The Ricochet Podcast - "Doom" and Boom

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Rob’s out in an interview with Greg Gutfield, so it’s just Peter and James this week. Even so we’ve got a packed podcast-full of wonders and terrors. First up is Niall Ferguson to discuss his brand new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. He and the hosts explore our fascination with disaster. (Be sure to catch his interview with Peter on Uncommon Knowledge as well!) Then they’re joined by... Source

No, by the time I'm bored of it, I've got something else. And I'll surprise you and you can cut it if you don't like it. But here we go. Ready? I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I've had it with him. I've had it with him.

I've had it with him. You know, I've lost confidence. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Rob's not here. I'm James Lilacs.

We're going to be talking to Neil Ferguson about doom and Stephen Myers about God in the universe. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, it's the Ricochet Podcast, number 543, the flagship podcast of Ricochet.com. Ricochet founded by Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Rob, he ain't here. He's off at Duffy's Tavern. But Peter is.

Peter, how are you doing? I'm okay, actually. He's not at... Where is he really? He's taping a show with Greg Gutfeld, isn't he? Oh, he's doing the Gutfeld show. Okay, good. Well, you know, that's interesting.

Gutfeld's on Fox, right? Yes. Gutfeld's on Fox, right? Yes. And Tucker's on Fox, right? There's something I think I want to say just on my behalf, perhaps, and Peter, you can chime in and tell me whether or not you agree. We have had so many guests on this show, and some of them we agree with, and some of them are people with whom we do not agree. Sometimes we push back. Sometimes we let people go on and on and on. Over the last six months, we've had a couple of guests who I think at the time we had them on were interesting people talking about the lockdown, Alex Berenson and Naomi Wolf.

And I think the lockdown was the center of what we were discussing. I think they've both gone absolutely mad on the subject of vaccines. And I would just like to say that. I would like to say we had them on. It was fun. It was enjoyable, but I don't really want to be associated going forward with what some of these people have become. So you may say that I'm being what's the word I'm looking for you chicken. But I just I want to draw that line. It's like we had these people on and then later they start saying this stuff. And I don't want people to say, yeah, well, ricochet, you know, that's where you're going to find your Vax deniers. Because I don't want the flagship podcast to be a place for Vax deniers.

I'm not one. You're not one. Rob's not one. And I think people ought to get the poke. There, I said it. Brave statement. I don't know what Naomi has said or written since we spoke to her. But I follow Alex Berenson.

I mean, fine. I don't mind associating myself with your statement, dissociating yourself from guests. Strictly speaking, if it makes you feel more comfortable, fine. But strictly speaking, I don't believe we ever want to get in the position where we consider ourselves bound by every word a guest utters after the show before the show and so forth alex berenson i still follow alex berenson that that i so i have followed what he's been writing he's always interesting he's just he's discovered

um it's called vaers v-a-e-r-s he's reading the statistics what is that what does what does the acronym stand for james? Can you remember? It's the vaccination error system. It's where all the reports of mistakes come in, right? So he's making the point these things were developed at warp speed, and some of them seem to have side effects that haven't been fully cataloged or investigated. We don't know about long-term. All that is true. All that is true all that is true fair enough um but i'm going to push back against you because he doesn't know what he's talking about i mean there's a great piece of national review today by a radiologist

doesn't know what he's talking about he's just as far as i can tell he's just reporting facts that show up in the various system well yes but it's a little bit more complex than that and that's why tucker tucker having tucker surfacing this idea that there's all of these deaths that come after this. And just add under the rubric of asking questions. Why? What what is Tucker's point in making people think that there's something going on here with a vaccine, that there's more deaths than when there isn't? And again, I'm not going to characterize the whole debate here on the air when people can go to National Review and there's a great piece that appeared on Friday by a radiologist who explains the Vera system just tells you why these guys are wrong. And there's a there's a consequence, though, to spreading wrong information he's suggesting that people think twice before getting the vaccine the implication that he or the the conclusion that he's implying is mistaken

is that what you're saying or is he actually okay he's he's imparting erroneous information but since neither of us are able to describe this to our own satisfaction let's take something else that we can probably wax about and sound as if we do know what we're talking about. The economy only added 266,000 jobs when we're supposed to do a million. That's Trump's fault, right? Yeah, exactly. The markets are beginning to figure out that if Joe Biden's spending $6 trillion that he doesn't have, then the Fed is going to have to print it or taxes are going to have to go up gigantically or a little bit of both. And that does not stimulate innovation and growth and investment. No, no, it doesn't. There ought to be more, of course, because supposedly with the retail opening and restaurants

opening and the rest of it, I mean, I'm still expecting it's going to be a little bit better, but I'm amused. I overheard this morning, my wife was listening to NPR and they had an economist saying how it's actually kind of a good thing it's probably a good thing that we didn't get a million jobs 266 000 is where we want to be that's that's probably good where of course in the trump administration it would have been a catastrophic indication of failure on a micro and macro level of his politics. Ah, well, this is the point where Rob in absentia is rolling his eyes saying, they're talking about how the media is not reporting as to their likelihood. When will these guys ever, ever, ever learn? Well, listen, one of

the things you ought to be worried about, frankly, is inflation. And that does bring to mind things that keep their value, which brings us, of course, to gold. Are you watching what's happening in the world today? Global pandemic. You heard about that? Yeah. U.S. debt spiking up, spiking inflation, looming Biden tax plans, looming and spiking. Everything's looming and spiking. What's the effect of this going to be on the economy? Well, in the 2008 financial crisis, many Americans lost a large portion of their retirement savings. What are you doing now to protect your money? Well, many turn to GoldCo, the leading gold IRA company in the US and four-time INC 500 winning company. With an A-plus rating for the Better Business Bureau and thousands of five-star customer reviews, you can trust the team at GoldCo to help you protect and grow your wealth. Now, why listen to me blather on about it?

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and Harvard as well. The author of more than a dozen major works on economics, military history, and diplomacy, Professor Ferguson has just published Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe. Welcome to the podcast, sir. It's great to be here. Mick Jagger was not one of my students. I'm much too young. I see your book inspired, of course, by the West's reaction to COVID, or the Wuhan flu, as we're not supposed to say, lest we be accused of all sorts of unfortunate xenophobia. But before we get to that, tell us a bit about the politics of catastrophe and our fascination with doom.

