"Don't Let It Go": Interview with NZ Journalist and Author David Cohen
01:47:00 Share

Okay, so let's go ahead and get started formally. This is Don't Let It Go, my solo Wednesday show. I'm Amy Peekoff, and I am very pleased today to welcome a Facebook friend for a few years now, David Cohen. He is a journalist and author from the Netherlands, and he was kind enough to send me a nice bio. So let me go ahead and tell you. Not from the Netherlands, Amy. Oh my gosh. Did I do that again? You did. New Zealand. Yeah.

I'm going to do that. I'm sorry. Anyway. It's funny, isn't it, when you get something locked in your head, like you meet a woman called Joanne and you think she's Wendy.

And you keep on saying, "I will never call her Wendy again." And then you do it. And I was talking about the news from Netherlands that they're starting to mandate certain business procedures with David before we got on. And so, yeah, I got it stuck in my head. And then I was saying New Zealand. So, yeah, okay. I'm a professional. I really am. So let's go into our bio.

David Cohen is a Wellington, New Zealand journalist and author whose work has been widely published both in New Zealand and around the world. His writings have appeared in New York Times, wow impressive, The Spectator,

Jerusalem Report, and the Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of six books with a seventh on the way, the latest book of which is called Book of Cohen, and it had to do with the late Leonard Cohen, so we'll talk about that. He describes his personal enthusiasms as poetry, philosophy, and Middle Eastern cooking. You've done a bit of travel

around that, which is exciting too. The last Middle Eastern cooking he has parlayed into a popular newsletter called Middle Feast, which he says is currently finding an appreciative readership at such a time when governments around the world have shut down the economy and told people to stay in their own kitchens. And if you want to find out about that newsletter, the place to go and to find out everything about David, it is editorial

services, editorialservicesnz.com. Editorialservicesnz.com is the website, so you find out about Middle Feast and all his books and his editorial services, as the URL tells us. So welcome, David. Thank you so much for joining me. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be with you, Amy. So...

It's a funny thing. We've been, until this week, as you say, we've had various connections online on Instagram, on Facebook.

I think we used to be on Twitter before I became appalled at that cesspool. But it's only this week that we've actually properly talked. It's like we're old friends already. It's great to be on your show and it's great what you're doing with it too.

Well, thank you. I mean, I've only recently started back up and part of it I was going to discuss with you in connection with Middle Feast. I love the recipes that you send out on Middle Feast and they look so good. And so much of that food is food that I can't have either yet or I don't know if I'll ever or who knows because I've had all this huge digestive junk over the last...

you know, not quite year, I guess, but you know, it's been, it was kind of percolating. And then last summer with mold exposure, it just went off the charts. So I've been battling with that. And I would love to get back to some of those really tasty recipes, but how did you get involved in that? I mean, what, how did you develop an interest in Middle Eastern cooking? I've spent quite a bit of time in the Middle East and many years ago it was,

the day before I came back to New Zealand and as usual I was rewing the fact that I wouldn't be able to have shakshuka which is a an egg dish sort of egg and spicy tomato hanging out of North Africa but the Israelis have sort of perfected it in a sense anyway there I am in Tel Aviv

thinking, oh gosh, I won't have another shakshuka breakfast until next time I'm here or in some Arab country nearby. And then I had a sort of brainwave. Why don't I cook it myself? Why don't I learn to cook shakshuka? It may not be as good as the stuff I can get in Jaffa or Jerusalem, but...

So I did that, I sort of toyed around, it's a pretty simple recipe. And then I thought, well, maybe I should get a book, maybe I should, you know, have some friends from the region who can cook. And I invited them around and got them to sort of walk me through the ropes, if that's not a mixed metaphor. Learning how to put an eggplant on a gas hob.

So I learned the shakshuka, learned how to do the tahini, learned chickpea salad. This is more than a decade ago. And now I cook every day. And probably about 90% of what I do is Middle Eastern, which is to say Turkish.

Persian, which is my favorite cuisine, North African, and then sort of Eastern Mediterranean, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli, sort of, because that's a sort of blend of Arab on the one hand.

which is superior in European cuisine, which tends to be awful. What's awful about it? What's awful about European cuisine? It's ghetto food. It's sort of food of necessity. And that's not a snobbish statement coming from me. I have an Ashkenazi background in my family. It's just awful food. I don't think...

I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that it's some kind of banquet. Although there are nice recipes there. It's the Arab, you know, the broader Middle Eastern foods. And a lot of them are Jewish, by the way, too, that I really like. One of my books I co-authored,

It's a cookbook, a Middle Eastern cookbook, and as you pointed out, I do a newsletter. It is finding a particularly appreciative audience right now, or readership, because I'm putting out recipes that are fairly simple.

No, and it's great what you're doing because then you're giving people a way to actually maybe during this time for the first time discover cooking in their own kitchens. And one of the threads that I've been, you know,

picking up lately because and I've had to do it out of necessity for health purposes is that if you're cooking your own food in your own kitchen you really know what's going into it chances are you're going to have less of all the horrible ingredients that make people generally sick so you are probably helping to improve people's health to a large extent thank you inspiring them to do this

Thank you. There is a creative satisfaction in the process. There's a nutritional awareness. And it brings people together. You know, the romantic idea of making someone a meal. It's not just a matter of mood setting. It's incredible trust. You sit down, you let somebody cook you a meal. What you're sort of saying is, you're not going to poison me. So it brings...

people together in a particular way. Unfortunately, right now it's a necessity as well. And I do feel sorry for people, a lot of the men, who might be unfamiliar with using the kitchen or might go out to restaurants all the time. These will be grim days. They are grim days anyway, but that will add to the...

to the difficulties? Well, I think I don't kind of follow the typical stereotypes. So I was not accustomed to cooking a whole lot myself. And then suddenly with all the health issues, I had to start cooking a lot more. But because of those issues, I was out of the market for being able to cook a lot of the stuff that you have, because there's a lot of carbohydrates that

whether it be all kinds of various veggies, a lot of the wonderful spices that you call for. Some of them. Right. And so I, but you know, again, I don't want to go into all that right now, but you know, the goal is to increase the tolerance over time and become a customer and an appreciator of all of your cuisine because it's, it's, it's some of my favorite as well. It's I just, I love all the flavors and the variety that you get.

Yeah, the gut issues are, again, once you've had, if you've ever had them, that's a whole revelation as well. The Greek word for soul, I believe, sort of is suggestive of one's stomach. Right. A gut feel. And you sort of get that, an appreciation of that concept if things aren't going well.

No, you really do. So my personal request is if you have more meat recipes, more meat based recipes, I could probably take it at least as a foray. Some of the spices I can take in moderation and things like that. It would be good to have more variety. But, you know, we're doing some curries and things like that. So I'm not completely bereft of any spices.

interest in what I'm eating. But for a while, I was just eating meat and salt the way that so many of these healing people do. But the meat, you know, beef heals the gut like nothing else I've

Well, Jordan Peterson tried that diet, didn't he? And he's in pretty bad shape. Well, okay, but he's in bad shape not because of the diet, because of the drugs. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, he was taking those drugs. So that's a whole different topic. So Middle Feast, anyway, the shishuka too, I want to try that, but I'm actually having, I think, some issues with eggs, believe it or not. Can you believe that? Mm-hmm.

