The Ricochet Podcast - Back To Work!

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

We’re a full month into full lockdown and quite frankly. we’re just about fully filled with aggravation about it. We vent to each other and then we bring in a couple of really smart guys (and coincidentally, Ricochet podcasters): Avik Roy and Lanhee Chen. They (along with Bob Kocher and others) have published A New Strategy for Bringing People Back to Work During COVID-19, a manual for safely re... Source

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my call was perfect mr gorbachev tear down this wall it's the ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex. Today we talk to Ovik Roy and Lonhee Chen about opening America back up again. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 492.

It's COVID-19. Our sponsor brought to you by Wuhan Labs of China. Look for the label. Oh, no, don't. That's right. Peter, Rob, open question. When the National Guard protesters fire on the people who've assembled peaceably to demand the opening of a golf course or something, here's my question. Will it be Rachel Maddow or Joe Scarborough first who blames Donald Trump for giving everyone false hope?

Well, I mean, everyone blaming – yeah, yes. The answer to that question is yes. Yes, yes, yes. It'll be like the moment in Jeopardy when all the contestants try to hit the button at the same time. Yes. Blame Trump. I, of course, I'm more interested in the vindication, the total vindication, if not 95 percent vindication of Senator Tom Cotton, who said six weeks ago, hey, do you think it might be something that escaped the Wuhan infectious disease influenza style SARS research lab and not a wet market, which apparently doesn't even sell bats? When Tom Cotton said that, even I, I say even I because I'm an admirer of Tom Cotton's. I know him a little bit. Even I thought, oh, Tom, Tom, Tom, no, no, no, you're going too far. Why? I thought that was a perfectly reasonable thing to assume.

Not that there was some infectious disease that they'd cooked up and said, this is it, finally, we've got something with a little bit of mortality, worse than the flu, we're going to release this cause, havoc and panic, and it's going to be awesome. Or some people were saying, no, they did it to give it to the Uyghurs so that they could separate them from the children and then all the old people would die, maybe 10%, maybe 20%. Now, none of that seemed to work. It seemed right that they were studying this stuff, like we used to study it before Obama shut it down, to learn more about

vaccines, or dual purpose, who knows? It could come in handy down the road. Somebody got sloppy. The chance that somebody actually sold a bat to somebody, or that they put it out in the back in the trash and didn't have proper protocols seemed much more likely than all this devious stuff.

Occam and Raz razor said it wasn't going to come from a wet market when you've got a virological institute up the road, for God's sake. You have the conservatory right there. I mean, for God's sake, if you have the Ebola, you know, the open window Ebola center, and it's next to a grocery store, and somebody says, we think this Ebola came from canned beans. No. Anyway, rock and roll. All I was going to say was that we shut it down. We shut ours down, or tried to shut ours down, because we didn't believe that we could do it safely. There were incredibly la uh, lax,

you know, it's just, it's like a people, it's a laboratory run by individuals and individual people tend to like over time get sloppy. That's why, uh, airline pilots and certain kinds of, you know, high stress kind of like high, uh, you know, danger jobs have what they call the checklist manifesto, right? The idea is you turn off your brain. That's what they say to pilots. Turn off your brain. Do not think about this. You just go through the checklist.

So for the first 20 minutes as you're sitting in the cockpit, if you're flying a jumbo jet, just do not, you do not have to think. Thinking is what's going to get you into trouble. Just follow the checklist. And you say to yourself, well, I already checked that instrument. I know that's fine. No, no, no. You have to check it again. Turn off your brain. And it's natural. Whenever you're working with dangerous substance, the hardest thing to do is to remember that you're not that smart, that it's smarter. My dad used to tell me when he was in electronics in the

70s, there was this some, they had a machine in the factory. I don't remember what this machine was. I was, you know, I was not the most attentive son, but there was a machine and it spun around real fast and it was spun around so fast. I think it was making early kinds of chips, of computer chips. And the machine took two guys to run, but actually only one guy did anything. One guy ran it. And the other guy stood next to the guy and reminded that guy that the thing was still running because it spun so quickly it looked like it wasn't spinning. And your brain would just suddenly, even after years of working the machine, your brain would just sort of reach into this thing and then you'd lose your arm. And you always needed another guy there to say, don't, don't. It's still on. Right? And that's kind of to say, don't, don't, it's still on, right? And that's kind of what these,

you know, there's lots of danger here. But it turns out Tom Cotton was, I'm in this long, windy story. I'm sorry. It turns out Tom Cotton was right. Almost, if he wasn't exactly right, he was close enough and has the most plausible explanation for how this thing came to our shores.

And everyone, the first thing they did was jump on it. And that is the first thing the media does. And what's amazing about the coronavirus is that it's been, if you don't have whiplash now, then you're never going to get it. If you don't have whiplash now, then you're never going to get it. If you don't have whiplash now from the mask, which three weeks ago were considered a socially incorrect thing to wear, selfish, now you must wear them. If you don't wear them outside, the cops will slow down and say, put on your mask. It was considered racist for Senator Tom Cotton to say, hey, I think it

probably escaped from one of their labs. And now it's, well, it probably escaped from one of their labs. If you don't have whiplash now, I don't think you'll ever get it. You're exactly right. The thing is, I don't think people are forgetting this. It's not as though people are just automatically doing the Winston Smith thing and saying, oh, I guess we are at war with East Asia now and putting everything down the memory hole. We're remembering and we do have receipts. The internet does remember. Peter, let me ask you this. Yes. So here's something from the Atlantic magazine.

McKay Coppin said that, quote, social distancing will soon be treated by many primarily as a political act, a way of signaling which side you're on. First of all, I'm tired by the whole setup of the whole thing. I'm just immensely weary of it, and I don't think that's the case. But there is this—whoever thought that we would take sides when it came to dealing with a virus? Because as Rob noted, we're whiplash back and forth. The reason that they went after cotton in the beginning was because they felt that this fed into a particular mindset that had to be squelched, that could not be surfaced because

it was wrong and it was evil and it was orange and the rest of it. Do you think that most people are, not Twitter, most people are actually seeing it along these bifurcated terms or just wanting to struggle through and get it over? I would hope not. I would hope not. However, I will tell you a little story from my own little life. I've been going for walks because that's about all I can do. The gym is closed. Gyms are closed across the country. So I'm going out for walks. And the last couple of days, I have begun passing people who, not because I'm a fast walker, but because we're going in opposite directions usually, and there is a class of people or a group of people, and I've noticed the same people several