And when I say that, all cultures at some point have their period where they're obsessed with decline. I mean, you go to the museum, you see these great pictures of the four stages of empire ending in catastrophe and decline and the rest of it. So it's always there. But there seems something unique in the West and in America in particular, in the post-70s fascination with dystopia and collapse. And you have an entire generation of children brought up on Hunger Games novels who have incorporated the sort of inevitability of dystopia into their worldview. Tell us how doom plays a role in society and whether or not there's

something unique about this moment that made the last year's doom what it was. Well, it's a great question. I was, in fact, thinking about this before the pandemic struck. I wanted to write a book that was focused on the history of the future. That is to say, I wanted to read my way through as much dystopian literature as I could and offer some thoughts as to why we are so fascinated with the end of our species, the end of the planet, because it is unquestionably there in abundance in science fiction and not only in novels but on the movie screen so that was my pitch to my publisher and they kind of were giving me funny looks like why does a historian want to write a history of of science fiction dystopias

and then uh to my relief some real dystopian events happened. We had the pandemic, which so many different novels had imagined. And that gave me an opportunity to get this book written. It became more than just a history of future disaster. It became a history of old disaster. And I noticed two things as I was writing it first we as a species are fascinated by the end of our species it is a preoccupation of all the great religions that there is going to be or at least most of the great religions better watch it here because it's not such a big story in Judaism it's a big story in Christianity and Islam indeed even in Buddhism that there are there is some great reckoning, the end time is coming.

And this clearly is something deeply embedded in our psyche. But it leads us to overestimate the probability of the end of the world and constantly predict it to the extent that we then become slightly paralysed when a medium-sized disaster happens. For me, it was somewhat symbolic that so many people during the lockdowns were sat watching that movie, Contagion, as if the real thing wasn't really quite entertaining enough. They needed the much more disastrous pandemic to get the rocks off. I think that what's very interesting about American dystopia, especially as it's been articulated in American science fiction

over the last half century or so, is that there are the political dystopias, Gilead in Margaret Atwoodaret atwood's handmade tales just one of of many in which usually the wicked american right produces some kind of totalitarian nightmare and then there are the sort of natural disaster dystopias uh like the road uh in which we've sort of laid waste to the planet and all that's really left to do is trudge through the apocalyptic wasteland waiting for the zombies to strike and and i think that kind of gets to where the the the imagination of of much of america is today certainly of liberal america because we're either in Gilead or we're in

another Atwood dystopia in which the species has largely been wiped out by a combination of climate change and genetic engineering. This isn't a particularly plausible future, to my mind, to put it mildly, but it's clearly the sort of default setting when you ask people what the future is going to be like. It is interesting how every time we come up with a new technological innovation or an advancement in technology, there's always a coterie of people who will extrapolate that to something that ends civilization. You know, H.G. Wells was a great one for finding the horrors to come in technology. E.M. Forster, of all people, wrote an incredible novel called The Machine Stops, which essentially

predicts the internet world, connected world that we have today, and the decline of it ends to the end of civilization. So, I mean, in one sense, you could say it's just typical human ingenuity. We see these things, and some people take them to bright utopian views and other people take them in darker places for entertainment purposes. But the question is… Happy-clappy utopias just aren't very interesting and therefore don't sell. And that's clearly why the overwhelming majority of forays in this direction uh imagine dystopia i mean i think mary shirley deserves some credit for really originating this style with the last man in which a disastrous

plague wipes out everybody except one dude who's kind of left uh to wander around europe uh in in a somewhat desolate state of mind. But Wells was the guy who made it popular, because actually Shelley didn't have great success with The Last Man. And the genre kind of owes a lot to Wells, but for certain tropes, the alien invasion, which we are very preoccupied with, but which so far as I can see hasn't yet happened,

is a good example of Wells' contribution. And then the time machine is great because the time machine leads you to dystopia however far you travel until it finally gets to the very, very end of everything. And it's like, oh God, well, this is how it ends with a sort of totally blasted and devastated, lifeless planet. I have 90 more questions, which inevitably end up in Star Trek, and I know that will make Peter very unhappy. So I'm going to give it right now to Peter before that happens.

I don't mind going to Star Trek, which is one of the more utopian science fiction films. It is one of the more happy, clappy ones, indeed. Neil, you and I spent an hour chatting the other day, and that interview has gone up on the web. And I have been reprimanded in the comments for failing to ask one or two follow-up questions. So I'll get to those. But at the moment, you're on a topic that is so fascinating, I want to ask a question or two of my own in that regard. Who did a better, while we're on the history of the future, who did a better job? Who was more accurate, Orwell or Huxley?

Huxley is the answer. Orwell's been by far the most influential author of a dystopian novel. 1984 outsells all comers, and with good reason, because it's obviously a brilliant work and i'm a massive all-world fan but the central thesis of 1984 was wrong the central thesis which all actually outlined in an article in 1945 for the tribune was that all nuclear superpowers would be slave states that and this is a an extraordinary piece of journalism. It's the first time the phrase Cold War is used. Orwell says that the Cold War is coming, and in this Cold War, there will be three nuclear superpowers, the United States, Russia, and China, and they will all be slave states. And that's really what 1984 envisions. He took the idea, runs with it, and Oceania, which the UK is

part of, is the American totalitarian state. Now, we all read this book, and I think it's good that we read it, but we ought to remember that it was wrong, that the United States did not become a slave state, and all theories of convergence, and there were many into the 1960s, think of Galbraith, who thought that ultimately a kind of managerial capitalism would start to look a lot like communism. All of that was wrong. The US actually did not converge with the Soviet Union. It diverged most clearly in the 1980s. And that was, of course, the decade that decided the Cold War. So I think all got it very wrong. Who got it right? Well, not necessarily the really best

selling novels. Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash, which was written in the mid-1990s, has stood up very well to the test of time. He, for example, thought that we would all end up spending half our lives on what is the internet now, and our avatars would be having a better time than we would in the real world. And his depiction of California as a sort of grimy wasteland that people are happy to escape from into cyberspace really works well. He also envisions mass migration towards the United States as a feature of this future order. So I recommend Stevenson's Snow Crash to anybody who wants to sort of see how it's done, because he quite shrewdly anticipates a lot of what we see today. One more question on this. I want to get back to the current book, but you just don't slow down enough, you know, to let people catch up.

You have a book out, which is about the pandemic, but now you have a new article in The Spectator, which is on Cold War II. I mean, it's very difficult to keep up with you even in talking with you, Neil, let alone reading your work. Okay, but one more follow-on question to this notion of the history of the future. 1980s, to any alert observer, we're not losing the Cold War. By the mid-80s, it may be unclear. It's still unclear that it's going to end as suddenly and quickly as it does at the end of the decade, but we're no longer losing. Things have changed. The dynamic has changed. And yet people were still quoting Whitaker Chambers, who said that when he broke with the Communist Party, he did so in the consciousness that he was leaving the winning

side to join the losing side. And I can't, you may remember the year of the book, Jean-Francois Ravel in 84, 85, publishes How Democracies Perish. And this French intellectual slim volume is taken up and read across the United States as a, we're this close to. And so how is it that there seems to be in democracies, or maybe it's unique to this country, there seems to be a turn of mind that expects the worst of what Paul Johnson called the 70s America's suicide attempt that believes the worst of the country, but also expects the worst. Why does that turn of mind seem almost modal in a country which is prosperous and at peace and which did win the