It's such a tasty thing. But I'm, you know, I'm happy I've kind of gone down this path before all this COVID stuff hit. You personally and your family and friends and everything, are you being hit by this disease in any way or how's it affecting you? Well, I mean, on the macro or micro level, on the micro level, no, I don't know.

anybody that has been stricken with this, with Corona. On the wider level, of course, one of the great paradoxes of the last four or eight weeks is that the world is, the nation state has reasserted itself on the one hand, but on the other, the globalization of the experience is very apparent. So we've got

sort of fearful paradox. Am I hearing sort of the implication that the one is bad and the other is good from you? The nation state maybe asserting too much power? Is that your sense or no? Well, I think some of these supranational entities like the UN and possibly the World Health Organization, I wouldn't know. The EU certainly

have revealed themselves to be threadbare during this latest emergency. So I'm not asserting a broad principle. I can certainly see multilateral bodies and treaties and alliances. But the worship, the deification of entities like the UN has been found phenomenally wanting recently.

Would you, so that's interesting, you know, what is your vision of the proper role of an international organization, a national government, local government during something like this, some sort of a pandemic? And then, you know, again, you say you've been disappointed in the international level. Have you been more satisfied at the national level there in New Zealand, at the local level?

How has that played out? In New Zealand, the response... This is not precisely answering the question, but I can securitously get back to it. In New Zealand, the response has been pretty good. New Zealand is blessed with a number of advantages that most other countries don't have. We're tremendously isolated. Right.

We have a small population about that of South Carolina. We don't have porous borders. We're sea locked. And I think we don't have air pollution issues, which I understand have some bearing on mortality rates.

And also, so those are advantages, whoever was in charge of the country or in charge of the government. Our government was, however, pretty responsive, was one of the first in the world, for instance, to shut down...

flights from China, from the virus heartland. So, you know, here the government in the emergence, during the emergency has been very difficult. I'm a federalist

by inclination. I like the American system. I like 50 governments. I'm a 10th Amendment fundamentalist. But that is challenged at a time like this when you've got an emergency, you've got an enemy, an unseen enemy swarming in and you've

you've only got a matter of days or hours to formulate a response. In that situation, the old checks and balances deal becomes very difficult. And so that's been...

challenging to observe and to think about. So you would say even in the United States, which is huge and arguably has been affected differently in different areas by COVID, that you think that the federal government should take a larger role? Well, of course it can't as far as I know.

as far as I'm aware, the 10th Amendment. Well, Trump seems to think he can, right? He had the press conference the other day where he said that his authority was absolute over governors. And so they set up this kind of battle between-- there are groups of governors who are saying that they want to get together and coordinate for their region sort of a phase-in plan to try to get back to normal life.

And he's saying, well, no, you know, this is I'm the president and I have total authority and You know, how dare you come and ask me for emergency supplies on the one hand and then say that you're going to go off and decide this yourself on the other. So there's this current tension and difference of opinion about it. Right. I mean,

I should say as a non-American, even though I have two American children, I don't want to sound pompous as if I know better than people in the US, but just speaking as a fan of the US system and someone who's given a little bit of attention to governance in the States, it seems...

abundantly clear that each state has the right to set its own response. It wouldn't matter who was president, whether it was Barack Obama or Thomas Jefferson. He couldn't say he has no constitutional authority to declare an emergency. Moreover, that could be challenged in the courts. And we just don't have the time for that.

It seems a state by state thing. The other thing is that the President Trump, if he wants to be in charge, he should explain exactly what he's going to do. It's not enough to be aspirational and say, I want the economy working, I want people back in church and

and et cetera, what's the plan? Presumably if he did have a plan, most governors would say fine.

But does he have a plan? It seems not to be a plan that would be based on anything. And sometimes he'll throw a date out there to see if it sticks, it sounds like. But I haven't heard a set concrete plan. The last that I heard is now there are a group of business leaders who have plans.

been pressing him, we need more testing because one of the things that we need is, you know, and I agree with you just, you know, for the record, you know, I know that you probably do not consider yourself to be an objectivist completely where we, you know, I say that the proper role of government is only to protect rights, but I agree with you that this is an emergency and

And so, therefore, that there are certain roles that government would properly have for a limited timeframe now that it wouldn't normally assume. So I do agree that a lockdown was probably an appropriate measure now, in part because

Our system, our healthcare system in the United States has been atrophied by government intervention for decades. And so there is a real need to flatten the curve and all that stuff. So, you know, good lockdowns. But now we need to figure out a way out. And you're right, there has to be a concrete plan. That concrete plan, as I see it, needs to rest on testing.

then because testing is inherently limited no matter how much the government opens the floodgates and allows it to happen, you need to use that data that you get from testing and perhaps the type of apps that Apple and Google have now proposed using

contact tracing and things like that so that you can use the information, the limited information from testing to the best possible use, you know, get the most bang for the buck and really help people use the testing resources wisely, tell people who need to get tested because they were at this place with that person who was COVID positive at

whatever time, that kind of thing. And then of course, common sense precautions. They're talking about having people wear masks, at least in certain contexts for a certain period of time, still banning large gatherings for a while and things like that. All of this, we need, but as you say, we need a plan. And I, of course, agree with you. He's out there challenging

challenging these governors. And he seems to have the idea that if they need him for some supplies, that therefore they have to listen to him in making these plans to open up their economies as well. That's what he's tweeting out there. You're missing it on Twitter, I'm telling you, David. You're missing his wonderful tweets, but that's what he's telling them. And everybody who has any sort of legal background is saying back to him, what about 10th Amendment? What about checks and balances?

And as if he's forgetting that, you know, where in the Constitution does it say that he can assert absolute authority over this? Right. For a lot of us outside the U.S., Andrew Cuomo, in particular in New York, the governor has been a lot more presidential than the president. I'm not a Trump hater. I don't have, you know, I don't froth at the mouth.

over him if he does something good. I hope I'm big enough to acknowledge it. Leaving that to one side, Cuomo has been the man on the stage and also just intellectually more credible over this. Of course, he was the one of six governors, I think, out in the Northeast working for a sort of inter-jurisdictional government

solution, which of course is absolutely necessary. I mean, you can't have something just in New York where you can cross the bridge. Yes. In New Jersey, you need that whole region accounted for. This is practical, factual, data-driven stuff. It's not just saying, I want to see everybody back in church by Easter.

No, exactly. And over in the left coast, as I like to call it, we've got California working with Oregon and Washington State. That's what Gavin Newsom of California has been proposing. But Newsom has, I think, not impressed me in the way that at least Cuomo, at least Cuomo doesn't

really disgust me in any way. You know, Cuomo, he hasn't really disgust me in any way, Cuomo. And you've got to give it to the guy that he has been dealt a really tough

situation to deal with there in New York City. There are certain things about New York City that, you know, just like you were saying, there are certain advantages to New Zealand. There are certain disadvantages to the city, which is all the public transportation and everybody in those closed compartments in the subway, you know, spreading it everywhere. And they closed down late and everything as well. So there's he's he's had it very tough and seemed to have handled it pretty well.