times now, they're wearing masks, and we can be 30 feet apart, opposite sides of a broad road, and they'll still stop and step even further away as I cross. And I have to say— Well, maybe they know you. It's possible they know you. Maybe they know. That's a third explanation. In my mind, I was thinking, why do those people do that? The most cursory reading about this is you don't need to have a mask on when you're 30 feet away. You certainly don't need to step across, step farther away when you're already 20 or 30 feet away. And I have come to the conclusion that they are either A, older people who are just genuinely frightened and overwrought,

and a couple of them are visibly older, and by older, I mean even older than I am, or B, and heaven forgive me for this thought, crazy liberals who've been listening to too much CNN or too much something or other, where there's a virtue signaling going along. That's the term I was waiting for. Because when they not only step aside, they step off the road into the verge, they give me the evil eye when I fail to do the same. Rob, I have the same thing here. So something is going on. Have you noticed this? Well, we're

calm enough here now in Minnesota, I think that when you see somebody coming the opposite direction, you go to the middle of the street. Last couple of weeks we'd go to the opposite side of the street, now we go to the middle side of the street. You're right. But Rob, tell me if you're feeling this. And I wrote about this on Ricochet a couple of days

ago, I think. There is this idea I sense, this real fluttery, furious, just intense hatred for the people who are eager to open it up, who are eager to get back. There's this sort of, no, you can't, you're going to kill us.

Don't you believe in science? Don't you believe, don't you know what mass death is going to result if you go back, if you go back to the hard war, Sturgeon? I feel like, I don't think it's as much in New York City. I really, I mean, it's hard to know because like we were, when we're out on the street, we're all wearing masks. Although everybody makes eye contact and smiles and does the kind of a New York thing. And like, what are you going to do? You know, what are you going to do? It's nuts, you know, what do we all do to each other? What are you going to do? The guy at the UPS store

found some plexiglass, which he put up in between the counter and everyone else. And I said, hey, nice plexiglass. And he looked at me like, what are you going to do? You got to have some plexiglass. It seems stupid, but he's doing it. So there are two things here. One is that I think that we are, this is an incredible crisis Freudian reflective identifying moment for the American culture and for the fault line that goes through, to push and pull the tug of war in American culture. It's been going through forever. But the second thing I just said,

your quick answer question is that it depends on how rich you are. 60%, something I saw yesterday, 60% of Americans can work from home. They do work that you can do on Zoom. 40% of Americans, and those are usually direct contact jobs. A lot of them are service jobs. 20% of the economy is service, you know, hospitality. Is that true? 20% is hospitality? Yeah, it's huge. There should be, the unemployment numbers actually are quite low, are lower than they, than they, you would have thought. They're not quite at the actual number that they should be if you take in all the people in service businesses who probably aren't working or no longer getting a paycheck. So it should be an enormous number, right? Those are people who live paycheck to

paycheck, or they live close to that, and they want to go back to work. Those are the people who, if you look at the demographic breakdown of the people in hospitals in Brooklyn and Queens, those are the people who are sick with corona. If you're not old and you're young, you're probably working class. I mean, just to be super blunt, right? So there is this kind of fancy—I hate doing this, but you know exactly what I mean. The kind of Elizabeth Warren-y kind of votary kind of person, you know what I mean? That they just want to just, that staying in, it's like, oh, it's horrible, but I'm on Zoom all the time and I'm ordering in and I'm, you know, eating by bulgur or whatever it is, right? We can manage. We can manage. And then

there are people who are working class who say, why will you not let us do our job and live in the risky world that we live in? The risky world, exactly. This is pushing the pull of American culture. And I don't think it's a political – I don't really think it's a partisan thing at all. But you start seeing fault lines in people understanding what they can expect from the regulatory culture and what you can expect from safety and what that really costs. And I don't think we know yet. I don't think we're overpaying now. We might be overpaying later. But this is, at heart, one of the deep questions, and your priors on this are going to inform how you feel about it, which is, you know, what do you risk every day?

If you go into an office, you don't risk anything. If you work on street construction, you do risk everything. If you're in construction, you risk your life, your health, it's always at risk. And we have just kind of slept walked our way into this culture that we live in now, where we just, our prior seemed to be that you should be able to walk in a supermarket anytime and take any product off the shelves, no matter what, and drink it or eat it or pour it in your eye and you'll be fine. Yeah. Well, that's not an unreasonable assumption for a technologically advanced, rich society like we had. Is it? Well, I see Yeti is telling us that we have about 30 seconds left in the opening segment because we have guests.

But let me just raise a brief topic. At the bottom of all of this, doesn't it have something to do with people's—people think something that people haven't even examined, but it's an attitude or feeling that they carry with them. And that is what they think about death. How bad is death really? Some people actually do believe there's going to be an afterlife and are in some basic way relatively relaxed with the idea of death. But if you don't, I mean, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. Let's just, if you can't. Not to me.

As Bill Buckley used to say, where there are no alternatives, there are no problems. It's going to happen. Relax. As opposed to, if you really believe this life is all you have, then you'll cross the street, you'll climb a mountain, you'll cover yourself and you'll cover your whole body in masks. Right. I don't know. Well, I would just say, can I just add this? You're the one who's been studying theology lately. I don't know. or choosing to shoot him or whether it's duck season or rabbit season. And he says to Daffy, he says to Elmer, shoot the rabbit.

Don't shoot me. I'm different. Pain hurts me. And that is sort of the theological underpinning for a lot of what we do. I would just say, here's what I'm thinking about. You should become a priest. I would sit down and listen to your homily no matter where or how long or what the subject. You'd listen to the first part of it and you'd stand up and stalk out in a huff.

I'm losing my audience. I just say there are two things that are interesting. One is if you're a pregnant woman and you're walking down the street smoking a cigarette, how bossy do we feel we're allowed to be? Oh, good question. That's sort of the same thing. The reason we don't let you smoke in a bar is not because of the other patrons, because of secondhand smoke. It's because the people working at the bar, this is what is in California, this is the theory. People working at the bar are now working in a toxic environment. They are now going to get lung cancer because you're smoking. So that there are—there's one bar, the Tiki Bar in L.A., where you can smoke.

Right. And it's because everyone who works there is part of—is in the family, and they're all owners. Oh. So all of these sort of—these are, these are the world that we have already been living with these conflicts, but they've just been amplified by this. And I'm not sure what the answer is, but that's now kind of the lens that I'm seeing everything through is the idea of like, how much are we as a society willing to risk? We already risk a lot. And when people say things like, well, you know, the flu kills this many or the car crash, that's all true. And I guess what we're saying to people is or what we're trying to say to ourselves is, but we don't have to think about that.