Cold War. This may be a healthy thing, paradoxically. In other words, it may be good to be a republic haunted by the prospect of Weimar or Rome, in the sense that if we keep worrying about those things, we might actually do the things necessary to avert them. On the other hand, the expectation of the dissolution of the Republic can become an obstacle to clear thinking. One of the things that I write about a bit in Doom and also wrote about in The Square and the Tower is the almost hyper ventilating response of a great many people on the left and many conservatives to Donald Trump's election. And we were told consistently, really from the moment he became a candidate, that the republic was in danger, that we were Weimar America. You know, think of Timothy Snyder's book, which was sort of 10 tips for surviving

a totalitarian regime. And I felt all along that this was overdone and that the whole point of the American system had been to design a Republican order that would be demagogue proof because the founding fathers knew that somebody like Trump would get to be president. And they had that in mind when they devised the separation of powers and made sure that this was a federal system. And it worked. I mean, the system basically worked far, far better than you would have been led to expect if all you'd done was, you know, read people like Snyder or my good friend Andrew Sullivan, who was always predicting the end of the Republic.

Now, the end of the Republic clearly sells. It's a great story, and it's been a great story decade after decade. And it's, I think, one of those things that's never going to go out of style. And as I've said, it may not be a bad thing to worry about these scenarios, but if it needs you to inflate every challenge to your most cherished liberal beliefs into the end of the republic uh you're going to you're going to start miscalibrating your your view of the world the key thing in the the u.s china race is not to become china in the process of competing with china and this this notion which prompted that spectator article is really the kind of punchline of doom

punchline of doom is you all want to talk about climate change yes i get that that is a serious problem but if one looks back over the last hundred years, the thing that kills people prematurely in very large numbers is totalitarianism. And we should be a lot more worried about totalitarianism in the 21st century than we are, because we now are up against a very successful totalitarian regime, which is clearly much better at a lot of things than the Soviet Union was. And even worse than that, we're sort of importing totalitarian modes of behavior into our own society. And that's the kind of doom that I worry about the most, especially when you use one form of disaster, whether it's a pandemic or climate change, to justify erosions of civil liberties that actually might pave the way to totalitarianism. Can you give an example or two, if you would? I've got the Spectator article open here on my screen, and I'm tempted to read it, but reading an article to the man who wrote it is a stupid waste of time. So could you just give us one or two examples of what you see in the United States

imitating China? It was Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, who drew my attention to the fact that Joe Biden had suggested to Boris Johnson on a phone call that there should be a Western version of One Belt, One Road. And I'd missed that. And I thought, well, hang on, that sort of fits into a pattern, doesn't it? Because another debate of the moment is, why doesn't the United States have a central bank digital currency like the clever People's Bank of China? Come on, Federal Reserve, where's your central bank digital currency? And then remember what happened last year when the scale of the challenge posed by COVID-19 finally became clear to policymakers in about mid-March. The response was, oh, we'd better copy the Chinese and do lockdowns. Interestingly, the guy whose name I nearly share, Neil Ferguson with an N-E-I-L,

the guy who was the Imperial College of Epidemiology. I thought quite cross with you two or three times before it twigged that he was not you and you were not he sorry about that i wronged you in my own mind once or twice but from people who can't spell i thank you mom by the way for spelling my name the funny way i know it often gets mispronounced as nile but i was really glad of it last year when the other neil ferguson any isle ferguson was saying that we had to lock down now he gave an interview just the other day to The Times, the London Times, saying, well, of course, we got the idea from the Chinese and we weren't sure that we could do it because we're not a communist society, but it turned out we could. That really was a moment of truth.

That is astounding. It is kind of amazing. So, we have been copying the Chinese in a lot of ways, some conscious and some unconscious. A good example of what's going on, which is semi-conscious at the moment, is I think we've got up to three different plans that the Biden administration is putting through congress and all of these different plans the infrastructure plan the covid relief plan and the family plan whatever that is um these all in addition to costing a cool six trillion dollars are plans and if there's one thing that we uh constantly fall into the trap of admiring it's the way that communist regimes plan and i wish I had a Bitcoin for everybody I've heard say, oh, if only we could take a long view like the Chinese and have high-speed rail links, dot, dot, dot. So this is a very familiar pattern that goes back a long way, the osmosis of war,

the osmosis of competition, where you're competing with a totalitarian regime and unwittingly or consciously you start becoming like it. You mentioned contagion and it goes back to doom. The movie Contagion shows a pandemic that was worse than what we had by a factor of 100. Bodies stacked like corduroy, to use the cliche, everyone dying, dropping in the streets. So people began the pandemic by seeing the classic example of what happens when a disease ravages a country. And that did not happen. By every measure, we did not have the contagion situation. Yet, the mindset was that we had. to take this and never ever be able to understand that it wasn't as bad as we feared at the beginning and that we might be overreacting. It was right to worry that it was as bad as contagion or as bad as 1918-19, the Spanish influenza, right at the beginning when you didn't know anything. So January, when I first heard about

the strange new virus in Wuhan, my first reaction was, uh-oh. And a bunch of my friends, including Nassim Taleb, published a paper in January saying, we should act like this is as bad as possible. And that means acting very quickly to shut down travel from China and to limit spread. And that was the right thing to do before you knew anything. And that's what the Taiwanese did. So the Taiwanese who have every reason to be paranoid about China and not to believe what Beijing says, acted in the assumption that this was going to be very bad and rolled out something that they had been thinking about for a while, mass testing, because you could test very early on once the thing had been sequenced, contact tracing using phones and then isolating anybody

who was infected. And they did this so successfully that the grand total of deaths from COVID in Taiwan is 12. 12. I'll say that one more time, as opposed to 550,000, which is the running total in the US. So there was a moment to panic, and it was right at the beginning. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist I got to know writing this book, had a great TED Talk back in, I think, 2005, where he said the key to pandemics, and he's one of the guys who eradicated smallpox, the key to pandemics is early detection and early action. And we wholly failed to do those things. And in the process of failing, and it was a protracted failure, we failed in January, February, and into March, we left ourselves with a very, very limited number of options to prevent a really significant number of deaths, more potentially than half a million.

