[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Carl Jung the psychologist talks about how there is no virus more dangerous than the mind virus.”

In this episode, we sit down with Gabrielle Bauer, a longtime health and medical writer and author of “Blindsight Is 2020: Reflections on Covid Policies from Dissident Scientists, Philosophers, Artists, and More.”

We reflect on what went wrong these last three years and how fundamental values of Western civilization were flipped upside down.

“You were called the vilest names like sociopath, eugenicist … if you dared to question in even the most polite ways what was going on. And those are thought-stopping words that are designed to put people in their place,” Ms. Bauer says.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek: Gabrielle Bauer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Gabrielle Bauer: It's a pleasure to be on the show, I’m really excited.

Mr. Jekielek: I absolutely loved reading Blindsight is 2020. You have gone on a journey talking to all sorts of interesting people who have really bucked the conventional wisdom, if there was such a thing, over the last several years, which has also been the journey of the American Thought Leaders program.

How did this all happen? As far as I understand it, you have been a medical writer for a very long time, and you very much work in the industry. This is not the book that I would have expected to come from the medical industry. How did this all happen?

Ms. Bauer: Yes, I agree. I don't have the profile that you would associate with someone who would write a dissenting book about the pandemic. I'm 66-years-old, for one thing. I was 63 when it all started, so I belong to a demographic that would be expected to be more cautious and more compliant. As you said, I'm a medical writer. I write for the medical industry, which includes the pharmaceutical industry. I've been doing it for 29 years.

When the pandemic hit, I was actually in Brazil. As soon as I found out about the lockdowns, from day one, like hour one, the whole thing just evoked this visceral recoil in me. My soul was not on board with what was going on. Then I spent the next three years trying to understand why, and trying to figure out why. That journey, which really was a journey, led me to meet all these interesting people all over the world. I absolutely needed to find like-minded people. My husband wasn't one of them. He was very supportive, very tolerant, but he was much more afraid of the virus than I was, and much more cautious. I'll never forget when I came back from Brazil, I had to do the 14 days of quarantine. I came back, "Hi, I’m home." He's like, "Stay away, six feet. Six feet." I went down to the basement where I spent the next 14 days. I had nothing to do except look at my computer, and I had a lot of time to think.

Everything that I was seeing was disturbing me on a very basic level, the way people were starting to shame each other and snitch on each other. The level of fear didn't seem commensurate or proportionate with what was going on. Yet, everyone that I knew was completely on board with this, and I didn't feel that I could talk about it to anyone. I tried to talk about it online, very gingerly, and the response I got was startling.

People called me a sociopath, a mouth-breathing Trumptard, a village idiot, a neckbeard, all the insults you can imagine. In all my then 63 years of life, no one had ever called me these things before. Suddenly, these people who I don't know are calling me these things. It was completely surreal. It was actually genuinely troubling on a very deep level. I even sought therapy to try to understand what was going on.

It was an organic process. Over time, I did a lot of reading and connected with like-minded people all over the world. I found the vocabulary to express what was disturbing me about what was going on, which led me to write a bunch of essays. When the opportunity to write this book came along, I went along with that.

Mr. Jekielek: I'm not surprised that you're affiliated with Brownstone, a collection of folks that Jeffrey Tucker has been finding over time. I apologize for laughing at some of the colorful monikers you were called, which are just obviously preposterous. This was one of the characteristics of the time that a significant portion of people felt justified in doing things like that, even coursing people into certain types of behaviors with very little pushback.

Ms. Bauer: Yes, they had a thought-stopping response to anything. If you tried to push back, they would say, "You want people to die." No, I don't want people to die. I want to have a nuanced discussion about this, but that's the kind of thought-stopping cliches that would be thrown at you. That's always a sign of an unhealthy dynamic in society when dissent is not tolerated.

Mr. Jekielek: You've compiled these amazing conversations and thoughts from a whole suite of different types of thinkers in Blindsight is 2020. Can you pick one or a few themes that emerged for you? If there's an overarching lesson, what would it be?

Ms. Bauer: First, I'll talk about how I came to collect all these people. I stumbled upon this Reddit group called LockdownSkepticism early in the pandemic. I literally just Googled, "I'm against lockdowns." I was so desperate to find people that I could relate to, and then up came this group, LockdownSkepticism.

