WBD203 Audio Transcription

Coronavirus Lockdown in Italy with Giacomo Zucco

Interview date: Friday 13th March 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Giacomo Zucco from BHB Network. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Giacomo Zucco is a Bitcoiner who is currently under lockdown in Italy. In this interview, he explains what life is like on lockdown, the measures that have been put in place, how he thinks the governments around the world have dealt with this pandemic and why he believes centralised planning is poorly suited for dealing with the crisis.

“It’s always good to prepare, but panic is never the answer, and when you panic you always tend to act irrationally.”

— Giacomo Zucco

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: How are you? How are things?

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah, everything's fine. We are starting to feel it a little bit, but we are privileged because we are nerds, so we don't get out a lot anyway! I imagine for other people it's way harder.

Peter McCormack: So if you weren't watching the news, you wouldn't even know anything's going on?

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah! The difference is that I travel once a month, so I see the word once a month, that's the only time.

Peter McCormack: Once a month. Well listen, I don't even know what show I'm going to put this on, whether it's a Defiance show or a Bitcoin show, but I think if it goes out on Defiance, maybe not as many people who listen will know of you, and we're not making a show here today about medical advice, you're not a doctor.

Giacomo Zucco: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: But you are someone who is... I don't want to say politically motivated, but you have a history in politics and you have strong opinions on politics and structures of governments and governance systems. Would that be a fair place to say it was coming from?

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah, I think my main issues about all these are ethical, and in that case, yes political and my background is basically that. Also I really like a logic and statistics and one of my strong issues about all this is actually statistics. So I'm not a statistician, but I know how to use a bias theorem. So I think I know that at least as good as many epidemiologists. So I use that for other reasons and I think I can talk about statistics pretty, let's say reliably.

Peter McCormack: Confidently!

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah exactly.

Peter McCormack: Okay. So you're in... I'm not even going to say the lockdown region now, because originally it was Lombardi they locked down. But very quickly, within two days, they locked down the whole country.

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah, exactly.

Peter McCormack: So what are the rules now?

Giacomo Zucco: The rules are basically, you cannot go out of your house. If you do, you may be stopped and if you are stopped, you have to provide a reason you are out. There are a few possible reasons. It's very confused and very ambiguous. But a rationalization of this mess that is the act, would be that you can go to a supermarket to buy food or for necessity goods, assuming that the place you're going to buy them are the closest possible to your home. So if they find you far from your home and you are not in the closest supermarket, you can't. You have to buy medical services basically, so pharmacy mostly, and you can go to work if your employer proves that they cannot use smart working with you and the operation of your company is some fundamental service.

So if you are a doctor or a nurse of course. But even if you are a technician that is needed in a hospital or public transportation or something, which is essential service, then you prove that you work there and you could not work home and then you can work. Of course, this is Italy, so this is not just ambiguous and very, very ill formulated and confusing, but it's also not enforceable in a proper way because there are not enough cops and soldiers to really enforce that.

So it's random and spot as always. It's like they fined a homeless guy in Milan yesterday, they arrested a few old people in the park that were basically alone on a bench on the park and mostly the people that they are fining and arresting are black market workers, people that are going to work, but they don't have a regular contract because they're working in black, they're working without taxation and without any kind of legal contract.

So they are trying to keep working to survive because they will not receive any kind of government compensation or social insurance, so they have to go to work to in order to survive and they cannot prove they are working and this is actually half of the economy in Italy. More than half in Southern Italy and a little bit less than half in Northern Italy.

Peter McCormack: Wow okay! In terms of the spread of Coronavirus within Italy, Lombardi was the region with the most severe outbreak, but is it in all regions of Italy right now?

Giacomo Zucco: We don't know if Lombardi... This is one of the issues I'm taking with a discussion about this. We don't know if Lombardi is the region with the most severe outbreak. What we know is that at the beginning, a false clue, so this story about a guy meeting with a Chinese guy, which was at the end, not true and not confirmed, basically pushed the doctor to try to test for this COVID-19, one guy in Codogno. From there, they tested this guy, it was positive, other guys in contact with him were positive and then they started to test people, get into the hospitals with severe breathing problems and severe basically respiratory problems and all these people were infected.

But what we know is that there are a lot of tests took in Lombardi and in this test, there is a measure of course of a positive case because other places, they just haven't been tested at all. What we know from genetic sequencing of the virus in Codogno is that is most likely a third generation mutation from the animal human leap, which is not coming from China. Probably is coming from Iran and probably is in Italy already since last October, if not even before. So we know that there is the virus in Italy. What we don't know, if there is the virus, especially in Italy, we know that there is the virus in Lombardi and we don't know if there is the virus, especially in Lombardi, so a lot of assumptions are being done mostly because politicians, they don't know about logics and mathematics and statistics and of course doctors, they tell the truth.

They say what they see and what they see is a medical system in Lombardi collapsing, which is not the first time that it happens. The medical system about intensive care in Lombardi collapsed at least four times. I was recovering yesterday the newspaper head titles, like we are out of places in medical care and we are starting to apply in triage. That sentence appeared on newspaper in 2008, 2013 and 2016 during the winter for especially severe outbursts of respiratory illness. So that happens because Lombardi is better than UK about intensive care units, but not as good as Germany, for example and it's very, very easy to overload.

They work basically at capacity already and when there is an overload, there is an overload. So the problem in the hospital is real. Now there is a strong possibility that people will have a serious health problem, because even for unrelated stuff, which is completely unrelated with coronavirus, if they need intensive care and intensive care is full, it is not there. It's not really at capacity, but it's almost at capacity in many hospitals. I have a few friends directly working in hospitals and they can confirm the story basically. They say that the load is around double of the normal load, the of last year, this winter and the capacity was not there.

Plus all the measures that they have to apply in order to insulate the possible, very highly infected patients reduced even more or they increased the friction, there's low turns for nurses, so it's not the same if you have to cure 100 people in intensive care without infection precautions, or with infection precautions. So that's why even if you had double the number of intensive care requiring people last year, it will not be the same this year, but it will be more serious. Of course, together with the insider information that I get, I get also a lot of... It's human psychology. I get a lot of fake news.

For example, my brother he works in a hospital and he said to me two days ago, "look Giacomo, this is very serious. One nurse of 30 years old without any pre-existing condition just died and hospitals are failing" and the day after I said, "look, I don't find in the news. How is that possible?" And he said, "okay, ask it to my contact there, they are keeping it secret." So I asked, "please give me the name of your contact. I want to ask them the name, how can they keep it secret that you just need, a foreign journalist just asking" And this is not something they can keep secret anymore. After three or four layers of, "please let me ask." Actually, after three layers, the last one said, "no, it was not really [inaudible 00:14:44], it was Galliate and the boss of my friend here said that.