And without much deep reflection, we jumped to the conclusion that the Chinese lockdown was the way to go. Now, I think by mid-March, we knew a lot more about the virus. We knew that it killed the elderly disproportionately and hardly killed any young people at all. We knew that from the Chinese data. We knew that the infection fatality rate varied so much between age groups that it was almost meaningless to say what the average infection fatality rate was. We knew that it was a super spread of virus, i.e. about 20% of the people infected were doing 80% of the spreading. We knew all that by mid-March. I know that because I was reading

the research coming out of the affected places, China and Italy, like I was drinking from a fire hose, and I was gaining enough knowledge to see that this was not 1918-19 and it definitely wasn't the movie Contagion. So I felt even at the time that the lockdown strategy was a very blunt instrument for contending with the spread of the virus and likely to have significant costs, including costs in terms of mortality, but also other costs, that might be in excess of the benefits of containing the spread. Now, this is an argument that some people really don't want to hear, because they really want the other Neil Ferguson to be right. They want to believe that a very large number of lives have been saved by lockdowns, and I'm not sure they'll ever really

be able to prove that. A, there's lots of mortality that we've seen in the last year and a few months that came as a result of the lockdowns. Remember, not all the deaths in the last year or so were caused by COVID. It's actually 13% of total deaths in the US. And quite a lot of the other deaths, quite a lot of the excess mortality that occurred came because people didn't go and get the checkups that they should have got, or the overdose numbers went up. I mean, there are a bunch of unintended consequences of the lockdowns that we haven't really properly measured. There's a big toll in terms of mental health that we are still going to take some time to calculate. And I think when we finally can do a full cost-benefit analysis we'll see that the benefits

of lockdowns weren't really that much greater than the costs and and this is a really important point that our colleague at Hoover John Cochran has made the public was adapting anyway it's not like we were just going to carry on completely as normal without shelter in place orders cochran predicted correctly that people's behavior would adapt once they heard that there was a dangerous virus in town and it did then austin gulby who was in the obama administration did a paper showing that most of the changes in mobility predated the government lockdown orders so there's not a i don't think there's a counterfactual in which people just carry on completely blithely, and we have like a million deaths. I think people would have changed their behavior in the absence of regulations. And it doesn't seem like there's enormous variance between states that locked down tightly, like California, and states that did not, like Florida, actually, the outcomes look pretty similar in those two states. So long-winded answer, but I mean, I think one can see that the right thing to do was the early detection, early action option, the Taiwanese

option. Copying China in mid-March was definitely a suboptimal response, and I am pretty sure that even then we could have done better. We could have been smarter in mid-March than we were. Neil, really quickly, the follow-up question that is being demanded in the comment sections of our interview, I didn't ask, and apparently I should have asked, Taiwan, the death rate in Taiwan is low, the death rate in South Korea is low, but might not at least part of the reason be that those countries are located geographically in such a place that they have wave after wave of SARS sweeping over them. And the population already has in one way or another, some immunity, certainly a much greater immunity than we did.

Well, that's a difficult one to be sure of. But it's certainly not the case that they can... All I had to do was ask it. Right. So it's not the case that people in Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan, for that matter, had been exposed to SARS and MERS because those diseases were so deadly that very few people got them. If you got it, you died, or you were very, very ill very quickly. So that doesn't make sense. And in any case, geographical proximity explains very little about contagion.

This is a really key point that the network scientists have been making for years. Lato Barabasi and Alessandro Vespignani argue that given the nature of air travel, there is a thing called effective distance, which is quite different from geographical distance. In practice, the United States was almost as close to China in effective distance as Taiwan, because the amount of travel from China to the United States is massive up until the pandemic strikes. So I don't think those arguments make much sense. And indeed, we can see that although we still don't know everything there is to know about susceptibility to the virus, that there isn't some obvious explanation for why it didn't spread further in those East Asian countries in either the genetic or any other

domain. Basically, they just took the right measures quickly and we could have done something similar not the same but why did let me just ask a question why did we not do anything with the technology why did we decide just not to bother with contact tracing i've never heard a good answer to that question because it's not like we couldn't have graphed the network of everybody in the united states really easily and i think the best answer that I can figure out is that the big tech companies decided there was too much downside risk to doing it. And so they punted it. And they basically decided, you know what, all of the data which we make so much money from, which we could put to good public use, we better just not put to good public use, because you never know what the consequences of doing that might be. So we just

haven't really tried. And that seems to be a much better explanation. Perhaps they thought it wouldn't work in a large country that didn't have the social cohesion of Taiwan. That, you know, it would work in Norway and Denmark, but when you apply that to the whole United States, perhaps not. I want to remind people that you wrote a book that we're talking about, and I want to ask you one last question about it before we let you go.

In Doom, you referred to the twin plagues of 2020. Well, one plague we can certainly name. I'm on tenterhooks. What's the other plague? Plague of the mind. The crazy ideas of which there were many that spread through the Internet and led us into a state of confusion and extreme polarization. Everything became politicized last year, from masks to vaccines by way of remedies. And I think that's because the internet is a perfect platform for disseminating misinformation and disinformation.

And it already was. That was the theme of The square and the tower. But it ended up being a fantastic way of confusing people about the crisis that they were facing. And it produced, just rather in the way that the 1340s produced the flagellant orders, a huge wave of protest last summer, which, if one took a step back, was something of a non sequitur, considering that we were in the midst of a pandemic. To have a huge nationwide wave of protests about police racial discrimination and violence was odd, to put it mildly. And I think it was part of that second plague that happened, the plague of the mind. And often those two things go hand in hand. Often you get contagions of one sort accompanied by contagions of the mind. And often those two things go hand in hand. Often you get contagions

of one sort accompanied by contagions of the other sort. It happened in 1918-19 as well, of course, when a very contagious idea of Bolshevism was spreading rapidly around the world. Oh, exactly. If you look in the United States at the newspapers, they're talking more about the bombing campaigns, the domestic bombing campaigns in the early 20s than they are talking about uh without the spanish flu is still ravaging hey we could go another 17 hours i know we could and we still haven't gotten to star trek but that's the next time if only if only we got to start yes it's been a great pleasure the book is doom yes doom the politics of catastrophe neil ferguson thank you so much for joining us today thank you gentlemen thank you um i mean he's right you have a plague that comes along and shows the rottenness institution in the

institutions and things collapse and into that flows a whole bunch of horrible new ideas and have the internet to facilitate them is just the curse of our modern times i mean i suppose the movable print and newspapers and radio served that function before, but never to the extent that it does today. And by the way, it doesn't matter what your politics are or who you voted for, frankly. Internet-wise, everybody should have the right to express themselves, right? Freely, right? Well, sadly, the big tech monopolies have instead opted for silencing tactics and censorship. You've heard the story. Parler, you've heard that one of the, what is it? It's The Intercept, actually, an internet site founded by Glenn Greenwald.

It is producing a huge user dump on Gab users to show exactly who's naughty and who's nice. Big tech needs fighting back against sometimes when they push back against you. If they want to control the internet, they are the internet. What do you do? Okay, that's where you use ExpressVPN. A VPN you want, Express is the best. That's all there is. Ever wondered how those free-to-access tech giants make all their money? Well, it's by tracking you. By tracking your searches, your video histories, everything you click on, you build a profile on you and then sell off your sensitive data to others, advertisers.

