, things start out pretty non-specific at first. You have a lot of inflammation; you have a lot of tissue damage. But then, as it progresses, you get more of a specific or an adaptive response, and that is more, you know, antibody cells that are more specific to any given pathogen. And there's a lot less collateral damage because of that specificity.

And so you would hope that a pandemic response would be like that. I mean, obviously, in the first few weeks, you're not going to know what you're dealing with. But as the pandemic spread through different populations, you got to see who the vulnerable people were, who wasn't affected, how transmissible it was—which was very highly transmissible—and you would hope the pandemic response would kind of look like that, like an immune response that was successful in defeating a pathogen.

But I thought it became more like an autoimmune response where we started attacking things that didn't matter, like schools, and issuing mandates without evidence that they were really going to make a difference. And so I've used that metaphor before in terms of the behavioral immune response. I think it's a really interesting thing, and I've thought about it and written about it as well because obviously, if you're thinking about the fear of this as being an immunologist, I had to delve into some psychology, which is another reason I'm fascinated to talk to you about this.

But you know, the political sort of tribal conflict that we have here in the United States seems to override some of the studies on disgust because you would think that based on studies, more people who are conservative would tend to be more easily disgusted, and that's been done in studies. And early on in the pandemic, that was very much covered in the press because, you know, Donald Trump is a germaphobe, and everyone wanted to kind of talk about that. Media people covered that a lot. But then it turned out that people who are more conservative tended to reject mandates and coercive public health measures, whereas liberals were more likely to just buy all into all of it and enforce it almost to the level of it being a religion.

And so I think that's really interesting—that the political considerations overrode that research.

Well, so okay, let's walk down that road for a minute. So I did—my lab did some of the research on disgust sensitivity and conservatism, and we looked at it in relationship, for example, to trait conscientiousness because there's some indication that conscientious people are more disgust-sensitive now. And it was striking that, as you pointed out, what you might have predicted to begin with—there's also a fair bit of research—I can't unfortunately remember the researcher's name at the moment, but I had him on my podcast—who's documented quite clearly the relationship between contamination, the prevalence of contaminants, transmissible contaminants, state by state and country by country, and the probability that especially right-wing authoritarian beliefs will arise culturally and individually. And the relationship is quite tight.

But as you said, it looked like it was the left in particular that was gung-ho about the lockdowns, even more so than the conservatives, although they were also complicit. Now, what seems to have emerged recently, there's another line of psychological research that bears on this, and so for 70 years, psychologists denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism. And I'm going to lay that denial at the feet of social psychologists because I believe that they turned a blind eye to left-wing authoritarianism 100% for political reasons, although it might also be because some of them were also left-wing authoritarians.

But there's been a new line of research developed, and there's probably only about 10 studies in total. We did one in 2016 before my research career came to an abrupt end—first of all, establishing that left-wing authoritarianism was identifiable on statistical grounds. But then second, looking at the predictors, we found low verbal intelligence and being female, and having a feminine temperament were solid predictors of left-radical left-wing beliefs combined with the willingness to use compulsion and force to enforce them. But more recently, people have been examining the role played by dark tetrad traits, so Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and sadism—which is a late addition to that horrible triad, let's say—showing I read one study last week showing that the relationship between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism was so strong that they're almost indistinguishable on the measurement front.

And so I wonder if what we saw wasn't so much a disgust reaction of the sort that you would associate with conservatives, but an opportunity for malignant narcissists to use fear to manipulate the population to put themselves in positions of power. And like your book, you make that case, you know, to a fair degree because you concentrate not so much on disgust, but on fear. And then on well, on the machinations that were used by people who manipulated fear to gain notoriety and political power.

In Canada, I'll give you one other example. So in Canada, I know for a fact—because I've been told by the people who were involved, even though they were embarrassed to have been a part of it—that virtually all the COVID lockdown policies were implemented on the basis of opinion polls and then provided with a post-hoc justification with the science. Right? So it was 100% instrumental manipulation. So anyways, that's a set of ideas.

Yeah, I think you can reduce it maybe to instead of left and right, authoritarian versus non-authoritarian. And I think that what you said is correct. I think the level of authoritarianism has changed between the left and the right in recent years, and that's because the amount of relative power has changed. I mean, you know, and I grew up in the '80s and I remember, you know, censorship drives and, you know, music was being attacked and everyone was joking about it because conservatives wanted to censor things. None of that really happens anymore; it's kind of the other way around where people can't joke about certain things, and they have to demonstrate how virtuous they are in sort of a left-wing kind of way.

So I think that you can reduce it to changes in authoritarianism, definitely.

Yeah, well, it's still uncertain the degree to which, let's say, we could make the hypothesis that over-sensitivity to disgust will drive an authoritarian response on the right. You definitely saw that in the Third Reich under the Nazis because, for example, Hitler appeared to be extremely disgust-sensitive, and I read a fair bit of his spontaneous utterances about the Jews and all the other people he persecuted. He used the language of purity and contempt and disgust constantly. It wasn't the language of fear. I mean, he did foster fear, let's say, in relationship to the people he targeted, but more specifically, he fostered disgust.

And so maybe—and no one knows if this is the case—maybe a disgust reaction that goes overboard fosters at least part of right-wing authoritarianism, and the dark tetrad psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism fosters something like radical left-wing authoritarianism. No one's cleared that up yet, but it seems at least tentatively plausible. I mean, I was struck by the recent research in particular because the relationship between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism is unbelievably strong. I haven't seen correlations, I think they were 0.6—crazily high correlations for two constructs that can't be measured that accurately.

Well, so it would be good to sort that all out as rapidly as we possibly could, assuming it would do some good.

Yeah, I agree. It's pretty complicated. The use of fear was very—going back to what you said a little bit earlier—was definitely widespread. And I think at the beginning, it's interesting to look at the contrasting messages that were given by the authorities. In the beginning, they really were trying to prevent panic, and they were really trying to lessen the fear of people because studies have shown if you are anticipating a pandemic, it's actually the fear is higher than when it has actually arrived.

