The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The Climate Crisis with Jack Holmes

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a series on solutions to the climate crisis.

This is Live from the Table, a Comedy Cellar-affiliated podcast coming at you on SiriusXM 99, Raw Dog, and the Laugh Button Podcast Network. This is Dan Natterman. And with me, of course, Noam Dorman. He's back in studio, back from, some people call it Palestine, some people call it Israel, some people call it the land of Israel. But Noam is back from there. Occupied Palestine. I trust you had a good time.

That's what my mother calls it. I trust you had a good time. I had a very good time, yes. I trust your Zionism is no weaker than it was. Is it any stronger? My Zionism is intact. Not reinforced necessarily, but intact. You know, you could get tempted to see, how do I put this?

You know, ethnic pride is a double-edged sword, and there's bad sides to it. So while I would confess that when I saw the remarkable achievements of this small country, the technological achievements, just in the short time since I hadn't been there, the progress, I felt unhealthy or tinges of ethnic pride. But that's not something that I'm proud of. So I'm going to confess to it. It is remarkable to see what's accomplished there. What was the question again? I said it's attack, but it's reinforced. So in that sense, it's reinforced. Why is that bad to have pride in, like you're saying, being proud of being Jewish?

Because nationalism is not always the greatest force in the world. With ethnic pride can come feelings of ethnic superiority and can also—the expressions of ethnic pride can lead other people to feel resentful or feel like you're taking a side swipe at them or whatever. Whatever. There's a lot of—and most of all, what do I have to do with it? Just because I happen to be born Jewish, I have a right to take—like, yeah, that's great. People somehow related to me in dna have accomplished this be that as it may it is it is a remarkable country and i think it's worth um uh of admiration for that accomplishment for so such an accomplishment in such a short time and other nations could learn from that um Having said that, just as a matter of

an embattled people who, you know, would be wiped off the face of the earth if their enemies could do so, yes, my Zionism is fully intact. And that's without regard to whatever policies of the new right-wing government, you know, that I may or may not agree with that haven't even been enacted yet, or if I would have voted for this party or that party, no more than I think that the French should be telling the Muslim women that they can't wear the hijab, right? Isn't that what they do in France? You know, I think that's a terrible thing that they do that, but it doesn't implicate my notion that France is a nation and has a right to exist.

That's kind of a domestic matter that I disagree with. So Israel may be headed for some domestic matters that I would disagree with. I don't know that. But that's a different issue to me than the fact that the country exists to protect the Jewish people from its enemies. And by the way, I forgot to introduce Perry L. Ashenbrand is also with us. Speaking of Jews. And she is our producer. And we have with us a returning guest, Jack Holmes.

But did you want to ask me about the waitress? I do, but I just want to introduce everybody first. Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports, and also hosts Unapocalypse, a series on solutions to the climate crisis. You can find him on Twitter at JackHolmes0. Oh, I have some questions to him about that. Go ahead. Well, we'll get to that. But first, I did want to talk about... Wait, just one second. Don't forget that we have to talk about stupid today. You promised.

Okay, stupid. Okay, moving on. I'm kidding. one second don't forget that we have to talk about stupid today you promised okay stupid okay moving on i'm kidding uh stupid is periel's we can do it now so get out of the way periel's web series stupid premiering on december 5th on youtube it's an animated talk show a bite-sized animated talk show set on the stoop of the comedy cellar. Our first episode is with the illustrious Noam Dorman. Well, listen, the truth is the only reason I'm the first episode because I was the funniest. I saw a bunch of them and I was really funny. I have to say, not that I'm always funny or I didn't find myself particularly funny, but the magic was in the air and I was really funny. You watched a couple of them. You were much more interested in your own.

Yeah, I'm so unusual. Certainly not unusual. But anyway, we wish Perrielle luck. I'm in one of the episodes. We wish Perrielle all the luck in the world with that project. Yeah. She worked very, very hard on it. And Nicole.

With Danny Cohen. Danny Cohen, Nicole. You didn't And Nicole. With Danny Cohen. Danny Cohen, Nicole. You didn't introduce Nicole. Oh, I forgot. Nicole, from the great city of Binghamton, New York, is our sound engineer. She works magic behind the scenes, seldom heard from,

but we couldn't do it without her. For those of you back from your 15-second skip. Anyway, it's a little bit like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe meets the Gary Shandling show. That's what your cartoon is? A little bit.

Because... What? Yeah, I mean it's supposed to start... Mr. Rogers? You ever watch Mr. Rogers? Neighborhood of Make-Believe when everything turns. So basically the idea is that it'll start in the beginning. That was not animated. With non-animated. That was animated.

It starts non-animated. No, no. With Mr. Rogers, he'd start it off like real, you know. And then it would go to puppets. And then it would go to the puppets. No, animated. It wasn't animated. Okay.

But I think the analogy is fair. Okay. Because it would go from real people to puppets. And so the second we hit the stoop, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. Right, exactly. The only part of the show I could really tolerate was the puppet part, not the real stuff.

Henrietta? Henrietta Pussycat? But anyway, the idea is that it'll, right now they're a minute, a minute and a half long, but the idea is once we sell it or partner with whomever to make them longer, they'll go much deeper and there'll be like five to 10 minutes.

And there'll be live action and animation. Yeah. Kind of like the Phantom Tollbooth movie. You ever seen that? No, but it's not, it's not gonna be- Who Framed Roger Rabbit also had- Yeah, yeah. It'll start out, yours is actually the only one

that's gonna do this in the beginning. So it starts out like you and I, and then the second we hit the stoop, everything- You and me. Yeah, go ahead. Actually- It starts out with you and me.

Yeah. With you and me. Yeah, go ahead. It's after the preposition, yeah. Yeah. No, but it's you and I start out because- Right, because it's a subject. Right.

Yeah, but that's not what you said. Go ahead. Okay. Well, let's play that fucking back and make sure. But that's sort of pedantic to really quibble with that. Yeah, but she deserves it.

But go ahead, go ahead. So it starts out in live action and then the second we hit the stoop, everyone and everything turns into a cartoon. By the way, Perrielle, pedantic means like full, you know, showing off your learning. I'm sorry,

I thought I was actually the one with a master's degree in fucking writing. That's exactly why I corrected you because you always talk about your frigging master's degree in English. We will talk more

about Stupid when the show is out and perhaps we can play a clip, the audio anyway. I don't know. Oh, maybe. But I did want to talk

to Noam. Okay. And we're going to get to our guest, Mr. Holmes. And feel free to chime in, Jack, by the way, on this next topic. But there was a waitress here that I thought was rather pleasant that ended up getting fired. And I asked Noam if we could discuss it, you know, because we won't mention her name.

But she got fired because apparently, and everybody liked her and she was a good waitress and she did her job well. But at some point, I believe she left. I don't know, she didn't have any tables, so she had a couple of free moments. Oh, no, she had tables, I think. Did she? I believe she had tables. I'm not sure. She left the floor and she went across the street to get a drink. Okay.

And shot. And she was fired. And she got fired, yeah. But I was not necessarily in favor of her being fired. Now, notice, by the way, note that Noam owns the place, lock, stock, and barrel. Well, this is a tough call because it is a serious thing for a waitress to leave the floor for any reason,

let alone to go get a drink. But the fact that you were not in favor of getting fired and you are the owner, one has to ask the question, well, then why was she fired? Because I give that authority to my general manager who decided that she wanted to fire her, that she could manage the place better by firing her.

It's a crazy thing to do to leave in the middle of your ship to go have a drink at a bar across the street. Having waitressed for many, many years in my younger days. Listen, I would imagine if you were to get this true statistic of how many people in the alcohol serving business have not snuck a shot of alcohol. It is a very small number. So that's the thing that's actually very curious to me because you have mentioned to me in the past that if somebody, like if a bartender gave a drink away, you would fire them for that. Yes, I would.

And that's, I mean, that's something that was- Because that's called stealing, Perry. Well, I don't, I don't, I mean, you're calling it stealing in my experience. Am I being pedantic by calling it stealing? Yes, you are. When you give somebody for free something that you're getting paid to collect money for, I would call that stealing because I end up with less money in my pocket that's supposed to be in my pocket.

But don't a lot of bartenders have the authority to give away occasional free drink? No, they don't. Not in our place. Okay. Maybe not in your place, but in my experience. Well, but they don't have that authority. But I worked in so many bars. And you need to specify bartender, but no.