I don't want to think about that. Well, everybody's having to think about it now. And when they go to the store and they put on the mask and they realize that they would like to pick up the cans with their elbows, but it's hard. They're thinking about it. When I went to Trader Joe's the other day, I didn't because there's a long line outside of people with masks, socially distancing, looking a little awkward and nervous, and they were letting them in only a few at a time. Once you got inside, crowded little aisles, people looking at each other, darting eyes, the rest of it, get me out of here. Instead, I went to Home Depot because I had to pick up something to fix the toilet. There's no alternative

to this. We can't tell everybody in the family. That is an essential activity. Here's a bucket. So I go to Home Depot, and I'm stunned because the lot is half full. There's a lot of cars in here. I walk inside. I spray what I assume to be disinfectant. Could be holy water. I don't know what it is, but I've just made the tick the little box in my head, pick up my bucket, get my stuff. And there's a lot of guys here. There's a lot of people standing here and they're not wearing masks and they don't look particularly worried. They're maintaining distance. But they've got pipes in their hands.

They've got wood. They've got tools. And these are the guys who are going to be the ones around the corner from me now when I take the dog for a walk. I think that I'm doing something dangerous because I'm not wearing a mask when I walk the dog around the block. There's a couple guys up on the roof up there fixing the roof, and they don't have any protective gear. And one wrong step, and they tum't have any protective gear, and one wrong step, and they tumble down, and that's it. So, yeah, there's risk, and then there's risk, and Rob's right.

We're having the sort of information class, the typing class, the staring and squinting at screens class, all of a sudden feeling the mortal imperative bear down upon them and how people are reacting to this. To me, there's the busybodyism that is about, no, we have to stop this. We have to keep flattening. We can't overwhelm the system is based on something other than pure, clear, rational discussion. There's something else here. There's either scientism or a desire for the society that they feel alienated from to remain shut down because they get a little pleasure out of bossing it around. Hey, here's the thing. Right now,

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You're not going to get this deal anywhere else. No, you will not. So you've got to go to AvioVision.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Avio for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. One buck. And now we bring back to the podcast, together for the first time, on tour, Avik Roy and Lonnie Chen. Avik is president of the nonpartisan think tank, the Foundation for Research and Equal Opportunity, which develops policy reform ideas

to expand economic opportunity for those who have at least. You can listen to his American Walk podcast right here on Ricochet. And Lanhee Chen is the David and Diane Steffley fellow of the American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution and director of domestic policy studies

and lecturer at the public policy program at Stanford. You can listen to his Crossing Lines podcast. That would be here on Ricochet. And so, guys, I'm going to ask a question. I want both of you to answer it at the same time and then fall silent in an awkward fashion and then collide again until I go to you individually, because that says we're learning how all of this teleconferencing works. We got to open it up. How? When? Give us the deets. Let's go to Avik first. Well, the core idea of this plan that Lon He and I and Bob Kocher put out is that we've got to reopen the economy with the lowest risk populations first. So we know an increasing amount about COVID-19 and how disproportionately it affects the elderly and the near elderly with chronic diseases. Younger people, while they can get infected, rarely get hospitalized, and even more rare is death in those populations. So if we can bring younger people back to work,

particularly, and younger people back to school, particularly those who don't live with elderly or at-risk individuals or have regular interactions with elderly or at-risk individuals, we can start to chip away at this problem and get some of the economy back online. Hey, Ovik, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. And also, thank you, Lanhee. Jump in. I mean, I know James kind of terrified you with taking turns, but here's my question. We start, we're told no masks, then we're told masks. We start, we're told the children can't go to school because they'll bring it home and they'll give it to the old people. As we are learning more and more and more, how do you convince people that now we know enough and we're not going to change our minds three weeks later? Now we know enough to open up restaurants and businesses, and now we know

enough you can go outside and you can participate in the economy again. Well, my view on this, and I'm sure Ovik has thoughts too, is that there's a lot we don't know about this virus still. And we are in the process of learning and figuring out exactly what it is that we need to know to make decisions responsibly. And I think that's been one of the challenges we face. So I don't know that there's ever going to be a definitive answer. Maybe there will be in a few years, but for now, at least, I think the question is, what kind of trade-offs should public policymakers be making as they think about things like, for example, how to reopen restaurants or how to start sporting events again? And I think what you have to do is you have to make decisions with the best data and

the best science you have in front of you, but recognize that there's also a cost on the other side of it, which is why we put this plan together, is it's an effort to take a realistic approach in how you get things restarted again under the circumstances of incomplete information. We're not going to have complete information. We've got to do the best we can with what we have. Right. But ultimately, the policy is going to be less effective than people's actual attitudes and their feelings. I mean, you know, restaurants were, I mean, New York City, restaurants were hurting and were, you know, half full way before they were told to shut. So the idea is to try to get people to understand

how much risk there really is and how much risk they're willing to bear when they, you know, start leaving the house. How do you do that? How do you tell people who've been getting all these different messages that, okay, these can trust this information, you can trust this, open up the economy order? I mean, it's more of a PR question or an attitude question. It's not really a policy question. Well, you have to respect Americans' intelligence, right? If you

explain it to them and say, look, here's the evidence we have. The evidence we have is that these are the populations that are most at risk. That doesn't mean you're immune or you can't be hospitalized or die if you're young. It just means the risk is a lot lower. And so what we're trying to do here is say, be careful, continue to do social distancing and wash your hands and wear masks when you're in crowded areas and things like that. But we're going to trust you to be responsible and take care of yourself because you're in crowded areas and things like that. But we're going to trust you to be responsible and take care of yourself because you're a relatively low-risk person. I mean, this is, in a sense, what Sweden has done, though in a much less structured and designed way.

And it's worked reasonably well for Sweden. And a number of the other European countries are looking at that model very closely. So knowing what we know now—I'm sorry, go ahead, Lonnie. No, I was just going to say, you know, many of the things that we do every day involve some calculation of risk, right? Whether you're getting behind the vehicle of a car, taking an airplane. Now, some of these things, you know, we know ways to reduce risk. And this is a similar situation. I think we will find with time that people will understand that there is a risk of clearly a very dangerous virus. But there are things that we can do to help to lower our level of risk. And then there are certain people who we believe, and I think the science shows, are going to be less prone to severe risk because of it.