So many of the messages were calming, and then all of a sudden there was this switch. And, you know, once there was community spread, we knew that there was a lot of virus around that wasn't being detected, then there was this sort of mysterious switch to basically the exact opposite—the fear-based messaging. And that was really surprising to me, and pretty infuriating because I knew it wasn't going to work.

Yeah, well maybe what happened is that maybe that reversal took place when the more narcissistic, psychopathic power mongers started to understand that they could cement their positions and broaden them with the use of fear. You mentioned earlier—I thought this was very interesting—you mentioned earlier that in an immune response, that is actually healthy, you get kind of flailing about on the part of the immune system to begin with as it attempts to get a purchase on the virus or the bacteria. And so you get an over-generalized response that's not very specific and sophisticated. But as the immune system learns, the response gets more and more targeted, more specific, and that you saw the opposite happen in the public response.

And that begs the question, right? Why? What drove the opposite response? Like the opposite of learning, and the we-want-to-accrue-power-to-ourselves narrative, and we'll use fear to do it does seem to fit the explanatory bill, let's say.

Yeah, that's the million-dollar question—how did that happen? My explanation of thinking about this is, you know, it happened a lot in Western countries—many, many Western countries—but it didn't happen everywhere. What I started to think about was, you know, I'm a parent; I have a child that's 11 and one that's seven. They were obviously three years younger when the pandemic hit. But being a parent, I've really noticed since I was a child this sort of emergence of safety as this sort of overriding virtue of all the—you know, taking risks as being something that's left to reckless people.

You can't even use probability to assess whether something is risky or not. If it's determined to be risky, then it's hazardous. And so I think the distinctions that used to be sort of surrounding child-rearing have—in terms of allowing them to develop on their own and take risks and, you know, get injured if they make a mistake or, you know, fail—a lot of that has been removed.

And I feel like this sort of example really leads us to the response to the pandemic. I feel like it's a cultural problem because if you look at places that don't have this very strong safety culture, Nordic countries are a great example—they did not have the same type of authoritarian response that we did in Europe and other Western countries, specifically, you know, Anglo-sphere countries—Canada, the United States, UK, Australia, New Zealand. They didn't have that, and they actually don't have a safety culture that's the same.

I mean, I heard a story when I was in Denmark a few years ago, and it had been covered widely at the time about parents that went to New York City. These were Danish parents; they brought their child in a stroller. And in Denmark, it was very common at the time to leave their child in a stroller outside the restaurant so that they could watch people passing by. And they got arrested for doing that in New York City.

And so, that was something brought up by my host in Denmark; it was really interesting that their view of raising children is different than ours. They believe much more in challenging them, allowing them to make their own decisions. And so I really think that that explains a lot. And that's how I get to the point of having the safety culture in the title or in the subtitle is because of that explanation.

I mean, anyone who's been a parent has had to deal with public schools. I mean, the threshold for canceling school, even before the pandemic, got pretty low. I mean, they even now predict snow in Indiana; here, they cancel school if it could never actually snow. So these things are much different than when I was a kid. And I feel like that has—as children have been raised that way and are now adults, now young adults—I have a feeling that that is one way to explain what happened.

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Yeah, well, there is some psychological research pertaining to that that's associated with some of the things we've discussed already, which is that mothers who have Cluster B personality pathology—so that would be associated with what's called externalizing behavior in women (it's borderline personality disorder, for example)—are much less likely to foster independence in their children. And so that cluster B is also associated with some of the dark tetrad traits that we discussed: that malignant narcissism, that psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism—perhaps pushing it, but perhaps not—because the question, of course, is why does that safety culture emerge?

And you can attribute some of that to neuroticism, to fear, but you can also attribute it to the willingness of hyperprotective parents to use their purported concern for the security of their children to justify their use of excessive power and control. And this is part of the reason why your book and the title of your book is interesting, and the attack you're taking on this, right? Because you are looking at the nexus between the use of fear and the justification for power and the safety culture.

It's got that virtue-signaling element, right? Which is extremely dangerous. It's like, "Well, listen, dear, the reason I'm doing this for you is because I care so much about you," and all I really care is about your, let's say, short-term security. And it's hard to argue against that because of course safety is a paramount concern—or an important concern—when you're dealing with children. But the problem is that it can be gamed by people who want to exert power and who can use their putative moral superiority as a justification.

And I do think this is a kind of epidemic. I guess a question I would have for you too is, I'm increasingly bothered by the fact that we even refer to a pandemic. You know, Jay Bhattacharya—I think that's his last name—who's a very good statistician and researcher, I mean he was the person who initiated the so-called replication crisis in psychology showing that so much of psychological research actually didn't replicate—not that it's necessarily worse than other disciplines, but he just published a paper or has published papers showing that the case fatality rate for COVID is way lower than we had been led to believe. In fact, it's so low, I think, that you could argue there wasn't a pandemic at all in some real sense, and you see this echoed in the Swedish data because if you—

I believe if you average out the death rate over a two-year period, there's no statistical blip in deaths in Sweden during the so-called COVID years. And so I think our terminology for what happened during that time might also be deeply wrong and that what we had was an epidemic of tyrannical lockdown with a putative novel illness—while the illness was novel, but a putative pandemic as the excuse.

Now, maybe that's too radical, but I'm not sure it is too radical. You know, it certainly was a disease that I think the Israelis recently announced, if I remember correctly, that they didn't have any deaths at all for people under 50 who had fewer than four comorbidities; something like that. And so, do you think it's completely preposterous to proclaim that we didn't have a pandemic at all, except one of tyranny?

Yeah, I would say we had a pandemic. But, you know, the response was something that we really blew and didn't focus on the people who were actually affected. I mean, if you have a population of people who are an average of 81 years old who are dying, that's going to be actually pretty difficult to measure in terms of excess deaths because a lot of people in that age group and with comorbidities, if you have a pandemic that lasts two years, the chances of many of those folks living two years is much lower than it is in populations of, say, young people.

So, the ability to measure that becomes more difficult when you're dealing with an old and/or frail or infirm population.

I think—well, that's especially true, too, if you then purposefully confuse dying with COVID with dying from COVID, which clearly happened, right? I mean, I talked to physicians who said that they were instructed by their professional organizations—they were encouraged by their professional organizations to list any death with COVID as a death from COVID. And God only knows how that gerrymandered the statistics.