You're an objectivist. Ayn Rand, of course, loved Manhattan, loved it, worshipped the skyscrapers, crafted novels around that. I wonder what she would have thought of this. I don't often find myself sitting down thinking, oh, I wonder what Ayn Rand would think about this. But I do about New York City. And it's an open-ended question. I mean, how would she have

responded well well as far as I can tell there are disputes a bit among objectivists as to whether a lockdown was appropriate at all during this time and some people are saying it really doesn't qualify as an emergency I did think that it qualified as an emergency because of you know again data-driven right how big is the threat

And how likely is it that the doctors and nurses at the hospitals were going to be overwhelmed and

You know, and you see the stories every day about doctors and nurses dying after treating COVID patients. And it's because, you know, I think obviously they work super long shifts and it's got to be exhausting and psychologically traumatic during this time for them, very stressful. And then at the same time, they're being probably bombarded with a huge viral load. So I call it, you know, viral load and psychological load. At the very least, so many of us objectivists have, you know,

had so much respect for healthcare workers and doctors such that we have for many decades been fighting against the socialization of medicine. And that's a lot of time and resources. So from my perspective, it is completely in one's personal selfish interests to want to stay in and help

ease the burden on them is in so far as you see that your actions can make a real difference in that regard. And then also that while normally I'm not necessarily for any sort of a heavy handed government intervention, I do think quarantines are sometimes a proper function of government. And that in this case in particular, you know, whereas maybe if we had a complete free market system, it would have been agile enough to deal with this emergency. We,

are not in that situation. And we've had, you know, I don't think New York was actually overwhelmed in terms of number of ventilators needed. And I'm hoping that continues to be the case, but it looked like it was going to be that, particularly if you didn't

have these measures. And I think in California, many of the areas have been very lucky or not even lucky. I would say that the measures of staying home have paid off and we have not overwhelmed the healthcare system in the way that we might have. And that means, you know, these

healthcare professionals that you have not contributed to making their work conditions horrible during this limited time period. And I think it's valuable. I'd also be interested to know whether in California, you've had what we've had here in New Zealand, which is what I think of as a certain fetishization of

quarantine. It's as if Judaism, Christianity and Islam have vanished from the stage and we now have this religion called stay at home. This is sort of, you know, if this had all been presented as a sort of necessary evil, quote unquote, a very highly regrettable short-term

situation to be rude every day because locking people up, non-criminals, is a bad thing. On that basis, most sort of halfway rational people could agree. I find this fetish thing

in my global neck of the woods, highly distasteful. What's it like in California? So we've had similar, and of course, the most nauseating things come out of government agencies where, you know, they'll have some sort of little public service announcement or graphic that they put up, you know, and well,

well, lockdown and we're not going to tell you how long it's going to be or give you any hope about this. We really, we're not even getting that impatient about it, but here are all these psychological services for you and call this number and everything as if that's going to really help the situation. And no, there is an essay by Rand that I talked about on one of my shows, it's called "The Ethics of Emergencies"

And in that essay... That is in Virtue of Selfishness. And she says in there, yes, and it's kind of in passing because the emphasis in that essay is on the way philosophy is typically taught in colleges where they try to derive the appropriate ethics from starting with some lifeboat scenario, which is not the way to come at ethics, right? But it's done all across the country in undergraduate intro classes.

But in any event, she says in passing, yes, in an emergency, one should help one's fellow man. But what is the focus? The focus is, as you say, to get back to normal life as soon as possible. And yes, there's a role for

Making fun out of being at home to the extent that you can make the best of it. And I was going to ask you, I want to ask you about how you're writing because you have a new book that you're working on during this time. All of us are trying to do different things to make the best of it. But don't make it into something that you just resign yourself to as now the new normal.

and certainly don't you know there is this sort of kind of fetish just like oh let's go on Instagram and make it look like stay home is the best party ever in the world no you know that that wouldn't be the appropriate response it is making a virtue out of psychosis and you know you mentioned virtue of selfishness Rand's collection of essays on ethics

The title, of course, is a provocation. But what we're talking about, and again, we agree on, is far more of a provocation, which is the virtue of imprisonment. There was some online Facebook discussion I didn't jump into, I observed yesterday,

somebody talking about Australia and New Zealand saying that these two countries should just have a number of months more of quarantine. Months? And I briefly sort of danced in

to the discussion and sort of made the unremarkable point that, you know, when the money runs out, everything runs out. There won't be a medical system. To which somebody said,

What is it? He said, money is never a problem for governments. So in other words, you just, you keep on printing. You just print money. Yeah, but you could, you know, the money is worthless if there's nothing to buy because nobody's making anything. And, you know, the news that I just saw, and it's probably true globally, was that retail sales, other than essentials, as they call them, have just taken a dive.

like has never happened. The graph went all the way back to 2000

And the line, the dive that it took, the red line was just so many times longer, a few times longer than any of the longest lines in any of the recession, the dip that it took. So it's scary stuff. And no, we need to get going. And I was talking with the neighbor. I don't want the neighbor to hear. But he was saying, oh, I have this trip planned in August and I hope I can take it.

And I'm thinking, you hope that we're going to go. No, of course we, you must be able to take whatever trip you want in August. That is bizarre that people are even thinking that that's an acceptable possibility. On the other hand, there's news from North Carolina, I believe,

that says that some people are actually out there actively engaging in protests to say end the lockdowns now. End the lockdowns now is a hashtag on Twitter, at least. So people are starting to do... I interviewed the two doctors last Friday who are putting forth a plan to get businesses certified as safe to go back to work in terms of either being COVID free or they have the appropriate protection

practices, you know, distancing and things like that within their business. And they're doing advising and testing to help people get back to work. That's the premise. It's, you know, we have an emergency. Let's, you know, do these sort of emergency measures for the least amount of time necessary to get people back to normal. That's the purpose of any help that you give in an emergency. Somebody could write, and maybe I should,

Or maybe you should, an essay on the kind of quasi-religious aspects to all this. You know, we've heard, I mean, I mentioned the stay-at-home religion. But what we're seeing every week is so many assumptions about

So I'm pleased I'm quite Socratic. I'm absolutely sure that I know very little. This is my life experience. That's quite a good starting point because we've seen an awful lot of people who would claim that they do know a lot rather changing their minds quite quickly.

a bit. For instance, the projections, all the projections... Well, are they changing their minds or are they willing to shift in light of new evidence that's coming forth? Well, it's rather unfortunate that a number of formidable policy decisions have been taken on the basis of 20 zillion people dying, for instance, in the United Kingdom.

give or take, according to Imperial College London, that number keeps on going down. I think it's at about 14,000 or 16,000 now. Who knows how low it will go? But the measures that have been taken have shown

have been big. But it's not just that, it's notions of how this, how corona spreads. You know, New York, they've closed parks, you know, people walking through natural parks, not just tiny little

parks on the corner of Queens. Large parks where people could spread easily. Upstate, with the deer roaming. This is just superstitious nonsense. Initially we heard six feet, stay six feet apart because the virus can, which sounds sensible. But now people are talking about 45 feet apart.

We've heard about surfaces. I'm not poo-pooing that, but the narrative just keeps on changing. Your cell phone can give it to you. Remote tribes in Brazil that haven't had contact with the outside world. With a cell phone or anything, yeah. Apparently are getting coronavirus. Is it being beamed in from outer space?

Yeah, there have been narratives about China. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. The bold facts are disgusting enough. But again, it is so clear how little we know

Right. And that's where you can say, okay, it definitely did appear to be an emergency, which in my mind, especially given the current state of where we are, required some sort of a government response. The way I look at it, you know, because again, I think you and I are different on overall political philosophy. I envision a

much more restricted role for government than you do, I assume, in general. But nonetheless, we are where we are. And so just as I would not be in favor of getting rid of Social Security all at one time tomorrow, just because it's wrong, I actually think that program is wrong, that government shouldn't be doing that. Still, I would phase it out because that is

the best thing, I think, the most humane thing to do under the circumstances. Most people that I know in objectivism would say, yes, you phase that out. You don't propose that you're just going to immediately drop it tomorrow. Similarly, I think if we went cold turkey on government intervention in coronavirus, because you know that in the utopia, the ideal situation are

healthcare system and everything would be agile enough to respond to an emergency like that at least. Ebola is maybe a different kind of story, but you know, this is more like a turbocharged flu as John Taylor of Duran Duran described it. He had it, by the way.