When you use the ExpressVPN app on your computer or phone, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address. This makes your activity much more difficult to track and sell to advertisers. And what's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your network data to protect you from eavesdroppers and cyber crooks. So that's why we use it. That's why we like how easy it is to use. It takes one click to protect all your devices. ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET and by Wired. Revoke big

text right to your data. Secure your internet with the VPN that we trust for our online protection. Visit expressvpn.com slash ricochet. That's e-x-p-r-e-s-S-V-P-N.com to get three extra months free with this exclusive link. Go to ExpressVPN.com right now to learn more. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Steve Meyer, my friend Steve Meyer, is a graduate of Whitworth College and holds a doctorate in history and the philosophy of science. What a great degree that is. Sounds like from Cambridge. His publications include Signature in the Cell, DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, and Darwin's Doubt, the Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. And most recently, indeed, just a couple of months ago, Steve published The Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.

Steve, welcome. We should note that you and I have already recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge devoted to the book. It's a terrific, terrific interview, Peter. Yeah, thank you for having me. We should note that you and I have already recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge devoted to the book. So- It's a terrific, terrific interview, Peter. Yeah, thank you for having me on. Can I just ask you really briefly, just tick through the three discoveries that the book discusses. Absolutely.

First is that as best we can tell from observational astronomy and theoretical physics, the universe had a beginning. The second is that the universe from the DNA, and RNA contain information in essentially an alphabetic or digital form that makes life possible, that at the foundation of life, we have not just matter and energy, but information. And I argue that those three evidences together support not just the reality of a designing intelligence of some kind, but a designing intelligence with the attributes that, for example, Jews and Christians have always described to God. In other words, they point jointly to a transcendent mind who is also active in the creation.

Okay, so the weak form of the argument would be these scientific discoveries, correct to call them all, strictly speaking, scientific discoveries, right? These are based on empirical evidence. Okay. The weak form of the argument is that these three scientific discoveries are all consonant with, they fit with, they do not contradict the Judeo-Christian notion of a God. That's the weak form of the argument. The strong form of the argument is that these three scientific discoveries are incomprehensible. Is that the right word? No, that's not quite. Well, let's say- I would say best explained by the-

Best explained. Thank you. Okay. Best explained. And which argument are you making, weak or strong? I'm making the strong argument that I'm using a method of reasoning that's common in the sciences, particularly in historical sciences concerned with questions of causal origins, known as the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inferring to the best explanation where the best explanation is the one that provides a hypothesis that affirms an entity with the with the causal powers to produce the effects in question and so when we look when i'm arguing that these three classes of evidence are best explained by a designing intelligence that has the attributes

that theists have associate with god transcendence power and a willingness to be active in the universe after the beginning uh and i and i compare that hypothesis against the explanatory power of other competing metaphysical hypotheses such such as scientific materialism, or pantheism, or deism, or a kind of exotic hypothesis, the idea that life on Earth was seeded here by an alien intelligence somewhere within the cosmos, which is odd as it sounds, is something that some scientists have actually proposed. Okay. James, you come in anytime you want to, because I've already had a shot at Steve, and these are the questions I thought afterwards at my hour of yakking away. And really, it could all be condensed, and I'm condensing it right now, sort of.

What do you say to the argument? So, first of all, the God that is implied, that you believe, that you argue is implied in the God hypothesis, we don't get anywhere close to a loving God, necessarily a God who intervened in the history of the Jewish. There's still plenty of room for what Christians would view as revelation, what Jews would describe as sacred history. We're not even close to that, correct? Pete What I'm, the kind of, yeah, I'm arguing for basic theism, which is what I think can be inferred from an examination of the natural world, or what theologians long called general revelation. It would be a mistake, I think, to try to go further than that, to establish attributes or something about the plan of God that is only revealed through what Jews and Christians refer to as special revelation, the revelation that comes through the scripture. So, and I think even in the religious tradition, in the Hebrew Bible, we have the affirmation that the heavens declare the glory of God. They don't tell us all of his

actions in the history of the Jewish people. In the New Testament, you have the idea from St. Paul that from the things that are made, the unseen qualities of the creator, his eternal power, divine nature, sometimes translated wisdom, are clearly manifest. But you don't get the whole of the Christian gospel from looking at nature either. So, those questions that would help us decide which of the theistic or monotheistic faiths, or maybe none at all, are correct are questions that have to be adjudicated in some other way beyond the assessment of the properties of the universe, as Richard Dawkins puts it. We're looking at what can nature tell us? My first two books were arguing that the informational properties of living cells, the digital code that's stored in the DNA molecule, for example, point to the need for

some kind of designing intelligence, a master programmer for life. But I didn't attempt to identify any further attributes of that intelligence. And many of my readers asked, well, who do you think the designing intelligence is and what can science tell us about that. And by broadening the scope of inquiry, by looking at the evidence from physics and cosmology, I think we can say certainly that the designing intelligence responsible for life in the universe is not best explained by an imminent intelligence within the cosmos, but rather by an intelligence which transcends the universe because we have evidence of design from the very beginning of the universe and we have evidence for the beginning of the universe and no imminent intelligence, no space alien could be responsible for the design that's present from the very beginning and upon which its very existence would depend.

This is so fast. I'm going to release you to James in a moment, but not just yet. I have one or two questions that I more or less have to ask because I've promised people. J. Bhattacharya, I may mischaracterize J. a little bit, but J. is a little queasy about this argument. J. loves you, Steve, as you know. But J. said, wait a moment, wait a moment, wait a moment. It's really important to keep science and religion in different realms. And so if science says that the universe had a beginning, the philosophers may then feel free to say, well, yes, this fits with the notion of the ground of all being the moment you step beyond that to ask about transcendent

or immaterial causes, you've crossed the border. It's much better to keep the difference, the distinction between the two disciplines sharp and clean, and for science to say, there was a Big Bang, and that is where we stop. We don't know what caused it. It's far cleaner and better for science simply to plead ignorance. Is that, does that? Well, how do you respond to that one? I think I put it more or less correctly. Jay would be better at it, of course. This raises a deep question in the philosophy of science known as the demarcation problem.

Ah, there we go. How do we distinguish between science and philosophy, metaphysics, theology, religion, etc. And it turns out that that's a very difficult boundary to enforce or to decide, partly because there are different types of scientific inquiry is concerned with describing how nature acts on an ongoing basis in a regular way or how one part of nature affects another. And any postulation of a designing intelligence or of a God hypothesis as a cause or even an evolutionary account is irrelevant in that type of science. We're not asking about what caused things to come into existence. We're asking about what things ordinarily do. And most of science is concerned with those sorts of questions about the ongoing operation of the universe or life or chemistry.