 So basically we don't have any trace of that 30 years old guy. I really hope he's not in some danger of the government, but I don't think it's possible to keep something like that either. That's the case of fake news spreading among medical doctors, so it's clear that they are really in panic. They are really facing a strong, overwhelming situation. So they are not making it up, but it's not at all clear that anybody has a real frame of what's actually happening, which is also clear from the fatality rate, the naive fatality rate that you can make in Italy, which is for some reason, four or five times higher than the fatality rate, which is actually registered in scientific studies, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

In South Korea, you basically have 0.7% of fatality rate. So fatality rate is not mortality rate. Mortality rate is how many chances do you have to die of this. Fatality rate is how many chances do you have to die of this, if 100% that you are already infected? So it's a lower number. The fatality rate in South Korea is 0.7% and they did a national scientific study, so they tested people around the country with some kind of stochastic selection and this is the result.

Now in Italy, if you just take the number of positive tests of the people and you take the number of positive tests of people who died and you divide it for the number of positive tests of people you get numbers like 5%, 6%, depending on the day. So it's like here, the same virus is a mysteriously becoming super deadly. Actually the chances are that these numbers are completely unreliable because the tests have not been done on the general population. They have been done basically on two criteria.

One criteria is people with serious respiratory problems coming into the hospitals, so already critical patients, where of course the critical rate is higher and the fatality rate is higher and the second bias that is generated is that they tested some people in strict contact with people that was already known to be infected. So they confirmed some kind of contagion path that proved to be completely unreliable because, for example, the first patient in Europe was not in Italy, it was in Germany, the first known patient. So this narrative that China, Italy... I mean, we don't really know.

Peter McCormack: Well yeah. I've been really ill this last week and they won't test me. So I came back from Turkey, which doesn't have or didn't until recently, have any cases of Coronavirus. But I had been in South America, I had been in San Francisco, Vegas, I'd come back through Heathrow, I'd then travelled through Heathrow to Turkey, I'd been to the Greek border and I'd been mixing with migrants from Iran, Africa, and various places.

Now a number of those people might've already been in Turkey. So the Iranians, I don't want to say, "oh, because coronavirus is quite widespread in Iran, that those people had it", but I'd been through enough airports and enough situations that I felt like with my symptoms, I should have perhaps been tested. I certainly had a very high fever. I ached all over, slightly shorter breath, but I'm not sure if I'm short of breath or it's anxiety that is causing me to be short of breath if you know what I mean.

But in the UK, they would only test me if I'd been to one of the primary outbreak locations of Asia, Iran or Italy or if I'd been in contact with someone who was a confirmed case. So they refused to test me and now they're stopping the testing. In the UK, their view is that it's already here, the testing and confirmations of cases actually doesn't give you any useful number to work with. It actually gives you a lot of false negatives. So I might actually have it. I've got no idea. I think it's definitely the worst flu I've ever had.

Giacomo Zucco: So I give you another anecdotal story. In December, my mother-in-law started to have a very severe dry cough and respiratory problems and high fever and she wasn't able to leave her home. She is 83 and cardiopathic with stronger heart diseases. Luckily she recovered and now she's well, but the doctors, the family doctors didn't tell her, "let's go to intensive care." They just told her, "stay home." Nobody tested her for anything. They gave her an antibiotic, it didn't work. They told her to wait and then she recovered after three weeks of serious fever.

So we took all the precaution, we kept her separated from the baby and so on, but basically what happened is that she probably had something very similar, but if it was happening now, maybe she would be in intensive care because now how will the first intubation react to that kind of symptoms, they would probably send her to some hospital. Instead if it was just died in December, she would be ruled out as 83 years old woman with severe heart diseases dies for complication, and we don't know.

So the thing is that really, as you said, we don't know. There is this strong argument that if you say this, you are minimizing, you are underestimating, you are trying to say that it's just the flu and everything's okay. That's not the point. This is to say that we really don't know. So you cannot just try to pacify yourself with some random, strong opinion about global police state, or nuking down cities, because you know that Coronavirus is there and you would kill everybody and so you have to just nuke the China or UK or whatever.

We really don't know. What we do have, as I told you before, is South Korea, where there is some kind of statistical study. Then we have the cruises like Diamond Princess, which is kind of a random example because it was random people on the cruise and they tested everybody on the cruise several times. So in that case, you have reliable statistics.

Of course, it's a very small sample, so it's not that reliable. Also, it's higher than South Korea, it's like 1% and it's older people because there were no children on a cruise. They're mostly old people. But those are healthy people because you don't go on a cruise if you are already sick. So it's not a very reliable stuff, but South Korea is a very good example of reliable statistics.

Peter McCormack: But what kind of conclusions is this... Or what kind of things is this making you think about specifically? Is it an overreaction by the government? Or is it that they should have a reaction from the government, but we just need better information? What kind of thought processes are you going through with this information?

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah, I think it's mediatic and political short [Inaudible 00:22:13], which is not really, only in the overreaction sense. It's actually a pendulum switching from severe under reaction to severe overreaction. So at the beginning of this mess, what happened was not overreaction, it was actually political organization, including the World Health Organization, which is a political organization, not a scientific one. They told everybody this was nothing, that it was just the flu and the Chinese government in order to avoid panic, went to great lengths in order to imprison people, including medical doctors, talking about the virus.

So personally, for the statistical reason that I told you before, I am not even convinced that we can say for sure that the virus originated in Wuhan, because think about that. This is called bias theory. Think about a global pandemic which is already widespread. What is the probability that you find this virus in the most specialized coronavirus research centre in the world, which is situated in an overpopulated city in China, which is the most connected city in China? So if the virus is already everywhere, where is the higher probability to find the virus? The answer is probably Wuhan and now we know that exposed. So the virus was discovered there, but it's not sure that it was born there. It's possible, but not sure.

So the government initially, the Chinese Government, decided to imprison people and I will say, I can say this on your podcast because worst case scenario the Chinese police will come to take you. They cannot enter here because I'm quarantined. I think they most likely killed those people, because there was the case of the doctor spreading the information about that and he was killed by coronavirus very, very quickly, without any picture of medical information.

Then you have a social media influencer, a girl, that made this very, very weird video of her talking to the camera like "the party is in complete control, everything is fine, I feel fine" and then she was dead of coronavirus that same day. So they were imprisoning for sure, possibly blackmailing or torturing, and maybe killing people spreading the information. In the West, they were minimizing, culling fake news, any kind of people in panic. So the first reaction is actually minimization.

Then in Italy, it was very funny because the president of the Democratic Party, which is the former Communist Party in Italy, he organized this aperitivo in Milan, this spritz, to prove that it was nothing, so it's just the flu. So he organized a lot of aperitivo with a lot of advertising and then he got sick and now is positive to the virus, which is completely absurd. But the first political input is minimize. Then they realized that they minimized and so instead of getting back to a more balanced situation, they do the other way around, they feel accountable to the public opinion.