And I think it was the London Times—The Times, now—reported two days ago on the fact that all the evidence in the UK suggests that the costs to the lockdown were orders of magnitude above the costs that were actually associated with the biological pathogen itself, right? They're not even in the same league. It's not like the lockdowns were a little worse than the virus; they were stunningly worse than the virus. And we haven't even seen all the accruing catastrophe that's emerged from that yet.

I mean, I don't know what to make of the excess death statistics, for example, that just don't seem to go away. Do you have any thoughts on that matter? Meaning, you know, in the last few years, we have had more excess deaths?

Yeah, well, even right now, the excess deaths in Europe are between 15 and 20 percent, something like that—10 and 20 percent above normal. And that doesn't seem to be going away, right? You know, I think the simplest explanation for that is that we hurt people very badly with the lockdowns.

But then the other open question is, is there some degree to which the actual vaccines are contributing to this? And, you know, that's an absolutely horrifying possibility, but I don't think it's off the table statistically at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, the vaccines were very promising for people who were in that vulnerable age group, but, you know, what happened was politics took over, especially here, and mandates—besides removing all liability from the vaccines themselves—which had been tested minimally and not necessarily on the population you'd want to test them on, that is, older and infirm people—they were minimally tested.

And so, you know, for an emergency, you'd want to focus on the vulnerable population because that would wear the biggest benefit would be obvious. But that didn't happen.

I believe that there was a lot of influence from pharmaceutical companies acting upon government agencies, and their incentives were actually not to promote actual public health of people here in the United States. And I'm sure in the UK and Canada it was exactly the same; there was outside influence. The same is true for, you know, just counting COVID deaths. If you provide an incentive to over-count, if you give hospitals more money for COVID patients, whether they’re—and if they’re on a ventilator or their type of treatment, you’re providing an incentive for those hospitals and health care providers to increase those numbers so that they can increase their profits.

And these are just—it’s just a matter of incentives. Giving people perverse incentives is going to lead to perverse outcomes, and I think that’s exactly what happened.

When you started writing this book, when you started observing what was happening around you, how would you characterize your political stance? Because people who are listening are going to be wondering, and I think it’s a reasonable thing to wonder how your a priori political stance might have formed the lens through which you were viewing what was laying itself out. How would you have characterized your political views, let’s say five years ago, and how would you characterize them now?

I’ve always been a—I've been in academia for a long time. I was in graduate school for a while and here in Indiana for about 12 years. So, being around other scientists, being around other people in universities and medical schools, I was never, you know, the most—I was not a liberal person in relation to my peers in that way.

If you put me in a room of people who are hardcore, you know, Trump supporters, I wouldn't fit in with that group either. So, you know, I haven’t actually voted for someone who’s won an election in a very long time. So if that gives you an idea, I’d probably say I was center-right. But one of the things that this really became associated with anyone who was willing to speak up—there was this fear that you’d be automatically put into this camp of, “Well, you’re doing this for political reasons. You’re doing this because you support Trump” or something like that. And I really encountered that both from friends and acquaintances.

And even people just on social media that I didn’t know, but, you know, that were liberal, they would assume that I was, you know, a hardcore right-wing Trump supporter, and even Trump supporters would assume that, which, you know, when it comes to closing schools, this became so politicized that even wanting hope to open schools became a sign that, you know, you didn’t want to necessarily agree with Trump on something.

And that was really unfortunate. I heard this firsthand from people that I talked to. It’s not something that I anticipated really at all because I’ve lived in a world where a lot of people I know and like disagree with me. My wife and I disagree on a lot of things, and I'm used to that.

But this is kind of the world that we're in now where those kind of disagreements are not allowed, and discussion and debate are shut down.

Yeah, well, the question, I guess one of the questions that we might want to address today is, what do we think we could do to make sure that the next time this happens—assuming there is a next time—we're not quite so insane about it?

And I would say also, what could we learn so that we don't respond the same way to other hypothetical crises that confront us? Because I feel that we could do precisely the same thing. And that there are many people hoping this will happen in some real sense, that we could do exactly the same thing. For example, on the climate doom front, and you know, the more paranoid, conspiratorial types have presumed that this was just a warm-up for that. But I have a certain degree of sympathy for their concerns given what happened.

Now, you start your book out—part one of your book is fear and germs; and one of the things you do to begin with is to lay out a little bit of background for people about the nature of the microbial environment that we do find ourselves in, right? So that you can, I suppose you can give people some sense of how much the relative risk increased because of the introduction of this new pathogen.

Do you want to walk us through that a bit?

Yeah, so I use my oldest sister as an example of a germaphobe because she was a nurse in a cardiac surgical team. And you know, obviously her job was very much involved being very diligent about preventing infections in patients. And so I think that sort of translated into she brought that home and became very diligent about avoiding infections and sanitizing and any sort of exposure to germs she became sort of interested in and obsessed with dealing with.

And so I use her as an example and I talk about how, you know, that way of thinking is not helpful because we’re in—we’re already in a microbial world, and we’re exposed to all sorts of things. We have, you know, at least 10 viruses latently infected in our system in our body at any given time—possibly more. And that’s not counting viruses that infect the bacteria that inhabit us, which are astronomically high numbers.

So I kind of lay out just how much exposure we have to microbes that we don’t realize. And you know, it’s just everywhere in the environment, and it’s not something you can avoid. And then I talk about, you know, although that’s the case, there are definitely instances where we’ve become very clean and our ability to avoid microbial exposures has resulted in some first-world diseases like increased autoimmunity, increased allergy, asthma—those type of things.

These are all first-world diseases. You don’t see them in developing countries nearly the same prevalence that you see here and in Canada, the UK, and other places. So I talk about why that is. And mainly it’s because we’re not exposed to the same level of environmental microbes, even pathogens, that we used to be because of obviously huge gains that we had from the sanitation revolution. We don’t want to go back to that, but something has definitely been lost.

And, you know, I give many examples of that, you know, in terms of pandemics. Polio is an example where polio was endemic for a very long time until sanitation improved to the point where people weren’t being exposed to polio until they were older, and then it became a lot more severe and noticeable in, you know, when you’re talking about older children as opposed to a baby who’s nursing, who just has a mild infection, and their mother breastfeeds and helps them clear the virus.