Yeah, turbocharged flu, right? Normally that wouldn't be an emergency, but it appeared with the use of ventilators and the requirement of ventilators and the number of them and all this stuff, it appeared to be an emergency where there was an appropriate response. So, but nonetheless, it's limited, that's it. And so now we should be on the premise of getting back to normal starting tomorrow.

Yeah. Good. How are the figures out there? I mean, because here locally, I'm in Orange County in California, and we have seen in the last couple of days quite a bit of drop in the number of new cases. We had only nine on one day, and this is a population of over three million. We had only nine new cases, and then we had 23 the next day. So, you know, it's all within this kind of small... How many days have you recorded?

I think it's 17 of the 3 million. Right. So it's comparable to that. That is comparable to New Zealand. New Zealand is 4.8 million. Okay. It's had nine deaths. Okay. And the rolling average at the moment for new cases is about 17 or 18. Are you pleased with the testing that's been available there? How is that going?

We've had a comparable amount of testing to the state of New Jersey. And given that out east, out left, as you say, that's where the crisis has really been. That's not bad for New Zealand, a country where... Well, we're all complaining here, right? Because we're on the premise, and we keep seeing this, our FDA is still bottlenecking the

the availability of tests and antibody tests in particular. So I don't know that you should be happy with that as a benchmark. You guys should try to compare yourselves maybe more with Singapore or Korea or something where they really got it under control. Yeah, well, the antibody tests

testing, as I'm sure anyone listening in knows, that is absolutely key. My personal belief is in the state of California in particular, that this virulent strain has been circulating for months. I can't think of any other explanation for why the state of New York has had 12 times

more fatalities than the state of California. Yeah, California went into lockdown three days earlier or something. There are a few differences, but basically it's the same. Same advice. The outcomes have been hugely different, even allowing for the density of New York City. But

That's just late night speculation. I mean, who am I? But then who is anyone? I mean, Andrew Cuomo doesn't know. Amy Peikoff doesn't know. Antibody tests will give us a basis because it's going to look really ridiculous if we discover that a fifth or a third or a quarter of the state of California

was basically immune to the condition. Well, and then there are, you know, a number of the experts are speculating about the amount of immunity that you do get. And so I heard Amit Shadalja, you know, he's an objectivist actually, but he's just been the voice of reason on this. If you see his clips out there, he's excellent.

And he was talking, I believe yesterday, about the fact that unless the viral count, the load is up to a certain level, then you may not actually have immunity. And there are people who have actually been sick who end up, they don't make antibodies up to the requisite level to confer immunity for themselves for any reason.

period of time, as far as he knows. But again, this is a, it's a moving target. And that was really kind of the diversion that I went down, which is, I don't know, some people I do think have changed their minds because though their positions have been

more geared from policy, you know, it's a policy motivation for their position instead of being driven by the science and the evidence. But because this has been a moving target and there's been so much that we don't know about this, you know, for instance, ventilators, they were the standard of care. And now they could be killing people.

Right, right. And I think a lot of people are trying to do their best in the face of that. The one thing is the recommendation to not wear face coverings, I think at first was motivated by a desire to save lives.

the masks, the supply of masks as much as possible for healthcare workers and other people like that. There may have been a policy motivation. So I felt like the switch, you know, it's common sense that with a respiratory illness that a face covering, if used properly, could confer some benefits. That sort of thing does change. Oh, I think what all this underscores is a philosophical principle that knowledge is open-ended.

I mean, we have our principles. They're axiomatic. Well, not all principles are axiomatic. We can get into philosophy if you want, but... Okay, well, let's. Yeah, we should. If you like. But the situation does underscore that knowledge in any areas is open-ended. You know, the principles are enduring.

but the knowledge can change day by day. And fortunately,

this has life or death aspects to it. It's not just what kind of guy you go out on dates with. No, and we're all scrambling to find out what supplements should I be taking to boost my immune system versus not. And there are certain things, so yeah, we've all been scrambling from any perspective, whether we're individuals just trying to gird ourselves against it and

prevent getting it, or if you're, you know, healthcare workers trying to actually treat people. So it has changed a lot. So let's shift a little bit, you know, again, you and I don't agree that this is nirvana to stay home all the time, but have you been making good progress on your latest book? Tell us about your

book that is going to come out? You said this year, right? And how it's going. Hopefully this year, if the stores are open, both online and physically. I try to do a different sort of book each time. So one of my books is about autism. Another is about the academic life. I've co-written a cookbook, as mentioned. Mm-hmm.

One about youth crime. My last book was about my namesake from Montreal, Leonard Cohen, as you mentioned in the intro. And my next one is about, I'm trying to think in Californian terms here, an extremely obscure former New Zealand Prime Minister. He's now 85. And over the past year,

We've set aside Friday mornings where we talk about life, the universe, religion, Ireland. His name's Jim Baldrick. He was a three-term prime minister. And so it's a sort of conversational study. And all going well, that will be out in August or September.

And it will be printed in North America as well, because he is a former prime minister. So there will be some academic interest. But it's not an academic study at all. It's very breezy, very conversational, quite personalized. What has been your favorite conversation so far that you think will be included that we should look forward to in the book? I enjoyed the interludes about religion, in his case, the Catholic Church.

What is the relationship there between religion and state? Well, he would see, he would argue that there's none. I mean, he's quite sensible. But again, part of the motivation for the book was that he was a leader who seldom talked personally about himself. And so 20 years after he, more than 20 years later,

after he stepped down from being Prime Minister, or rather was deposed by one of his colleagues, I wanted to stick with the personal stuff. So the book will have very little about policy and sort of governmental decisions and so forth. As I say, I'm not a political historian, and nor would I

wish to be thought of as one or ever aspire to be one. So that's it. And after this book, I would quite like to do another cookbook. Okay. And so you would do the cookbook on, because you said you already wrote about Middle Eastern cuisine, right? With your co-author? Yes. So what would the next cookbook be?

I'm not at this point. I'm not sure but I just sort of feel that that's that's where I would like to go I think the current emergency is underscored for me how much people like this stuff

and it makes people happy. It's like being a massage therapist or something. You know, people leave feeling better than when they came in. And it's the same when you can give them good recipes and inspire them, particularly guys and people who haven't really tried it before. If you can inspire them to... You could be the Jordan Peterson of cooking.

where Jordan Peterson has all the men who are cleaning up their rooms and everything and he took particular care in that. Right, find them to have a chair to like clean up your kitchen. Yeah, okay. I hadn't thought of that. The other thing is if our economy tanks, and I don't think it's absolutely clear that that's going to happen, I do think it could be a snapback, but if the economy goes down,

in the short or medium term, then some cooking skills, there's another good reason for cooking skills for most of us because it's a cheaper way to eat.

Well, and I've got the health angle, right? So again, the more you're cooking at home, the less processed food you are eating, more likely you're going to make healthier food choices. And there's, you know, a whole angle on this in terms of what sort of diet and lifestyle makes you more susceptible to diabetes.

a virus like COVID. Some people are using this as a wake-up call. So anything that you can do to help them cook more efficiently and have a better time doing it and enjoy the result in their own kitchen will be greatly appreciated. Yeah, yeah. So I'm inclined to do

Something like that. I should add that this is not the United States where I'm seated. And doing books is for ego or creative satisfaction. It's not anticipating

huge sales. Well, I'm sending everybody to your website to check out your books and you will, they will be shipped internationally if people so choose, I understand. So yeah, editorialservicesnz.com. We're continuing. I'm not, I just drop it in there every so often. Your latest book is about Leonard Cohen.