So "okay, we now look like morons because we minimize, so now we have to show you that we are in control" and to show you that we're in control, what do you have to do? You have to take extreme measures, you have to exercise control, you have to send the policemen to stop people. You have to do something, because if you don't do something, people will ask, "what are you doing?" The second thing that you have to do in order to appear in control, is to create a simpler narrative.

So a virus which is already everywhere is a complex narrative, you don't want that. You want the virus which is exactly in the city of Codogno, you don't know how the hell, but it's there and if I stop the city I can prevent it from going there. I have a simple narrative or something that I can stop, or something that we can all stop if we just stay home, or do this or do that.

Peter McCormack: So you believe this is all narrative-based? This is all about government reputation? Or do you think it's a little bit more complicated than that, but it's kind of like a cross between, there is a need to have some reaction, but usually it's the wrong reaction at the wrong time?

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah, the latter. I think that this is not all about narrative. I think that most of the things we're seeing now are narrative in the context. So what is the context? Now, I will give you some numbers that people often get mad about because it's like you're trying to move the goalpost or change the argument. But these are just to give a context. We are in a context in which so far, if you take a few days ago, the average number of people killed by coronavirus or dead with coronavirus, which is another thing.

So if you die for car accident and you have coronavirus, you are still counted on these. It was like 56, now it's probably 70 something today. This statistic where three days ago, now it's probably 70. This is the average people dead. So the number of people divided for all the time passed in 2020. So yellow fever, which is something already know, is 82, Rabies is 162, Measles 247, Meningitis-C 129, Cholera 392 and so on and so on. I can go to the seasonal flu, which is 127, Malaria is 2,002 every year, HIV/AIDS still... It's a known narrative, we were all scared about HIV and AIDS in the '90s, but now it's still there, and it kills a 2,110 people every year. But pneumonia, hepatitis-B and tuberculosis kills 3,014 people every year statistically.

Of course there are like 4,500 people would die yearly for car accident, or 5,000 suicides, or 5,300 diabetes people dying for diabetes, mostly by following the WHO guidelines about food, but this is another topic. So in this context, is not that coronavirus is nothing, it's something and it's something that you have to keep into a specific context. Now if I say this, the Silicon Valley type will freak out and say, "you don't understand exponential because you are not a Silicon Valley start-up. So you don't understand exponential growth." So yes, this is just 80 now against the 3000 of tuberculosis. But what if it's exponential and it grows and grows and grows? Which is true.

But the point is that in no single disease, I mean, all these diseases are exponential infection, but the point is that the disease is not a pure exponential forever. It's a Gaussian and the Gaussian starts as an exponential, and then it goes down and you just try to understand where to fit it. So I will not say that this is not an emergency. But this is an emergency that you really have to see and to watch in the context of other emergencies, with all the difference. For example, I will treat this emergency more seriously than tuberculosis. Why? Well, for two reasons.

First, tuberculosis is not first outbreak, so we know her. We know tuberculosis, we know how it behaves and so we can think that even if it's tragic and it kills way, way more people than COVID-19, we know it and so we can somehow predict it. Why this is an unknown, unknown, like we don't know about this new virus, maybe it is the zombie apocalypse that will destroy earth. We don't know and when you don't know, you are more cautious than usual. But that's the same with any other major outbreak of new viruses or new families of viruses every year.

The same was with SARS, the same was with MERS, the same was with aviary flu, every kind of new infection, it will be exponential growth, just like the other, but you don't know where the Gaussian is going to stop, because we don't know the absolute number, because you don't know spreading rate and mortality rate. So if you don't know, you are more cautious than usual. This is a completely rational reaction because it's Nassim Taleb is explaining with the asymmetric risk and asymmetric decision metrics

The outcome in which you are wrong because you are taking too many precautions, is not as bad as the outcome in which you are wrong because you are taking too few precautions. So, since January, when we first heard about this, as a personal reaction, me and Mia, we started to use the masks, using gloves in the airport, really limiting contact, especially with her parents that are older, taking care of distancing and avoiding public places.

So doing this is not crazy or paranoid or excessive, it's healthy because when there is something new, you react with a novel precautious way, which is completely normal. While screaming to the sky that you want the military to segregate everybody in their home, welding the doors like in China, in Italy, really, if you read on social networks in Italy, most of the people I know and I should have a selection bias about libertarian people and most of the people I can read about, they're actually asking the government, "please, you are too democratic, you should be more like China. Why aren't you sealing me inside my apartment? Why aren't you welding my door?"

They are desperate for a narrative of control. So the emergency is real in the context of many, many, many real emergencies, different real emergencies and it's rational to react to the emergency in a cautious way. But it's completely irrational to think that this is something outside the history, outside the world, which should take priority over anything else, including ethics, and freedom, and human rights, and other diseases for example.

Peter McCormack: Well let's come back to that. Because looking at the stats, there's a website I've been using since the very start, worldormeters.info. It's been very good at providing the stats and I'm on the Italy page now, and it certainly looks like, in terms of cases and the death rate, we have got the uptick on the curve. You talked about, was it SARS and MERS, it seems like Italy alone is already ahead in numbers of those two diseases as well and the jumps in the number of deaths do seem quite alarming in Italy. It does feel like that, without any action, you could have been at maybe 300, 400, 500, 1,000 potentially a day of deaths. Do you not even look at that and have some concerns?

Giacomo Zucco: So I am looking at the same website since the beginning actually. I was looking at that in December already, because the strange thing is...

Peter McCormack: It's a great website, right?

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah! In my family, I am the over paranoid, because I always overestimate the fire risk and when everybody start to freaks out, I become the skeptic one. So I was looking at this website in December already, Mia was looking at that every day in January and it's a great website. It can be unintentionally a bit misleading because it gives a lot of importance to new cases, new positive cases and new positive cases is a completely unreliable number, because it only tells you a severe underestimation of cases. So those are only the positive tested people and as you said, this test has a very strong tendency to false negative.

So one every two tests the result's negative, but it's actually positive and many people are not tested at all. Basically nobody's tested. In Italy, as I told you, people are just tested if they are inside an hospital, or if they are strongly connect with some kind of epidemiological assumption. So the number of new cases discovered is behaving like it's an exponential, but it's not an exponential of the infection, it is an exponential of the testing capability or the testing will of a specific institution. The number of deaths though, that is a little bit more realistic. So if you look at that, there is no messing around very much.

There is some messing around for the reason that, as I told you, for example in China, there was a building falling down over the head of quarantined people, six people died and they were all positive. None of them was critics, but they are all counted inside the coronavirus death of course, because there is not an easy way to filter that out. Assuming that most of the people in intensive care were very old with pre-existing condition, some of those people were terminally ill with cancer and stuff like that, so all the people dying with coronavirus are counted.