So, you know, that was an example of a trade-off. And so I wanted to sort of highlight that all of these things were trade-offs, and you know, people have been—this hasn't been controversial at all for a long time.

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There’s no reason to aim for something like zero microbial exposure because that's completely preposterous. And so I think, if I remember correctly, in terms of sheer cell number, I think you have more bacteria in your body than cells. Now, they happen to be very, very tiny, but it gives you some— that gives the listeners and watchers, let's say, some indication of just exactly how prevalent—as you said—the microbial load is.

And then do you have any sense of what actually constitutes, let's say, reasonable precautions? You don't want to sterilize everything in sight partly because maybe you make your immune system hyper-responsive if you're overprotected. But obviously, we don't want to return to the filth of the centuries prior to the 20th century where people were dying of infectious diseases at an incredible rate, especially in hospitals, let’s say.

So what—and I don’t imagine you made yourself particularly popular with your older sister, by the way, using her as an example—but what do you think of as a reasonable response to cleanliness, given the necessity of minimizing both kinds of error?

Yeah, so, you know, certain viruses are pretty nasty and cause really awful infections in people. But it turns out that in a general sense, the nastier the virus, the harder it is to transmit it. And so there’s sort of an association between the ability to transmit something and then the severity of the disease that it transmits.

And so if you take something like HIV, it’s a nasty infection, has a very long period where there’s not a lot of symptoms, but then becomes very awful in terms of destruction of the immune system leading to opportunistic infections. However, you can avoid getting HIV for the most part unless you have some sort of accidental exposure directly to your blood, which does happen but has been, you know, greatly reduced.

The same thing is true about something like hepatitis. You know, these are nasty infections, but you don’t necessarily get them from just being in contact with other people. In terms of respiratory infections, those are much harder to avoid because they are very easily transmissible; they have a lot of genetic variability.

And so the immune system might be able to prevent severe disease, but not the actual infection itself. So, you know, there are some viruses that you want to avoid and some that you really can’t. And people should kind of understand the distinction between that.

Yeah, well, the rationale was—I think once that became obvious that the rationale was, "Well, if we slowed the rate at which it spread, we wouldn't overwhelm the hospital systems." And you know, one of the things I saw in Canada that was particularly remarkably dim and pathological was that the governments took almost no actions whatsoever to increase the availability of emergency, of intensive care unit—of intensive care units—which seemed at least at the time—and maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong—seemed like the logical thing to do, especially after this extended over a multi-year period.

I mean, we knew how early did we know that virtually everybody was going to get COVID, you said. As you pointed out, respiratory illnesses are transmissible, and there isn't really a damn thing you can do about it.

Yeah, I mean, the response was very much like, you know, behavioral modification was absolutely necessary, and everyone had to completely change their behavior. And that sort of did not consider the length of time that was going to be necessary and the fact that, you know, the whole world doesn’t operate that way. We’re so interconnected.

You’d read articles about how—I would read them and think, you know, people would talk about "Yeah, just get groceries delivered," and, you know, "You don’t have to leave your house." But somebody somewhere is going to have to leave their house in order to support that. And these things weren’t really thought out. And, you know, as a result, it could be delayed, but not completely eliminated by behavioral modifications.

Yeah, well, wouldn’t you say they’re not completely thought out? I mean, I think that’s what you might say that’s the understatement of the decade. I watched recently a viral video of the new CDC director talking about how she made the decision to lock down football, and she is giggling while she’s saying this, which is appalling beyond comprehension.

And it doesn’t really seem to me to be a nervous giggle; it’s more like, "Well, isn’t this cute? It’s so funny that this is the way it happened." She talks about talking to one of the health officials in Massachusetts and just sort of bandying back and forth ideas about who should be locked down next—in this case, it was anybody who wanted to go watch a football game.

And that kind of random scattershot approach to depriving people of their civil liberties seemed to be par for the course. And with this particular video, it is an incredibly egregious example of that because it combines an idiot cutesiness with this terrible proclivity to really deprive people of their fundamental mobility rights. You know, except for the expendable people, let’s say, who were doing the grocery deliveries.

And there was a really nasty element to that as well, is that, you know, the important people could stay at home and lock themselves up and protect themselves, but the expendable working class could go about their business as usual, right? I mean, there were all sorts of videos of, I don’t know what the video version of a hot mic is, but where people would know that they were off camera or think that they were off camera, and you could see them immediately take their masks off because they’re truly believing that this is something they have to perform to show for people, and they don’t necessarily believe that it’s going to be 100% effective in reality.

And so there were lots of examples of that where people didn’t actually believe what they were saying. I mean, when there were protests, there were lots of public health people that said, you know, protesting racism is a public health necessity or something like that. And a lot of people rightfully identified that as just being completely a bit based on nonsense.

I mean, the idea that, you know, the same thing happened with COP26 in the UK, right? So it wasn’t just like Black Lives Matter protests; it was also climate change meetings. The UK government completely inverted its rules to allow the delegates to the climate change conference to proceed apace with no restrictions because apparently that was what the important people got to do, whereas ordinary people who were going about their lives weren’t able to continue.

And one of the things we did see—and this is going to have extraordinary long-term consequences—is that there was a massive transfer of wealth from the, like, essentially working class and lower-middle-class business owners who got demolished by the pandemic restrictions to huge retailers like Amazon. And once those little businesses are gone—and many of them disappeared—it’s very hard to get them back.

And so—and I don't know, you know, I don’t know how you count up that kind of collateral damage when you’re trying to derive the statistics about exactly what the pandemic lockdowns cost us because the toll that took on families—well, there’s no one even interested in measuring that, I suppose, in some fundamental sense.

Yeah, I mean, you cannot put a single number on it because there’s so many areas of life that are affected by it. I mean healthcare, in a way of treatment of cancer, treatment of heart attacks, screenings, the kind of diagnostic tests—all of these things were completely eliminated. People who were dependent on communities, Alcoholics Anonymous, that kind of thing, all those things were shut down, and some people needed that to survive and were unable to continue something that kept them in a healthier state than they would be otherwise.