All over the city. Like if somebody, if their friends comes in or their wife or somebody. Oh, their friend. That's great. Let me just give out drinks to people's friends. What if it's like, if you buy one, you get one free. But that's not our policy. Okay. But back to the original thing. Is the problem that she had a drink during

her shift or that she left the premises to have said drink? Both. Those are both problems. Problematic. But that's on one side of the ledger. And also on that side of the ledger is the consequences of the undermining the rules if somebody doesn't get fired for something.

But actually, it's coming back to me. I had suggested that she be suspended for two weeks. I thought that would be enough of a deterrent for future people who might want to do it. I thought she was quite a good waitress and had a good friendly spirit that I liked for the place. Now, maybe she wasn't as good a waitress as I thought she was. Obviously, they kind of do better when I'm there. They put their best foot forward when it comes to me, although I never heard that she wasn't a good waitress. And I tend to be more forgiving actually about, I'm very unforgiving about a waitress being rude to a customer, nasty to a customer, things like that I find intolerable.

And I think they need to go because someone who's nasty once, that's just who they are. They're going to be nasty again. It never works. I've given second chances. It never works. Stealing is another thing. As I told you, my father used to say, stealing is like masturbating. It's very hard to do it just once.

That has proved to be true. I once gave somebody a second chance who stole $40,000 from me, and then she stole another $160,000 from me. So I learned my lesson. You mean she stole a whole night's revenue? This was in the office. That is so insane that you said you would fire somebody for giving a shot for free, but you're going to give somebody a second chance after they stole $40,000?

Does that make any sense? Well, he's learned from that mistake. He learned that stealing, you don't just steal once. Yeah, well, this is a different thing. It was a new office. I'm not going to go into that situation, but anyway. But having said all that, you know, when you're dealing with younger people,

and that's a whole other scenario I could talk about another day. When you're dealing with younger people, and that's a whole other scenario I could talk about another day. When you're dealing with younger people, this is a woman who was a very good employee.

There was a lot of cash in and out with not a good system. She had a child. It's a whole other thing. I mean, I'm sure that she needed the money.

You know, you're a fucking heartless bitch. You know that? But you also said you'd fire somebody for giving away a drink. So that does,

an explanation is not out of, ridiculous as also said you'd fire somebody for giving away a drink. So that does, an explanation is not out of, ridiculous as to why you would fire somebody for a drink and not somebody who stole 40 grand. Right, but if I said anything, he would say that, just because it's me saying it. So having said all that, I'm not that eager to fire people. And when you have a young person at early 20s, they do stupid things like sneaking drinks. Now my question would be is,

uh, who is the least famous comic that if they ask you to, to hire her back, you would hire her back? Oh, that's a good question. The lead,

the lowest on the totem pole, which is, by the way, going to insult whoever you name. I can't name it because exactly that, it would put them on lowest on the totem pole.

I could tell you that if, if Chris Rock said, bleh. I could tell you that if, I don't want to say, but there's a lot of comedians, if they said, listen, I really miss that girl. They're back again.

How much, in other words, would it be enough? If somebody said, hey, where's, let's call her Kelly. It's not her name, of course. What would they have to say to get you to hire her back? Oh, you know what? I miss Kelly. Would that be enough for certain comedians? Well, it would be easy.

In this particular case, it would be because I wanted to hire her back anyway. So if Ray Romano said nothing but, oh, come on, where's Kelly? Oh, too bad. And he said nothing more. Would that be sufficient for you to say, you know what? She'll be, we'll get her back. No, no, that wouldn't be sufficient. What if he said, oh, no.

Oh, geez, you know, I like the wings, but, you know, when they're served by Kelly, they taste a little bit better. No, no, you lost your, your Ray Romano left you. You had it the first time. Left me. But anyway, but, but, but, but Ray Romano could certainly,

if he said, I would like you to hire Kelly back, you would do so. I don't know. You know, probably, but like I said, because I was leaning, you know,

I kind of wish that we, I'd be fine having her back, but if it was somebody I felt I couldn't hire back, no, no comedian would ever throw that kind of weight that we... I'd be fine having her back. But if it was somebody I felt I couldn't hire back, no comedian would ever throw that kind of weight around if I... What if they said, I'm not coming back here again unless you hire this person? Well, I'd have to hire them.

But none of them would do that. Well, none of them would do it. It's a hypothetical. Yes. Jack Holmes is with us, as I pointed out earlier. He's got a deep, rich timber. That's true. He's quite young. That's also true. How old are you? us, as I pointed out earlier. He's got a deep, rich timber. That's true. He's quite young.

That's also true. How old are you? 31, as of Sunday. Oh, happy belated. Happy birthday. To our favorite Sagittarius. That's true. Wow, Dan.

I didn't know you were gay. I am not, but I just thought that was a funny thing to say. So what are we talking with Jack about today, Noam? You said anything and everything? Well, let's get his take on the whole world. But having said that, when I saw Jack in the Olive Tree, Jack was on years ago because he was such a far left-wing Charles Pierce type of, is that his name, Pierce?

I used to edit him, yeah. Yeah, Pierce type of guy. And when I saw him, I? I used to edit him, yeah. Yeah, Pierce type of guy. And when I saw him, I think he was a few in, but he said, you know, I turned to the right on some stuff. Well, I think I, like a fair number of liberal-minded people, got a little exhausted by the COVID regime that we ended up having to live with, where whenever I would write something that was like,

seems like it's looking pretty good, the vaccines vaccines work like maybe we should go back to doing the things that make life worth living uh i would just get a torrent of abuse of people telling me that i was an ableist you know sociopath and all of this really and this is what they do to people that are putatively like i'm like on the same side. Like I was for the lockdowns for a long time. I didn't know what the effect would be on schools, but I thought it was worth going in that direction. But at a certain point, we do need to move on with our lives. And the reaction to that really put me off. You know, it made me aware of how people go down these sort of online rabbit holes and struggle to come out.

And it's not just a right wing issue. Yeah, well, that's very, and by the way, I, I, I agree with you just, you know, we were very, I was very COVID left, although I, at the time it was happening, it was not yet a partisan issue and I didn't see it as a partisan issue. And then in retrospect, I think it's pretty clear that some of it was excessive. But we couldn't have known that at the time. I feel very confident it was the right decisions to make at the time. And then at some point, it was like, well, we have the vaccine and we know very well what the risks are now. And we even have Europe is opening their schools. Like, what's going on here? What are we doing? And at that point, it became kind of ridiculous, right?

Yeah. I mean, I got blown up on a Friday night by Taylor Lorenz, who's a Washington Post and I think now Atlantic reporter. She got fired, right? I don't know what the issue was. She got fired for leaving the office for a drink. That's true, yeah. But, you know, she blows me up in an eight or nine tweet thread on a Friday night about how it's because, you know, Dave Weigel, who was her coworker, said, thank you for pointing out that nobody died because of the White House Correspondents Dinner. I don't even remember

this, but when before the White House Correspondents Dinner, which is D.C.'s favorite event, a lot of liberals are saying that this is going to be a super spreader event and implying that this is going to be some sort of mass casualty issue. And then, you know, month, two months later, we don't really hear about anyone dying. And of course, we can't say for sure that nobody on the wait staff or anybody was negatively affected. But I did write something that was like, are we going to talk about how none of that came to pass? And, you know, everyone was vaccinated and they went to an event, you know, a gala event,

gala event, and it was fine. And it's like a nine tweet thread. All of her fans are coming in saying, how could you say this? It's horrific. And I'm like, but that's what happened. You know, that's what happened. And if you're concerned about your risk of COVID exposure, at some point, it's no longer a social problem. It is a personal decision that you have to make based on your risk assessment, you know. I agree with you. And of course, it really began to jump the shark during the BLM protests when you saw people just who had been so, you know, angry about, there were some kids in like

Midwest University, not, you know, who were out in the, in a, in a river swimming. Do you remember that one? And there was a people, they're going to get people killed. And then like a week later, George Floyd, everybody's out protesting. And they managed to rationalize the protest.

I was like, well, what are you doing? Like, you know, take some kind of principled stand. It was outside. Like the,

the defense is that it's outside. It's, it's hard. No, that's fine. But, but they, but they weren't accepting that defense from right-wing type people, right?

Yeah. And we didn't know. Also, the beaches in Florida, people were making a big deal out of spring breakers in Florida outside on the beach. Yeah, the Grim Reaper guy that was walking around. I don't know if you remember that guy. Oh, yeah. That rings a bell. But it turned out that he was completely wrong and people were totally fine to be on the beach.

