You must have studied this shit in school big time.

There must have been this whole freaking crazy set of units

on the Spanish flu and the pandemic

and the pandemics of the future and all that stuff.

Yeah, I mean, that's the key word

in epidemiologists is epidemic.

I think about an epidemic like a fire.

If you've got a toaster fire, you know you need to put it out.

And if you can't put it out in the toaster,

it's going to take over the house.

And if you don't put it on the house,

it's going to take over the neighborhood.

But imagine all of the stuff we do to prevent fires, right?

We've got fire alarms in our houses.

We've got fire stations in our neighborhoods.

Imagine you were to take the batteries out of the fire alarm.

You were to furlough the entire firefighting staff.

What do you think is going to happen

when the toaster catches fire?

And this is exactly where we were.

And so we have created a society where not only did we

actively shut down the capacity to respond in real time

...