It doesn't mean that nobody is. It just means that we need to be able to make the most educated decisions we can and leave it in the hands to a certain degree of the American people. Okay, I got two questions. I know Peter wants to jump in. My first question is just do you – you said something, Ovik. We treat the American people like adults with respect. Do you think we've done that from the end of January to today? Is that –

I think it's varied, right? I mean, if you look at a place like Michigan, my native state, where the governor said you can't garden, but you can buy weed or whatever it is. I mean, there have been some, obviously, some incredible nanny state type approaches here. But then there are other states. I think Texas has been a good model where the governor has laid down certain benchmarks and let localities take the lead a little bit more. And that balance has worked reasonably well in Texas. So I think you've seen different models, and that's okay. That's part of the federalist system.

And while a pandemic does lead you to want to have some national coordination, it's good that we have a little bit of room for experimentation in our system. You can't go to Home Depot or to a hardware store and buy a bucket in America. In the United States of America, the freest country in the world that doesn't contain on it, printed on it, a warning that buckets are the cause of drowning accidents. Don't drown in this bucket, it says. And has kind of a gruesome, has a really gruesome diagram of a little child bent over with his head in the, I don't know how the kid got there, but the kid is upside down in the bucket. That apparently does happen. Do you think at the end of, I mean, it seems to me that we have been living in during this virus in that kind of bucket attitude,

warning labels on a bucket. Do you think that's going to change? Do you think it should change? Do you think there's any way to protect ourselves from virus from COVID-22 or COVID-27 if we still live in the bucket society? Look, there's no 100% sure way to protect yourself from pathogens, whether we know about them. And by the way, a bunch of pathogens we don't know about that we're yet to discover. I think one of the challenges in this shelter at home period, the shelter in place period, has been a sense that if only we continue this indefinitely, we can avoid even more harm. And I think there's no question in my mind that this was the right policy move for where we've been for the last couple of weeks. It is not the right policy move to continue it indefinitely.

And I think the point of our plan is to say, look, if you don't want a shelter in place indefinitely, what are some responsible, realistic steps you need to take to move things forward, to get our economy going again? Because one of the things, and there's a tendency to poo-poo this, but there are real costs to continuing to be shut down completely. And I think we have to weigh those costs appropriately. Hold on. Let me follow up on something that Rob said, the warning signs.

When you go to California, essentially, you are confronted with… Everything is a warning. Everything is a warning. There might as well just be, as soon as you get off the airport, a large billboard that says, welcome to California, everything here causes cancer. And it's on every single damned door. about us, are we now going to be, as a society, less inclined to heed what we have already dismissed? But just to say, no, I'm sorry, let's grow up here. We don't need to be warned at every single step that this building has licorice in it, which causes cancer, in meerkats, or something like that.

I mean, I think there's going to be regional variation. I mean, Texas is very much the opposite of California in that way, and it's much more of a you-look-out-for-yourself culture, and I think it'll continue to be versus California or New York. One thing that actually Lonhee can speak to is if you think about the case studies from Asia, from the Pacific Rim, where they had what we might now call SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, which was pretty bad. It was just as bad as what we're dealing with now for those Pacific Rim countries. And they had that muscle memory of dealing with SARS in a way that allowed them. And by the way, if you look at the healthcare systems of Taiwan and Singapore and South Korea,

they're all very different. So it's not about the health care system necessarily. It's really about that experience of the citizenry and of the leadership in dealing with SARS that led them to really be on top of this in a way that we were not. And so my hope is that what we'll get out of this is that that muscle memory will be there, and that will help us a lot as much as any of these kind of nanny state type things. Ovik and Lanhee, Peter here. You've been talking about trade-offs. You've been talking about the way risk is inherent in life and that we do our best to control risks, but we accept them. And you've been talking about the importance of making decisions on the best data you can possibly get. Question. Are both of you satisfied with the degree—have the public health officials, and let's say as evidenced in the White House briefings that we've all been dipping into from time to time over the past couple of weeks, have they done an adequate job of weighing the costs

of the shutdown? It seems to me, I will reveal my own thinking about this, but that both of you are experts and you're economists and you know 10 times more about this than I do. But it seems to me that the vivid image has been overwhelmed health care, people choking to death in hospitals because there aren't enough ventilators. And what's been ignored is what we know. We know that unemployment leads to alcoholism, opioid abuse, domestic violence, suicide. We know that hospitals across the country—I saw a link the other day where the Mayo Clinic is expecting a $900 million loss because all kinds of other procedures that would otherwise be taking place simply are not taking place. Some people are going to develop cancer because they missed their colonoscopy, or the mammogram has been—the PAP test has been delayed, or the PSA test has been delayed. I just don't see that there's been—we

hear modeling, we're modeling this current crisis. I don't see that anything like that attention and rigor and serious effort to understand the costs of the shutdown have been done. What do you guys think? the costs and impact to, you know, people getting sort of infected by this novel coronavirus and the sort of direct impacts of that, as opposed to really thinking about some of the broader societal questions or broader economic questions that also have health outcomes. And I think the reason for that, in part, is because, you know, public health professionals sort of look at the data that's before them. They look at the challenge that's before them, and they say, how can we address this particular challenge? I don't necessarily think that there is a framework

that they can jump into where then they also account for some of these broader questions. I also think that in the acute part of the response to this, it was going to be very difficult to think about those questions. I just don't think the bandwidth was there. But now, that's why this question of reopening is so critical, because now we are recognizing, you're absolutely right, there are all sorts of impacts. And by the way, those impacts do not fall equivalently on all parts of society. Absolutely society. There is a clear impact in terms of socioeconomic status. There are probably other kinds of stratifications as well. So the more that that information begins to make its way in, then hopefully people will account for it. But no,

I don't think to date there has been enough attention paid to some of these other effects, which can be just as, in the long run, just as, if not more important. So, a follow-up question to that is, one of the refrains we've been hearing, actually not even particularly from Democrats alone, certainly from Democrats, but it's in the air everywhere. One of the refrains is, take politics out of this. We should be listening to the public health officials. Listen to the doctors. No politics. But isn't that wrong? Isn't politics the only place? The political sphere is—you just said the public health officials have their own, frankly, their own incentives, their own techniques, and all of those would lead them

to focus on the immediate health care crisis and miss other costs that are just as real. Politics is the only way, as the United States is constituted at the present moment, where the other costs get registered. It's up to the elected officials to make these tradeoffs that, really, that we're talking about. If Anthony Fauci had been made dictator of the United States, this shutdown is likely to go on and on and on. You see what I'm getting at? I'm putting it in a crude way, but you see what I'm getting at. What do you make of that? So, Peter, I'd say two things about this. First, the judgment as to which of these tradeoffs is more important is inherently a political question, like you say. So I absolutely agree with you there. But there's another layer of it, which is

the public health experts are not looking at objective truth. They're trying to predict the future, right? They're trying to predict how many deaths will we have if we do X versus Y versus Z, when nobody knows because we're all operating on A, incomplete information. Even if COVID-19 is something we had a deep familiarity with, you still can't predict how certain blunt force measures like lockdowns and things like that will affect the course of the spread of the disease. So there's no objective truth here because we're looking at, we're trying to predict the future. So to really be able to judge tradeoffs, you know, in a sense, you'd have to know,

okay, five days from now, five months from now, how many deaths will there be in this scenario A versus B? You never know, right? So absolutely, there's a role for elected officials to make decisions here. And you know what? I'll tell you, the president, as we're recording this, the president put out his guide, his path to reopening the economy yesterday. And my view, and I think Lon, he is too, but he can speak to that, is that the president and his team have been too cautious, that they missed some opportunities to reopen the economy more than what the plan they currently have details.