And as you said, we made some mistakes as a society in the beginning. We didn't we'd never gone through this since, you know, my grandfather died in 2021. He was alive for the last pandemic, but pretty much nobody was. So we didn't know what we were doing. Did he die of COVID? No, no, no. Wait, the last one was 1918 or something? 1919.

So how this motherfucker was over 100? 101. Yeah. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. Did he so how, this motherfucker was over 100? 101, yeah. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. Did he have his marbles even toward the end?

He did. Yeah, he totally did. Fodder to Iwo Jima is a great man. Yeah. But, you know, nobody knows what we're doing. So, you know,

everyone makes a big thing about, you know, Gavin Newsom in California, they fill in, or the LA County, whatever it was, they fill in the skate park on the beach in Venice. And everyone's like, in retrospect, obviously, that was stupid because that's not a priority for the government.

But at the time, we didn't know. So we should have I think, you know, somebody wrote on this in The Atlantic recently. But there should be hopefully from both sides, there could be a little concession that like maybe some of the Democratic governments overreacted and some of the stuff they did because they didn't know what they're doing maybe the republicans were a little too cavalier about the risk of death and maybe we could hope to move on of course this is never going to happen but we can speak in fantasy yeah the only one who's not defensible here is tucker carlson with his fucking vaccine denial and the Alex Berenson thing. That's a whole other thing. But, you know, so I think I told you in Forbes, was it? No, in Bloomberg, there was an article comparing Florida's lockdown, Florida's lack of a lockdown, Florida statistics to California's, and then, you know, controlling for age and various risk factors.

And the article concluded, and this is Bloomberg, not a right wing, that actually Florida had a better record in the end than California did. And I think that in somewhere in all of this is a reluctance to admit that maybe DeSantis lucked in, you know, however, either because he's smart and he is smart. He might have the same policies as Trump in certain ways, but he's not Trump. This guy is a Harvard lawyer, you know. Well, the funny thing is that the thing that might sink Trump for DeSantis' benefit is support for the vaccine. I mean, DeSantis has studiously avoided encouraging people to get the vaccine, has not set him up as pro-vaccine.

Whereas Trump, I think rightly, is like, I did Operation Warp B. Oh, absolutely. I developed this vaccine in record time. He didn't personally, but he put the funding there, whatever. You're going to claim credit for that. But that could actually be a problem for him in the Republican primary. But, you know, I think this vaccine is actually just skin deep. But DeSantis, on the other hand, was very good about prioritizing the vaccine

to the people who needed it the most. It's kind of like AIDS back in the 90s when they were trying to tell everybody, because they were, again, for good reason, they didn't want people to just consider it a gay disease and nobody would care about it anymore. They tried to make sure that we all thought we could get AIDS. But after all, we realized that just wasn't true. And this became the same thing with COVID. It became very important not to admit that actually there's a very small group of people who have a very high risk of dying from COVID.

And it's like a 20,000 times greater risk. And actually young people are not dying of COVID. And the fear was, well, once they figure that out, they're going to be like, fuck this shit. I want to go out, which is kind of what was happening. And so DeSantis, you know, I think he was very aware of the various risk categories and he was very good about getting the vaccine to the people who would likely die. And he was more cavalier. So you don't want to take it, don't take it. And this became especially justifiable once it became clear that it didn't stop the spread. Because when the vaccine first came, we thought, once you take it, that's it.

You can't ever get it again, and that would stop the spread. That's my fault. Well, in fairness, the people on the science side never said that it would stop the transmission, but it actually does. No. It lowers the transmission. It doesn't stop the transmission, but it makes it less likely

because you usually produce less of the virus. They didn't say it at first, but then the first studies after it came out showed the R-naught going way, you know, a little just above zero. So it was going, it would have disappeared on its own and you weren't supposed to be able to get it again. Only an outlier was supposed to get it again. But then it became clear that actually, as Alex Berenson said, it's more like a medicine that you take preemptively. So you might still get it again, but you'll, you just won't get that sick. So at that point, well, that's really up to you if you're young, you want to take it, you don't want to take it, you've had it a lot of,

so I thought DeSantis was kind of proven correct about that. He didn't close the schools. On the flip side, another sort of possible come-to-Jesus moment is that there's still no statistical evidence that the states that close schools more than the other ones have worse academic outcomes right now. Like the most recent study also that I saw written up in Bloomberg was also sort of a wash where it didn't really make that big a difference. I'm not shocked by that, but I'll add to that. When they've been talking about all the lost time and how this is – we're going to see this as consequences for a generation. I'm like, they'll catch up. Like my father came here nine years old from a – a lot of people, geniuses – well, actually, that actually undermines me. But just regular people came here as immigrants, not even speaking the language in grammar school. And they catch up, too.

When I did a story where I talked to a bunch of teachers about what they were seeing in the classroom, maybe in January of 2022. And for them, they were not as concerned about the academics. Like, eventually the kids are going to learn hopefully enough math to do fine. But a lot of it is behavioral. And it's like socialization that they did not have. And when you're going from third to fourth grade or fourth to fifth or whatever it is, that gap of a year where you're not having

that sort of organic interaction with other people your age, with adults who you have to listen to who are not your parents, they noticed that there were big behavioral issues. Yeah, and work habits too. Yeah. I don't want to dismiss it as zero,

but I don't think it's the calamity that they're trying to say it is. Can I ask before? You know, I'll add to that, to that whole thing that also, it might also be worse for poor people than even middle-class people. Poor people do use, do rely on the schools as daycare and stuff like that. And, you know, I don't want to be flippant about anything,

but as they say in your business, things are never as bad as first reported, right? So I think that, I think we're going to be okay. The loss of money that states that locked down, if that was a hurricane, let's say, we said this once before on the show, it would be the most serious natural disaster in history.

So Florida spared itself the most serious natural disaster that it could have had in its history. All that economic damage and all the lives ruined from that economic damage without losing more lives than a state which reacted drastically whether he got lucky or whether he's a genius you got to say well you know this is this is a good credential for a guy who's going to run for president and is going to have to steer us potentially through future problems so the left who hates DeSantis does not want to give him that credit. No, and I'm not, you know, it's hard to gauge if, like, just deaths alone are the only criteria, whether there are other factors in play, as you say. But in the end...

It's a big one. Yeah, but in the end, you know, he was vindicated in that. I haven't seen that exact thing. I'll send you the article. Yeah, if California is comparable to Florida, then, you know, he is vindicated. Yeah, yeah, and it may have been lucky, right? It may have been lucky, but, um, I think it's likely that it was lucky. Yeah. What, what insight would he have had? Well, he, he would, A, I mean, he had the same insights that, that Jack was having at some point

long before, I mean, Jack was having his inside probably a year before policy started changing. We were all kind of getting the feeling. I mean, as soon as the vaccine started coming out, a lot of reasonable people were saying, OK, you know, let's let's move on now. There's a vaccine. And it was almost another year before we really shed. But again, like I, you know, I did work on this where I was like, you know, my father is, is on the older side, has a bunch of preexisting conditions. So, you know, before I would go to family gathering, I would take a test to make sure I wasn't bringing COVID in to give him COVID. And I, we sort of wrote, and I did videos on this where I'm saying,

you know, it's probably a time when we can start going to do the things we do, but that doesn't mean you have to be all cavalier. You can take a test and make sure you're not spreading it to old people if you're going to be around them. But there's really no market for that. It's really either you're a full-on COVID is not a problem for anyone, it's a conspiracy, whatever, or stay in your house. Well, and this is a classic dividing line between, you know, conservative thought and liberal thought. And depending on the issue, I might find myself on one side or the other, but liberals tend to be more paternalistic and conservatives tend to say more like what you're

saying is, listen, you're adults. You have, you have perfect information here. You have the same information anyone else has. You decide what's best for your family. You have somebody with a pre-existing condition. Be more careful. Your college, I mean, colleges were shutting down. One person would get COVID after the vaccine was there, and they were just sending everybody home. This is crazy. And the interesting thing is, you know, among China's many problems

is that they've done the zero COVID thing, and it's obviously this big authoritarian nightmare. But it also, it just showcases that in the end, everyone's going to get this virus. Like you, you can try and have these lockdowns for years and years and years, but like the end game is that everyone's eventually going to get COVID. Like my parents got, my dad ended up getting COVID and he made it because he was boosted and that was the right thing to do. But they have really paid the price for this, you know, what I guess conservatives would think of as the ultimate sort of democratic policy of lock it down. Now, what do you think is going on? Are you knowledgeable about China?

