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rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath.

As soon as the pandemic began, and I first became sure that it was going to happen in January of 2020,

there was already a contagion of fake news about it.

So the light motif, as I began thinking about what was going to happen, was the interplay between the real,

as it were physical contagion caused by the virus, and then this confounding contagion of nutty ideas about it,

which the internet seems perfectly configured to disseminate.

The reason that network effects matter is that they make the global disasters.

If there's no network effect of any kind, then a disaster's localized.

I'm David Pris and this is the LawFair podcast, May 4th, 2021.

2020 was a remarkable year in so many ways, not least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects.

Why did so many countries bungle their responses to it so badly?

And what should their leaders have learned from earlier disasters and the pathologies clearly visible in the responses of their predecessors to them?

Neil Ferguson is the Millbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution,

and the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe.

Neil joined me for the LawFair podcast to discuss everything from earthquake zones to viruses to world wars, all with a mind to how our political and social structures have or have not adapted to the certainty of continued crises.

It's the LawFair podcast, May 4th, Neil Ferguson on Catastrophes and how to manage them.

Your new intellectual project, Neil, is remarkably wide in scope, even in relation to your past efforts.

...