And of course, part of, I think you're fascinated with him, you've worked in the past as a music critic as part of your journalistic career. Is that correct? That's where I began. So I got into journalism securitously. I was a music writer when I was very young, in my early 20s. So that gave me a basis for journalism.

writing about music. I actually was a very bad music writer. So the book on Lena Cohen, I'm no longer very young, as should be obvious. The book on Lena Cohen was not so much an exercise in writing about music because I still don't feel I'm terribly adept at that.

- Why don't you think you're adept at writing about music? I mean, I have this discussion with friends all the time and friends will make fun of me for my music tastes, but you know, you must have some, you think objective assessment of why you're bad at writing about music. Why? - I think I have the same problem that Ayn Rand had when it came to aesthetics and that is that I lack a vocabulary.

to convey ideas and experiences in the arts. I think I'm okay. I think I used to be rather appalling. And I'm not being self-deprecating here. I also...

you know, I mentioned Ran because that's sort of part of the show. I do think that was one of her deficiencies. It was...

And what have you read of hers that you're drawing upon when making that evaluation? The book that she did on aesthetics. Okay, so in terms of her writing explicitly about aesthetics, you thought that she didn't have the total vocabulary that would be necessary to do that well, in your opinion. Yes, and I can actually hook this back to Lena Cohen as well, and objectivism. But no, I think that that was one thing she didn't,

get very well. I'm just looking for it. This Playboy interview with Alvin Toffler. I love it, actually. It's a terrific, terrific interview. But in that as well, she tried to put forward

a notion about the arts, which as opinion goes is okay. But when you say it's objective with a capital O, you get into problems. So what in particular did you think was problematic that she said? Not so much problematic as audacious to say, well, Dostoevsky

has a certain sense of life. I like Dostoevsky a lot, so I don't vigorously disagree with the particular, but

to say, oh, you know, Dostoevsky had a magnificent sense of life or whatever. I'm not quoting it, but Tolstoy was malevolent and mystical. You know, those sorts of judgments that rhetorically, they're great. They sound good. They make good coffee, but they're sort of nonsense, really. Well,

Well, and so there has actually been, you know, within the objectivist movement, I've been married to Leonard Peikoff, and he gave a course actually later talking about the survival value. I think this is what it was called, the survival value of great but malevolent art, and went into a number of these examples. And of course, he was an appreciator of Beethoven, and you hear the rumors that she disapproved and things. So there has been, in terms of

you know, adhering to the list of concretes that she either approved of and liked or disapproved of or whatever. There's been a, you know, kind of a movement away from any of that. Right. So that, yes, of course you can get value out of things that are more malevolent. It can still be,

great art, etc. The place where I think you would have more agreement, of course, is in non-objective art so that if you have something that's just kind of a smear on the wall as opposed to an actual painting that's more representational. Those sorts of issues people would tend to have

But these are sort of arbitrary preferences, I think, to some degree. You know, representative art versus abstract art. There's a skill, I'm sure, to what Jasper Johns did.

Not to my personal taste, but again, I would lack the vocabulary to explain why Jasper Johns is somehow occupied a much, much lower run to, I don't know, Da Vinci or whomever.

And at the very least, I think these sorts of judgments should be prefaced by, well, in my opinion. It's like, I have noticed, and we will get back to Lena Cohen in just a few paragraphs because there is a relevance here. I have noticed among objectivists

now and then, a tendency to mimic Rand's particular taste. So certain operas are kosher, certain types like Beethoven are not kosher, and this is, it's sort of like

everybody, what was her husband's name? O'Connor. Frank O'Connor. Frank O'Connor. It's like everybody's saying, I would love to be married to Frank O'Connor. There's no individualistic room in here. We have our taste in people. We have our sexuality, our particular psychology, our quirks. We have our sense of humor. There's no reason why we should all be the same. And if

One is trying to be an individualist. That should be most self-evident. And that includes authors as well. There's no reason why everybody should love Dostoevsky. For me, there's two different questions. One is, what is the principle behind art? Art is spiritual fuel for human beings to help

in Rand's view the rational faculty operate well so you're presenting life as it might be and ought to be and you know that for her the superior value of romantic art therefore but um

Within, there's sort of a broad range that, yes, there's going to be individual tastes. You know, you say ice cream, you know, there's different flavors. And for music, you know, there's different types of music that you can grow up with. There's certain types that are, say, atonal to music.

I've actually heard stories of dogs, there's like one particular atonal piece of music that would make this one dog wail constantly or something. It's actually painful to hear. And no, this maybe is not life-serving in any way.

It's one thing I think to announce that principle and then it would be another to take as a dogmatic edict that you should mimic Rand's preference for living in the city versus living in the country, you know, because you worship skyscrapers versus you like to live by a lake or have a huge plot of land that you can go garden or whatever. It just doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't. I mean you can find value in both or you can diminish value.

The problem with her, for me, with her aesthetics is that their deficiencies bleed into areas like sexuality. So homosexuality, because she was not homosexual herself, you know, she wrote about, or the guy she was then having an affair wrote about, in very disparaging terms.

terms and not just homosexuality as a concept but homosexuals. So it becomes highly distasteful. Yes, as far as I know in a personal realm she was not as condemnatory about it. Of course, Leonard Peikoff has also done some work to, you know, kind of change that and there are well-respected homosexuals within objectivism working scholars and things like that, which is a beautiful thing. So

Some of this, you know, you can look back at, say, founding fathers' own slaves. Ayn Rand, at least a certain point in her career, didn't have a more modern accepting view of homosexuality that maybe she would have had she been born in a different country.

in a different country, for example. - Jefferson owned slaves and probably fathered a child with a slave, although he did say he trembled when he reflected that God was a just God. This was not a religious statement as such. He was a deist, but I mean, he was saying, "I know this is terrible." - Yes. - But here in Virginia, this is how we do business.

I can't get back to Lena Cohen on this, because when I started out in journalism, writing about music, it was also a period in my life where I would have tremendous arguments about philosophy, which was great for me, and including arguments about objectivism and liberalism

small government versus big government. I guess it was an undergrad experience, although I was never an undergrad, I'm a high school dropout. But it was a very useful period where I had to read philosophy and argue philosophy. And a good part of that was with objectivists. And there was one in particular, we used to have the most terrible arguments about Leonard Cohen.

because he was convinced, you know, Lena Cohen was always a part of my life because of my name. I'm actually the only David Cohen in New Zealand, if you can believe it. Oh, wow. Yeah, there were family reasons. I mean, I'm not directly related to him, but background, he was from Lithuania and blah, blah. But I also just love his music, most of his music. Anyway,

we would have these tremendous arguments about Leonard Cohen. His view, basically, was that Leonard Cohen was malevolent, had a malevolent sense of life.

And only a depraved, very Randian word, only a depraved individual would aesthetically respond to Lena Cohen in any kind of positive. Now, did your friend actually believe this or was he using it to kind of poke you? He certainly believed it. And we eventually somewhat parted company on this.

this, it was probably the only time in my life where a musical disagreement became so personal, but it was sort of dictatorial as well. And it was sort of stupid because it was based on this idea of Lena Cohen as a morose, you know, music to slit your wrists to, completely oblivious to the humor and wit and novelistic and

devices and the self-deprecation and the Jewish aspect and the craft of the songs. This almost made it into my book, but it would have required a big digression about Rand and I didn't particularly want to go there. It wasn't relevant. It is relevant, though, to

why aesthetics I see as possibly the most problematic feature of

of the objectivist. Now, when you talk about the issue of homosexuality, I would put that more under psychology or, and typically anything else that she's talking about with sexuality. I wouldn't necessarily call that aesthetics as much as psychology. I guess there's some overlap. What is it that you find sexually attractive or, you know, proper to find sexually attractive, but that would be psychology. And I would draw kind of a strict line between the basic philosophy that Rand enunciates versus

you know, aesthetics or any of the applications in psychology per se. When you talk about the fundamental philosophy of hers, are you religious at all yourself personally?