But there are branches of science, in particular, the historical sciences that are concerned with these questions of causal origin. What caused life to arise? We have a whole discipline called origin of life research. We have evolutionary biology and in those disciplines we're concerned with causal origins and in those the the the questions that surround those then therefore have a different form they have the form well what caused this feature of the universe or the universe itself to arise and a possible answer to those questions can be, is that strictly materialistic processes of some kind can explain those events. Another possible

answer is that creative intelligence played a role. And our argument is that in investigating those questions, we need to be open to both types of answers. Whatever we end up calling the form of inquiry, we might, in positing intelligent design as an alternative explanation for strictly materialistic chemical evolutionary scenarios for the origin of life, I have argued that the design hypothesis should be considered a properly historical scientific explanation because it has all the same features as an explanation of its competitors other than its positing creative intelligence instead of materialistic processes. In other words, I use the same method of reasoning that, for example, Charles Darwin used in making my case for intelligent design, a standard historical scientific method of reasoning called the method of multiple competing hypotheses. But in this case, I'm going further than just

arguing for design of some kind. I'm actually arguing for theism as the best overall explanation for these three big questions about causal origins, about the origin of life, the origin of the physical structure of the universe, and the origin of the universe itself. The competing hypotheses in this case are also metaphysical hypotheses, strict materialism, pantheism, deism, and so forth. And so, I'm quite happy to call the God hypothesis in this context a metaphysical hypothesis, but at the end of the day, I don't really care how you characterize, how you classify the hypothesis. What matters to me is which hypothesis provides the best overall explanation, and therefore, which is most likely to be true. What we really want to know is what happened and what caused things to happen. And so, yes, the boundary between science and theology, science and

metaphysics can be fuzzy, and there are overlapping concerns between theology and science in certain areas that make it impossible sometimes to enforce a strict boundary. I don't think the non-overlapping magisteria idea of Stephen Gould works. It works in some parts of science. Some parts of science are metaphysically neutral. The answers don't bear on larger worldview questions. The formula for salt is the same for theists and materialists. But the question of the origin of the universe might be better answered by theism than it is by materialism. And therefore, that question would not be metaphysically neutral. And there's no reason to sequester

the competing hypotheses from the scientific evidence and say, well, we're not going to think about which of the great worldview systems best explains this data point, simply because in so doing, we'd be crossing some imaginary disciplinary boundary in our minds. Stephen, James Lallix here in Minneapolis. When we finally figure out whether or not there is indeed a multiverse and that perhaps we sprang out of one soap bubble in another dimension, or is there still so much that we have to accumulate before we can truly say we've got our brains around the physics of this universe? Because as impressed as I am with what we i know now i know that we're

always finding things and positing new ideas and who knows next week it's going to be resonant multi-dimensional super string theory that finally we find that the you know the the longest of them is tied to the finger of god i mean there may be a question in there somewhere i let me let me jump in with something specific that will i think help, help address the question and the force of the question. Let me just unpack the basic argument for intelligent design in biology. And I think you'll see that it's not an argument from ignorance. It's not dependent on, at this point, further knowledge, although we're always open to revising any hypothesis with respect to further knowledge. But it's based on things that we know.

In 1953, Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule. Four or five years later, Crick proposed something called the sequence hypothesis, in which he hypothesized that the chemical subunits that run along the interior of the twisting helix in the DNA molecule, the subunits being called bases or nucleotide bases. He posited that these are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like zeros and ones in a section of software, which is to say that their function within the DNA is not dependent on their physical properties, but rather upon their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention, which was later discovered and is now known as the genetic code.

So what was, and this was confirmed over the next seven or eight years. We now have a very good understanding of how digital information in the DNA directs the construction of proteins. It's called the gene expression system. It's a fascinating system of information storage, transmission, and processing. It has all the markers of our own high-tech digital technology. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. Richard Dawkins himself, the great scientific atheist,

says that DNA contains machine code. Now, we know from experience, our uniform and repeated experience, that information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form, always arises from an intelligent source. Whether we're talking about a computer program, or a paragraph in a book, or a hieroglyphic inscription, or the information that's transmitted electronically as we're doing now, information always arises from an intelligent source. Chemical evolutionary theory has failed utterly to account for the origin of the first life and the origin of the first life and the origin of the information necessary to produce it. But we're not inferring design just from the failure of those evolutionary models, but instead because of the positive knowledge we have of the

cause and effect structure of the world, namely that it always takes a mind to generate information. One of the early information theorists, Henry Quastler, said that information habitually arises from conscious activity. So we have knowledge. Well, let me finish the argument. The point is that our cause and effect knowledge, not ignorance of how the universe works, is the basis for the positive inference to intelligent design. The idea that the discovery of information at the foundation of life therefore points to the activity of designing mind in the origin and history of life. Let me stop you right there. I just wanted to say that information can be described and defined in different ways. If we get fast radio bursts from a distant source, that's information. It may not

be useful information to us at the time. It may not have a message encoded in it, but it's information. On the other hand, if we get information from a distant radio observation that shows the rate at which a planet is passing in front of a satellite, in front of a sun, that's information. That's actual factual information. And it's not being arranged by a conscious mind. It is simply the universe doing what the universe is doing. Well, there's an equivocation in the usage there that you indicate by just noting that there can be different definitions. I've carefully defined the kind of information that we're talking about.

We're talking about coding. We're talking about information that is transmitted in accord with a symbol convention and is what's called specified. We're not talking about mere Shannon information, which is a signal that has some calculable improbability associated with it, but rather an improbable arrangement of characters or chemicals functioning the same that is also specified by arrangement in order to produce a function

or to exemplify a set of functional requirements. So they're very important. In other words, information in the same sense that we mean as a written text or a section of computer code. We're not talking about information about something. When we look in the sky, we could say, well, anything we see is information in that sense. We're talking about an actual transmission of something that is functional or is conveying a message. And this is what we have in DNA. We've encoded information that is functioning very much like a computer code. Right. So science has allowed us then,

and our brains have allowed us to develop the tools to peer down. It's almost like looking at the smallest cell in your body and finding that inscribed upon it is a message. It's a remarkable thing. So let's get really metaphysical now and out of the technical. You could wonder then whether or not the purpose of the human people say, what is the purpose? Why was this all done? The idea of creating a system that produces creatures capable of finally apprehending the nature of what they live in is a fascinating thing. And I mean, I've heard people say if there's no life anywhere else in the universe, that perhaps the purpose of man was to behold it and therefore give it meaning.

Because the universe unobserved, a simple empty machine rolling around on its own, has no use, no beauty, no glory. But to create a creature that is able to understand it, to understand an element of beauty to this too, of wonder and mystery that absolutely needs to be twinned with this, because otherwise it almost sounds like homework. I completely agree with that. And I talk a lot in the very last chapter of the book about the loss that many young people in particular feel of a sense of ultimate meaning to human life. If we're the result of undirected, unguided processes that did not have us in mind, the sense that human life is in some way special is very difficult to hold. Nothing can mean anything to a rock or a planet or an atom. And if the process that created us was just a matter of blind, pitiless indifference or matter in motion, as Richard Dawkins has put it, it is not hard to see why many of the scientific atheists are also saying that human life has no ultimate significance. And Steven Weinberg has famously been quoted as saying, the more the universe seems comprehensible to science, the more it seems pointless. And I think that message of nihilism is percolated through into the culture.