Why are they doing this zero COVID thing? I think they've just gone down that road. And I don't think their vaccines are very good. Is that what it is? Yeah, I think they're like, you know, if ours, I'm making this up, but if ours are a 90 out of, if we scored a 90 on the test, I think they're in like a 60. Why wouldn't their vaccines be very good that it doesn't make any sense?

Too much MSG? Exactly. No, I don't know about the science of it, Does it make any sense? Too much MSG? Exactly. No, I don't know about the science of it, but everything that I've seen on that is that the Sinovax, I think it's called, it's just not very good. And now they've started bringing in Western vaccines. But, of course, all of this is tied up in, like, as you say, nationalist fervor. Yeah, the ego of having to bring in the Western vaccine,

because we have the mRNA technology. They don't, as far as I know, they don't have the ability. But the other thing, you know, again, this is it's we don't know this yet, but like the mRNA vaccines, are is a school of thought that the J&J as a traditional vaccine actually perform better against the different variants because it works with your immune system in a more traditional way. that if the virus had not varied or mutated, the mRNA was much more effective than the J&J. At the point when it mutated, then it's not clear anymore because the whole beauty of the mRNA is that it's so perfectly targeted. Who knows? It's amazing technology, though. Yeah.

But I will say, you know, the theme of this is that I'm quite happy that every day we don't, you know, I don't see I don't spend my whole day looking at the news about COVID. I think we're all prepared. under Biden than under Trump, the main difference being that this Biden's regime existed while there was a vaccine, that, like what you said, there wasn't much we were going to do. Sorry, go on. No, no, more people died under Biden. Is that what you said? Yeah. Oh, okay.

Yeah. There's just sort of an inevitability about it, which I don't think that we as human beings are really readily ready to accept that. Like for the entire history of the human race, we've had these viruses sweep in and cause a lot of damage. And hopefully we can mitigate the damage. Again, I think the decisions that political leaders made in 2020 are very defensible. And, you know, what's the thing bet but they were made all around the world it's similar to see it's not like another i mean sweden uh the people made a big deal about how sweden had less of a lockdown but they still had a lot of social distancing in place even there yeah and i think hopefully you know when this comes around again hopefully not soon there

will be more of a you know nuanced approach but if it comes around again and it really is bad, it's going to be hard convincing everybody of that. It's sort of a boy who cried wolf thing. The next pandemic. Not if people start dying. The thing about COVID, it was just like a lot of people were dying, but not that many people were dying and they were old. If you had a bunch of kids dying,

like you wouldn't have to convince anybody about to do anything. Lock it down. Yeah. And we were tremendously lucky that babies didn't die. I mean, it could have been so much worse. It was sort of a starter pandemic in a way.

I mean, it was still horrific. I mean, millions of people died. But compared to the, as we were talking about the Spanish flu, I mean, that's an entirely different thing where as you say 25 year old kids were dropping dead yeah the years lost you know philosophers talk in terms of years lost the years lost could have

been way worse I can't believe we lived through it I'll tell you this though it was a pleasant time for me it was if money is not a huge issue it can be quite a pleasant time you go you can go somewhere you know having a business If money is not a huge issue, it can be quite a pleasant. You go, you can go somewhere.

You know, having a business, have I said this on the show before? Having a business is such a stressful thing. It's always open. It's always there. You can never get away from it. During the pandemic, we were shut down. I was hanging out with Perry Ellen and her family a lot. We were shut down. That's why you enjoyed it so much.

And it was nothing I could do. And with that came a serenity that I haven't had since 9-11. Which is the truth, because 9-11 was in there. Manhattan was shut down. 9-11, your father was still alive, so you weren't as involved in the comedy cell. No, but I had the Cafe Watt. I had the Village Underground. I had the Pussycat.

I had a lot. Comedy cell was not even the and that was only shut down for how many how long were you shut down after 9-11 a week a week or two not too long you were in quite a pickle but i just remember that feeling of nothing i could do like and and it was very very relaxing you'd have to you'd have to experience it understand although at one point you the pandemic, you did say, what did you do so bad in your life that of all people, you had to get stuck in a house? With you? Anyway, so. I was the only person you could talk about politics with. That's what you said. Oh, no. Yeah, that makes sense. And then also, the government was, you know, the government took very good care of the

businesses that it shut down, especially the nightclubs. Can we- Not so much of the restaurants. Just to outline a little bit the restaurants. No, go ahead. I want to ask Jack. But I do want to get to Christy McVie. Okay.

And I guess climate change, right? Because that's sort of your- I have some climate change issues. Go ahead. Christy McVie. But unless you have more you wish to discuss on this topic. No, we probably had climate change issues. Go ahead. But unless you have more you wish to discuss on this talk. No, we probably had enough of this. Go ahead. Okay, so Chrissy McVie or climate change?

Chrissy McVie first and then climate change. Is it Christine McVie or Christine McVie? Christine could be short for Christina. Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac fame died, I just found out, before the show at 79 years old. You still did the show then, I'm proud of you.

I didn't realize that she was that old. Do you know who that is? Fleetwood Mac. Right, so you know who Christy McVie is. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't cast myself as a super fan of... Well, she, I mean, they were big in the 70s, so it's

a little bit before you, but Christy McVie was at the piano. You see, Stevie Nicks, I mean, they were big in the 70s, so it's a little bit before you. But Christy McVie was at the piano. You see, Stevie Nicks, she didn't really play an instrument. I don't know. She played like a little bit of, which is amazing because she wrote great songs. And usually people who write great songs are decent instrumentalists. I love Stevie Nicks. I think she wrote them along with Lindsey Buckingham. Excuse me, I'm coughing.

Do you have COVID? I don't have COVID. I choked on the water. Go ahead. But Christy McVie was a pianist, and she wrote several songs, too. Songbird, Over My Head, Say That You Love Me. Anyway. I love you.

Huh? Is that the name of one of her songs? Are you confessing your love for me? No, you said Say That You Love Me. Oh, okay. Okay. Anyway. But I wanted to ask Noam, because Noam's our resident music nerd

who was the better musician overall Stevie or Christy who was the baddest bitch in rock and roll or at least in Fleetwood Mac anyway I don't know as you said Christy McVie actually played played an instrument on a

professional level like she was the keyboard player I guess so you would say she's a better instrumentalist. I don't know who's bigger talent. Stevie Nicks, I think wrote, somehow became a bigger star. Well, Stevie Nicks was sexy. Yeah, we could go, but we could go through, you know, Stevie Nicks wrote and sang Dreams, right? Here you go.

Yeah, yeah, Dreams. And that was one of the very biggest hits. And Rhiannon. Rhiannon. Yeah. Which was also huge. Rhiannon. And who sang Landslide?

And Landslide. Yeah. And she wrote that too, I believe. Maybe with Lindsey Buckingham. I don't know. So they're both good. It's a great band. Amazing band.

I love it when talented women are reduced to who is sexier. He didn't say that. He did so. No, I said who reduced them. He was saying that maybe that's why she became a bigger star. That's correct. Yes, I said who is the better musician, I think was my question, and then he said Stevie was a bigger star. I said, well, she was sexier,

which has a lot to, I think, has a great deal to do with it. And she had her voice was, I mean, certainly raspy and interesting. And, and, and she had her voice was, I mean, certainly raspy and it was raspy and interesting. Yeah. And Mateo Lane, this guy had the nerd, the fucking boy.

I should, I was about to kick his ass, except he's in, he's a lot in better shape than I am. But, uh, he said that she sounded like a goat and, uh,

and that, and that he prefers Mariah Carey. Well, that's apples and oranges. Mariah Carey is one, that's apples and oranges. Mariah Carey is a fantastic singer. And she's the all-time leading female artist. And she writes all her songs. I don't think she writes her songs.

If she writes her songs, then I might have to... Mariah Carey? Mariah Carey absolutely writes her songs. I don't know if she's written every song she's ever performed, but when she hit the scene, she's... Are you gay now? She produced her own demos and brought them to Tommy Mottola before she was

famous. Mariah Carey is a big success. I don't know that she wrote her own song, but I had to verify that. If she did, then I might have to go rethink this whole thing. Wow. You didn't know that? Let me... No, I just assumed she didn't because she's a singer who doesn't play an instrument, so generally speaking, singers

that don't play instruments don't write their own songs. How many of Mariah Carey's songs did she write herself? Now, as I said, Stevie, I guess, was an exception because she didn't play really. I think she played a little bit of tambourine. One question is whether they have a songwriting credit or they actually wrote the song. Because, you know, everybody gets a songwriting credit, really, if you're a big enough star. No, Mariah Carey is a great uh songwriter and talent she's no joke she she she broke out on the scene um with songs that she had written herself well if that's the case then i guess i have to rethink it meanwhile um now you with that baritone voice,

do you have any musical ability? Duo band, perhaps? I've been known to sing a little bit, but no. My mom tried to make me learn the piano when I was about nine and that put me off the music business. But I'm talking about your voice here because that's what really stands out with you. No, I don't sing.