That's how I came to know some of these giants in the resistance, like Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Vinay Prasad. I got to meet them on Zoom as a moderator of the Q and A sessions, and I kept in touch with some of them. At some point, it occurred to me that it would be great to collect all of their wisdom into a single book. I also felt it was important not just to feature scientists and doctors, because a lot of the wisdom that I was receiving was coming from writers, musicians, philosophers, economists, and all these voices that were not being heard.

We were told at the beginning to, "Follow the signs, follow the signs. Listen to the experts, listen to the scientists," which struck me as crazy from the beginning. A pandemic is not just a scientific puzzle to solve. It's a human problem to manage. How do we steer the human family through this while preserving dignity, preserving people's abilities to earn a living and provide for their families, and to have the kind of communion they need? That's what managing a pandemic is.

I took pains to include very diverse voices in the book, like these two writers that come to mind, Matthew Crawford and Lionel Shriver. Some people may know Lionel Shriver is the author of the very popular book,We Need to Talk About Kevin. They are featured in my chapter on freedom. You talked about themes, and that was a key one.

Mr. Jekielek: Looking at the truckers' movement and many other different areas, it seemed like the people who are involved in physical work are more aware of the crazy nature of the policies that were being implemented and find it easier to push back. You mentioned in the book that a lot of the people that would come to do work on your home seemed to be much more relaxed than your peer group about the pandemic.

Ms. Bauer: Absolutely, like our handyman, who was just so philosophical about the whole thing. Matthew Crawford has that sensibility as well. He is a philosophy professor and a writer, but also an auto mechanic and completely crazy about cars. He has a shop and everything, and he's always fixing cars and motorcycles. He wrote a book about the freedom of being on the road, and how that's worth something, and how curtailing too much of that freedom with too many rules takes away something important about life.

He described how the Covid policies just made a mockery of freedom and just cast it aside, as did Lionel Shriver, who is a very interesting woman and a contrarian by temperament. She just could not believe that people willingly submitted to the most minute details like, “You're allowed to stay two-and-a-half meters from this one, and two meters from that one, and the bubble is this size.” People just thought this was all fine and dandy.

I also found it disconcerting how during the pandemic, freedom was just turned into this caricature. You know how we kept hearing about freedumbs, spelled, D-U-M-B-S. All these people were mocking, "Those freedumb lovers, they want to be able to get their sandwich at Arby's or get their nails done at the salon," as though that's really what people were asking for.

People died for our freedoms. This whole western civilization has been built on this idea of freedom. It was so disconcerting to see just how most people were completely willing to give it up in the name of some hypothetically greater safety, which didn't even turn out to be greater safety.

Mr. Jekielek: The protections of freedom are there precisely for this type of situation. They're for situations where it's incredibly inconvenient.

Ms. Bauer: Exactly. It's like we say, "Freedom of speech." No one needs to have speech protected when what you're saying is, "Oh, I believe in world peace." No, you need your speech protected when you say controversial things that are going to disturb people. It's the same thing. It's during the hard times when you find out what people think about freedom and when you find out what you think about it, and whether it matters or not.

Mr. Jekielek: You have 11 American Thought Leaders guests in your book. That means there's a lot of people that are of great interest to me. Is there someone that particularly inspired you? I know a lot of people felt very alone, the people that thought what they were seeing was crazy. You said you actually got therapy. How did that work? Was it over Zoom?

Ms. Bauer: That's all that was available at the time. Actually, I called him Dr. Zoom, not to his face, but when I was talking about him with my husband. Yes, I sought out therapy because I needed to understand the people around me. Largely, I belong to the middle class and I have a so-called progressive circle. I needed to understand why all this was troubling me so much and not them.

I was prone to doubting myself. I actually asked him at one point, "Am I a sociopath? Is there really something wrong with me?" He said, "No, there's no sociopath on earth that introspect as much as you do. You don't have to worry." I'm partly joking, but I really did doubt myself at some point just because I was surrounded by all these people that thought this was the way to go.

He was great, and he was perfect for the job. We talked much more about philosophy than about psychotherapy. We talked about deontology, consequentialism, and all these postmodernists. He was very well-educated.

He was unique in that he was more mainstream than I was in terms of adhering to the policies or believing in the policies, but he never, ever shamed me. I've heard from many people who went to see therapists wanting to sort out this stuff, and their therapist just said, "I'm sorry, I can't go there with you. You need to do this stuff for the greater good, so we can't really talk about it." In the LockdownSkepticism group, I've heard so many people report stories like that. I consider myself very lucky that Dr. Zoom had the breadth of mind to just listen and work through it with me.

