Tom Frieden

And we also have to see the trends of...

You know, like Ebola, when I was running CDC, Ebola was exploding in West Africa.

We couldn't get anyone to pay attention.

And then a modeler, Martin Meltzer, showed this exponential increase, and then people got it.

So you have to see trends.

You have to see whether programs are succeeding or failing.

And one thing I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit is you have to see the path to progress, the technically rigorous path.

But you also have to see why we're blind.

Why we don't pay attention to those warnings.

And the Cassandra curse really indicates that we may know something bad is going to happen, but we don't act on it.

And why?

And in chapter two of the book, I talk about six of the drivers for the Cassandra curse.

And the underlying theme there is that our perceptions are wrong.

Our perceptions are inaccurate.

We think things about ourselves, about the world, and about the future differently.

that aren't really aligned with reality, and therefore we don't act.

I'll give you just one of these six drivers of the Cassandra curse, which is a fancy term called hyperbolic discounting.

And what it basically says is we shortchange the future.

If every smoker knew that they had a 50-50 chance of dropping dead after the next cigarette, not a whole lot of people will keep smoking.

But 50% of smokers, unless they quit, are going to get killed by tobacco.