And the beauty of the universe, as well as the intricacy of its design, I think speak to a personal source. And in fact, the problem of gratuitous beauty in evolutionary biology is rather acute. You know, there's a lot of beauty in the world that has no, in living things, it has no apparent survival, it confers no apparent survival advantage. It's gratuitous from that sense, and it's very hard to explain on a Darwinian account of things. But it does, I think, point to intelligence and to something about the nature of the mind that created things. It's remarkable, too, when you think about it. If we are indeed just a random accident, you would think that would make people prize it even more as to the uniqueness of it. But the idea of having familiarity breeding contempt in the field of cosmology is just astonishing.

When you look at those Hovell shots, the deep field shots where… They're gorgeous, aren't they? Yeah. In the space of a dime. But if you held a dime up to a square part of the sky, you would see not only just a myriad number of stars, but tiny flecks, each of which is a galaxy containing billions of stars. The extent of it is the awe, the awestruck feeling you have contemplating it. And James, we had no idea of this even 100 years ago. It was in 1920 that there was the quote-unquote great debate at the Smithsonian between astronomers who thought there might be

galaxies beyond our own and others who thought that the nebular structures we were seeing were just smudges around stars within our own galaxy and the Milky Way was the whole show. And so, in less than 100 years or about 100 years, we now know that there are at least 200 billion other galaxies. It's an immense universe. It's expanding, and it's expanding outward from a point that marks the beginning of the expansion and arguably the beginning of the universe itself. For centuries, it was thought that the universe was eternal and self-existent, that matter and energy were the things from which everything else came. And this, I think, gets back to the question that Peter raised. I mean, if we get into the actual specifics of the argument I'm making, you can see the logic of it, whatever we end up calling it, whether we call it science or metaphysics or historical

science with metaphysical implications or some other thing, it doesn't matter, to explain the origin of matter, space, time, and energy by reference to any prior material state is incoherent because it's matter and energy that come into existence at the beginning of the universe. And so, materialism as a worldview does not provide as good an explanation as worldviews that posit something external to the universe that can act as its cause. Now, that point is essentially acknowledged by materialists who attempt to posit an infinite cycle of expansions and contractions before this universe to try to, in a sense, it's a form of materialistic supernaturalism but those models have problems based on the basic physics that each of those cycles of expansion and contraction will result in an increase or a decrease in the energy available to do work and an increase in entropy and all of them have to on a completely ad hoc basis, posit some mechanism, not ever specified with any degree of

particularity, that would reduce the entropy with each cycle so that you could have another effective expansion. So they're not very tenable models. And yet, the evidence we have about this universe suggests that it had a definite beginning, which is exactly what the materialists never expected to find, but is exactly what theists have expected to find. The great physicist Arno Penzias, who discovered the cosmic background radiation, said that the data we have from cosmology are exactly what I would have expected if I had nothing to go on, but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole. So, these comparative expectations allow us to test metaphysical models. Richard Dawkins has said that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there was no design, no purpose, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. And that statement implies that his

metaphysical hypothesis of blind, pitiless indifference, which is shorthand for materialism, is testable. It's testable by looking at the world to see if it has the properties that you would expect if materialism were true. And the argument of my book is that the things that we've discovered from physics, from cosmology, from biology, are not what you'd expect on the basis of materialism. Materialism did not expect that the universe would have a beginning. It doesn't expect that the universe would be exquisitely finely tuned against all odds to make life possible. A common sense interpretation of that, as Fred Hoyle says, is that there was a fine tuner. And it's certainly a strictly materialistic

worldview did not expect the immense integrated and informational complexity of life the models in the 1930s of the dna were little hat boxes stacked on each other in a highly regular law-like way nothing like an information processing system so um the the the i think it is possible to test metaphysical hypotheses by our observations. The New Atheists agree with me about that, interestingly. But I think the arguments that they've made or the evidence we have does not support a materialistic worldview. It's not what you would have expected on materialism. The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer, 400 pages of close reasoning and also scientific history.

You go through what we knew a century ago in each of these questions. You go through the development of the Big Bang developed by Le Maître. Einstein doubted it. Einstein's finally convinced, and here's why. You go through each of these. It's absolutely fascinating. One final question, if I may, Steve, and I want to put it to you. Again, it's about the nature of your argument. I'm putting it, I have it in the form of an email from a friend who's a regular and very

careful and sympathetic viewer of Uncommon Knowledge. But I get this kind of question a lot, both about the interview that we taped, what was it, a year and a half or almost two years ago now in Italy, and then the interview that we taped just a month ago. So I'll just read this to you. It's the nature of your argument, and it's on evolution. I find it coming up a lot. Your interviewee seems to argue that one, Darwin's process of small variations and natural selection is insufficient to explain life, and that therefore, two, it can only be explained by intelligent design. Proposition one isn't controversial. I doubt even Darwin himself would have argued that the process is the whole story. A number of additional processes have since been discovered. A particularly interesting and important one is Lin-Margulis' process of mergers and acquisitions across organisms, about which I know nothing. But

the point is that there's been work done since Darwin. There are post-neo-Darwinian models of the origin of new body plans or animal forms, sure. Right. Okay. So there are other processes involved in the evolution, probably some we haven't even discovered yet. So Proposition 2, the necessity of intelligent design, does not follow from Proposition 1, the weakness or the shortcomings of Darwin's argument. Okay, you must get that 10 times a day. I know exactly the argument. Yeah, this is very well stated. The opposition or the objection is very well stated. But that's not the form of the argument, first of all, for two reasons.

I'm not simply arguing for the insufficiency of Darwinian evolutionary processes to account for the origin of the information that is needed to build a new form of animal life. And this is really addressing the argument I made in Darwin's Doubt, which was my previous book, and about which we had the wonderful discussion in Fiosoli with the two Davids, David Gelerenter and David Berlinski. But in that book, I also take great pains to evaluate the newer evolutionary models and show that they too have the same problem. And in fact, in a form of meta-analysis, if you look at all of the evolutionary explanations, they exemplify one of two problems. Either they do not address the problem of the ultimate origin of information necessary for what's called morphological innovation, or more commonly, they presuppose prior unexplained sources of information,

showing that the information problem is essentially incorrigible. You can keep pushing it under the rug. And this is what nature is telling us. Okay. So that's on the negative side. But then I argue that I don't simply, I don't say therefore intelligent design. That would be, as your listener suggests, an argument from ignorance, which is a formal, informal logical fallacy. But instead, I argue that we have positive evidence for the causal power of intelligent agency to produce the effect in question. And by carefully characterizing the type of information we have present in biological systems, and showing that we have known examples of intelligent agents producing that type of information called specified information or specified complexity. We therefore have a

positive warrant for inferring design as the best explanation. We're not arguing cause A couldn't produce cause X, therefore it must have been cause B, without offering positive evidence that cause B is capable of producing cause X. And when you have that positive warrant or positive evidence for an alternative cause, then you can infer that alternative as the best explanation. If you have no positive evidence for the alternative cause as having causal power or causal efficacy, then you would be committing an argument from ignorance. So on two counts, your listener is not actually characterizing the argument I'm making accurately. We're not only critiquing Darwinian models of

evolution, we're showing that all models are subject to the same type of problem. They either do not explain or they presuppose prior unexplained information. And then alternatively, we show, I show that an alternative cause, namely mind or intelligence, has the power to produce the effect in question. And therefore, we have good grounds for inferring it as the best explanation of the effect in question. Stephen, it's been fascinating. And I just wish you could boil it down to 140 characters so you could take it to Twitter. Twitter is, of course, where all the important intellectual discussions are happening these days. Well, I got somebody that made a stab at that on another interview the other day.