But that said, of course this category will grow with tests as well, because if you assume that you have this number of people dying for cancer every day, then if you increase the testing, you will have more people positive to the testing, dying of cancer. So this number will increase together with the increase in testing, so this is not an indication of how the virus is going, this is an indication of how the testing is going. It's only a proxy of the virus if the testing is statistically averaged out, which is absolutely not. Not in Italy anyway. Somewhere else maybe. In Germany, they are starting some random testing, but we still don't know.

So the number of deaths is better as a proxy of reality, but you really have to put it in context because for example, what I didn't know before trying to make sense of this figure, was how many people are dying in Italy for the same kind of respiratory complication that this virus is also making worse and that's a very, very huge number. So we should look at this number, but we should not extract a lot of narrative from these numbers until we get the context of this.

What is very, very, very reliable, again, is everywhere you find the scientific test over the population, where you take the population in a place, you randomly test for the virus, and then you randomly check for the death and even better, if you manage to exclude all the causalities that are clearly not caused by the infection, by the respiratory infection, then you have a reliable number. So what you're seeing in this website are exponentials.

But we don't know, A, what is this? We know that this exponential is the testing exponential and the death exponential, we know that that's closer to reality, but we don't know where it's going to stop, or how it's going to stop its... The sad point is that we don't know shit!

Peter McCormack: I think one of the things, if you get away from the statistics, one of the obvious things is when you've seen or heard the stories of how overrun hospitals are, how overrun staff are, which did happen in Wuhan in China, and is happening or appears to be happening in Italy, and the fear of running out of beds. So one thing I think is quite obvious, it is a condition that appears to spread very quickly, and it does seem to affect enough that there are fears of running out of beds. So even if the percentage is wrong, the total volume numbers still could be very high.

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah, sure! A lot of people is dying, a lot of people will die for this situation. I'm not saying that's not true. But the problem is that... This you are talking about, is not data. These are stories, which are true, but even if they are true, they are not quantitative. They don't tell you how much, they tell you just that the intensive care units are overload, which is true, I don't doubt that. But it's not the first time that happens in Italy again, right? It already happened in several times. So if you ask how more serious is the situation than when the same situation happened in 2016 and 2000, what's the quantitative difference?

We don't have answer to this yet. Of course the medical personnel, they are risking their lives in order to save lives and they will do what is obvious. They will just tell you what they see, what is closer to their reality, which is the truth. They will tell you, "Help! We cannot manage this. We are over stretched, we are working too much, we are risking infection, we cannot take care of everybody" and this is the truth. But the point is that this is not data. This is true story of somebody that you have to put in the context of, how often did it happen in Italy? Several times, and also how much is this worsened by the policy of taking care of this virus again?

Which is not zero, because again, when you have to insulate everybody, your ability to take care of everybody is decreased and then you have the point that I told you about my mother-in-law. It's interesting because a lot of people that was not going to be put in hospital two months ago will be put in hospital, or they will try to put them in hospital now because now they know if an old woman is having difficulty to breathe in December, the doctor just say, "sorry, you are old, try to breathe" and they will call the ambulance when you are really on the ground passed out.

Otherwise they don't send anybody because they're old, and so they're just expected. But now if you say, "I have difficulty to breathe", "oh, I have a name for this, this is COVID-19 infection. You go to the hospital if there is space." Also, as you said about yourself having these kind of symptoms, I don't underestimate the amount of people that will show up to the hospital for a psychological generated similar symptoms, or exaggerated symptom, because they are now anxious and basically they are feeling something more than they should, just like you say, because of suggestion. So yes, the situation in the hospital is an objective factor that shows you an emergency, that's beyond any doubt.

But it doesn't really show you that this is a zombie apocalypse. It could be, it's nice to be prepared for a zombie apocalypse, I realized that we was unprepared because all my stocks and weapons were in Switzerland, but my original family was in Italy. So when I had the perfect chance to escape to my new country, I decided to get back to where my parents are, so I was not prepared, my plan was really not complete. But it's always good to prepare. But panic is never the answer and when you are in panic, you always tend to act irrationally. Now I think the situation is very severe and disastrous overall.

So I don't think that the virus infection itself... So the virus infection itself, why I completely agree about being overcautious and over precautious, because it's an unknown, it's a possible exponential, the site is interconnected, so we have black death, and we had Spanish flu. So don't mess around with this stuff, because a modern pandemic can be devastating. But I don't think we have strong clues that this stuff alone would have created a lot of disasters. I think that the way it has been managed by nation States in the last three months, made it an objective and irreversible disaster that will kill a lot of those people.

Basically what they did was first hiding a new infection for a very long period, then telling people to ignore this infection and now they are overreacting in a way that destroys, completely destroys, entire economies. Now destroying entire economies can seem like a completely unrelated topic, like, "yeah, you are poor, but now you're healthy." But that's not the case, because with an economy destroyed, guess what? Who is going to pay for intensive care unit if you don't have money to pay for intensive care unit? The government, but the government is taking this money from people working and if people are not working, the government doesn't have the money.

They have to print it, but if they print it, it's worthless, unless there is an economy that can actually absorb inflation. So it's not unrelated, scarcity is a reality of life. So when there is an outbreak of some infection, there is a scarcity of medical resources. You cannot think that destroying an economy will not make the shortage of healthcare even worse. Of course, it would be a little bit unfair to completely put the economic crisis that I think would be terrible and probably irreversible and probably the most serious yet we have seen in centuries on coronavirus. I think that this was a trigger, the finance world was ready for a collapse and it just needed the pin. The bubble was there, you just needed the pin.

The pin was going to be 9/11 in 2001, but then they recovered. Then it became a sub-prime mortgage in 2008, 2007, then it somehow recovered printing a lot of money, but it's still unsustainable. It's like again, you have your junky friend, which is an addict, he will take more drugs and more drugs, and every time he seems to recover from withdrawal syndromes, but just because he's taking more doses and more doses and eventually he will OD. So this is the coronavirus crisis, is the pin. I think that the explosion of the bubble has been made worse by the political action of, for example, China, Italy and World Health Organization and stuff like that.

I think we see some example of, let's say very shy behaviour, which is like United States and UK, which is like, "let's not do anything" which is better than destroying everything. It's not true that doing nothing is always worse than doing something. If what you're doing is bad, doing nothing is better. But there are some few [inaudible 00:48:12] example. For examples, again, I don't want to praise a nation state, I hate nation states, but South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, being a nation state, they are violating some human rights and that's a given, but they behave in a very proportionate way.

They're having way better results than others because the population is better informed without the secret police coming to your home to kidnap you because you're spreading information. So there is transparency, there is information, the number are discussed. There is no anybody coming to your home to arrest you if you don't agree. So we have some examples of a reasonable and rational reaction. Of course the health, the virus problem is so global that there will not be any kind of single system that will be better off at the end.

