Cal Newport

moral trap that you've just fallen into because you are now perpetuating something that's going to cause exponentially more harm.

You should be the very first person shutting down your company and trying to get the other ones to do it as well.

So it's this weird moral trap they've set up where whatever is actually going on here, if they're coming out here saying these things, it is bad.

This can't possibly, normatively speaking, be the right ethical behavior to be out there saying these scary things all the time because either you need to be building the barricade or you're just scaring people for the marketing.

Neither of these, I think, is something that's defensible.

Someone did write that.

Someone did write that, by the way.

They did say, I remember early pandemic, someone did write, hey, you know what?

This is good for the planet.

Like, hey, we're driving less.

This is great.

And we're overpopulated.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting analogy.

I want to just pull on that thread a little bit because I think COVID gives an interesting – I think it gives two different interesting observations that go in both directions, right?

So I think you're definitely right what you're saying is –

When the pandemic was coming or it was getting bad, really a lot of the coverage was about what should we be doing or who are the people doing the wrong thing.

But it was very much coming from this angle of like, okay, we need to do whatever it is.

Like we need to be better about this.

It's got to be vaccines.

It's got to be masks.