I used to describe myself as a theist, but a friend of mine who's a professor of religious studies assures me that I'm a deist. So it's sort of like Jefferson, who's one of my heroes. I've always been fascinated by religion. I enjoy writing about it. I enjoy thinking about it. It is a primitive form of

philosophy. And so I'm very comfortable with people who feel religion is tremendously important and want to throw around ideas and discuss that. I don't, as someone who's Jewish, I don't see the contradiction between religion and science. Even before the word scientist

was part of the language. Judaism, about a thousand years ago, accepted the primacy of science over, well, just the primacy of science, which is why the Semites have done pretty well, all things considered. But religion is, I mean, it's tremendously important and it's an enthusiasm thing

of mine. Actually, in Greek, enthusiasm, of course, entheos means possessed by God. Okay. Yeah, philosophy means love of wisdom in Greek. A friend of wisdom, yeah, sure. So I'm Jewish, and I'm a member of a synagogue, but I also accept the Timordic

actually it's not, the notion that to read anything literally

in the texts of Judaism is itself heretical. So it's a, you know, I don't... So if there were a conflict between any sacred text that you ascribe to as someone who's Jewish and what science is telling you, you would always go with the science? The science. Okay.

But as we started off talking about, Amy, in the last eight weeks, we've seen the shortcomings of science. The best scientists, epidemiologists, medical practitioners have been scrambling around

to understand the crisis. There's a sort of shortcoming there, and I think it sort of shows how you can, the relationship between the two. Of course, the facts of reality, you know, data, science, absolutely, absolutely, I mean, no,

no argument in any way, shape or form. But there is a solace that we can find in other things personally that also is important.

or can be important? You obviously it is good to know sort of what you know and what you can control and what you don't know and what you can't control and try to keep those very separate and confine your focus as much as possible to dealing with those things that you know and that you can control.

But I don't think that we have seen a shortcoming of science or that somehow science itself has been shown to be deficient. I think because, you know, the communist regime in China has kept everyone in the dark from the beginning and withheld so much crucial information about what we're dealing with. There's that. If they had come clean, for example,

Maybe there's some information in that lab that people are finally now starting to accept might have been not the origin in the sense that they were creating some bioweapon or any crazy conspiracy theory, but they had this lab that the purpose of which was to study these sorts of viruses and that maybe it leaked out by accident. If China had been forthcoming about this, then maybe all of these scientists, epidemiologists, et cetera, wouldn't have been caught so flat-footed.

And that's a huge disadvantage. In a way, it's, I, you know, you'd say it's almost very aggressive on the part of the Chinese to withhold the information when they know that it's them who have been responsible for getting this virus propagated all the way around the world. It's hostile what they've done really. And the fact that, you know, the scientists are scrambling, that's what scientists have to do when confronted with phenomenon.

Thankfully, the universe is not such that we are constantly all the time confronted with phenomena that are both deadly and that little is known about them. If that was the constant state of existence, you and I couldn't be talking right now. I agree 100%. I'm simply suggesting these are different realms.

I mean, of course, science is the only basis for understanding the what about life. But religion or philosophy, using the words broadly, have some relevance to how. It can make you have more equanimity.

about the things and the risks and everything that you can't control or know about. I shared like Christopher Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens dislike or loathing of the tendency for many religious people, not all, not including every thoughtful, kind, decent Christian in this, but for many

to extend their notions about how they should live to how everybody else should live. And that, of course, is the great deficiency. So proselytizers are not necessarily your favorite. Ted Cruz had a tweet just a few days ago last week, and it was something to the effect of,

Okay, now I've, you know, made you, you're in your house and your schedule is cleared and everything. Now will you listen to me, signed God. Okay.

Yeah, as if all, well, and it actually ties into what you were saying about lockdown being a religion. He was implying that somehow this is all part of God's plan, that we are all in this lockdown right now, and that somehow there's some message that we're supposed to be getting from God that's

That the only way that we could get it is if this horrible thing happened and we were all in lockdown. And so that's the purpose that we're all serving by being in lockdown right now is that we're supposed to be receiving a message from God. That would not be the sort of... Sort of like, I think the Pope said something similar about how this was a wake up.

call from above, which reminds me of a rabbinical conversation in the wake of the Holocaust. And one rabbi says to the other, apropos, you know, the death camps and six million, one rabbi says to the other, where was God during all this? And the other rabbi responds and says, where was man?

Yes. Yes, yes. And what we have seen here in the United States, that even in the last week or so, some people have insisted on going to Easter services. Mm-hmm.

knowing how dangerous it is, but counting on somehow God to help them. And, you know, I have a grandmother who was tremendously influential on me and she was a lapsed Catholic, went into something called science of mind that is somewhat religious, but not really. She actually had a statue of Socrates that I have that I love. It's a, you know, a beautiful memento of her, but

you know, she would say God helps those who help themselves. That would be her sort of a, you know, approach to it. And like you say, you know,

human beings, we need to be taking the steps in the real world. I can understand maybe that some people do find comfort in the ability to have more equanimity during times like these if there is religion, but it's not going to make me into someone who's going to be a believer. And I seek...

secular alternatives. So for example, a meditation practice can help you do this. And you can have a meditation practice that doesn't require that you believe in any sort of a higher dimension. But we got down this just because I wanted to talk about more fundamental issues in philosophy. And so if you do consider yourself a deist, insofar as you believe in there's a god of some sort and some sort of higher dimension, a heaven maybe that people go to,

then you have that fundamental difference with her. We don't necessarily get to aesthetics that far at all. Because that would be the fundamental question. What sort of universe are we living in and what is our relationship as human beings to things in the universe? Well, her two favorite philosophers

well, I don't know how much of a favorite philosopher Thomas Aquinas was. She mentioned him very favorably, but certainly Aristotle. Now, Aristotle was a deist. The notion of a prime mover, that's Aristotelian. He argued in his metaphysics that you can't have an infinite regress of cause and effect. So somewhere,

there's a first. Yeah, and so for her, the first is just existence, not any sort of a prime mover. So she departed from Aristotle on that. But when you think about it, it seems to me there's not a lot of difference, or at any rate, there's some similarity between those positions, because whether you, whatever you come back to for your first, you know, the prime mover, if at all,

You're talking about an eternal being. You're either saying existence has always been there or that there's something over and above that. Well, but then with a prime mover, you might start to impute motives and things, right, on this prime mover. And so, you know, Ted Cruz saying that God has a plan and that's why we're all in lockdown right now, that would be the sort of thinking that you would start to fall into maybe if you believed in a prime mover versus just a

what is, is, and there is existence out there, and so let's use a scientific sort of approach, you know, evidence of the senses and inference thereof. Right, but a deist would say, I don't actually know, you know, to the question of, you know, what was the point in creating all this? I mean, a deist would say, I don't know, and I don't think it's actually terribly important. I'm not obligated

to say that, you know, because I believe in Aristotle's prime mover, I'm not obligated to tell you how to live. No, no. I have no special insight. How we live is based on the facts of reality now.

and how we arrange ourselves as individuals and societies, etc. The die-hard religionist, of course, wants to put people at the point of a gun.