Even if you are perfectly managing the crisis in South Korea, but then you continue to have infection coming from China, it's not the solution until you have a vaccine or something, and the same goes for the economic crisis. Even if you behave responsibly, if the world economy collapses, the way the world economy works now with the interconnection of the supply chain, think about electronics. You cannot think that China goes down and United States goes down and you keep going. That's not the case, that doesn't work.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that's an interesting one on the economic side of things, because if you lock down a city or you locked down a town and you managed to eradicate COVID-19 from that city, as soon as you open up the city again, you have the chance of the condition and the disease expanding again and that was what the Chief Scientific Officer in the UK was saying this morning. He said that actually what we need is a herd infection to actually develop some kind of immunity to it, because as soon as it's gone and we open up movement and trade again, it's just going to come back. It's almost like coronavirus will itself become a seasonal flu, and it will never completely go.

So I'm sometimes I'm looking at this and I'm kind of weighing it up saying, "yes, I understand they want to protect people, I understand they want to stop old people getting this or overrun the hospitals, but at the same time, we're going to have a huge economic shock." And for what? Because if it's just going to keep coming back... But I don't know the answer, it feels like a lose-lose. It feels like whatever choice you make, it's a very difficult decision and there's likely negative outcomes.

Giacomo Zucco: Sure, I will urge you to consider though that the situation is not symmetric. So if you don't know the answer... So you see a trade off, right? You can either stop it, but destroy the economy or stop it, but then it's useless because it comes back again. But on the other hand, if you don't contain it, you will have overrun the national healthcare system, and so you will have people dying for a lack of care. So you have a trade off, but when you don't know which way to go, and when you see a symmetric problem, then if you are acting for yourself and your family and your company, you decide one way and you go. But if you're playing with the life of millions of people, when you are in that, the original thing is actually doing nothing.

So doing something is not something that you can afford to expect, because the problem is that in big complex systems, when you are playing like toys with the lives of millions, you don't have feedbacks. So you don't have a feedback loop. So in your family, you can decide your strategy, then either you die or you adapted because your strategy was stupid, and then you adapt. In a complex system with millions of people, you cannot really have feedback because you don't have the information in a centralized way, so you cannot decide for one and then for the other and adjust. You can't adjust.

You will emanate, enact an order, and the bureaucrats and cops will blindly enact a this order, but they will be unable to do that because some of these orders are unenforceable. So any kind of lockdown, you will have people scared escaping the lockdown inevitably, and you will have some local bureaucrats giving special privilege to himself and his family. So it's like this is a control freak illusion, or delusion, as you cannot control in a strict way complex systems of millions of people and if you don't have a clear path forward, then the answer is actually... It looks like stupid law.

The answer is doing nothing but not doing nothing everybody. Doing nothing, the central planner playing with millions of lives, and doing something and maybe doing a lot, single, smaller, more agile social groups, like hospitals, doctors, people, families, social groups. So it's not that we should do nothing, but that central planners should do nothing. We have plenty to do in a lot of different ways.

Peter McCormack: But outside of central planning, what should we be doing? Because again, you've definitely in the past shifted my thinking. You've completely shifted my thinking on Brexit, you've shifted my thinking a lot on government central planning and that we would be better with more decentralized governance, local politicians that we vote for over national politicians, and national politicians over European politicians. You definitely shifted a lot of my thinking on that. I do struggle with the anarcho-capitalistic view of no state. I do really struggle with that.

Without some form of central planning, what actually happens? Because it feels like, especially as I've seen kind of the footage inside Italian hospitals and I've seen the fact that they're now using chapels because so many are dying, and the numbers they're dealing with, I do struggle with... Is this really also part of Giacomo's hate for central planning, hate for governments and just anything they do, you're going to hate? I do wonder whether actually this is one of those scenarios where it does require some form of central planning.

Giacomo Zucco: I think this may be a false dilemma, because if you have on one side an imperfect decentral planning of a bottom-up process of people deciding for themselves and on the other hand, you have a perfect centre planning of people that really know what to do, and they have incentives to do it right. Then there is no doubt that in some situation central planning is better. If you plan the right thing, then centre planning is better. Central planning is faster, more efficient, and especially in emergencies, you don't have the time for coordination of small little parts. So if you are certain that the central planner will always be smart and just, or most of the time smart and just, then sometimes I will say, go for centre planning.

The problem in modern democracy is that we see with this crisis, this guys really don't know what they're doing. The democratic process doesn't select for competence, it doesn't select for honesty. If anything, we have strong evidence from a public choice theory that it does select for the exact opposite and selects for sociopaths and for charlatans. The problem with central planning is not that a smart guy will not be able to faster coordinate everybody into something, right? The problem is that we don't have a sound process in place to select these super humans. They probably don't exist.

So what you have is not perfect centre planning versus imperfect centre planning, it's imperfect central planning versus imperfect decentral planning, and so the second always wins, not because there is never a case for centralization, but because there is never a case for a responsible and accountable, all-powerful centralization. In a company, for example, it is centralized. In a company, you don't have a lot of workers and they go around in the market and say, "I can do this, you can do that, let's negotiate the price" every time.

No, a company is an island in which people stops doing a bottom-up decentralization, and they centralize over one co-ordination, because co-ordination is good and centralization is good. But in a company, if you start to fail, people have a very few cost to opt out and join another organization, so you have a strong feedback from the reality. With politics, with the modern nation states, you don't have this feedback. So it's not about a lack of central planning, it's that we don't have the tools for rational and well incentivized central planning.

Peter McCormack: Okay, if you were the central planner, what would you have done differently here?

Giacomo Zucco: So let's use via negativa. I'm the president of whatever via negativa. So the government in most of the Western world, but even in the Eastern world at this point, basically is forcing every kid to go into a Petri dish of cross-infection of everything every day. So far only for schools and high schools, but actually, for example in Italy, they were just passing a law, it's very ironic, but they were passing a law three months ago to make kindergarten mandatory because we live in a society.

So kindergarten must be mandatory, so that was the nation states are doing, they're forcing kids of every age up to 17 or 18 to stay all the time in something, which is completely unnatural, with a selection of a huge number of people of the same age. So disrupting the natural order of kids working and playing with kids of other age and learning from each other. So you have this homologated classes, which are very bad I think, for culture, but they're also very, very bad for disease prevention, because basically you are creating Petri dishes.

So I am a central planner, one thing I really like about all this stuff is I closed those schools. If you really want to go to school, go, but I closed down compulsory central overpopulated schooling. It's interesting because now that the schools are closing everywhere basically, and the reaction to these are very, very telling, like people are protesting with politician. Not because their kids are not educated, they're protesting because they don't know where to put their kids and how to give them lunches. So what is school? Is just a parking for kids in a society that cannot really manage them properly anymore? So I would close down schools.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, are you saying you would close down schools because that's your outside of coronavirus? That's your belief issue with centralized schooling?

Giacomo Zucco: Sure, I mean it's the other way around...