And so this sort of singular COVID monomania was so damaging in so many areas, and you know, you see it every day. There’s some news that comes out, you know, the kids’ BMI has doubled, you know, and retention rates are still low in terms of kids staying in school even, you know, three years after the pandemic and test scores.

Right, right—and a huge number of kids never returned to school.

Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, there are studies that have shown that even three months of disruption in a child’s education can affect their long-term, you know, ability to earn money and make a living—and to have this happen on a global scale, people who are already in a poverty-type situation are going to be forced further into that than they would be otherwise.

And so it’s going to be so pervasive that it’s going to be very difficult to measure, but we’re seeing so much of it in terms of, of other healthcare costs, inflation—all that stuff. This is all very related to what happened.

Look, there’s another interesting political issue here too that’s, I guess, relevant to the use of fear and also to some of the topics we discussed earlier. So, one of the things I found that was virtually miraculous in terms of its incomprehensibility was the fact that people, particularly on the left, lined up on the side of the pharmaceutical companies.

And if you would have told me 10 years ago that left-wing politicos and believers would have aligned themselves with pharmaceutical companies, I would have thought you were completely out of your mind because the bugbear of the left—the bugbears of the left on the corporate front for the last 60 years likely have been oil companies and pharmaceutical companies, you know, and with some justification, especially in the latter category.

And yet there was this unholy alliance between the left-wing authoritarians and the pharmaceutical companies, and I can't help but think that that's likely mediated by this association, heretofore unexamined association between psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism, and the desire for power. Because one of the things that aligning with the pharmaceutical companies did for the power-mongering left was—what would you say? Justify their willingness to use power to compel and force people.

And I can't find another explanation because it's so—it runs so counter to what you would assume the leftist narrative would be because of all the people who should be skeptical of gigantic pharmaceutical corporations—you think the leftists would be number one. So I don’t know if you’ve had any thoughts about that?

Yeah, absolutely. You would think that, you know, with the sort of natural distrust of big business and pharmaceutical companies that has historically been on the left—combined that with the distrust of the ability of government on the right to take over massive projects, subsidize economies, take, you know, regulate all healthcare and things like that—you’d think that there would be some bipartisan consensus there, but that wasn’t the case at all.

And I think, you know, for certain people this benefited them to sort of push the—this—they shared the same interests with pharmaceutical companies and people who were in power. And even if that didn’t mesh with their political beliefs in the past, the promise of gaining power and influence was simply, you know, too much to—it basically overrode that traditional stance.

So, in the first part of your book, you talk a bit about germs and you try to make a case for what the proper relationship might be between a fair response and, say, the overwhelming prevalence of the microbial biome around us. In the second part of your book, you concentrate more on a pandemic in the time of safety.

So maybe we should delve into that a little bit more. I don’t feel that you’ve had the opportunity to develop your hypothesis about the relationship between the safety culture and pandemic planning thoroughly. Do you want to—one of your chapters, six—is “Pandemic Planning Meets the Safety Culture,” seven is “All the Doom We Need” and “The Face Badge of Virtue.”

Do you want to delve into that a little bit more and elaborate that for everybody who’s watching and listening?

Right, so the first part of that is sort of the realization that, you know, the safety culture has enabled a lot of this. A lot of people like to, you know, describe the whole pandemic response and all the bad things that happened to, you know, a select few, you know, supervillains out there. And while I am sure that lots of people took advantage of the situation in odious ways, I didn’t feel like that’s just not my nature to think in the sort of conspiratorial terms and blame a small, you know, cabal of supervillains on the whole pandemic response.

But instead, I feel like there was a cultural problem that enabled all of this. I could see it in some of the things, even on a local level. One example I give is when my daughter was probably about two years old, she got what’s called hand, foot, and mouth disease. And her daycare—hand, foot, and mouth disease is one of these things where if it gets into a daycare, it’s not going to get out until everybody gets it and gets over it, and who’s susceptible, at least, and adults—daycare workers can get it and have very mild or no symptoms and still be able to transmit it to others. It’s passed through the stool.

And so if you’re at a daycare and you’ve got toddlers and babies, it’s nearly impossible to keep that clean to prevent spread. Once it’s there, it’s going to spread. And, but it’s very sort of innocuous. It gives children—it makes them very uncomfortable; they can’t eat; they have sores in their mouth; they have sores in their body; they have a fever for a few days, but then it goes away.

And sometimes it takes a while for, you know, the spots on their body to heal. And what the daycare was telling us is that my daughter had to stay home until she was completely healed, which was opposite of what, you know, people had been told about hand, foot, and mouth disease for a very long time. It was generally, you know, what the American Academy of Pediatrics said was that after they’ve had fever a day later, they can go back to school or daycare or whatever.

But instead we were told to be, you know, to keep our kid home and, you know, continue to pay for daycare until all of her lesions were completely healed. And, you know, that wouldn’t have made anyone safer. I mean, this was—that obviously she got the virus at the daycare, which means it was in the daycare; it was going to be spread. Lots of kids were going to get it, and it's just going to blow through the daycare until it was done.

And so keeping her home would have had zero effect on the spread in the daycare. But at the same time, the local health department backed up what the daycare owner said and said that she should stay home for two weeks even though our pediatrician agreed with us based on what the American Academy of Pediatrics said.

So, I mean, I went directly to the health department and talked to the head of the health department, and you know, she was basically unapologetic, and I really thought later, I really thought later that you know, this way of thinking could be translated into how we thought about the pandemic response.

And it wasn't just safety or keeping kids safe; it was the appearance of safety that was important. And so I have a chapter called "Hurting Children for the Appearance of Safety," and that's, you know, one of the things that really bothered me as a parent—not just an immunologist or infectious disease scientist—the ability of, you know, people can remain ignorant about what their real risks are and still have a lot of control over these things just in the name of safety, but not real safety—just an illusion of it.

It seems to me that, you know, your chapter nine "Hurting Children for the Appearance of Safety," for the appearance of safety—part of the question there is, well, why would people be concerned about the appearance of safety? And I think part of the reason for that is that people like to use their concern for children and for other vulnerable people, let’s say, as a way of signaling just exactly how morally virtuous they are.