Mr. Jekielek: You would think this is the one area where you should have complete freedom to share whatever is on your mind, however crazy. In fact, that's the reason you're doing it.

Ms. Bauer: Yes, exactly.

Mr. Jekielek: But it’s not that shocking, because there was this mind virus and groupthink. The biggest theme that I didn't grasp at all prior to this pandemic is our need to belong as human beings. It's unbelievable to me how powerful it is. The need to belong or the fear of ostracism can drive people to do the craziest things or say the most terrible things to show that, "I'm on the team."

Ms. Bauer: Yes, it's very primal. It's baked into our DNA, the fear of being shunned. That was really the tactic that the mainstream enforcers of the narrative did use, it was shunning. Again, you were called the vilest names like sociopath and eugenicist. Those were the memes that they threw at you if you dared to question in even the most polite ways what was going on. Those are thought-stopping words that are designed to put people in their place.

One of the chapters in the book is devoted to Mattias Desmet, who talks about that and really explores that whole idea of groupthink and mob psychology, which he calls Mass Formation. That was a term that he coined for that. Other people later ran with the term and tacked on the word psychosis, calling it Mass Formation Psychosis.

But he doesn't actually use psychosis, it’s just Mass Formation, which is another way to say crazy mob psychology, which people are vulnerable to when society is in a state of atomization, and when people are not really connected. There isn't really a strong sense of communion. There's a lot of stress, a lot of isolation, and that makes people vulnerable to these forces. Then they start connecting to the authorities, to this collective mind, and that is one step toward the establishment of totalitarianism.

Mr. Jekielek: We're here in Canada interviewing in Toronto. Of course, I was following the whole truckers' convoy movement very closely. But you actually had an insider.

Ms. Bauer: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: Your son went to join the truckers' convoy. There was this whole very powerful narrative in the mainstream consciousness around who these people were that was very different from reality. But you had an insider, so you could see.

Ms. Bauer: I had an insider.

Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about that.

Ms. Bauer: My friends and relatives were just shocked that I supported the convoy. They couldn't wrap their heads around it. It was sort of beyond what their brains could compute. I remember some people told me, "How could you support them? Your mother was a Holocaust survivor." Again, they were assuming that this was some kind of Nazi group. Of course, I wouldn't support a Nazi group. I supported them because I saw a larger theme at play. Again, they were a corrective to the insanity that went beyond vax mandates.

Both of my kids, fortunately, felt very much the way I do about everything having to do with Covid. My son, who still lives in Montreal, he and a few friends of his went to the Ottawa protests to participate. I actually interviewed him for the book and I asked him the hard questions, "Was there a Nazi vibe? Was there a white supremacist vibe and all that?" He told me that at every protest, you're going to have one or two people who have crazy flags that are not representative of the event, but that he said the overall vibe was not at all that.

He said, "Yes, there was a lot of anti-Trudeau sentiment," but he said it was very celebratory and it was certainly not exclusively white at all. Yes, there was an atmosphere of jubilation and wanting to join together for a common cause. I trusted him more than the Toronto Star, and I also knew that he would've nothing to do with a Nazi or white supremacist event.

Mr. Jekielek: One of the things we talked about was your observations around how different religious groups dealt with this whole thing. Please tell me about that.

Ms. Bauer: I come from a mostly Jewish background, with a little bit of Catholicism. My mother was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and later dropped the Orthodox part. My father was half Jewish and my mother was a Holocaust survivor, but I was not religious, and I'm still not religious. What I found very interesting during the pandemic was that I related to some of these religious groups in surprising ways that I had not expected.

For instance, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic in New York and in Israel, they just refused to comply. I explored that a bit and they explained why. I realized that they just have a different way of looking at the world. For instance, one religious Jew who was interviewed in Israel said, "We believe that going to school, and learning about the Torah protects the kids. We're going to keep them in school because we believe this protects them."

I just realized all these things that the secular world considers essential and non-essential, that's just one lens. There's a different worldview that looks at essential and non-essential in completely different ways that are really, at least as valid, if not more valid. Because really, what these groups were saying was that communion learning together is important even in a pandemic. We can't just completely toss them aside. Perhaps we need to make some changes. We can talk about that, but we don't just categorically dismiss them and tell everyone to stay home.

