David Zweig
speaker
193 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
David Zweig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh yeah. You can do that to me from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Oh. If they're maligned, if they're called fringe, I don't stand a chance against this. So there was no way that. And look, I'm sympathetic toward if this is someone how they're making their living, you know, taking care of their family. They've spent the last 20 years studying in order to work in medicine.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea that they didn't want to get fired.
And NIH more broadly. That's right. When you control the purse strings. But I would say, Megan, even beyond any sort of explicit thread of withholding funding, people were social creatures. And most people...
are not really inclined to be in the out group, and I talk about this in the book, is that if you think about medicine, it self-selects generally for a certain type of person, a really hard worker, someone who's smart. These are great traits in a doctor, hard worker and smart, but it also selects for rule followers. It doesn't select for iconoclasts.
You go in, you do your residency, you have to listen to the attending. You're not going to start challenging them. They got there by following the rules. These are people who their general nature is not to be an outcast. So they don't want to be cast out of that social group. And I would argue the same thing is within the sort of prestige media outlets. How do you get to the New York Times?
Well, you got straight A's in school growing up. Then you went to Brown. Then maybe you went to Columbia Journalism School. And now you're at the Times. I'm not saying every reporter there is like this. There certainly are plenty who are excellent reporters important independent work there.
But nevertheless, the broader type of person who gets into an institution like that is the same type of person who's going to get into Columbia University Medical Center and these types of places. It self-selects for people who got to where they are, became successful by being part of an in-group. So you have these two institutions, health and
and media that were controlling the narrative within our country, yet the people within those institutions were a certain type of personality. And I'm not saying this was nefarious even. This is just kind of a human nature. And then you had the small group of them who were coming to me off the record saying, hey, I don't like what's going on. This is wrong, but I can't say anything about it.
So it's really important for people listening and watching this program to understand, and hopefully they'll read my book and get a deeper understanding.
Hopefully they'll have an understanding of how, what I try to show is how narratives get created. It's sort of like, how do the gears turn within our society? It's almost like Plato's cave. Who's looking at the shadows? Who's creating those shadows? How do you actually get out of the cave? A lot of the book is about evidence. That's the way that we really can arm ourselves to be aware.
It's sort of like a media literacy that you can even bring to your doctor. I suspect you, Megan, when you go to the doctor, they're not like, here's what you need to do. You're like, yes, doctor. Not anymore. Right, this isn't 1955 where you just do what people say. And this doesn't mean that we should ignore what quote experts say.
It doesn't mean that we should dismiss it out of hand, but it does mean that you should bring your own skepticism with you and you need to think about evidence. Ultimately, my book really, I think it's about kind of what we might call like epistemology. It's like, how do you know what is true? How do you know that this thing is true? And over and over again,
in our country, and we still do this now and it's every topic under the sun, but when I show what happened in the pandemic with such horrible consequence, is that the experts repeatedly told us things without providing any evidence behind what they were telling us, and then the media regurgitated this same information without providing evidence.
And within philosophy, that's called what's known as a logical fallacy. This is it's an argument from authority. Just because a person is saying something doesn't mean it's true. And they never pushed back and said, well, wait a minute. I know you're saying that they need HEPA filters and we can't open a school until they get the HEPA filter. What's the evidence behind this claim?
What is the evidence for this? No one bothered to push back.
I think one of the most important and remarkable things that happened in the pandemic that we need to reckon with as a society is that this was one of the most classist, class-based policy endeavors that had ever occurred in America. It's quite remarkable. The people who made the rules coincidentally fared the best during the pandemic. So you have what people today might call the laptop class.
Who do you think works at the CDC, the NIH? Who are these people on television and working at these elite media outlets? By and large, these people are making six-figure salaries or seven-figure. Their lives are very different from the people, millions and millions of people in our country who their policies and their guidelines were affecting.
And that includes, I mean, there were kids who were sitting in a parking lot of a Taco Bell to try to get a Wi-Fi signal so they could do their fake remote learning. There are children who are in homes that are unsafe. One of the crazy things that happened was there was a drop in claims of child abuse early on. And you might think, oh, that's great. Child abuse went down. It's so heartbreaking.
What they found was it's not that it went down. It's that teachers and educators are the most important line of defense for a child who is in danger at home. Now those kids had no one to talk to, and some of them were left home with a monster. Yeah. You had kids who didn't have their final year there. This was their chance to get into college. Maybe they were a football player.
Maybe there was someone who was a wonderful actor or an artist. All of those things were canceled. You're not going to get recruited for the football season to play in a college and get recruited there if there is no season. So all these things were happening to kids around the country.
Showing 141–160 of 193 · page 8 of 10
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