The Premonition A Pandemic Story

But I did it with like, okay, I'm going to find characters and they have to be obviously relevant to the story but like I'm going to start with people I'm just interested in and I'm only going to write a book if I find people I'm interested in.

And it took a while but the three people who were at the center of that book are the three best characters I've ever had.

And they are like unknowns.

I mean, like I'll give you one quick example. Charity Dean is a local public health officer who has been like fighting disease on the ground for the last 20 years who, let me leave her to one side because the guy who's easiest to describe is the guy who wrote the pandemic plan for the United States who invented basically an idea of how to respond to a pandemic.

And his name is Carter Mesher. He was a ICU doctor by his whole career.

the premonition and it wasn't.

the premonition.

I struggled with Michael Lewis's new book, The Premonition. Not the reading it, of course. It's a joy to read, like everything Michael Lewis does, but I did struggle with its central argument.

And there were people who had that plan. Michael Lewis's book, he's following characters who saw this coming early and were trying to raise the alarms on it.

It is episode 63 of people I mostly admire and it's called the only Cove in 19 book worth reading

One of the most shocking passages in this book, I thought, came with this revelation that Sam had looked into paying Donald Trump not to run.

Sam's thinking, we could pay Donald Trump not to run for president. Like how much would it take?

He was floated. There was a number that was kicking around and the number that was kicking around when I was talking to Sam about this was $5 billion.

The question Sam had was not just is $5 billion enough to pay Trump not to run, but was it legal?

The book is just coming out, I think today. And there's an excerpt of it in The Washington Post that I read that, you know, it kind of plays into these stereotypes that were created about Sam being like the boy wonder, the boy genius that goes through this whole narrative about, oh, he's on the Zoom call with Anna Wintour and he's also doing, you know, eight other different things at the same time and he's playing video games and whatever.