Did your guidance counselor ever say, look, forget the grades. Traffic and weather is your future. I should should be so lucky yeah you're on new york one your first album can be called able a sociopath yeah exactly i would fly off the shelves it's amazing why was it ableist um because it is a real issue that you know people that are disabled some are at higher risk of of dying of covid and we should be cognizant of that but me saying that people should feel free to go to a sports game is not really ableist i don't know it's okay so now now that you've had a little taste of it are you exhausted with this whole uh

woke uh pc what does woke mean i people now it's it's been's been so bled of meaning to me. I think politically correct, but even more so. Fucking idiots. What kind of a fucking idiot white person refers to themselves as woke? You know? If you actually were socially conscious, you'd realize that white people stole that word

from black people. Once again, doing the Elvis thing. Right? But you know what? I blame black people. Once again, doing the Elvis thing. Right? But you know what? I blame black people for that. One of them fucked up. They were at a party. There was white people there. And they let it slip out.

Stay woke. I don't care the fuck you say it. And some white person heard it like, Oh, who is that? Stay woke? I wouldn't say that. I gotta say that and some white person heard it like, ah, who is that? Oh my god. Say woke? I wouldn't say that. I gotta say that around my white friends so they know that I'm down. Oh my god, I'm gonna fucking say that. Fucking woke. I'm fucking woke. I'm a woke signaler. I fucking had it. I've had it. I support black people in my white apartment on Twitter.

That's what I do. I'm fucking here for you. Every white person likes to lie to themself that they were alive, you know, 150 years ago, that they would have been working on the Underground Railroad trying to help slaves escape, right? I would have been one of the good white people. I would have taken time out

of my day, risked my life, and the reality is, is you'd be doing back then exactly what you're doing today. Nothing. Not a fucking thing. Maybe a little hashtag, Black Lives Matter. Oh my God. My heart breaks on my L-shaped couch. My favorite thing about the Black Lives Matter marches was the store windows that would have the plywood over the windows and then it would say

Black Lives Matter on top of the plywood. I just love the duality of that message, you know? It's like Black Lives Matter, we're all the same, we're all one. Don't burn down my store, you fucking animals! Everybody is welcome in this store. Anyone can come in one at a time, follow him! It's just a safe space for everyone.

Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, you know, there are movements online that are ultimately unproductive, I think. But if, you know, if being woke is like aware of the fact that police treat me differently than somebody who's black, I think I'm woke. If it is, you know, trying to get someone fired from their job for something they tweeted, that's not what I'm woke. If it is, you know, trying to get someone fired from their job for something they tweeted, that's not what I'm interested in. Wokeness also that, that, you know,

wokeness also to me has the connotation that you have these kinds of opinions and also you are not interested in anybody discussing them with you. Like if you say it's, it's if you say, it's a liberal position. I would say you can have the position that, what's her name? The swimmer who, at Penn, who the transgender swimmer.

Well, Lauren, was it Lauren? Whatever her name was. So you could have the position that I don't think it's... Leah Thomas. Leah Thomas. I think it's fine for her to compete in female sports. Like, Alan Dershowitz had that position. I wouldn't find that as woke.

It becomes woke when you say that and you think anybody who disagrees with you is a monster. That's part of the whole woke thing, is this opinion of anybody who disagrees with you. a monster. That's part of the whole woke thing is this opinion of anybody who disagrees with you. Or should be cancelled. That's a whole other level. Like we were surprised that Dershowitz felt that she should. Right, but he also said he sort of

he could be swayed otherwise. He wasn't ready. I pushed back on him and he said, well, maybe you're right. But he did a podcast prior where he came down strongly that she should be able to compete. But nobody would call Dershowitz woke because he was making a reasoned argument in his mind why it was. Wokeness has this almost quasi-religious thing to it, which whatever. I don't know.

That's why they call it woke, right? No, I think the term now is not very useful because it's basically just a term of derision that people use for people whose views they disagree with. I do agree that if the way that you talk about the issues is really just to show that you're part of some in-group and that you are in the right place and everyone else who agrees with you is in the right place and everyone else is a problem, it does not seem like a productive way to conduct yourself. But it's certainly not exclusive to

you know the far left and it's also you know i think people are they get very upset they they for things that affect them personally especially um it's a they viscerally feel it and they do react strongly to people who they think are not sometimes they don't think that you're disagreeing with their politics they think that you are denying their humanity in a way or denying their complaints about how they don't have the full rights of citizenship in our society. And I can understand why people get upset. It's just in the end, it doesn't solve many problems when we yell at each other. And I don't really understand why they get upset. I mean, depending on the case, but

you should be able to discuss things without people getting upset. As long as you're not being nasty or in bad faith. So, climate change. Climate change, baby. I was listening to this podcast. It was Megyn Kelly's podcast. By the way, Megyn Kelly's podcast,

I don't know if you ever heard it, is very good. She really is good. And then, you know, getting back to Stevie Nicks thing, she was always so attractive and so polished. And, you know, it wasn't clear to me if that was part of the reason that she was doing so well on TV. She is very good. But anyway, she had this guy, you probably know him, it starts with SH, and he ran for governor in California. The dude, and he claims to be a climate change expert.

Oh yeah, but he wrote the book sort of Against the Grain on science. I don't know his name though. Shut, shut, shut. How can you not know? Alright, we'll look it up. He got bulldozed by I don't know his name, though. How can you not know? You're a climate... All right, we'll look it up. He got bulldozed by Gavin Newsom.

And he came out with this stuff essentially saying that electric cars, because of all the minerals and everything needed to produce these electric cars, will not be the answer to auto emissions. You know anything about that? I was shocked by this. You know something about it? Well, from everything I've read is, yes, you produce more carbon emissions.

The production of electric cars are much worse in terms of carbon emissions. But after about five years, you break even because you're using electricity and hopefully clean electricity, ideally. And then after that, there's a net benefit to an electric car. And as we use more and more clean energy, that mathematics will only get more and more in favor of electric cars. That's what I have read. I don't know. I think that's true. I mean, the one thing that Americans are very reluctant to confront is that the internal combustion engine is one of the biggest climate problems we have. Because cars are so integral to American culture,

we've designed our entire society around cars. Every city is designed around cars. But in the end, we need to change all the cars that we drive because the the the exhaust is a massive problem it's not the only problem but as you say yeah the you know and some of the you know the minerals that you need to make a clean battery for a for a an electric car they're very hard to procure you need lithium which is only available in a few areas of the world all this stuff but in the long term if we had a full fleet of 100 million cars on the road that were clean instead of internal combustion engine, it would make a huge difference.

No, but he said we can't scale it up that high. It would become very, very expensive. And then the electricity to produce all the technology to produce all the electricity would also not work out. I don't think that's backed in the- Schellenberger, yeah. I'm not sure that's backed in the mainstream. I mean, it doesn't mean he's wrong, but-

You should go and listen to it. It's on Megyn Kelly. It's also, you know, I did a story on- Yeah, I asked to have, it was one of my guests, on my guest wishlist, I think, Schellenberger. Well, let's get him on. I think Coleman can help us get him on. So i was listening to this guy i'm like if this guy knows what he's talking about this is this is serious but i don't know it's a little it's just

a little short-sighted because all of all of our survival depends on our ability to continue innovating and make making better and better things i did a story on hydrogen as a potential uh battery for cars which is a complete alternative to what you would find in a Tesla or in any other electric car you'd find on the market now, which is a completely different way of producing cars. And it has different materials and everything. And if you were to scale that, yes, there are costs on the front side. You know, concrete and cement is a huge carbon problem.