So, by the way, here's my last question. I love talking to you guys, of course, so I'll be greedy and ask one more. I saw a headline. I was just skimming this morning waiting to go on with you guys, and I saw a headline someplace. Trump, I mean, Drudge or someplace, and the headline read, Trump puts reopening onus on governors. But shouldn't we be—it sounds to me, from what you've been saying, you've been talking about regional variation. You've also been talking about, in a way that would lead me to suppose you'd very much approve of some experiments.

Let the states reopen in somewhat different ways and learn from each other. Shouldn't we rejoice that the founders gave us this federalist system? Shouldn't we rejoice in this hour particularly? Yeah, I mean, look, it's quite obvious that a one-size-fits-all policy is not what's needed in this crisis. We're not going to find our way out of this by saying that the same policy ought to apply in Texas as in California, as in Nebraska, as in Wyoming, where caseloads and how people respond to government intervention is going to be very, very different. And so this is an opportunity for different states to take action. The one thing I would say is I think some measure of coordination between states is a good thing. I think it makes

a whole lot of sense for states that are in neighboring proximity to one another, where there's a lot of travel between states, try to coordinate with one another to take rational action. It doesn't mean that they take the same action. It just means that they understand what states around them are doing. So I absolutely think this is a great time for that kind of approach. The one area where I do think we ought to be a little bit more aggressive in considering reopening is in looking at schools. I think that there has been a demonstrated impact of this virus that is less significant on particularly school-age children. And recognizing, of course, it's not going to be all school-age children because some live with vulnerable

populations. But this is one area where I think Ovik and I would agree that we need to be more aggressive in thinking about reopening by thinking about how we can get schools back online soon. And you're sure that's not because you both have little kids at home who are driving you crazy? You've discovered our motivations. Federalism, the Wuhan labs of democracy. Gentlemen, here's a criticism that has been leveled against the United States is that in testing or in contact tracing, we weren't like other nations, which were ethnically homogenous and culturally monolithic and small, that were lagging behind their technological ability to let people know via their smartphone whether or not they wandered into the path of somebody who had it. So now Apple and Google are developing APIs that will enable to alert people and do that contact tracing that we're

talking about. Now, a lot of people are going to say, wait a minute, Google already knows where I work, and I never told them that. Google knows where I go. They know what I'm looking for on the internet. I don't want to give them this sort of information. No way. Technologically, it's really amazing how they do this, and it's hard to explain, but do you think that they're going to be able to launch these apps and people will use them without fearing that they're going to be giving up all kinds of personal information? Because it's actually quite ingenious technologically how these things work. Is that going to fly in America, the apps? Well, factually, we already

give this information to Apple and Google and Facebook. Like if I'm wandering around the Stanford campus and I'm not already Facebook friends with Peter Robinson, I might get an alert from Facebook saying, you might know Peter Robinson. You should consider friending him, right? Facebook does that every day to billions of people. So this information is already being deployed for advertisers. So in that sense, the technological leap is effectively zero. But there are obviously people who are particularly sensitive when it comes to health information and are particularly sensitive when it comes to the government having some role in interfacing with some of this stuff. What a lot of the governments in other countries are doing is they're just buying the data that advertisers buy online on the online marketplace, just like

anybody else. So there isn't really any excessive, in that sense, intrusiveness, other than it's just the government doing it versus the private sector. But the data is already out there. And I would say that the main value of this is, yes, is it an incremental intrusion on your privacy? Yes. But here's the, again, it comes down to the trade-offs, right? So the trade-off is, if you don't want to do something like contact tracing and have that as an element of our response to this situation, then we're going to have to lock down the economy for longer. And would you rather go to work? Would you rather send your kids to school? Or would you rather be forced to stay home so that you can say, hey, at least I preserved some fraction of my privacy on

my cell phone? Hey, oh, sorry, go ahead, James. The difference is, though, is that we've signed these end-user licensing agreements that, of course, nobody ever reads to give them this privacy, tell them where we are, what we're doing, and the rest of it, and we understand. But that data is attached to us. I mean, we are sold as individuals to this. It's a different paradigm when you're talking about the contact tracing, and it's going to be hard to explain to people why this is actually different than what Google already knows, that you, your identity, your personal identity is not going to be part of this. Because people are going to think, if the government knows that I've been in the path of somebody with COVID, that's going to go into a data bank. I'm going to get dinged for that later. I'm going to get called for that later.

It's going to go on my permanent record. I guess I'm not asking a question. I'm just making a statement. People shouldn't worry about it, but I just can't help but think that people are going to fight and resist. Anyway, Rob, you had a question. Well, I was going to say, so just to put ourselves forward a few more weeks, I mean, hopefully not many more weeks, but just a few more weeks. Oh, hold on a second, Rob. Wait a minute. Did you get the email about when we were going to cut for the break? You didn't, did you? No. Oh, shoot. Oh, go right ahead. Sorry. Yeah, well, I should have told you that. Here's the problem. I mean, I get emails all the time, I opened up my email box a little while ago and I had 1,742 emails and I panicked because I never

have that many. I never have that many. I'm like, Rob, I go for zero. I got 40,742 emails and I panicked because I never have that many. I never have that many. I'm like Rob. I go for zero. I got 40. I got 30. Why do I have 1,700 emails? It's because my SaneBox subscription had lapsed and I learned what it's like to be out there in the real world

with these things coming at you without SaneBox standing athwart you and the onslaught and helping you live your life. So anyway, I'm sure that I sent that email to Rob about how we're going to do this spot in this break. And Rob probably has me in the black hole. So everything I send to him goes to this place that he never sees and is crushed by gravitational forces. We'll talk about that. Anyway, if you ask anybody about the biggest workplace time waster, everybody's going to say the same thing. It's email, even if it's not a waster. It's just an onslaught. It's a tsunami. It's a fire hose coming at you all the time. A recent study found that almost 50% of the time that managers spend tending to their inboxes tends to get spent on emails that should never have been sent to them or didn't even need an answer.