Yeah, I mean you could hypothesize, I suppose, you know, there's the prime mover who basically set the universe in motion the way that exists as Rand understands it. And practically speaking, there wouldn't be a lot of difference as long as you are the deist variety where once it was there and set in motion that

there wasn't going to be any more interference, God coming in and favoring one group of people over another or any of those things that have caused lots of trouble throughout history. - But my point about Rand was that she loved Aristotle, really, you know, rated him. And my point is that there you have an avowed atheist and a deist.

And they actually can coexist philosophically. So, yes, it's a significant difference, but you can start from that place and you can end up agreeing on a lot of important things.

So in terms of ethics, then, what do you see yourself as following? Do you say you have a code of ethics? Selfishness, you said, is a provocation in the virtue of selfishness title. Is selfishness something that you would want to reject out of hand? Or you probably understand something about Rand's idea of a rational self-interest that is not selfish.

the kind that says, you know, whatever thing I want, I can traipse all over everybody else and get it in some sort of a Hobbesian, you know, steal your neighbor's cow sort of scenario. Obviously, she doesn't think that's selfish. Yeah. And I think probably for me, ethics are more a matter of arbitrary preference. And I'm like the guy in the joke who, when asked whether he,

shared Rousseau's view or the Hobbesian view about how we should live in the ethical realm, said, you know, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I'm with Rousseau. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I'm with Hobbes and Sundays I take off.

So I'm a little like that. My basic disposition would be somewhat chivalrous. I think we should do good by people, and I think we should do good by ourselves. And the more we value people, perhaps the better we should be. But there's a tremendously good case for acts of charity, not least that they release people

sort of endorphins or whatever that actually make us feel quite good when we simply do a benevolent act. The issue of compulsion, whether we should be compelled to do good, of course, I don't agree with that whatsoever. I'm an individualist.

So you do not think that, whereas you think that there's maybe even a virtue that you would describe charity as a virtue personally. I would say the virtue of chivalry. Chivalry. Okay. So how do you distinguish chivalry versus charity? Well, politically, I would call myself on the chivalrous left. That is, we do good for those who are less fortunate insofar as that's possible.

And it's not possible in every circumstance. Where I'm not on the left is this whole utopian idea, creating perfect societies, politically correct speech, the whole identity politics thing. I mean, that I find totally repulsive. But the chivalrous, the wish to do good by people,

But then if you're talking about politically helping out those who are less fortunate politically, then you are talking about forcing charity in a certain way, right? That it would be appropriate for government to force charity via redistribution of wealth in a certain way. Right. As long as we have governments, there is an element of redistribution.

and I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. Well, but do you have to be an anarcho-capitalist to reject that as a proper function of government? Yes, you do. You think you do. Okay, why? Because you can't have governments without taxation, which itself is coercive. Okay, but I'm not sure if you're familiar with the... There's been proposals for voluntary taxation whereby Iran thinks that you could, and I tend to agree...

Well, not only just a lottery. So for example, she had envisioned something like a stamp tax where if you had a contract, say, you know, your book was

was going to be published by a particular publishing house. Your contract with the publishing house, do you want that to be enforceable in a court of law? Well, if you do, Mr. David Cohen, then you need to pay a 3% stamp tax, like 3% of the value of the contract or whatever it is. And she thought that you could fund all of the proper functions of government, police, courts, military, as she saw it,

voluntarily, and then you wouldn't be in a situation where there is compulsion and it also, she would leave all of the decisions about charity, which she thought was proper, she thought charity was proper, but not a duty, she'd leave that up to the private individual.

Is that workable to you or you think that that would be an immoral system that didn't incorporate redistribution into... I just think it's unworkable. And I think Rand, for the most part, as for instance, in this interview I held up before the Alvin Hoffler...

which I recommend anybody who hasn't read it reads it. He put some of these questions to her as well. And I don't think she answered them terribly well. She would get frustrated and say, "Look, I'm not a government planner. I can't tell you how tax works. I can just tell you the principle that people shouldn't pay tax."

I don't accept that principle. And I think she was putting forward another provocation here that she never particularly explained very well. Yes, of course. It would be wonderful. We don't pay any tax. We don't have a currency. The anarcho-capitalist stuff is good. As mentioned, I don't like utopianism.

And we're not there, we're not going to get there. I'm not even sure there is desirable. There are some basic functions, as even Rand conceded. The only practical way to pay for those is some sort of consumption or income tax, desirably at a low rate.

As far as I know, George Reisman has done the most detailed work about how you would get there from here and there being a model that would be fully voluntary taxation, which the government performed only those months.

three functions, that it is a workable, doable thing, but that would take a long time to establish and it would take people to actually crunch all the numbers and say what... And there are derivatives of those three. It's not just three, like what's happening right now. Again, now let's say, without being a conspiracy theorist, let's say that China is deliberately

unleash this. I don't believe that. I don't see the evidence. But let's say a scenario where State X unleashes bioweapons. Under the rubric of defense in that situation would be massive medical expenditure, which is what we're seeing now, because there's an initiation of force, to be randy about this,

But part of the defense of the free citizenry has to be medical as well. And it has to be orchestrated in some way because you can't have 50 million people descending on one hospital because the whole system collapses. So that's a derivative of...

of defense, somewhere into health. See, I would say if we were in the ideal scenario, we would have a healthcare system that was agile enough to work on this. There is always going to be, in a scenario like that, some

cost and maybe loss of life if it's not possible to defend. But, you know, government could close borders, of course, as we have done with really deadly things like Ebola. And, you know, like I said early on when we thought we were dealing even with just a really turbocharged flu, it was appropriate to have travel restrictions at a certain point, given the overwhelm of the system. You know, this is one of the good reasons to have borders is to protect you against, you

contagious diseases that are going to come in. But that being said, you could limit government's role in this to do

do some sort of distancing measures as necessary in something like this if something happened to slip in before because they were being nefarious and spreading it to us. So I would say closing borders, distancing measures of certain kinds, depending on how contagious and how deadly a disease was, that those would be under proper functions of government. And it would be just as if you're also within the borders of a country preventing

or not preventing, but addressing criminals insofar as they pose danger to other people. You know, you've got police force. Very difficult to implement that, isn't it? And even if you allowed some anarcho-capitalist situation where people were dying in the streets of...

on the island of Manhattan because they were insufficiently insured, you still have the initiation of force principle because they could infect others and it's awfully difficult. No, no, it is awful. And the thing is, is that this is, and we go back to our, I think we both agree, this is an emergency. And so we...

what I think is principles that will apply in normal life, which is that government is only doing police, courts, and military and doesn't have any of these extraordinary roles to play. It's because we're living normal life. We're not in this. And as you and I know, we don't believe that this is the thing that is a sustainable state where our goal is to get out of this as soon as possible. And at the same time,

It's not anything that you're trying to, you know, derive life principles. We're not going to make it into a religion either that, you know, COVID now, you know, everything is about, and they did the same thing after nine 11, right? So after nine 11, we had the Patriot act and the Patriot act should have been a very temporary measure to deal with this pandemic.

limited emergency and what has it done? It's been going on now and renewed and it's insidious and its effects and that's what we don't want to see here. What's your prediction though? I mean, are you seeing an actual plan to resume in New Zealand or not? We're told we'll have one next week. Okay. And the government so far has been pretty good. But like you, I'm

apprehensive that this could be used to promote things that I find politically distasteful. I want the greatest freedom for the greatest number and I want that everywhere. In that sense, we started off talking about this. It's another example of how we are all in this together.

And the thing that most of us hopefully share in common is that our precious liberties and freedoms are respected, that they continue, and that the realities of the emergency are not promulgated

into a limitless future. And the more we can be vigilant against that, the better. Yeah, I think we're all right. And so now that you, actually, I think you are probably because you've raised it, and I see what you mean, this idea of a religion of stay home. Yeah.