But, you know, the end if we if we change the way we do everything which is what's going to have to happen eventually we will come out the other side and it's all dependent on genius engineers just how bad uh would it get if we did nothing and continued uh doing what we're doing so i mean that that's a debate in and of itself of course the the big thing that's been a problem for decades is that people talk about sea level rise. And that is simply not the issue that we face. The issue that we face is extreme weather events

in many different forms that are going to kill millions of people. And before they even do that, those millions of people, hundreds of millions of people are going to be on the move. So if you live in Bangladesh, and you have three typhoons hit in a year because they're going to become more ferocious and probably more often, eventually you're going to leave. And so where are you going to go? Are you going to go to a neighboring country? Are those people going to be happy to see you? Look at how

we deal with the caravans that arrive at our border. This is a political problem way before the, you know, the ocean is in your, in your front yard or whatever. Um, the fires out West, the droughts are going to be the drought in China this year, which basically was ignored by the West was horrific. It was absolutely horrific. It basically was mass crop failures across much of the country. And these are the things in the short in the shorter term. And right now we already see these crazy storms. But those are the things and the political problems that they create are what we have to worry about. And also diseases. Right.

I was just reading about like the zombie virus in Siberia. Yeah. As the ice melts in the Arctic, there are these ancient viruses that are coming out of the ice. Hilarious. That we have no immunity to at all. This is a science fiction movie, I'm sure. Yeah. It's already been.

It could be a script. Yeah. And of course, on any particular storm, you don't actually know whether, like Florida actually has had a bunch of years where it had fewer hurricanes than it's supposed to have. It's less about the number of storms than, you know, there's very solid science that as the earth warms, there's more water vapor in the air.

And so then there's more precipitation in the clouds that falls faster. So you might have noticed in New York particularly, we have a lot of flash flooding problems now in the summer. And it's not storm surge. It's a massive amount of rain

falling in a very short period of time. And there are areas of Brooklyn and Queens that people live in basement houses. If there's a flash flood that they have no warning about, they are stuck in their basement and people die. I mean, in 2021, there were two hurricanes where we had a lot of fatalities. And this is what in the near term happens. And then it gets worse as it gets hot now you'll be pleased to know i drive a tesla and it is the greatest possession i've ever owned in my life but not because it's electric necessarily you just you you know the handling the everything yeah i mean it drives the way it drives because it's electric right i didn't i did not buy it to to help the environment. But having said that, this is an important insight that Musk had, which is that, you know, not everything has to be like taking your medicine.

Like, it's perfectly fine to make these cars desirable in their own right so that people will buy them, you know, and the byproduct can be helping the environment, right? And that's a big part of the work that I've started doing with this Unapocalypse series, where the solution is going to come in making things cheaper and better. Like, nobody in the end, as you said, is really making that many decisions as a consumer based on their fear of you know wildfires in california um but if you know solar and wind are cheaper which they are now um that is just cheaper than they used to be or cheaper than coal and and oil cheap cheaper than oil and uh oil and gas if you can natural gas is very competitive still but coal is no longer competitive at all um and the barrier to that which i did it

was a feature in our series is we need to basically redo the um power grid of the united states basically right now there are three grids that are separate and they're all controlled by local utilities and it's almost impossible to get a solar plant or a wind plant online in a lot of areas because the local utility is not that interested they have their stuff going on already that's not their prerogative um and it costs you know there's a huge regulatory barriers um and it costs a lot of money to build these big transformers that are going to be basically the future of um moving energy around the country they're called transmission lines um but if we were to set it, it will take some government action. And actually,

Joe Manchin's permitting bill, which a lot of liberals hate because it will make it easier to build fossil fuel stuff, it will also make it a lot easier to build these clean infrastructure projects, which we need to make what's already a very good product, solar energy, viable to supply the places where people actually live. But what about the problem that solar, sometimes the wind doesn't blow and oftentimes the sun doesn't shine, and that means you have to store the energy, but that can cause problems because that's not necessarily efficient. So the storage is an issue, and there are a few ways to approach it.

They are developing better and better batteries. That's another innovation thing. There are ways to use other power forms to store the energy. So there are models of using hydropower, which is totally clean. And we actually have a ton of already because we have dams all over the country. You can use hydropower as a means of actually storing energy from other parts. Is that by you lift the water up? Yeah.

You use energy to lift the water to a higher level. And then when you need the energy, you let the water fall? Is that how that works? Yeah, you have control over when the water is coming through the turbines. You spin the turbines, generates power when you need it. But the larger model is that basically right now we have a pie, and there are a lot of slices of the pie. And the biggest slices are obviously oil and gas, and now to a less and less extent, coal, and a bigger and bigger extent, solar and wind. But if we want a pie that actually is dependable and serves everyone all the time, you need things like hydropower. Nuclear will be a huge part of it. I want to ask you about nuclear in a second. And we're shooting a video tomorrow,

actually, about geothermal energy, which is a very cool kind of what's called firm. All of those are called firm power. And that's basically they are operating 24-7. So they supplement what will probably mostly be wind and solar to have a dependable grid all the time. And how far are we away from fusion? I mean, the old joke is we're 50 years away and always will be. Yeah, I don't know a ton about um well i think what we have now is fusion i think fission is the other thing isn't it well fission is what with what nuclear power is oh so what we have now is you your vision yeah but

fusion you're putting the atoms you're smushing the atoms together and creating energy that way so years ago i mean maybe 15 years ago already, I was saying the following. I said, you know, they're not serious about this climate change thing. They're telling us it's an existential threat. But if they really believed it, they would build nuclear plants right now. I think I started saying this

when McCain was running against Obama. That's how many years that is. I said, because if you think something's an existential threat and you have a solution now, yes, there's some risk to nuclear power, but not huge risks. You build it now and then you buy time. And then when you are ready with the other means to produce energy, then you go online with the other ones to this day there has not built been a new nuclear power plant built in america since nixon no i agree and german what the fuck is going on we just saw germany and now we have i'm sorry but now we have electric cars so you could power all the electric cars with the nuclear energy so no- I agree. There's a taboo about nuclear,

and a lot of people on the environmentalist left are opposed to nuclear, and I think they're wrong. You look at Germany- You say you think they're wrong. They are wrong. It's indefensible. And it makes me think, you don't really believe what you're even saying. Do you really believe there's an existential threat here? If your child, if I had doctor said, listen, Mr. Dorman, your child is going to die. We have this temporary measure. There's some complications with it, but it'll hold over until there, but they're developing new medicines all the time. No, no, I don't want it. Like it's not, it's no. And I, you know, Germany almost basically committed national suicide by shutting down all of

their nuclear plants at just in time to get into a geopolitical conflict with Russia. It's amazing. And Trump warned them not to. They were, yeah. Well, yeah, he was actually right about the Nord Stream thing. But they were, then they were talking about firing up their coal plants for the winter. And eventually they reversed course and now they're using nuclear again. And actually France is huge on nuclear. They've always been. I mean, they've been since the 50s. And the French didn't meet their Paris Accords. Was it the Paris Accords?

Now are being fined because nuclear doesn't count as part of the energy. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. What a species we are. In Esquire magazine, actually, during the Paris Climate Accords, John C. Richardson went to Paris. And one of the stories he filed was about what was basically a smaller group of people who were dedicated to nuclear being part of this pie, of this energy pie. And they were not, you know, in the mainstream of this conference, as you get it.

It's like the Great Barrington Declaration for climate change. It makes no sense. It really makes no sense no but unless unless people don't really believe that it's an existential crisis no the the the takeaway is that democrats are one explanation is that democrats are full of shit but it is a real problem you know but when obama runs on that people forget that in the stimulus bill which would should have been much bigger there was a lot of climate funding including for a company called tesla which basically got off the ground as a viable scaled business because of this government money that we pumped into it which i think was the right thing to do isn't schellenberger also a big nuclear booster isn't he the one that he probably is because he's you know a iconoclastic voice i

mean how could you not i would say nuclear has is back in the mainstream discussion now of like we need whatever percentage 15 20 why not 100 well you know you don't you wouldn't want to live next to a nuclear plant like i understand people's reservations i don't i think we need to build them but i don't know if it would if 100 would mean that i would want to live next to a nuclear plant. Like, I understand people's reservations. I think we need to build them, but... I don't know if 100% would mean that I would have to live next to... Well, that's the other thing. That's the issue with wind and...

Build it in the poor neighborhoods. Can you build that? We have a lot of land in this country. I'm sure there's places to build nuclear power plants that don't mean somebody has to live right next to them. This is the issue with the transmission lines that I was talking about. The best wind and solar harvesting is in areas of the country where nobody lives.