It’s a real demonstrative performance of "Look how much I care." And it also gives you the opportunity, if you do that, not only to elevate your moral virtue as a consequence of doing that in an unearned way, but to demonize anybody that would stand in the way, which is also convenient if what you’re trying to do is to accrue power.

You know, you told the story about your daycare. When you were in the midst of that, what was your personal reaction? I mean, how did you find yourself responding to the demands that the daycare was making on you and your wife, your family, given that you knew that their actual factual concerns were unwarranted?

Yeah, well, I would think that, you know, I had some sort of relevant knowledge that could affect the outcome of this. It actually helped other parents because, you know, this was obviously going to come up. Other kids were going to get the infection because it’s highly contagious, and kids can transmit it for weeks after their symptoms have resolved.

So, I wanted the other parents to understand that this had really no basis in making their kids safer. There was no argument that could be made. And I would think that that would have had an effect on the owner of the daycare—it didn’t at all. In fact, we ended up getting booted from that daycare.

But that experience was, I think, you know, really set up—it helps set up the pandemic response because there’s something that has changed in the culture where we don’t accept any sort of risk. We want risk to be completely minimized away until there’s none, which in many cases is not possible.

And if that isn’t possible, then we want to pretend that we can do that. And the illusion of control, the illusion of being able to eliminate any sort of risk becomes very attractive for people. And any sort of leader or official, politician, whatever, becomes a very easy sell when people are afraid.

And that’s kind of the way that I set up all this safety culture explanation for how we responded.

Interestingly to me that you and your child got the boot from that particular daycare, and so that perked up my clinical ears, let’s say, because that seems to me to be a perfectly logical extension of exactly what happened if we’re using the power-mongering theory here a bit. What happened exactly there? What did you derive from that? What moral did you derive from that?

Yeah, I mean, I basically contacted all the other parents in an email chain and told them why this was not making any of their children safer. And, you know, none of them really responded saying, you know, "Thank you," or anything like that. It was more the daycare owner saying, "You know, you don’t have a right to do that, and we don’t want you to come back after your daughter is better."

So, on what grounds exactly?

Well, I mean, that was kind of a personality thing too that we had discovered before with other issues. So, I don’t think that’s necessarily a cultural thing. However, I do think what the health department did and the way that they responded agreeing with the daycare owner, they would have no other reason to support her other than the fact that they've sort of been conditioned to be over-cautious—in ways that wouldn’t actually make people safer.

And that was, you know, ultimately how I made that connection once people started behaving in a way, treating children like they were disease vectors. I mean, the way that my kids were treated at school—even in a place like Indiana, which you wouldn’t think would be, you know, like Portland, OR, San Francisco—the way that they were treated, even in the public schools in my area, was just completely unnecessary and not based on evidence at all.

And so my futility of dealing with the daycare situation was kind of a harbinger of my futility to deal with anything in the local area in terms of trying to quell panic or irrational or non-evidence-based responses and the way the children were treated more specifically.

So let me throw out a couple of hypotheses with regards to the prevalence of this. So here are five different reasons, perhaps, why it’s become more prevalent.

So one would be people have children much later than they used to. So instead of having children in their early 20s, they have their children in their early 30s. And so that means that in some ways, they’re grandparents by the time they have children rather than the normal age for human beings to have children. And I suspect that makes them less risk-tolerant because younger people are wilder and more impulsive.

And obviously, there’s a downside to that, but God only knows what the upside is. Then the next problem, hypothetically, might be that, well, you know, if you have six kids, you’re just not going to be able to exercise that much control over them because they outnumber you terribly and you’re exhausted, and you’re gonna just let the tribe go out and do like tribal things, and you’re going to chase them the hell out of the house because you know enough kids.

But if you have one, well, then you have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. And so the child is also not being challenged and provoked by his or her siblings in that constant manner that might have been the case more likely than when there were more siblings.

And then also, parents are richer now, and so that means that they can dote in a way that would have been practically impossible before. And then additionally, like we did find, for example, in the study that I cited to you at the beginning of our discussion, that one of the predictors of left-wing authoritarianism was being female and also having a female temperament—quite a strong predictor and quite a surprising predictor.

And there are a lot more female-dominated families and institutions now than there were 40 years ago. I mean, there's lots of single mother families, and then in schools, of course, the vast preponderance of teachers are female. And so, well, there are five reasons why the safety culture might have become increasingly paramount.

So I don’t know if you thought through at all and written about why you think that culture has become more predominant. I mean, we obviously have talked about its dangers.

Yeah, well, to think about some of the things that you’ve said with the size of families, I mean, and the age that people are having children, that certainly might have something to do with it. If you look at places like where I live, so in the United States, there are a lot of different areas where the average age that a family desires to have children is different.

Here it’s probably much lower, and I know it’s much lower than it is on the coast. And so there are lots of families here where, you know, they’re having three kids by the time the mother is 28 or something like that. I mean, that’s something that you wouldn’t see generally on a major population cosmopolitan city on the coast.

And so you would see differences if that were the main explanation. You would see differences in safety culture, and you’d see some of that. But I mean, like in the neighborhood I live in, it’s a historic neighborhood; there’s a whole degree of socioeconomic levels in the neighborhood, and there’s just—it's very difficult to find lots of children outside playing.

And even with those levels there, and I think that—so I think that—that’s one possible contributing factor, but it’s not—it can’t be the whole explanation because even here, you know, I try to get my kids to go outside, but they don’t want to because there isn’t an outdoor culture like there used to be. I mean, I knew I would miss something; I knew I was going to miss something if I didn’t go outside.

And they will miss something if they go outside because, you know, there are computers and there’s, you know, streaming, and, you know, there’s a whole lot of alternatives that can keep them inside. So I think that’s another part of it, is that, you know, before there wasn’t any mechanism—any sort of—I alluded to that a little bit in terms of being wealthy to dote on children to be helicopter parents—the tools to do that have become much more available. And so I think that’s another possibility.

So— and that, you know, goes to the whole explanation of, you know, there’s still this debate out there: did Zoom enable the pandemic response that we had? And I think there’s a lot to that. The technology became matched what the culture wanted to do, and it basically took it in that direction whereas it wouldn’t have been possible.