He says, well, no one tries to explain the iPhone without Steve Jobs. Crunch it down. That's all I'm saying. Crunch it. Not too bad. Yeah. iPhone being full of information and requiring information for its construction. Exactly. Return of the God hypothesis.

Three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. Stephen Meyer, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you both, gentlemen. Great questions. Yeah, good discussion. Steve, thank you. Oh, I had more questions too. Indeed, when you started talking about there being insufficient energy

for the big bounce, the expansion, the contraction, the expansion, the contraction, the universe is like a big accordion that's constantly closing and opening. I like that idea because it revives and recycles and keeps going because the alternative is heat death, where the end of everything is just nothing but every atom billions of miles apart and there's no activity going on. It keeps you up at night though. If you think about it, it keeps you up at night with the eventual fate of the universe. Maybe some other things are helping you, keeping you from falling asleep. Job worries, money worries, COVID worries, the rest of it. Wouldn't be great. It would be so great. Rob says there's absolutely no way it's possible.

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here for you headspace.com slash ricochet today and we thank headspace for sponsoring this the podcast and how quickly he says before he can queue it up and we can make a joke about how it's not playing on time. The James Lylex Member Post of the Week. Well, good. Continuing with Trent. The Lylex Post of the Week. Kelly D. Johnson, your pet is a climate problem. She talked about an article

that appeared in Vox. And of course, everything's a problem. Everything is a climate problem. Fido, the worst. From the piece, pet owners are facing a new challenge, this time from climate change activists. They're coming for you. They're coming after your pet, especially your carnivore-eating ones, especially cats, since they're obligate carnivores. From news coverage of a 2017 study, UCLA professor Gregory S. Oken found that meat-eating dogs and

cats create the equivalent of 64 million tons of carbon dioxide per year based on the energy consumption required to produce that food or the same impact of driving 3 13.6 million cars what do they suggest get a hamster instead he advises get a hamster instead instead of your dog okay the reason i chose this partially was because just shows you that on ricochet we don't just complain about politics we also complain about the people who want to make your life worse by taking away your dog or at least making you feel guilty for having one because you know that the people uh in charge of making sure that you don't have a dog will probably have a couple romping around them farms themselves peter are you going to forswear any future pet ownership in order to save the planet?

Absolutely not. No, no, no. In order to save, no, no. By the way, the good news here is that dogs outnumber cats by about 20 million. I consider that reassuring. That's a reassuring datum about my fellow citizens. I thought so too. I was surprised by that.

I thought that cat, I think dog ownership increased during the pandemic because people reassuring datum about my fellow citizens i thought so too i was surprised by that i thought that cat i think dog ownership increased during the pandemic because people really wanted somebody who was going to be a companion and involved cats don't do that do they really no i mean i there are people who swear by them who love them and they have their own form of companionship and you know you own a dog a cat owns you etc but the of interactive stuff that I got going on with my pooch is, is there's nothing compared to what my, the cat, I mean, I've had cats and I like cats and I'm safe from having them because my wife's allergic, which is the perfect excuse.

But just the other day going out and walking around the block with the dog and meeting the neighbors and meeting other dogs and having talks with people I might not have otherwise seen. I've never met anybody who said, yeah, I took my cat out for a walk and ended up standing in the street corner for 10 minutes talking about things. It just doesn't happen. That is true. Last thing before we go, Peter, do you think it is wise for the United States and the Biden administration to interfere with the IP, the intellectual property, the patents for the vaccines? Or is it vaccine nationalism to insist that their patents should be protected? No, I have to confess I haven't read deeply into that story. As a matter of fact, by not having read deeply, what I mean is I haven't even read first paragraphs i've just glanced at headlines property rights make all of this stuff possible and um we would we would not have have

had vaccines what is it half a dozen now in a year if the companies that produce them didn't believe that they were going to be creating property rights in the intellectual property. And I don't need to belabor this point because the lessons of history are so clear. Erode property rights and you erode productivity and above all, you erode innovation. This is not only a bad idea, but an ignorant idea. It requires a willful disregard of all that history, particularly the history of the last century, tells us. I think it's interesting that the Russians call theirs Sputnik. It's like, we really got a lot of good publicity with that one before. Let's call this Sputnik again. There's not a lot of people clamoring for the Russian vaccine because you get the idea you're

going to be injected with windshield wiper fluid or something like that. I mean, it's just the very idea. No, I don't want the products of Western warp speed, high technology. Give me the Chinese vaccine. Give me the Russian vaccine. I don't think so. No, I don't think that's the case,

but if you want to be a good world citizen, as I believe Joe Biden wants us to do again, that means doing everything possible. That makes countries in the other world. Happy American happiness being a little bit down the ladder. I think it's been a long podcast but it's been great man what a what a my head hurts these two guys my head hurts um i think we should have we should have flipped the order of these because talking to neil would

have just been like chewing cotton candy compared to the uh i mean those is you're going to talk science and theology intertwined in a way with a density you've never addressed before. It's a great way to spend an afternoon, and I've enjoyed it and loved it. Peter, it's been fun. Rob will be back next week, we hope, and we'll see you all at Ricochet in the comments. That would be Ricochet 4.0. Next week. I may not always love you But long as there are stars above you

You never need to doubt it I'll make you so sure about it God only knows what I'd be without you If you should ever leave me Well I could still

go on, believe me The world could show nothing to me. So what good would living do me? God only knows what I'd be without you. Ricochet! Join the conversation. God only knows what I'd be without you If you should ever leave me The light would still go on, believe me

The world could show nothing to me So what good would living be? God only knows what I'd be without you. God only knows what I'd be without you. God only knows what I'd be without you. God only knows what I'd be without you. God only knows what I'd be without you God only knows what I'd be without you God only knows what I'd be without you God only knows what I'd be without you Gentlemen, and take it, my wife is leaving on a jet plane.

So I'm just going to run downstairs and say goodbye before the Uber grabs her. So you continue. I'll be back in three minutes. Okay?