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's not answering the question I actually want to ask, because I actually believe in schooling. I don't think it's a perfect system, but my kids are at a good school and I think it offers a lot of benefits. I just want to get outside of Giacomo's world of hating central planning, the government and if you were brought in by the government now, and Conte said, "look Giacomo, I need your help here, what the fuck do we do here?" In terms of response to coronavirus, what would you do? Not peppered with your other beliefs.

Giacomo Zucco: But it's impossible for me to answer because I don't segregate logical thinking. If logical thinking tells me that something is reasonable and something is not, I can not really force myself into being partially irrational.

Peter McCormack: I think that's a cop out. We call that a cop out in the UK.

Giacomo Zucco: What does it mean?

Peter McCormack: I think you're copping out of the answer. It means you're avoiding answering the question. A lot of people are going to be happy with their kids in school and want them to use schooling, and that's a different belief they have from you in terms of whether they want centralized schooling or not. I'm talking about, do you think in terms of if the government wanted to reduce the spread or the speed and spread of coronavirus, because they're worried about people dying or they're worried about hospitals being overrun, what are the decisions you would make?

Giacomo Zucco: So in general let's avoid schools. In general I think modern governments are taking a lot of action to force and push for extreme physical promiscuity. Another example could be like punishing private cars in favour of public transportation, because of the environment. So I ban private cars, or I fine private cars because I want everybody to go into this very democratic. So I will stop this kind of interferences so that people are free to go back to use more private, insulated kind of transportations and stuff like that.

Second thing, since a lot of people look up to the government in order to receive good information, I would just try to provide good and honest and transparent information, which is basically something that no government at all ever did, because first they minimize, they lie in order to minimize, and then they lie in order to maximize the effect of their reaction. So I would just try to be honest.

Peter McCormack: But do you think that's all of them? Because I think despite my misgivings about him, I thought Boris Johnson did a good job in the UK yesterday. I don't think the UK's reaction is perfect, but these are really tough decisions, but then he came out and said, "I'm going to level with you, some of your family are going to die and they're going to die before their time because of this." I struggle to say that every single government, every situation is just lying to minimize. I think that perhaps they don't know what they're dealing with.

Giacomo Zucco: You're right. There is this tradition, I think it's very typical of the UK, like in famous Churchill talks, famous Queen talks, about a government guy telling hard to the population, like the function of a government, something that you have to know, but nobody really wants to tell you that, and so we will centralize that kind of responsibility, and will tell you how things are going, which is something that I think Boris Johnson did as well, and I think it's good because it's helps the spread and the roboration of information.

People can research, they can decide, but they have not been told everything is right, that everything is fine, everything is over. They have been told people will die more than yesterday. Some because of this virus, some because of the economical collapse everywhere, so things will be bad. This is a good thing, I agree with you, and this is something that if you really have to have a national state, at least you can have one that doesn't lie to you, which is a plus.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I still don't think we've got to a point of what should be done differently. Should we be having some form of central planning to try and lock down areas, or should we just be allowing people to continue as they choose, but giving them the advice? So for example, I took into my own hands to say to my father, "look Dad, you smoke, you have bronchitis, you have asthma, you're 72. If you get coronavirus, you'll probably have a higher chance, a higher probability of dying than most people. So just go and get some food in and perhaps lock yourself away" and he's done that.

That is our choice to do that, but if people choose not to do that, they are essentially putting other people at risk by allowing the spread of the disease. So what I can't decide is that, a part of me has got this Bitcoin, libertarian, anarcho-capitalist on my shoulder saying, "stop pointing your guns at people and telling them what they can and can't do. Stop ruining the economy, let people make their own choices." But the other side is saying, "well look, we're all in this together. If we get this wrong, we all contribute to the spread. It might lead to more people dying" and this maybe is one of those scenarios where even if you don't like the central planners, I think you do need central planning.

Giacomo Zucco: The problem is this. I understand that this reasoning is flawed, because if I try to apply it consistently, it falls apart. So I often use this other examples and people get pissed because they say, "now you are changing the topic. You are changing the goalpost." I'm not, I'm trying to show you what happens if I use this kind of reasoning consistently across all the data that I have. If there is a disease and you get out and talk with other people and kiss somebody, are you putting other people at risk? Answer, yes. We don't know how much, we don't know of what, because of the same thing that you're doing when you drive a car, when you drive a car, you are putting other people's life at risk.

When you do everything basically, you are... With the [Inaudible 01:06:03] theory, says that physically speaking, you working in a park can cause directly causally some American in Florida killing people. The point is that when we are able to identify the causal chain in a way that you can be reasonably sure to prevent damage if you behave differently, then it's your responsibility, but when all we have is just random estimation, and some of these are random estimation are maybe more famous or more mathematically viral than others.

But the point is that scientifically they are all on the same ground. We don't know how much damage you as an individual are doing, and if you don't know, you cannot trial somebody for damage. So the point of a fair trial is that I have to prove intention, knowledge and causal chain between the action and the damage, or if somebody has a property or personal right and in this case, you can apply the same. If you try to play in consistently these reasoning for the virus and for driving and for everything else, you literally cannot allow anybody to do anything and the point that the most powerful people in the war become a whatever organization or committee is in charge of the siding.

The very, very complex and subtle estimation of this risk of proportion, and this is not like a simple science like mechanics, you have a pendulum, you have a weight, you have a mass and you just calculate. This is super complex, exponential growth, dynamic network effects, whatever mess around statistical data interpretation. So there is not a clear connection. So do you want to give power of life and debt on committees that are going to guess some kind of causal model? You don't. So you allow people to drive, even if possibly some of them will kill somebody.

I know it's imperfect, but this is not a form of decentralization. When you act ex-post on the problem, after there is a victim, so the victim from crime, where somebody did kill somebody else with a car, and now you start to trial. Now you try to understand if he knew, if he didn't knew. This is less efficient, but this is better than try to punish ex-ante everybody from the centre with like a Minority Report future police, I don't remember the name, that doesn't work. If you try to do that consistently, you create the worst possible nightmare of society you can imagine.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I understand the argument for certain things. I think the analogy with some of those scenarios with this coronavirus is that we're actually dealing with an extreme circumstance, something that is very different. I understand the argument for saying, well, people die in car crash. I understand the argument for saying, "well, people die in car crashes. We have to accept that." We can't just say, "You can't drive, you have to use public transport." But we're in a very extreme situation here where then perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe millions would die with inaction.

Giacomo Zucco: But we don't know!

Peter McCormack: But can we wait long enough for the actual statistics? Because sometimes I think, with these situations, even without the statistics, you can visually observe what's happening. We're visually observing accelerating death rates. The death rate is the number I'm always happy to look at because yeah okay, you might say, "look, there was somebody in a car crash who had coronavirus." I don't think that's a statistically significant part of the numbers...

Giacomo Zucco: But that's not specific.

Peter McCormack: ... But I think the accelerated death numbers are scary.

