may 15, 2020 Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Subscribe: episode updates the covid cassandra who saw this coming. tom and rp are in conversation with laurie garrett. laurie, a pulitzer prize–winning investigative journalist and one of the greatest public-health and public-policy prognosticators of our time, particularly on the topics of HIV and COVID-19, is a cassandra, or a person who can foresee crisis even if no one responds to the crisis itself. laurie saw the COVID-19 pandemic approaching from china. she answers the questions: how should the world have prepared for the virus? what is it like to be a cassandra? how do we balance our lives with our livelihood in a pandemic? laurie garrett is the author of New York Times bestseller The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health tom scott is chairman & co-founder of the nantucket project. rp eddy was the architect of the Clinton administration’s pandemic response framework and the United Nations response to the global AIDS epidemic & is CEO of global intelligence firm Ergo. rp is co-author of the best-selling award-winning book Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes with Richard A. Clarke, Former National Security Council counterterrorism adviser. listen to this episode on apple podcasts subscribe to our youtube channel follow us on facebook follow us on instagram transcript Tom Scott [00:00:22] Hi, everybody. My name is Tom Scott, chairman of the Nantucket Project. With me, as always, is RP Eddy. Today joining us is Laurie Garrett. Laurie, thank you for being here. I was going to tell Laurie the story of how this all came about. And basically the way it came about was, you know, I was relatively slow, whatever that means. I mean, we closed our office on March 12th, but it really took me a while to wake up to what COVID was and what was going to happen and all these different questions. But we had been making a film with R.P. about Cassandra's, and we knew that in his book that he had written about about this about this Cassandra. So I called him. I said, hey, what do you think about getting on and just doing a conversation together that we can distribute to kind of our constituency? You know, we do these live events and we do all these different things. So all over the country. And he said, sure. And that would have been right around that right around that time. And I remember the exact date. But one of my first questions was RP, who's the Cassandra in this case? Who is this person? And he said, Laurie Garrett. So, Laurie, thank you for being here today. That's how we ended up coming together today. And that's how the show started. And one of the things I'll tell you just some highlights from my trip, you know, I'm getting to the end of the river now. We literally started at Lake Itasca, which they say is the source of the Mississippi. And I was connecting with a woman up there. I think she said she had a restaurant for twenty years. She's probably going to close the restaurant. She was a very thoughtful woman. But she said it's very strange to be put out of business when there's this disease is nowhere near me. We don't even know what it is like, what it feels like. And I contrast that with where I am now in Baton Rouge. And some of the places I've been, particularly as I've gotten down River, you know, Baton Rouge is a ghost town, Baton Rouge is, very anxious about the disease. And so, you know, you start in a place where the economy is basically destroyed or certainly challenged and you end in a place where the economy is the same. But you start in a place where there's frustration and anger about being at home and then you get to a place where people want to stay home. You know, you expand the spectrum of it all. So it's been a really interesting trip. But, Laurie, as I said, you are unknowingly part of the way this show ended up laun...
