The overnight coronavirus expert
I want to tell you a story about an unusual storyteller. His name is Tomas Pueyo, a 37-year-old Spaniard who went to Stanford, lives in San Francisco, and earns his living running strategy for a company called Course Hero.
Were it not for the pandemic, Pueyo would be just another tech guy, albeit a quirky one. A few years back he wrote a book deconstructing the Star Wars narrative. He gave a TEDx talk about story structure. He posted his views of the world on Facebook.
Then, just as the coronavirus was descending upon the U.S., he published two long articles on Medium. The first warned Americans to take the virus seriously. It has been viewed 40 million times. The second, “The Hammer and the Dance,” coined a term picked up by scientists, public health officials, and veteran journalists. With clear language and clever charts, Pueyo accurately described how the world would react to the pandemic: first with dramatic shutdowns (the hammer) and then with chock-a-block containment efforts (the dance).
Experts were shocked that someone with no health-industry training could be so effective. “Everything felt like it was thoughtfully constructed and fact-based,” says Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, who, like many, doubted Pueyo before reading his work carefully.
I met Pueyo in early June, the first (masked) in-person meeting either of us had since sheltering in place. I asked him what gave him the confidence to write so authoritatively about such a complicated topic. “Credentialism is not as strong as it used to be,” he replied. Pueyo has turned the vogue to dismiss experts on its head by nearly instantaneously becoming one himself. He studies publicly available information until he understands the data well enough to explain to people without scientific backgrounds.
All of a sudden Pueyo was an epidemiological superstar—all while holding down his day job. Donald McNeil, the eminent health writer for The New York Times, referenced “The Hammer and the Dance.” CNN’s Anderson Cooper invited Pueyo to speak on TV. Pueyo followed up with more Medium posts and tweets, repeatedly making accurate predictions about the course of the virus.
Pueyo’s story is a counter-narrative to social-media personalities who are famous for being famous. He is semi-famous because he has done outstanding work and promoted it well. When we first met, he told me he felt he had aged several years because he wasn’t sleeping much, what with the demands of a job and a calling—and a young family.
When we spoke the next month, as infection rates were jumping in California and much of the South, he was somewhat hopeful (and better rested), if only because Americans were beginning to pay attention to the science of the disease.
“In politics, there is a long time from decision to impact,” he told me, this time over Zoom. “You can story-tell your way around that. With coronavirus, the feedback loop gets shortened from months to weeks. With coronavirus, you cannot escape reality.”
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Fortune is collecting nominations for our annual Most Powerful Women lists: We’re shaking things up a little this year, adding a new criterion: how the executive wields her power to shape her company and the wider world for the better. (Examples might include instituting hazard pay for frontline employees during the pandemic, instituting gender/racial pay parity, creating a program or business unit that serves a disadvantaged population, measurably reducing the company’s carbon footprint, or creating new hiring pipelines that have resulted in a more diverse workforce.)
We’re accepting submissions through this online form. The deadline for applications is Aug. 24.
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by David Z. Morris. Check out The Ledger, the fintech newsletter he edits weekly.