If you take that sentiment that is sort of out there, the religion of stay home, it will make people more receptive to the continuation. As I said, they just kind of complacently accept that it might be a couple months before they can do the very normal things that they were doing before. How is it that people could accept that and, you know,

for me, it is not inconsistent to say, yes, there's an emergency, stay home for a limited period of time. At the same time, the whole focus during that time should be getting back to normal life as soon as possible. And when we don't see from our leaders, a sense of urgency about getting us back to normal life and some concrete plans, it does, it makes you nervous. All I know from Newsom so far in California is that he's says, we're going to do it based on science.

And then he has a list of very common sense parameters that he's going to consider in figuring out the plan. But there's no definite plan yet, as far as I know. Right. He seems relatively sensible. The guy in New Jersey, Phil Murphy, seems borderline psychotic. Oh, really? Wow. Well, he was saying people in the same house should distance from each other.

So if you're there with your spouse in bed, I mean, but I won't go through the details, but talk about government in the bedroom. Yeah. And Cuomo, as I said, seems presidential. But every day, whether it's New Zealand, California, New York,

Great Britain, leaders should be apologising and should be empathising with their fellow citizens. Look, this is disgraceful. This is terrible. But this is an emergency. And by definition, it will end and we promise

We will go back. The new normal will include the old normal as far as freedoms are concerned. To me, the best news that I heard today was that, and it's connected to a piece we already have before, which was that Apple and Google were going to work together to have this app on a phone that would help trace for COVID-19.

and that they say as soon as the COVID emergency is over, the app goes away. So they're modeling what we wish our leaders would do, which is, yes, there's an emergency. Here's this temporary measure.

to deal with it. And of course, there's wonderful technology available that can make this anonymous, pseudonymous, whatever. Let's put the knowledge in people's hands and give them what they need to assess risks for themselves sensibly, and we can get back to normal living. And at the same time, the assurance that it's all temporary and we'll get our freedom back. Yeah. Yeah.

So for you, you're going to go right now. You're going to... What's a day in life? You're going to cook. You're going to write. What else? I've got...

I've got two of my kids in the house and one has kind of special needs so I need to spend a bit of time with him going on a good walk up the hill. In The Spectator, the magazine, I've actually written a bit about this and the issue that comes out tomorrow. Excellent. I'll do some cooking and some shopping and a little bit of writing and I'll

fertile around on Facebook, probably more than I should. Yeah, I took half a day off and it was pretty nice actually at one point, but I got really upset because it wasn't so much Facebook, but it was all the news that I had steeped myself in that I was posting on Facebook was getting me upset. And then I just said, hey, I'll just step away from the whole mess. But you write on a daily basis every day, basically? Monday through Friday, weekends too, what?

Sunday through Thursday. And I do, if I do 800 words a day, that's a good day. 800 good words. I can get up to a thousand if I really try and that's it. It's diminishing returns. And you are an autodidact author actually because you did not graduate from high school and you've published six books.

So, yeah, so far. But, you know, education is a little overrated. G.K. Chesterton, a great English writer, said he never let education get in the way of his career. And I sort of tried to follow the same edict. And at my point in life, I find people increasingly strange if they hark back to the college they went to,

often taught by people whose exposure to life was not terribly much more than that college or academic environment. I consider myself quite fortunate. Really, for 15 years, I wrote about higher education, mainly for the Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C., back when it was a profitable paper, also for The Guardian in Britain.

So I've been, I've visited scores of campuses around the world, including America, spent a lot of time with scholars and researchers, teachers. And, you know, there's a lot of second rate stuff happening in higher education, I discovered.

a lot of good things as well. So I don't think it's a particular advantage or disadvantage to have been exposed to it. And again, as we're seeing at the moment, coming up through the scholarly ranks, you know, Karl Popper said, great men make great mistakes and great academics can make great mistakes as well.

Oh, no, I mean, certainly that's the case that they can. And look at the humanities. My God, I'm genuinely grateful that I was not exposed to some of this piffle. I was a math major.

And part of it was, yeah, part of it was the desire to escape humanities. And the numbers don't tell us everything, but the numbers don't lie. No, typically not. Now, I wasn't in statistics as much. I sort of wish I was because it'd be so valuable today, but not so much. I want to ask you, because I think probably we are a bit over time and you get to all the things you wanted to do. One question is,

In your music critic career, you have had some interaction with Bono, the lead singer of U2. Can you tell this story? Because I don't completely understand whether part of the story that you posted on Facebook was true or not. I wanted to know. It is true. 30 years ago, U2 came to Australia and New Zealand. They had just released the album, The Joshua Tree. So I wrote a

what we call a thumbsucker piece, sort of contemplating the meaning of U2 in a modern world. And it was not a very favourable write-up. And so when the band arrived in my hometown, Wellington, New Zealand, and performed The Joshua Tree that night, the lead singer, Paul Hewson Bono, took the opportunity to disparagingly

read excerpts from my review on stage. And he was a little unkind himself. And so the Irish group recently was re-touring The Joshua Tree 30 years after and came to New Zealand about four or five months ago. And

So I did another think piece, you know, just reminiscing a little bit about that earlier occasion when Bono performed my words as we were on stage. And he actually wrote to me and apologised for the earlier incident. And so I wrote back and, you know...

thanked him and, you know, I said I still, actually he invited me to the show. Did you go? I couldn't go because all the planes were booked out by people going to the U2 show. But I said I still didn't like the album. But I said, you know, if it's any consolation, my son does, which is true.

And so that night... What don't you like about the album? I used to go running to that album. I thought it was a great album for running. Running to Stand Still. Well, not just that one. Yeah, all right. Well, I think it would be a very good album for running because all the songs sort of meander forever. That was my criticism. The other part was that it's a very sex-less album. Mm-hmm.

But just to end the story with a couple of words, I mentioned my son really quite enjoys some of the bands. So he, on stage the next night in New Zealand, of course, he sort of starts rapping about my son in a very nice way, sort of dedicated the song to him. So we're all pals now. Yeah.

So it's a nice story. And I do like a few of the U2 songs, just not the ones on that LP. Which ones do you like? The one about Museum of One Tree Hill. I think Beautiful Day is inspiring. And I like the song One. Okay. Yeah. So they're okay. Okay. Well, we'll chat some more about music. I'm not going to...

take any more of your time right now but thank you for telling that story and everybody if you want to go find David's work and maybe I assume you do editorial services for people is this true? I do. That's why it's called editorialservicesnewzealand.com what do you do in that do you actually just I give you a manuscript and you edit it or is it? I edit manuscripts I do

I give editorial advice, I do just basic line editing, copy editing, or what we call sub-editing over here. So that's it. That's partly how I pay my mortgage. Okay. Coaching, keeping people accountable who are trying to write their books, any of that stuff or no? I'm sorry? Accountability on people who are writing books, do you do that kind of thing?

slave driving in other words like oh me no yeah no you don't do any of that stuff okay no no okay that's what i need somebody to get me uh to the desk i guess oh i see all right i'll keep that in mind well no i mean you know you could expand you can use this covet era to expand the services that you offer as well right everybody's doing it um so yeah yeah

Amy, thank you very much for your time. I've really enjoyed it. And I hope I've kind of, I mean, I've enjoyed it both ways. Not just pontificating, but listening to your thoughts and ideas as well. Yeah. And I'll see you on Facebook and I'm sure we'll discuss and debate some more now that I know more about where you're coming from. So that's excellent. Take care. Everybody, thank you for tuning in. I'm going to end right now.