Just junk. What if, though, just bear with me, what if you could press a magic button and never see those time-wasting emails again? Well, that's exactly what SaneBox does for you. With just a few clicks, SaneBox automatically, automagically gets your email under control. It filters out the messages you don't need to focus, and it shows you what you need to focus upon. You don't even have to switch email apps because it works in concert with whatever email client you already use, which is great.

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And our thanks to Sanebox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Anyway, Rob, sorry I interrupted you with commerce. Go on. Commerce is important. We've got to restart the economy. Lonnie and Novick agree. Speaking of restarting the economy, let's push ourselves a few weeks ahead. How do you envision the waves of opening?

What's going to open first? I mean, I live in New York City, so my CVS is open. My drugstores are open. My grocery store is open. The schools aren't open, but we're getting to a period where maybe it doesn't even make sense to open the schools for another three, four weeks. Who knows? How do we open it up? And how do you craft the message to the American people, who, by the way, I believe will be receptive to this message, but how do you get any politician in America to get the stones together

to actually say to American people, to tell the American people the truth, right? Something that the American people kind of know deep down, which is that we're not going to eradicate this virus. It's going to stay. It's going to be endemic. It's going to come back. And you're going to have to just grow up and keep your hands clean and take care of the

at-risk populations that are in your life and maybe adjust your behavior a little bit. But that's how it's going to have to be. I mean, who's going to deliver that message? I mean, I can't imagine anyone in an elective office in America in 2020 doing that. Lonnie, go ahead. Yeah. So who's going to do that? I was going to say, I don't think that it's necessarily in the hands of public office holders. I think maybe some of them will express that message. But I want to go back to Ovik's point about muscle memory, because this is really important. When societies have to deal with these kinds of major outbreaks,

and SARS is a great example, they develop practices. They get used to doing things like wearing masks in public. And it seems weird at first, and it seems strange. But once you develop that muscle memory, once you develop that sense that, hey, this is what we need to do to keep ourselves safe, people begin to take their own precautions. I don't think we can rely on or depend on public officials to always be willing to do the right thing. I know that's a shocker. But the reality is that I think there will be some who will convey the right message. There'll be some who won't convey the right message. But ultimately, what we need to realize is that we have some agency as people, as members of society, and we've got to do our best to do what we can to keep ourselves and those who we love safe. Okay. So a year from now, this is sort of

faded in memories. These things do in American culture. We all sort of sit around every now and say, hey, remember the virus? That was crazy, right? So a year from now, and then suddenly there's a flu going around. Are we going to just see people, maybe ourselves? Okay, yeah, for the next week and a half, the flu's going around the office, I'm going to wear a mask. Is that something that we're just going to, in two years, three years, it's going to be second nature to us? Yeah, I think so. I mean, again, I remember actually Lonnie and I were together in Singapore a few years ago, and I remember going to visit the public health authorities there, or I was at the medical school or something, and there were a handful of people wearing masks just because I think they had I think that it's kind of like 9-11, right? You know, before 9-11, we'd wander around airports unimpeded, and people got super annoyed about having to take off their shoes. It, of course, continues to be annoying to take off your shoes,

but, you know, you get used to these cumbersome travel routines, and they become a bit of second nature if you travel a lot, and life goes on, and I think that's my hope is that and my belief is that that's what we'll see here. You're skeptical? No, I'm not skeptical at all. I'm not skeptical at all. Rob doesn't wash his hands, I guess. Yeah, no, not at all. I let the bacteria thrive and fight it out.

I agree with you. I just was just thinking to myself that I remember seeing, you know, Asian tourists in New York city wearing masks over the past few years and kind of rolling my eyes at the, oh, please. And now I think to myself, there's a business here in, we're all going to have masks.

And I remember a time when it was, I considered it weird. If people said to me when upon meeting, oh, I'm not going to shake your hand. I have a cold when I considered it weird if people said to me, when upon meeting, oh, I'm not going to shake your hand, I have a cold. I'm thinking, what's that's the weirdest thing in the world. And now I think of it, oh, thank you. And I think we sometimes feel like when people say, I mean, I'm a little bit sick, I'm going to stay home today. They go, yeah, right. What are you really going to do? Dermophobia has become cool.

It has become cool. Not only cool, it's become routine. And I guess there's nothing really wrong with that, but I'm just trying to project myself into two years from now and trying to send myself a little time capsule to remember the time when this started and seemed strange. And I think you're right. In 18, 24 months, it'll be the way we live. Yeah. I mean, it's going to represent a new normal. And I think everyone said, hey, let's expect a new normal. But there are elements here that we previously thought, you know, that's a little strange that I think we'll all get used to. Yes and no. It could possibly be in a few years that a handshake will still be seen as the equivalent of unprotected sex. But as the AIDS panic subsided, so did people, you know, change their minds on that. We'll see.

Hey, Ovik, I called you Ovik at the beginning of this. You now have free reign to call me Jim Lillick at any time in the future you wish. And Lonnie, thank you very much, both of you, for joining and sharing your wisdom and information. It's been great. It's been informative and a joy. And we hope to have you back soon to talk about the massive, successful reopening of the economy and how everything is not as dire, hopeless, and depths of despair, slough of despond as it was three, four weeks ago. Talk to you later, gentlemen. Thanks. Thanks, fellas. In the meantime, before we reopen, get right back to homeschooling your kids.

You know, you know, the challenge of the moment. All right. See you later, guys. Thank you. Yeah. The homeschooling part, you know, somebody had a post. I can't remember where about how this lockdown has deprived so many kids of so much stuff. In particular, I mean, high school students no longer have the opportunity to have a prom. Right. And there are people telling them, look, you know what? That's probably all for the best. It may seem like a big thing now, but it's really a meaningless blip in your life that you'll look back with embarrassment quite shortly as you go off to college.

But then again, some colleges are talking about not opening up. I mean, my daughter is sitting here drumming her fingers whether or not she's going back to Boston in the fall. And she regards this all as just as nonsense. I mean, that it's an overreaction and that things will get—she's got this faith that it's going to pass. And it's great to see. And, I mean, we have a student with us who I call Rotaria, who's from Barcelona. And it's bad there. It's getting a little better, but it's bad.