I found that I had a new respect for those groups and a new understanding. It’s the same with the Amish. I can't say that I suddenly found religion, but it certainly opened my mind. I came to understand and respect those groups in new ways.

Mr. Jekielek: Watching elderly people die alone and prevented from connecting with their family members, how could you possibly come up with that policy? Nevermind that it's anti-human, it's also anti-society, and anti-everything you could imagine.

Ms. Bauer: It's also what I call an anti-life cycle. There's such a thing as a life cycle. When life comes to an end, human beings want and need to honor that. Again, the policy was so one dimensional. Sunetra Gupta, who I also featured in the book. She said, “It was a one-dimensional response to a multidimensional problem,” which is exactly what my issue was with the whole thing.

I remember the very minute that lockdowns were announced and everyone started saying, "Follow the scientists, the experts, the scientists," I thought, "Wait a minute, where are the economists? Where are the philosophers? Where are the historians at the table? Where are the mental health experts? Where are the social scientists?" These voices are just as important for managing a pandemic. It was singularly one-dimensional and anti-human, as much for the old people. As for the children, the young people, we can talk about that a bit.

Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about that because you have a whole chapter on children. Jennifer Sey is one of your subjects, and she's been on the show. Please tell me about what you found.

Ms. Bauer: That's probably one of my core values, which I really came to realize during the pandemic, is that adults are supposed to protect the children. In some sense, I consider children's lives more important than my own. I know this became heresy to say this during the pandemic. They were saying, "All lives are equal. A 95-year-old's death is no different from a five-year-old's," which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Before Covid, we used to be able to talk about it, but somehow there was this strange new narrative that took hold where children didn't have a special importance. To me, they do.

I hope to live another 40 years. I'm thankfully in very good health, but I still consider my kids' lives and other kids' lives more important than my own. I've had lots of fun. I've had the opportunity to do most of what I wanted in life, but the young people have not. They deserve it. That's just one of my values. I really discovered that during the pandemic, and it really troubled me that no one was talking about the children. I remember actually speaking online to a stranger, which I shouldn't have done because that's always very dangerous, about how I was worried about my kids. They were both in university at the time. They were living alone in these basement apartments.

My son is tall, he had literally two inches above his head. They couldn't go out, and they couldn't socialize. All their extracurriculars were gone. All their classes were gone. I was worried about their mental health. This one person basically told me to shut up. She said, "Nobody cares. The only thing that matters is we all have to stay home, and we all have to beat this virus."

I profoundly disagreed with that, and I thought we really had to put children first. When the whole vaccine campaign rolled out, there was this push to vaccinate children, really in order to protect adults. Because the rationale was that children weren't not as vulnerable to serious harm, but you vaccinate them so they won't bring it home and raise the risk for adults. Again, the whole idea of using children as shields for adults is so distasteful to me on a fundamental level, that my whole being recoils against that.

Mr. Jekielek: You're echoing Dr. Scott Atlas' view that he absolutely found it so unconscionable when the risk to children all along was less than driving in a vehicle, to do a cost-benefit analysis here. That's something else that comes out in your book as a theme, that we forgot about cost-benefit analysis.

Ms. Bauer: Completely. One of the people that I interviewed and that is featured in the book, Sanjeev Sabhlok, is of Indian origin, but lives in Australia. He's an economist. He talks about how cost-benefit analyses are useful even if they're bad, just because at least there's something out there, and people can react to it and talk about it. But again, for some reason, that was taboo to do during Covid. Again, there was this narrative that you can't put a value on life.

Mr. Jekielek: But actually, they are. They are putting a value on life and it's not as high as one would want it to be.

Ms. Bauer: Yes, that's a very fraught subject. When you're dealing with public health, in a sense, you have to put a value on life. Nobody's going to spend or support spending a billion dollars to extend somebody's life by 10 minutes. There's realities to contend with, and we have to manage public health as a whole. We can't ignore the social costs and the psychological costs. Public health is a balance. A lot of the people that I interviewed said, “Public health is a balance, and you really have to think about striking the most human and humane balance.”

One of the interesting things that Paul Frijters considers is wellbeing. He's a leader in the field of wellbeing economics, because most standard CBAs, cost-benefit analyses look at very standard health metrics like quality-adjusted life years. They evaluate quality of life just in terms of how healthy you are, how mobile, and how restricted you are.