It's in, you know, parts of West Texas, up through the middle of the country in the least, some of the least. Well, I was just in South Dakota and I had a gig there, oddly enough, but I was driving like for 10 miles. It was nothing but windmills. Yeah. And so for that, you need these massive power lines that are a nuke. They're called direct current. Like what we have in this room is alternating current, but there's a new

type of power line that can carry it over huge distances. So the idea- That was Tesla, right? He wanted direct current, or no, Edison wanted direct current. Tesla wanted, I forget. Maybe, yeah, I don't know. But yeah, the idea is that in Iowa, where they are starting to have a lot of wind, actually, you could carry that to Chicago, and that would power people's homes in Chicago, and they wouldn't have to have a power plant outside their house. Yeah, it seems like we have a lot of solutions available to us, but nuclear is a big one. And, you know, even in the Soviet Union with Chernobyl, with communism, in 1970s technology, we managed to contain it. We could build nuclear power plants. And let's say there is an accident and 5,000 people die. You know, that's not the end of the world. If it means we're saving civilization,

people die. We have accidents. There's hurricanes. I mean, there's all sorts of times people die. Yeah, I understand on the visceral level why people are concerned about it, but as you say, the facts of the matter are that we need part of our energy to come from nuclear. Anyway, all right. What else is on top of your list politically these days? Now that you're a right-winger. Fully transitioned into Santaantis superfan, yeah. What are you still liberal about? I am amazed at the idea, and I don't know if we should venture into this, but I am amazed at the idea that the solution to free speech in society is to give one rich guy control over what people are allowed to say. Well, he bought it. He didn't give it to him.

But everyone is lauding this as this great moment for democracy. Now people can speak freely again. But can they? Nobody knows. Now it's a totally opaque process. Obviously, Twitter, he was right to lay off a bunch of employees. They had way too many employees. It was badly run in some ways.

They were not turning a profit. But if you've been on Twitter recently, the ads now are the kind of things you'd see at the bottom of a porn website or something it's like i wouldn't know but go ahead but i don't do i even see ads on twitter i'm on twitter a fair amount i'm not sure if i'm seeing i was talking about this today on on the said platform and you know to make it clear i'm not gonna you know quit this this platform just because he took over but now every four tweets you have a promoted tweet from some like crappy little website that's like, here are the 12

funniest texts of 2014 or whatever. I'm going to give a rundown on all the pertinent issues on this Twitter thing. You tell me what I'm leaving out. Number one, Twitter was losing $250 million a year, I believe, something like that. So, even though our journalist class doesn't seem to understand

that, that's not sustainable. So taking over, he had to lower costs, lower expenses, and raise revenue. And that was not easy to do. And the way you do that is often by trial and error. So yeah, he cut 7,000 employees. Twitter still runs. That's savings of hundreds of millions of dollars. Number one. Number two, it's very difficult to take over a business and steer it in a new direction with employees from the previous regime. They're psychologically inclined to resist you and to make any idea that you have

fail. So he's right to want to clear the deck of all these employees or try to find ways of weeding out who will become a good team member and who will become part of the deep state, as it were. Because that's real. I took over a business once, and I dealt with this very problem. This kind of a subscription thing, $8 for a checkmark, whatever, that kind of blew up in his face, he tried. And I think that he'll have to try other things, and I wouldn't judge him too harshly for that.

He might be bipolar. Some of the stuff that he did, including this Paul Pelosi thing, you can't defend it in any way. He needs to shut up. So he seems to have a problem there. I don't think he's going to turn it into a cesspool. I don't think people are going to be using the N-word, and I don't think you're going to have obvious hate speech there but I think that ambiguous hate speech, things that are defined as hate speech by the woke world but one man's hate, kind of like one man's

hate speech is another person's point of view kind of thing. I think he will err in that direction more. I think that you cannot have it would be nice to have a Twitter that gets it just right. But I think in real life, either you're going to have to decide either you're going to have a Twitter which jumps the gun on lab leak and Hunter Biden and all those things

or Twitter, which might be a little more permissive than you would like it to be. I don't think in the real world a middle ground is possible. And I think that Musk is going to have it freer. There's going to be a little bit more stuff that we kind of think, how did that get through? Why did that get through? I don't think it's that serious. Just block it or don't read it. I think that his inclination is generally correct, which is that this has been – and let me add to that, that Twitter was not only jumping the gun on things, but it was always from the same direction.

They were always jumping the gun from a left-wing direction. If it had been a story about Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop, I don't think they would have censored it. So having said all that stuff, I think Musk taking over is probably a good thing. And we should give him time to see how he does. I do think he personally should maybe shut up. Yeah, he should. But I think he will. And stay in the background.

Unless he's bipolar, he will. Because he'll have to see, what the fuck? I got to shut up. I think he's got a few problems. Is that picture he put out of his bed? Yeah, he had like, first of all, it was Diet Cokes without caffeine. It was so weird. What is that about?

And like three guns. Yeah. It was just like, it looked like such an unstable situation. Yeah, he looks like a 14-year-old kid who's on like a gaming binge or something. But that's neither here nor there to how he's running Twitter. To the point of how he's running Twitter, he leveraged so much debt on this company that he has like $100 million

in debt service alone every year that he has to deal with now, which was not there before. As you say, they were not running a profit before, but that doesn't help. And his behavior, not just his personal behavior, but the way he's running the company does threaten to make it an inhospitable venue for people to advertise in. And that's why I'm seeing these crappy little ads.

Yeah. Because nobody wants to advertise there. I think the reason they didn't want to advertise is because they got scared. Because I don't think there's a huge return on twitter ads to begin with so i think they're all getting off just like they get off fox news when tucker carlson talks about replacement theory and then a few months later you find that they go back in once the temperature lowers i believe that in the end these advertisers will come back to twitter if things calm down.

I just think there's a reason he tried to get out of the deal at every single turn. Oh, yeah. It's a horrendous business decision. It makes no sense, especially because this is a man who manufactures like 40% to 50% of his cars in China. And now he's going to be the champion. That's the most interesting of all. That's the most interesting issue of all. I read a Reuters op-ed on April 25th. So very soon, a few days after he agreed the merger agreement.

And they were like, we don't think that Elon Musk will go through with this deal because it presents so many problems for him as the owner of Tesla. Yeah. There's no reason for him to do this. It's not worth it to him. And he tried to get out of it for that reason, because it's a disaster. What, now that there are protests in the streets of Beijing and every other city in China, he's not going to come out and say, go free speech for the protesters.

Well, let's see what he does. If he has balls, he will. All right, no way. Or if he's crazy. I don't know. The reason I say I don't know, because when you're that rich, money may not be everything. money may not be everything.

Money may not be everything. People could surprise you. But again, it's reputational risk, not just to Twitter, but to him. But I think caving into China, he will never recover from that in terms of his reputation in the world. He already has. He already backed China's side of a dispute about the Strait of Taiwan. He has too much of his business tied up in there to go

after them. But the bigger thing is that so much of the value of Tesla was not, of its share price, was not based on the fundamentals of the business. So much, like 90% of it. Tesla a year ago was worth more than the next nine automakers combined. That's not based on how many cars there are. You, he, I mean, they, like Tesla a year ago was worth more than the next nine automakers

combined. That's not based on how many cars are produced. So, so the, you correct me. I think the, I think like a typical PE, PE ratio, price to earnings ratio is like 15%, 15 times in the stock market. And Tesla was like over a hundred. Yeah. So it's all, it's all, uh, it's based on this mystique that he's cultivated, that he is a generational genius who will usher us all into the future where we fly into space and we have these cars. And by the way, as you put earlier, I think he did a great service to humanity in making electric cars, not a Prius, basically. But now he runs the risk, if he really fucks this up, of that sort of mystique around him fading away. And suddenly he's just another Silicon Valley guy who's a little hit and miss.

Yeah, I'm rooting for him. I think he's made some mistakes in terms of not being able to control his ego. But I don't think Twitter, I don't think he's going to make Twitter worse. And I think if he can hold it together for a couple of years, I think, you know, years is a fair, it takes me a couple of years to implement new policies in my business.

If you can hold it together for a couple of years, figure out procedures and various things, ways of allowing people to speak more freely on Twitter, ways of identifying things that are reliable and not reliable. Other people will find ways of doing that. I think it will be a good thing. You know, I don't like, I do not like the censorship on Twitter. And I think that this censorship on Twitter, it's not just Twitter, which is a private company and they have every right to do it, but it's part of the death of a thousand cuts that's happening to our general cultural norm of respecting free speech. Like we just expect in universities everywhere, people shouldn't be talking so freely. I was doing some research on YouTube. I mean, they had on CNN, they had the grand dragon of the KKK.