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah scary, but life is scary. I'm not denying that this is a very scary crisis. I'm denying that this is the only scary crisis that... Your appeal to emergency assumes that somehow you will not have other comparable emergencies soon and you are not facing similar emergencies now, but people are dying.

Peter McCormack: But I'm not saying we won't. I think if they happen again, how would we approach this? But this feels like this might be the most significant event in my whole lifetime in terms of the impact on the world, the impact on media, the impact on life, the impact on the economy.

Giacomo Zucco: But Peter, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Yes?

Giacomo Zucco: How many people died ... This doesn't mean a cynic question, just a realistic question. How many people died of this virus do you ever know? Because for me, it's zero.

Peter McCormack: Zero, at present.

Giacomo Zucco: At present. So at present, this is the most impactful political event ever in my life as well. I have never been arrested and sequestrated in my own home, never have been, and this happened with still zero sanitary impact. I'm not saying that it cannot become 100 or 200 or 1,000. What I'm saying is that, if you want to use extreme measures, you have to go at the extreme length to explain me and convince me that this really is it. What I see as a difference between SARS and MERS and this, is basically mostly the mediatic reaction.

Ebola is a fucking scary virus! The good thing is that it's very, very slow to transfer, even because you have this trade-off. Every time a virus is very, very good at killing people, it is very, very bad at spreading. And every time a virus is very, very good at spreading, of course, it's very, very bad at killing people. This is the same. This virus is more evil, it kills more people than the usual flu, less people than MERS and SARS, but since it kills less people than MERS and SARS, it spreads more.

So I see the evidence for which this is scary, and this is an emergency, and this is important, and this is not the joke, and this is not the hoax. What I don't see is the emergency to claim that this is something that should suspend any kind of previously-used social assumption, a heuristic dynamic, or social contract.

Peter McCormack: So you think we should have just carried on as per normal, but given people better advice in terms of, "if you're over 70, you may want to isolate yourself", some of the advice in terms of hygiene, but we should have just gone on as normal, business as normal?

Giacomo Zucco: You're asking me what I would do as a central planner. I was a central planner together with my wife for my family, I did central-plan my family. We decided to central-plan our family by insulating the oldest and weakest people of the family immediately. Then we decided to insulate the youngest and weakest. Then we decided to... Basically, we wash everything, hands, we sanitize, we use this mask, so we are centrally planning an overreaction, which is a conscious overreaction. It's like, we know this is a bit paranoid, but guys, better safe than sorry. This is something new, so we don't know where it's going.

But what we didn't know was suspending rationality and claiming that this is something that will change everything of our ethic conventions. I'm not going to shoot people on the street if I don't know that they are really for sure, putting me at risk. So it doesn't change your ethical assumption. It doesn't change your ability to look in the numbers rationally, calmly, without panic, because panic is not good. Caution is good, overcaution is good, but panic is just something... Panic was developed, evolutionary, to fight or flight from lions in the savanna.

If you see a lion in the savanna, you should either collapse, faking your death, or run very, very fast. But there are very few things in the modern world that are as simple as a lion chasing you in savanna. Most things are more complex and for complex people, at least their brain with this panic reaction, is really inefficient and really, really unreliable. So don't use that, and use this kind of ration I just said. That said, this is what we have done for the primary risk, which is the virus. The problem is now, I think that this risk, whilst is serious, is the least of my concern right now because probably people very close to me already lost their jobs and they will never recover them for months.

I have people close to me having mental breakdowns because they are scared by the situation which is happening. I know that the economic situation in the world was already a bubble ready to burst, so now I think that what you're seeing with the stock exchange, is bad. Even if I don't think the virus itself could have brought the world to Mad Max situation, I would give a non-zero probability that that economic scenario will bring to that, independently in a way, but using the virus as a trigger.

So now I will say that 60% of my concern and preparation and cautious is about like prepping for food, medicines, movement, to try to understand how can I get back to Switzerland, when is the best moment and when not, what I can bring with me and what not. So guns, of course. I am an apocalyptic guy, I just don't think that I will... I can really bet some satoshis with you, I think that I may die by police hand more likely than by coronavirus tentacles.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I would agree with that bet though because I don't think you're going to die from coronavirus because of your age. Do you know, I think one of the other problems here Giacomo, is that you are like a free, independent thinker, have the kind of political views that some people don't even know they can have, but some people don't even consider of a world of no government. They're so conditioned to the state that they believe there will be one and it'll either be a left-wing state or a right-wing state or a centrist state, and it will just sway between these.

Therefore, when something like this happens, they're conditioned to expect a response, and no response will likely lead to some kind of reaction. Whatever happens is going to be a reaction. Whether you believe they've underreacted or overreacted, everyone else is going to believe whether someone's underreacted or overreacted. If suddenly the NHS is overrun and lots of people are dying, people are going to say they underreacted. Therefore, the governments have to have some kind of response because they are run by people who want to maintain power.

They want to keep their jobs, they want to stay in power as a government, so nobody ... Well, very, very few people are in a world where they're rationalizing this in the way that say, you are. Do you think that's a fair...

Giacomo Zucco: Sure! Yeah, it's fair. I don't think this is a first in the human history. Before the abolition of slavery, how many people would even think a world without systematic African slavery in cotton fields in America was possible. If you read the debates between the abolitionists and other people, other people were like... But even smart people and fair people like Jefferson and others, they would not say, "guys, you are right, theoretically." But then there is the reality, is that it always went like this, and it would probably be, "nothing could work without this. You cannot really abolish slavery in the cotton camps, it's just impossible, it cannot happen."

So it's normal, and it can last for centuries. Maybe I will spend my days without seeing anything changing, and it will change later. Same stuff for religions. I'm not really that adversarial to religions as a typical free thinker is today, which is very homologated kind of thinking anyway. But if you think about religion and if you see a religion and you think it's crazy, you have to realize that there have been people that were, in majority, incapable to think outside of that paradigm for centuries and sometimes millenniums. In Ancient Egypt, they were basically creating pyramids for protecting the soul of the pharaoh.

What the fuck! But still, a lot of people can be wrong for a lot of time. Let's say it like this, I don't think that we should ignore what's most people say because that would be just arrogant. If everybody thinks something, you should listen and you should factor that into your decision because that's a social heuristic. So if everybody says that, maybe there is a reason, let's try to understand the reason. But when you face a clear contradiction, and you have logic on one side and popular opinion on the other side, popular opinion doesn't really hold anymore.

You have to keep considering that for your personal choices because if you are the only one... For example, you know that Bitcoin is going to succeed. Nobody else knows, so you act, and you buy. But if you know that the Soviet Union will collapse and nobody else thinks that, but it collapse after eight years from your time, then there is nothing that you can do to leverage, to speculate on that. So even if I'm right, I could die while everybody thinks I'm wrong, and it's okay.