So Steve, you experienced on a broader scale in the social world the same thing or something analogous to what happened to you at your local daycare, and you learned something about the opaqueness, let’s say, of the general population—or maybe even of the human mind to scientific research. I mean, whatever we might be as human beings, we’re not—it’s not easy to make us into scientists.

And so what did you learn on that front?

Yeah, so it seemed to me like people really wanted to be given certainty in things that were not necessarily certain or fully known, and they don’t want to leave things up to chance. And like I said, they want risks reduced to zero, which in any case can’t be done.

I’d see this with, you know, the local schools. Sometimes my children would come home and tell me, you know, even things that weren’t mandated by the school—they were doing extra, taking extra measures. You know, they were like dousing them with hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer is not something that’s proven to be effective on, especially for respiratory viruses. It doesn’t even actually work that well for other types of viruses like GI viruses, which you would want it to be more effective for that than hand washing.

So I mean, all these measures—another thing they made them do was they could not play with each other unless they were in the same class. So even when they were outside at recess, they had to distance themselves from the other classes. So if my daughter had friends in another class, they couldn’t interact with each other. And, you know, outside—for how long? For how long was that policy in place?

Yeah, probably a whole year. And so I was asked at some point to be on an advisory board for the local school district, and I think one of the reasons I was asked is because I had talked to the medical director of our county health department and had become kind of friendly with him.

And even though we disagreed with some things in public, you know, there wasn’t as much disagreement, and we were, you know, still became fairly friendly with one another discussing things that were happening. But he recommended to the superintendent that I’d be on this board because a lot of the other people were local physicians and community people who would never really deviate from what they were being told by the CDC and other organizations.

And so they actually did want somebody who was contrarian to kind of challenge what was being mandated and what was being done in the schools. So that was a pretty good opportunity, although, you know, you really encounter the cautiousness of people, especially physicians.

You know, I mean, they are used to being cautious and avoiding any sort of risk in their practices because they’re afraid of malpractice, and you know, they’ve been sort of conditioned to think that way. And so it was kind of a tall order to be able to convince them that a lot of these measures were hurting children—not actually making them safer—and were really only there in sort of a theatrical way to give people this sort of illusion or appearance of safety.

And I started writing—I had been writing for the local paper on some of these issues about especially how children were treated, and obviously those weren’t going over well. But then some of the writing started to get picked up on a national level, and one of the reasons is, you know, I started really putting together evidence and compiling it for things like masks, especially in a child population.

There was really no evidence that they would make a difference in schools, and there was no consensus prior to the pandemic that they would play an important role in pandemic mitigation. You could go back and read papers for 10 years before and really see that just by looking at the publications even up until the beginning of the pandemic, there was really no consensus about whether masks would work for the population, much less for children.

So I put together a lot of evidence and gave some presentations to the physicians and the other people. And, you know, I think it had an effect, but in the end, the governor sort of overrode all of the local district’s power because, you know, they had mandates for masks tied to things like, you know, the ability of classrooms to operate with, you know, six feet of separation between children, which was impossible.

And then if they were masked, they would have an arbitrary—completely arbitrary—if they were masked, then they could have three feet, which is actually doable. So, six feet was something that schools didn’t have the space to do, and so that was essentially a mask mandate without actually calling it a mask mandate.

But anyway, because I put together these things, it really became useful to write about them, and it ended up getting some national attention, getting picked up by certain outlets like Brownstone Institute and other outlets that a lot of people read. And so that's how I kind of got from the local level to a little bit more national exposure and ultimately to the point where I had enough to write a book.

When did your book come out?

Yeah, it came out in April, so it's been out less than two months. Doing—I got a really good push, and one of the reasons is because I've made a lot of friends. You know, Jay Bhattacharya talked with you about this; you know the prevalence of social media is a curse and a blessing because it could really put people together that would normally not be able to find each other.

And so I've met a lot of people through social media and through my writing that has really sort of formed a community and given me a lot of other opportunities. I was involved in writing a document that you talked about with Jay, which we call the Norfolk group document. I had questions for the COVID-19 commission that is being used by people in Congress.

I was invited to be on a public health integrity committee for Florida, appointed by the governor DeSantis and the Surgeon General. So because of all these connections, you know, when I released the book, I could ask a lot of people to retweet it and, you know, write a little bit about it.

And so I have a lot of connections that way, so I think that really translated into a pretty nice push at the beginning. Obviously, doing things like being on your podcast will help tremendously as well. So I haven’t got the sales numbers yet, but I think it’s doing okay, so there’s some optimism inscribed.

I mean, you have attempted to voice a contrarian opinion, let’s say—although one that increasingly appears to be in accordance with common sense and with the facts on the ground. I think that’s got to the point now where that's indisputable unless you’re completely off your rocker.

So that’s a positive thing. And here’s another mystery: you know, I think that what we did during the pandemic was unforgivable. However, we did stop doing it, and it isn’t exactly clear to me why. You know, given everything we’ve talked about, given the joy that people had, like my sense in Canada, especially in Toronto, which is my home city, was that 70% of people who lived in Toronto would have been perfectly happy—they would have worn a mask for the rest of their lives without making a peep.

And half of them would have been happy about it just because it would have given them an opportunity to inform and spy on their neighbors. And it was pretty appalling to see. But, you know, in the final analysis, we did back down, right? We backed off this, and we have lifted the pandemic restrictions and requirements, and we have returned to something approximating whatever the hell the new normal is, right?

I mean, things are a lot less bizarre than they were during the lockdown. And like, why do you think it is that we moved back from the brink given all the push there was to put us in this authoritarian position to begin with?

Well, that’s a really good question. I mean, I think all of the machinery of the pandemic response is still there. I think you have to have a leadership class that has learned a lesson from what happened, and I'm not really sure that that's the case.

Because you can see it, you know, there are some areas where there is some concession of harms of the pandemic response. You know, you see people running away from the idea that we should have closed schools, even to the point of pretending that they never advocated for it, such as like Randy Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers. You know, you see that happening, it's sort of a tacit admission that there are certain things that people will actually understand were very, very harmful.