The New Republic had a whole issue about the bell curve with, you know, five or six black intellectuals debating this. There was a free speech culture 20, 30 years ago that does not exist anymore. And that's not to our credit. And people expecting Twitter to be part of this culture of censorship is bad. I think it'd be great if we had a huge institution like Twitter that didn't do it. But what's going on on TikTok? Are you a big TikTok follower at all? Of course he is. I do enjoy it. So what's going on there in terms of how they censor videos oh that's that's a mess yeah i mean all that data is going straight to some company in china but but

did they have is their free speech on tiktok comparable to how would you how would you compare it to twitter do they allow things everything to get through or is it more strict it seems pretty algorithmic um i noticed that people if they have a curse where they there's a big culture of putting text as you speak and it's like goes along it's like closed captioning basically um and when people use a bad word they like exit out in the in the thing and that's how instagram is also doing some of their uh covid misinformation monitoring it's algorithmic where if you mention it, they start putting things on it for better sources,

go to the CDC or whatever. So you see some of that, but I think it's mostly the same model where people report stuff they find abusive or offensive, and then somebody somewhere decides. Is TikTok particularly strict? Yeah, I would say people get stuff taken down a lot i would and getting back to the other point so it was eric wempel who wrote that uh uh piece blog uh in the

washington post where he basically confessed to being totally wrong about the new york times firing of james bennett the editorial page editor who put the Tom Cotton editorial, and where the employees of the New York Times had claimed they felt unsafe, blah, blah, blah. This is all about, this is all what I'm talking about. That, like, how do we get to that culture where people on the New York Times, you know, had somebody fired because he ran an editorial by a senator, you know? Part of it was about the editorial process. Like, he freely admitted that he didn't, like, look at it at all, that, you know, it seemed like there was some shoddy editorial process.

No, did you read Eric Wemple's thing about it? You have to read it. It's all basically untrue. It had been fact-checked. There was nothing wrong with the editorial. They printed Aiz Holokamani editorials there. There was nothing particularly bad in it, except he thought that we need to control the riots. He actually said, anybody's peacefully protesting and free speech, we have to respect, but the violence has to stop.

Maybe we should bring out the military. I mean, I didn't support that. I might've supported it if it continued for another week. I know I was worried about it here. The riots died down, whatever. It was not a crazy position, but the idea they fired the guy, right? And they apologized. This is all part of this same attitude, which freaks out if somebody tweets something. I would say- Can't we survive this hearing, reading these things? I agree that there is a culture of censoriousness, but I think it's also important to consider that in the age of the Internet, people now mock the term misinformation. But I recently was on Twitter. Actually, I saw I think she lost her house race in rural Missouri, but she's Democrat. And she would talk about how she knocked on people's doors and they are speaking a different language of like totally

detached from reality they've fully gone down these rabbit holes where you know something becomes something else and it flies around the the world twice as they say before the truth gets its shoes on whether we like it or not can we do have to exercise some control over the flow of information on a massive platform because most people are not going to read you know the the follow-up that come the fact check that comes in and they're like actually they're not you know there's actually no basement in the pizzeria also they're not richard gear didn't did not put a gerbil up his ass from a business from a business point of view people don't want to be on a platform that that that is too toxic that says openly racist things where the n-word is flying around no i don't think anybody's uh advocating that and the issue of misinformation like outright lies

is a different in is just a different issue but i don't i don't think I agree with you. I think that there's no alternative to what you're saying and that we will learn to adjust. I believe that we will learn to adjust as a people. It is, but it's sad. You know, it's not just, you know, Democrats don't like that people think that they're, you know, baby eaters or whatever. Like real people are losing their parents to these alternate worlds that don't exist. And they become unable to communicate with their own family members. And I see these people pop up online just when I'm just cruising the internet. There are people like, yeah, my, you know, my, my whole family, all my kids haven't talked to me in four years. I don't go to Thanksgiving anymore because they, they don't like my theories about what's happening.

Yeah, but you don't know how many people that really speaks for. I mean, it's not just the internet, too. I mean, Fox News has done this to people, whether we like it or not. Fox News is a problem. Yeah, I mean, people sit in front of the TV all day just mainlining this rage about, you know, variously true and untrue things that people they don't like did. But it is destructive in the end. But we will adjust. Look at how the midterms petered out for the Republicans.

Have faith. I think freedom is the only solution and we will adjust. People will get burned a few times by believing a bunch of crap that gets debunked and they'll say, oh, you know, all right. I think it's going to be all right. I hope you're right. Well, it is. Look at the midterms.

Like, people talk a good game about Trump, blah, blah, blah, and they're like, oh, fuck this guy. Yeah. I mean, they were also just talking about this crapola that does not have anything to do with people's lives for most of the election. It's just this insanity about, you know, everyone's trying to make your kid a drag queen. I mean, it's just not real.

And eventually normal people are like, I just don't want to hear this anymore. Like, this is insanity. People trust the censors less than they trust the bullshitters. And for good reason. I mean, this Hunter Biden thing, like every like super right wing person I know, this is like their national anthem. You know, it's like. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think you're underestimating how ignorant people in this country are.

Like people get their literal news. Like there are people in my family who get their news from like, you know, memes about Trump on Facebook. And like they think that that's. You see this poll. They ask liberal people how many unarmed black people you think are shot by the cops every year. And they'll say like 10,000. They don't know either.

I do think that the best solution would be to introduce a class on critical thinking and source identification at the grade school level, honestly. And take Fox News off the air. You. And take Fox News off the air. You can't take Fox News off the air. Yeah, it's not good. I'm thinking Fox News

is going to have to adjust on their own. In retrospect, I know it's time for us to go. Roger Ailes was such a villain, but the worst thing that ever happened was that he left Fox News. Fox News under Roger Ailes was a thousand times better than Fox News

now. It was more fun. I mean, it was like Bill O'Reilly talking about the war on Christmas. Now it's gone into this. It was more reliable. Well, they still, you know, their polling unit is still good, their elections unit is still good, but pretty much everything else has gone completely off the rails. So let me give you an example of Fox News under Roger

Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. Dick Morris, it was a 2012 election and everybody, Dick Morris was predicting that Romney was going to win, blah, blah, blah. So then Romney didn't win. You never saw Dick Morris again on Fox News. It's like the guy that called Arizona for Biden. He was out the door in a month. He was gone because they were hemorrhaging viewers to Newsmax and to Starwalt. He was out the door, even though that was the reality.

I have some inside information about that. He actually did call it too soon. They were way out in front. They got it right, but it was an irresponsible call. I know this from data journalists who are not, you know, partisans. But essentially, like, I mean, Ailes had famously regretted hiring Glenn Beck because Glenn Beck was the first one, like, and got rid of him.

With the whiteboard. Yeah, well, and all this conspiratorial stuff. Fox News now is just, I mean, I don't know if you saw it. Tucker Carlson was laughing about Paul Pelosi getting hit over the head with a hammer and implying that it wasn't true. And then he talks about bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Well, what I asked when I saw it, I was like, what if they had actually assassinated the Speaker of the House? How would these people have reacted? Who knows?

It's not a good sign. It's not a good sign that they're just openly laughing. This guy's like 82 years old. He got hit with a hammer. It's beyond awful. Fox News used to have Charles Krauthammer, right? When Fox News was considered on 10 to be like the worst, we got to wrap it up.

There were already documentaries outfoxed. This is when Charles Krauthammer was the voice of Fox News when Charles Krauthammer was the voice of Fox News. Charles Krauthammer would not find himself dead on Fox News today, right? He would disassociate himself so clearly from what's going on. It is a totally different animal now. The problem with liberals is that they always think everything's on 10, so now nobody believes them. I just read an editorial from the Washington Post from 2012 complaining about the

arrogance of fecundity that Romneys are showing by having six kids. Like, you know, just like crazy stuff from your people. But anyway, I think we agree on a lot, Jack. I think maybe just with age comes a little like...

We'll just have another pandemic, then I'll really be all right. All right. We got to go. It's way too long, but I love talking to Jack. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Jack Holmes. Thank you. And if you're seeing us, if you're only listening to us on audio, Jack is a white man despite his...

Barry White. Barry White-esque. Timber. Is it Timbre or timber? I don't know. I thought it was timber. But in any case, of course,

Nicole Lyons, thank you for your behind-the-scenes magic, Perry Leshinbrand, and stay tuned for Stupid, coming soon on YouTube. December 5th.

And we'll speak to you next time. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.