Peter McCormack:Well don't die! It's an interesting debate because... I guess I have to come to the conclusion, despite the insults that come with it, I guess I'm a statist because I can't picture the world of no state. Erik Voorhees said to me once, he said, "it doesn't have to be binary. It's about a trajectory towards less state, less government."

Giacomo Zucco: Absolutely!

Peter McCormack: That's a good thing, and that's an achievable target. I do like that and I do follow that, but I do, at some point, I struggle with the whole concept of no state, and I sometimes think central planning may be better. I think, in this scenario, it may be. I certainly see the arguments that it infringes upon freedoms, it is the men with guns telling you what you can and can't do, and people are going to lose their companies, and it is terrible. But I also struggle with the logic of inaction or just relying on people to follow advice. I don't know, I'm a little bit confused, I'm weighing it all up.

Giacomo Zucco: It's okay. Anyway, you are a statist, but that's just the default. I'm more nasty with the people pretending to be libertarian than being in core system. I know a lot of people with...

Peter McCormack: Well I threw myself into libertarianism. I did, and I've spoken to a lot of people, and I realized I'm not there. But when people talk about ... They're shit coiners and they say, "you say your thing is not decentralized." They're like, "Decentralization is a spectrum." I think for me, statism is a spectrum. I am not a full statist, I am certainly somebody who... Look, I'm on the spectrum because if my house gets robbed, I'm going to call the police. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the firemen. If I get ill, I'm going to go to the hospital. But I have a lot of problems with that, and I do like a lot of the libertarian ideals of free markets and I do want less government. So I think I'm on a spectrum.

Giacomo Zucco: I think that you may not haven't a couple of two things right now, yet. One thing is that state is not organization or voluntary central planning. You can have very high level of organization here or key coordination, community, without having aggressive violence over other people's property. Some people thinks that anarchism or no state means that everything that we associate with the state, which is the monopoly of healthcare, weapons, and coordination means that we will not have any more healthcare, weapons, or coordination, which is not what's more libertarians are saying.

What we are saying is there will be force and defence, there will be coordination, even multinational, not national, but even global co-ordination, either very strong coordination, just not based on aggressive violence. The other red herring may be that, while the first thing, we can have coordination, which, without the state, I think it's true. The second thing, we can have zero violence, is not really true. It's just a direction, just like Erik said. So the point is that, think about health, which is in the news.

You are a doctor, you want to eradicate diseases. Do you really believe in a world without diseases? The honest answer of a doctor would be, "no, even if I eradicate these, some other disease will come." Very few doctors believe in a health forever without any kind of mortality or disease. Most of doctors, they know that you always have some level of diseases. Sometimes practically, you will have to accept the less serious disease in order to fight the more serious disease, which is fine for a libertarian.

What is not fine is that you'd never see a doctor cheering for a disease. So the short circuit in the statist mind is, "since I cannot imagine a world which is completely healthy without disease, then yeah, disease just infect me." But that's the logical leap. You accept that some amount of violence will always succeeds, and you know that the subset of this violence will be organized violence, like mafia, and you will know that, probably for many centuries and since many centuries, a subset of mafias are called nation-states.

It's not that you have to either pretend they don't exist or they go away forever or accept that as something good, you can still think that's bad and you can still think that you should reduce it every time it's possible. Of course, if you ask me a question like...

Peter McCormack: Well I agree with that though.

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah, okay. So you're not that statist. I'm a statist too, at this point. I know these nation-states exist, and I know that it is unlikely to have them disappearing very, very soon, and I know that even if they don't exist, some other kind... I mean, in Somalia, you don't have the state. You have warlords and Islamic Courts, and they are acting violence just like the state before. What I think is wrong is to assume that if you make peace with the worst evil, then you are keeping at bay other unknown evils. It's like, "please don't fight AIDS because we don't know what kind of scary diseases can arrive."

It's like, "please don't find a vaccine of coronavirus because if you do, we know that some other disease would come, and we don't know what kind of scary decentralized disease." So it's better to have this very strong, big disease, keep it cheered, and push it and promote it and defend it because, otherwise, there is chaos. I think this is the fallacy. We do not expect to eradicate violence, but we are able to see and to say that violence is wrong and violence is ethically wrong and economically long-term destructive. That's not a dogma, that's reason applied to reality.

Peter McCormack: Okay. In time, my trajectory is becoming less statist. I would say, directionally, I'm becoming less statist, but I'm still not there. But look, it's useful to get your views on this. I don't agree with you 100%. I think in some points, your political ideas are mixed in with things, but it's...

Giacomo Zucco: I will stop here with my defence, but I don't buy this argument. I may be wrong, but it's not like my political thinking is interfering. I created my political... It's not that I have been assigned a political thinking at birth and now I am rationalizing it. I choose my political conviction as a consequence of my argument.

Peter McCormack: No, I understand that.

Giacomo Zucco: So it's really the other way around.

Peter McCormack: No, I understand that. I just think perhaps... I don't know. I think I'm a bit more practical about where we are and what we're dealing with in terms of the government reactions, whereas you're like, "just close the schools. because we should get rid of the schools anyway", and I don't think that kind of answers the question of how we deal with the current problem. But it's not like a huge criticism. I come to you to learn anyway.

Giacomo Zucco: Yeah I'm not very practical, I know that!

Peter McCormack: All right man, how long are you on lockdown for?

Giacomo Zucco: We don't know. It's very hard to predict because the disposition says until the middle of April, but it's basically something that will be reviewed. It's really a psychological question more than the biological one. If they think they really can contain it like this, then if people thinks that it is working, they will ask for more. But then, where really nobody is working anymore, there is literally no money anymore and hospitals are going down because there's the money, then they will ask to open.

What I'm afraid of will be another pendulum from, "this is nothing, this is just a flu," to, "please, we want China Communist Party here," to, "we were wrong, let's open everything again", and "what the fuck, try to get the economy back very, very fast with a stimulus or something." So, I'm scared about pendulums! I don't know, I cannot say this on a podcast, but let's say that I think I have a reasonable expectation to be able to live in Italy with my family if I really need to.

Peter McCormack: Well fingers crossed then! Well I'm sure we'll talk again, I'll keep checking in on you. Say hello to the good woman for me as well. I'm not sure when I'll see you next because we don't know when we're going to go to any events. We don't know what's happening, so I guess it might be...

Giacomo Zucco: I think it will be bad. I think you would see something because people will start to die for pneumonia as well because that's unavoidable and people was already dying for pneumonia probably since a few months, but it was still not really realized and it will get worse. Also, the political and economic consequence will hit Great Britain as well. This is a very interconnected system, so we will have very, very rough months in the future and you as well. So let's just hope that the internet connection works. As long as that works...

Peter McCormack: We can stay in touch. Well listen look, all the best. Always appreciate your time. I love talking to you, Giacomo, and best to the family!

Giacomo Zucco: Thank you very much, really just for everything.