I'm sorry. Where's she from? She is from Barcelona. Oh. Oh, you mean Barcelona. Oh, Barcelona. I didn't understand what you meant. Oh, okay.

Rotaria. And, you know, here's this kid in another country who's studying physics in another language on a computer, taking virtual classes from the high school that's two blocks up the street. So, you know, her attitude is just fantastic. So the resiliency, you know, this generation impresses me. It really does. And I'm proud to see it. But they are missing an awful lot. They're bearing up, but they're missing an awful lot.

So, yeah, it's absolutely – well, let me ask you this. When you guys – wait a minute, wait a moment. That was almost three seconds when you were at a loss for words. I have never heard. I thought it was probably some sort of segue you were working on. Yeah. Oh, that's exactly what it was,

Peter. There was an actual calculated pause there for a reason, because I was precisely doing exactly that. And I'm, I'm, I'm happy that you didn't see it coming, that you actually thought it was some sort of a mistake on my part. I walked right into the open manhole cover.

That's tragedy. Comedy is when I, comedy is when I, you know, cut my finger or tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you blow into a Segway by going down a con Ed Manhole. Anyway, yes, I was obviously working my way around to the spot and people are at home are thinking, well, I wonder what it could be. We've been talking about contact lenses, which are great. We've been talking about how to manage your email. There's all sorts of the rich, wide panoply of products that Ricochet can bring you. This one is different because it's an idea.

It's a great idea. And it's one you may probably not have spent an awful lot of time about. We've been talking about the Constitution and how so many parts of it seem to have been tossed out the window by governors who believe, well, science, because science, as I said on Ricochet, apparently Isaac Newton wrote a clause in the Constitution in Invisible Ink that allows science to trump anything that happens in the actual laws going on. But how about the 14th Amendment? When was the last time you sat down, knitted your brow, rubbed your chin, and thought about the 14th Amendment?

We ought to, which brings us to bound by oath. What is bound by oath? Bound by oath is a deep dive into the history of the 14th Amendment that's accessible, unenjoyable to non-lawyers, but also it's chock full of interesting tidbits that lawyers will not have learned in your constitutional law class. The need for the 14th Amendment and the ratification of the 14th Amendment are fascinating stories that people just, you know, don't know

about. So is the story of the Supreme Court initially, and to some degree still, rejecting important liberty-protecting provisions of the 14th Amendment that's relevant today. Now, for people who are unaware of the significance of the 14th Amendment, it radically changed the structure of the Constitution in an attempt to live up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Bound by Oath is a podcast, and it's a production of the Institute for Justice. And many, but by no means all, the stories that we tell in this podcast are of Institute of Justice clients fighting for the right to earn a living, property rights,

and other essential American liberties, more keen and pertinent today than ever. Bound by Oath recently wrapped up the first season with nine episodes. It's best listened to from the beginning, of course, so please start with episode one, go from there. It's available on any podcast platform. Simply search for Bound by Oath. And our thanks to Bound by Oath for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, Post of the Week. The James Lydon

Member Post of the Week. Now that wasn't really fair because you just jumped right into it. I mean, you didn't even. But it's in the rundown. It's no mystery to anybody that that's what I'm going to next. If this had happened to Johnny Carson when he did the golf club swing, after a week he would have walked over and, you know,

beamed Doc Severinsen with a virtual club in his hand. James, I love you. You're not Johnny Carson. I know. All right. Well, this week's Post of the Week comes from Bucknell Dad, changing my mind on country of origin.

Bucknell Dad wrote in the membership post section, changing my mind on country of origin labeling thanks to China. Bucknell wrote, China, thanks to its malevolence in this whole coronavirus issue, we're just beginning to learn how bad they are, has confirmed its status as a malign, untrustworthy, corrupt, and evil player. While the United States lives by international trade rules and should not automatically terminate trade in Chinese ingredients and products, it's now in our national, if not personal, interest to know why they originate from a truly evil empire that means us harm or worse.

Why did I choose this? Well, because I didn't want to say, here's a post about life and parenting and love and family and the rest of it. I could have, because that's a lot of the Ricochet membership post too. Could have gone with something over here saying pop culture, going back into the old music, talking about painting and art. Could have done that, but I didn't because we've done that before. Wanted to remind people that we have pertinent conversations on the issues of the day, something you might not have thought. When was the last time you thought about country of origin labeling? I didn't, except for the last time I bought some carrots and it said product of Brazil or something like that. And I thought, thanks for telling me.

But I kind of would like to know sometimes whether or not this stuff is coming from and whether or not there's a domestic alternative. I've been seeing all of these ads popping up on the Internet because Chinese companies have made big, big buys, huge buys on some podcast network or some Internet site networks selling junk. And it just makes you realize the extraordinary amount of stuff pumped out of their factories and sold through all of these strange, indistinguishable portals that look like American sites. But when you drill down right to the bottom, they're all identical. And they all have the same sort of monolithic, here we come, here's all of this knockoff leather goods and cheap thermometers and toilet paper and the rest of it. It's kind of nice to know where stuff comes from if you want to buy American. So that was the argument. That was the discussion. And people are still talking about it as we speak

in the member section of Ricochet. I think that's a really good post. And it's not just the country of origin. It's actually a meaningful country of origin because you can bring something in. It's happened a lot with food. You bring something in, so seafood or shellfish from Southeast Asia or China, and you bring it in and you touch it in some way in the United States, some manufacturer does something to it, then it can be labeled a product of the United States. So sometimes you, especially if you care about the stuff and you want to buy local, you want to buy, you want to support American fisheries, which is something you might want to do, you can, in good faith, buy a product that says, you know, made in the USA, and it is not, in fact, you know, lump crab meat from the Chesapeake. You're not actually supporting,

you know, domestic producers. So that's a, you know, that's the side of nationalism, I think, that a lot of people, no matter how you feel about the free market, you might want to, or free trade, you might want to be able to vote with your dollars in the store. More information is a better informed choice. Exactly. Hey, folks, we got a closing question coming up for Rob and Peter. But before I get to that, I'm going to tell you the things we always have to tell you because if we left them for the end, you would shut off the show and go on your merry way. First, this podcast was brought to you by Avio, SaneBox,

and Bound by Oath Podcast. Support them for supporting us and make your life better. Better contact lenses, better email management, and learning something about the 14th Amendment. That's a pretty good roundup of ways to improve your life. And please take a minute, if you would, to leave a five-star review. We would desperately beg you, if you could give us a say. As a matter of fact, if you could print off the Apple podcast review page, add an extra star, and mail it to Cupertino, we'd be happy. The reviews let new listeners discover the show, and that helps keep the show going, and it helps keep Ricochet afloat, which you all want to do. And speaking of podcasts, Peter, Rob, what podcasts are you listening to besides, of course, this one, which we all know that you sit and listen to and make notes about? Yeah. Great your word.

