To hear the full episode, become a patron at petriam.com slash netpanel pod.

I pulled a quote from you.

This is from May 2020.

You're talking to the elephant and you're talking about the problems in the early US COVID response.

And you're talking about how they're more due to decades of austerity

versus a kind of shortage of durable medical equipment, like ventilators or a shortage of

PPE. And for context, like if folks don't remember, back in the early months of the

pandemic in the United States, there was a big

conversation around the CDC saying, don't wear N95s because we don't have enough of them and

we needed to save them for folks who are medical workers in the WHO early on, sort of made these

decisions about economic availability and sort of global supply.

And so one of the big narratives that's like going on kind of early in the pandemic is this

discussion of like, do we have enough of the medical stuff?

Like are we going to have all the stuff we need?

And really kind of the bigger question actually was, have we gutted the system to

such a point that we no longer have a way to respond in just in the way that we've set up the

way that we manage our own sort of structural behaviors? And so you say, quote, part of my research

is about metrics.

And so if you make your own report card, if you're the designer of your own rubric for grading,

then often you are the person who does the best on your own.

Let's just be real.

If your metrics are the ones you set, and that's often the case, at some point when those metrics become

...