But at the same time, it’s still not enough to have that sort of underlying admission. There has to be a real accounting of what happened and why it happened. And I think, you know, some of that’s happening on the political level with COVID commissions in the U.S. Congress and other countries, but it’s going to be kind of a long haul because there are a lot of people who will want to sort of control how the history is told in a way that kind of whitewashes the harms of what was done.

So has the fact that we did retreat from the authoritarian controls that were implemented restored a certain degree of optimism to you? It doesn’t exactly sound like it. I mean, the argument that you just made seems to be, if I’ve got this right, that you think that it wouldn’t take a lot of provocation for the same kind of hammers to come down again.

But that does beg the question; why? Why do you think it was lifted? I mean, we kind of made an arbitrary decision in some ways that the pandemic was over, and I don't understand why we reverted back to something approximating normality.

Well, I mean, is it finally that enough people got tired of it? People like Jay Bhattacharya and started to make enough noise so that there was some pushback. It just took people a while to get organized. Was it because enough people got infected?

Is what I think. You know, you have these really highly transmissible variants like Omicron that were actually not as severe as their, you know—not as severe as the earlier variants, and they just spread like wildfire.

And I mean, it’s been shown that if you’re on the edge of a pandemic and you haven’t experienced it, your anxiety and fear levels are much, much higher in the population because they’re getting their information from the news, and they’re getting their information from the media in a way that’s not comforting because the media relies on advertisements and clicks and things like that.

So the fear level, when you’re not exposed to the actual pathogen, is quite high. But then once it’s actually burned through the population and people have gotten it—whether they were vaccinated or not—they start to see the reality of what the actual risk was.

You know, burns through their entire family. Their parents get it; they might even have some comorbidities; they might be 80 years old or whatever, and they did fine. I mean, so you have enough people like that that even though they sort of bought the story on the idea of distorted risk, that everybody had the reality of being infected, and having that direct exposure lessens the fear and the willingness to go along.

But I think, you know, if some pandemic happened right now, I think there’d be a lot of pushback because we’re so close to what happened with the COVID-19 pandemic. But I do think that there is going to be, you know, an official story that has to be more correct than incorrect, and I think that’s going to be a fight that’s going to go on for a while.

So, well, part of what you've concluded actually is somewhat optimistic because your conclusion seems to be that once the facts of the severity of the illness were actually thorough and tangibly accessible because so many people ended up with COVID, they weren't hypothesizing it anymore.

That we had enough grounding in our civil rights tradition to return to normality, right? So once the fear did decrease to a somewhat normal level, we didn't find the attractions of the authoritarian lockdown sufficient to continue in that direction. So there is some optimism in that, right? They reverted. We reverted back to being a free society.

There is. I mean, but you still see hints of things that are sort of left over, like drives to—you know, I’ve read articles about eliminating—there's been several of them like this—eliminating all respiratory viruses from the air of buildings based on their ventilation and filtering and engineering building, basically.

I mean, one thing we witnessed when kids had finally been in-person schools is that they were getting lots of viruses. I mean, influenza, adenovirus, RSV—these things spiked, and sometimes it was even in the summer outside of their normal seasons because these endemic viruses had been suppressed. And it actually—the separation and distancing worked better for those endemic viruses than they did for the pandemic virus itself.

And so the idea of, you know, eliminating respiratory viruses from the air that we breathe, I think is a dangerous idea. And much like people who fought when antibiotics came out that you could just give everybody an antibiotic for anything—that there would be no downside to that.

Now, of course we know that there is. So I think there is a lot of hubris that's still out there about eliminating risk even from sort of everyday infections that I think is going to take a while to go away.

Yes, well, the part of the hubris is that we don’t understand that the demand to reduce risk to zero is as cardinal form of risk, right? Because it requires a kind of impossible totalitarian overreach.

It’s probably the case that when we’re agitating for zero anything, you know, because I think the same thing with regard to the War on Drugs; I think the same thing with regards to Net Zero on the climate front. It’s like, "No, you’re mitigating one form of risk, but you’re radically increasing another form of risk."

And it’s obvious that that’s what we did with the pandemic.

Is there anything else you want to bring to the attention of our viewers and listeners before we close out? We've been talking—I’ll just let everybody know—we've been talking to Steve Templeton today about his book "Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germaphobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe."

And so you can obviously pick up that book and walk through Steve's argument in more detail. Is there anything else that you think people should know that we haven’t covered, or are we at a point where we can reasonably begin to bring this to a close?

Yeah, I mean I think, you know, just when you ask something about how do you respond to this, how do you fix things, that’s obviously a very difficult question. But, you know, some of the things that we’ve lost in the previous three years—the ability to sort of challenge them, which has gone on for much longer in terms of a safety culture.

I mean, it’s important to try to reverse some of that, and I think that that could go a long way to making things better.

Right. Yeah, well, it’s a difficult—as we said earlier, we don’t understand the preconditions—all the preconditions that were in place to allow children to roam and range more freely than they do now.

And so it’s very difficult to figure out what we would have to return to, let’s say, or approach in order for that to occur again. I mean, to some degree, encouraging parents to understand that fostering independence in their kids is the proper risk-free approach. I mean, people can learn, and I wrote about that a fair bit in my—especially in my book "12 Rules for Life."

Encouraging parents to understand that they can be the biggest risk to their children because of their hyper-concern with safety—absolutely. And that’s the message is that, you know, this paradoxical safety culture actually makes children less safe, less prepared to face the world, and less prepared to deal with any sort of threat, whether it's microbial or, you know, arguments in college with people they disagree with.

I mean, a lot of these things are related.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s always one risk or another; it’s never no risk.

Absolutely!

So, and that is a hard.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Alright, well for everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms, thank you very much for your time and attention to Dr. Steve Templeton, author of "Fear of a Microbial Planet." Thank you very much for talking to me today.

We’re going to go over to the Daily Wire Plus platform now, and I'm going to talk to Steve for an additional half hour about the development of his interest in immunology. And if you’d like to join us there, that would be just fine.

Otherwise, thank you very much, Dr. Templeton. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, and thank you for the book, and congratulations on its success.

And hopefully the message that you’re attempting to distribute will be picked up, and there’ll be some positive consequence of that.

Thank you. It’s been an honor to chat with you.

Hello everyone! I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWirePlus.com.