Whereas, wellbeing economics looks at all the factors that contribute to your wellbeing, which includes things like attending weddings or graduations or going to summer camp or having a backpacking trip to Europe that you'll never have an opportunity to do again. All these things are part of what constitute the experience of living, and they have to be factored in as well. He did some wellbeing analysis, which concluded that Sweden actually did a lot better in terms of overall preservation of wellbeing than countries with much stricter lockdowns.

Mr. Jekielek: There's a performative protection of life, but not actual protection. What really happens? It doesn't really matter as long as I'm supporting it or I'm seen to be supporting it.

Ms. Bauer: Yes, that's very true. There was so much performative policymaking going on. Think about something like masking toddlers. What toddler on the face of the earth is going to keep a mask on in a way that fits the face over the course of hours.

Mr. Jekielek: They were talking about N95 for toddlers or kindergarten children. It was comical.

Ms. Bauer: That's a complete performance. It's interesting that they really went for that in America, but not in Europe. In Europe, they were more sensible about that. They were also more sensible about schools. They opened up schools for kids much, much sooner. They did not do worse, their statistics were fine, and the kids did fine.

It is very puzzling that America didn't see what was going on there and adjust their policies accordingly. It's this intense polarization that has taken hold of America that made people dig in their heels and they just can't change course. They stuck to these absurd rules for children, and the school closures much longer.

Some of the things that they made kids do are just heartbreaking. A mother took her 13-year-old son who had been exposed to Covid to the hospital in the trunk of the car. She drove him to the hospital and he's in the trunk. What mother does that to their son? There are even sadder stories. There was a young man, a teenager, who died of meningitis because the hospital did not want to admit him, because he had been exposed to Covid. Just horrible, horrible stuff that really broke my heart and it made me furious too.

Mr. Jekielek: Do you contend that people went mad?

Ms. Bauer: Yes, I really do. I know there's various theories about how this all came about, but to me, the most plausible is that there was a collective psychosis. This happens. Carl Jung, the psychologist, talks about how there is no virus more dangerous than the mind-virus. There are so many examples in history, including in the medical field with the laughing trend or the fainting trend, or, of course, the Salem witch hunts, and more recently, the Satanic abuse trend.

Collective psychosis gets hold of people, and that herd mentality, which is baked into our DNA, kicks in. It was all embedded by social media. This was the first world event that occurred in the context of social media and that just amplified these human traits like wildfire, then we got this collective madness.

Mr. Jekielek: How important was propaganda facilitating this?

Ms. Bauer: It was huge. The media abdicated its traditional role, which is to question and then push back against government excess. The media just became completely complicit. The mainstream media, or the mainstream left-of-center media became 100 percent complicit with the narrative. Somehow people were made to feel and came to feel that it was their moral duty to coerce everyone else into doing this one thing, and that superseded all their other obligations.

Mr. Jekielek: This idea of, "Don't do it or you'll kill grandma," was actually tested in focus groups and selected to be one of the tools because that was the thing people would respond to.

Ms. Bauer: That's pretty insidious. In the UK, they had all the nudge units who did behavioral analysis and who did that kind of thing.

Mr. Jekielek: You have Laura Dodsworth in one of your early chapters.

Ms. Bauer: Yes. She talks a lot about that in her book, which was one of the earliest books that came out criticizing the pandemic policies, A State of Fear, and it was like a lifeline to me. I ordered it right away when I found out about it, I was like, "Oh, thank God." A lot of the stuff she talked about, I could relate to very much.

She said that the job of those nudge units was to manipulate public perceptions and behaviors. Her whole questioning in the book was, “Is this ethically justified?” That's really the crux of it. Is this ethically justified? Some people will say, "Yes, it is, because if the goal is to try to save lives, it doesn't matter what you do."

But then there's a lot of people like her and me and many others as it turns out, who say, "Wait a minute, no. There are certain fundamental principles that are not okay. The end doesn't justify the means. No, find other ways." If you think that your goal is so important, find other ways to communicate it. If the goal actually is that important and if the measures are going to help, ultimately telling the truth is going to have a better result.

Mr. Jekielek: One of the themes that also comes out in your book is this inordinate focus on safety above all else. That's a deeply troubling trend in society. I've had guests from Let Grow talking about this, and how that affects children's development, even without a pandemic. But in the context of this pandemic situation, it just got amplified.