There is no reason to listen to any podcasts that are not on the Ricochet Network. I will say that. And the truth is I haven't listened to any that aren't on the Ricochet Network in a long, long time. I used to like Reply All. I think I'll probably go back to that at some point. And I've been listening on and off to James Hamblin's podcast from The Atlantic called Social Distancing, where he gives you a very grim outlook, but he's a doctor. He knows what he's talking about, so it's sort of interesting information. But essentially, I don't believe

that there's any need for anyone to get information from anywhere else or anywhere other than the Ricochet Podcast Network. Peter? Glopp. I never listen to this podcast. I never watch any show that I record either. I don't know. Having lived through it once, why would I want to listen to it again? Anyway, I never listened to this podcast, but I listen to Glop. I love Glop. I love. I love.

It's amazing. You'd think I would get almost enough of Rob each week in this podcast. And then in a slight, I agree with Rob in general that there's no need to depart from the Ricochet Podcast Network, but I'm a sucker for Dan Carlin and Hardcore History. Are you guys familiar with that one? What I love about Dan is that when he has a new podcast out, it's generally about 17 days long. Yes, yes, they go on and on and on. It's a man who is so passionate that he loses track of what century he's living in, let alone how long his podcast lasts. I like dipping into that intensity from time to time. Oh, God, it's exhausting, but it's fantastic.

It is fantastic. And I wonder, I mean, he's got to have notes in front of him, but his ability to extemporaneously conjure the history and speak about it. I mean, he's got this view of humanity that you know in the pit of your heart and stomach is absolutely correct in its brutality, in its glory, in its accomplishments. But, I mean, it's a well-rounded view of humanity and an appreciation and hatred for war. I mean, the appreciation in the intellectual, emotional aspects of it, which a historian has to grasp and comprehend, and a hatred of what it is. But it's just brilliant stuff.

And I finished as much as I could of his recent piece on World War II in the Pacific. Good Lord! What you learn about the Japanese, especially the run-up to the war is fascinating i mean it's just it's it's great size you can't second that enough dan carlin hardcore history well if mine if i had a judge i you know i like to dip into the crew true crime podcasts before the show actually i was just listening to criminal with phoebe judge who is as much in love with the sound of her voice as you are, and she knows it. I mean, I think she's got a spinoff podcast where she just reads the phone book,

and people give it five stars because they love her voice. And from time to time, I'll even listen to Dateline NBC. Could the husband have done it? It was possible. But then they found something that changed the story entirely. Okay, the husband did it in every single one of those. plausible but then they found something that changed the story entirely and you know okay the husband did it in every single one of those but um i found myself trying to find a good fictional podcast because they're rare and they're always overrated and i found one called angel and

vine which essentially is the black dahlia and it's essentially one of those found footage things where somebody finds the tape recording of a 1950s detective who was trying to investigate a brutal sex crime in LA. It's pretty well done. And it's well done because it's not schlocky. It doesn't have uptalking and it doesn't have a lot of fry, any fry. And the guy who plays the 1950s detective, I've heard him before. And I think it's the same actor who read Marlowe stories, unexpurgated Marlowe books, and he just nailed it. He has the best noir private detective voice I've ever heard. He's really good.

And they sparingly put him throughout the show, and I'm three episodes in. And it's really like essentially a 1940s Raymond Chandler novel that's been brought to the podcast medium and updated for the future. It's pretty good. And then, of course, I've been listening to the stuff that's going to go into the next Diner and or Ramble, which should be coming up in two or three weeks because I have no excuse for not turning up my own podcast while I'm sitting here at my desk. Well, gentlemen, that should do it. That was fast. The weeks seem to go fast. Exit question, where do you think we'll be in a week from now? We won't be open. We'll be, you know, I said a while ago that I've been feeling itchy. And this last week,

I thought, now I'm starting to chafe. And I'm thinking, if I say that, Rob will say, you know, there's probably some talcum powders and some salves for that, James. But I get the feeling that a week from now, we're going to be even more wanting to burst out and hit the streets. Am I wrong with that, or are we going to be third wave, second wave, fourth wave, bad newsed out of this? What do you think? No, I think say the elected representatives, with their incredible ear towards the public mood and sentiment, will start getting ahead of the public's desire to be free. Like what you want, I mean, the best possible outcome here is that the elected officials and the public health officials are coaxing us out, are telling us, no, no, you can leave now.

It's safe, rather than the other way around, rather than people saying, to hell with you. I'm leaving. I'm opening up my restaurant. Take me to prison if you have to. That, I think, would be the worst possible outcome. But the problem is, of course, once you give politicians control and a lot of extraordinary powers, they like it. So the smart ones will get out in front. The smart ones will be leading the parade out of the house. And the ones who really love this kind of power

and they're strutting like a martinet on the stage, those are the ones who really love this kind of power and they're sort of strutting like a martinet on the stage, those are the ones who are going to be saying, stay in, stay in, stay in. I think in about a week, two weeks, the American people's independence and appetite for risk will return as it should be. The hospitals are not overflowing. People are not dying in hospital parking lots. The field hospitals that have been set up in New York City, for instance,

are not full or not even near full or not even half full. We seem to have done the right thing. And at this point, you know, we've had the stick. Now it's time for the carrot. Well, we'll see. And next week, Peter, are you still there? We know you had your run. Did he fly? Draft the luck. Okay, because I was going to tell Peter that his assignment for next week is to listen to at least 10 hours of the Reply All podcast that Rob mentioned, because that will be Peter's introduction to Internet culture, and he will be a changed man. That's true. Thank you, everybody, for listening to this, the Ricochet podcast.

On behalf of Peter Robinson, who had to go, and Rob Long, who's here, I'm James Lalix, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. All around I hear the sound of money But I ain't got a nickel to my name And everywhere I look, I see temptation. She stands on every corner and calls my name. Now won't you tell me if you can, cause life's so hard to understand. Why's the rich man busy dancing

While the poor man plays the band Oh they're building me For killing me Lord have mercy On the working man Uncle Sam's got his hands in my pockets And he helps himself each time he needs a dime

Them politicians treat me like a mushroom Cause they feed me bull and keep me in the blind Now won't you tell me if you can Cause life's so hard to understand Why's the rich man busy dancing while the poor man pays the band oh they're

building me for killing me Lord have mercy on the working man. Ricochet. Join the conversation. you you