Ms. Bauer: Yes, that’s what they call safetyism. It's this presumption that safety is the highest value, and not just the highest value, but that it is orders of magnitude higher than anything else and should supersede all other considerations. Nowhere is that written, and that's not a fundamental truth. That's just the way our society has evolved.

But when this safetyism encroaches on more and more and more aspects of life, and when it seems people are just willing to give up the freedoms that make life interesting in order to just preserve what one of the philosophers that I talk about calls "bare life", when this preservation of "bare life" or metabolic life completely takes precedence over what makes life worth living, then there's an imbalance. A lot of us felt that, and that's how we found each other.

We are freedom lovers. It's something in the genes, and something that is inside certain people. I've come to realize that, perhaps in 20 percent of people, where they realize that safety is important. As a mother, I can get pretty crazy about safety when it comes to my kids, but we have to balance it with other fundamental values that make life worth living in the first place.

Mr. Jekielek: You remind me of Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory that is in your book. That's a very interesting perspective where different people are wired for prioritizing different moral foundations.

Ms. Bauer: I really believe in that theory. I came upon Jonathan Haidt's work in a video, Masks & The Moral Matrix, by a medical influencer and doctor called Zubin Damania, who goes by ZDogg. I featured him in an early chapter. He calls himself an alt-centrist or a radical centrist. He was trying to explain to people on both sides why some people are so tenacious about masks and other people are so opposed to them.

He talked about how we all have these moral levers, which he calls moral taste buds. We all have a different palette and a different configuration. This is all based on Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory where some people are more wired for freedom, or for caring, or for justice. Some people's primary orientation is that everything should be fair in the world, for other people it’s loyalty. There's also a sanctity foundation, cleanliness.

For people who have a really strong sense of a very powerful sanctity taste bud, to them, the virus was perceived as something unclean that they just wanted to get it off them. That might really orient them towards wanting to get rid of this virus above everything else. Freedom doesn't matter. The important thing is to get rid of this unclean, unsanctifying thing.

Then the last one is authority. Some people believe that there are natural hierarchies, and society is better served when everyone stays in their own lane and follows the rules. Depending on your particular configuration of moral taste buds, you're going to react in different ways to certain policies.

That's why we had these extremely strong and visceral reactions, and I tend to really agree with that. We often rationalize our reactions later. We use logic to say, "I reacted this way because of X, Y, Z," but a lot of it is quite instinctive and intuitive and comes from who we are. Who knows where we acquired these moral foundations, but I imagine that they have deep and early roots in our lives.

Mr. Jekielek: I really like his framework too, but it also has to do with what we prioritize as a society. This whole American experiment and all of the democratic-type systems out there today come from the original American experiment of freedom and liberty.

Ms. Bauer: This is all becoming performative too. People are not just concerned with actually being caring, but with being perceived as caring. Somehow, in the narrative, the caring choice became conflated with supporting lockdowns, masks, and mandates. There were people who saw themselves and wanted the world to see them as caring above all else, that was the only item on the menu that they could choose. They were backed into the corner. It takes independent thinking to be able to step away from that and say, "I'm willing for people to not think I'm a great person for a while," just to really explore all this and really get to the bottom of it.

Mr. Jekielek: Your book is an absolutely fascinating exploration of all sorts of very interesting thinkers, who saw through a mind-virus and a very terrible time in all sorts of different ways. Thank you for this, and I am going to encourage our viewers to check out your book. Do you have any final thoughts as we finish up?

Ms. Bauer: I'm very grateful to all those minds, and of course to Jeffrey Tucker for publishing it. That's one of the silver linings of this whole thing, is that I met so many amazing people that I never would've met otherwise. That's something for all of us to be grateful for, that we found each other and found a way to move forward, and hopefully to keep talking about it. Because all of us want to put it behind us, but some of us, we need to keep talking about it so it doesn't happen again. That's really the purpose of all these essays, books, podcasts, and discussions.

Mr. Jekielek: Where will people find the book?

Ms. Bauer: The easiest way is on Amazon, it's in all the Amazon stores. It's available as a print edition, e-reader, or an audiobook. If you do not use Amazon, it’s on Lulu, and also on my website.

Mr. Jekielek: Gabrielle Bauer, it's such a pleasure to have you on.

Ms. Bauer: Thank you so much. The pleasure was mine.

Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Gabrielle Bauer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.