The Ricochet Podcast - Glimmers of Hope

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

Do you follow the science? Do you have an aversion to the scolds who routinely declare code reds for humanity? Perhaps you’re being driven to despair. But we at Ricochet hope to see you flourish, we want to see you b(j)orn again! Our guest this week is the absorbingly optimistic Bjørn Lomborg, exactly the man to set us straight on the U.N. climate report and the cataclysmic media circus that’s... Source

Laptop, check. Spanner, check. Screwdriver, check. A career built around me, check. Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus. We are leading the way in sustainable public transport, moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions. Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road to greener journeys. Enjoy a career that's built around you. To apply, visit careers.busserran.ie today. You're not dressing like Cary Grant. You're actually wearing Cary Grant's old clothes.

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. If the Senate does not pass the reconciliation bill, we will uphold our end of the bargain and not pass the bipartisan bill until we get all of these things back from the Senate. 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 Peter Robertson and Rob Lund. I'm James Lyle. It's the day reductive Bjorn Lomberg who will tell us don't panic, but do have a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet podcast episode number 556. Why don't you join us at ricochet.com and be part of the most stimulating conversation community on the web. You want to do it. You've been putting it out for years. Go there today and join. As an additional incentive, I'm going to have the founders now beg you to join on hands and knees plaintively. I would do that. I would absolutely do that. If that's what it takes, I would do it. We really do need members. We need you to join. It's a great community. They're thoughtful, funny, smart, incredibly offbeat. You're always going to find something interesting, even if it's not politics. It's just it's just culture reflection memoir my favorite stuff are just people writing about things they remember

doing or people they've met or experiences they've had and and um you know that's actually what you remember you know i don't really remember people's positions on policy matters and good lord how boring um at the end of the day at the end of the day and it but but that's not what ricochet is about really i think it's about the people and so i would love you if you're a people all that is true people hearing this we would love you to join ricochet ricochet.com um and not only would love it to have you just for the sheer joy of your membership but also for the um for the continuation of the enterprise that we have set ourselves on here ricochet we actually do need your custom your fine custom i would like to note

that if you do join ricochet and you go to the you get the link that shows when we're actually doing the podcast you would see that peter and rob are both wearing what appear to be elvis costello homage glasses black rimmed uh national health service glasses as i believe they're called i would like to get yeah these are not and i want to get these guys should be um advertisers it's called cat c-a-d-d-i-s were expensive and they i got them from instagram they somehow they knew i was buying readers and they're really great they're super indestructible and they're like they're not i not, they're not granny glasses. I'm not trying to like pretend I can read.

And they're not that strong. Like this is a, this is a, this is one and a half times. So I've sort of moved up. I've been at one. One and a half times. Yeah. Okay. Great.

You know, I, I've got quadrifocals. I have so many little lines of gradation. I've got to keep tilting my head up and down to be able to see things. The last time I had my eyes checked, they said, actually, your prescription was too strong. And I love when they tell me that. Then why can't I be Superman? Why can't I see through walls? What do you mean too strong? I've got to be too strong. I want to be able to read as much as possible. Well, even if I was able to read all the fine print, I still probably would have made it through the infrastructure bill. Peter, you're no doubt appalled and horrified that they passed this huge,

ginormous, wobbling thing that nobody knows what's inside of it. And everybody knows that there's going to be a steady diminution of liberty the more laws that they pass. Who knows down the road what we're going to pay for, both in terms of inflation and government control and overreach with infrastructure. But yet it passed. What does that say about the opposition party? It passed. How many Republicans voted for it in the Senate? It was, was it 17? There was enough.

Enough, enough. 19. Thank you. Thank you, Blue Yeti. So what is there to say about that? I suppose, as best I can tell, they made a calculation that the politics, you don't defy a tidal wave. You just don't do that in politics. And the infrastructure bill sounded good.

So it was polling extremely well, even among Republicans. So they decided, led, I think, in large part by our friend, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, that they would make it as least bad as they could and entered into negotiations with the Democrats. And I'm sure they all feel, and this may very well be justification enough in the actual political reality that they were facing, I'm sure they all feel that it's less bad than it would have been if they hadn't negotiated. However, here we are right back where the Republican Party was from roughly 1933 to 1981. That is to say, just trying to manage the expansion of the federal government to make it less bad than it might otherwise have been. that is just unsatisfying rob

yeah i mean uh there's two ways to look at it right there's one way which is the it was three ways really there's one which is the kind of a keynesian stimulus thing where you go well you know let's spend money gonna build stuff and that'd be that's good um i i'm not a big fan of that theory but i can i you know it's been around i get it um the other way to look at it is uh um adroit politics looking at the political landscape that the people want you know people like spending money that it isn't as if the democrats have forced them to do this this is what that overwhelmingly popular most people most americans who say i'm a conservative

they'll also say let's spend money on stuff so so spending other people spending taxpayers money is is good politics but they could also say look we uh it could have been so much worse um it could have been so much worse. It could have been so much worse. As you rightly put it, has been pretty much the Republican Party motto for 80 years. Could have been so much worse. But I guess what upsets me about it is just the the lazy, sloppy way we now say things that aren't true. The nation's crumbling infrastructure, we say, which aren't true the nation's crumbling infrastructure we say which isn't true it isn't i mean they're yes obviously they're bridges and roads that need to be repaired but they are in constant state of repair we do not have a crumbling infrastructure

the the the the the you know a cliche will take hold and people will just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and never really quite question it there's no doubt that there's probably really big things the country could be spending its big fat money on i mean i i'm broken record on this but we just spent a lot of big fat money on finding a vaccine in 10 months and we spent it in a smart way and we got results um give me more of that like how about we spend i don't know half of that infrastructure money on curing alzheimer's or on i don't know something else rather than weird little electric car battery subsidies which actually aren't in this one that they passed. But a lot of like, it's going to be a lot of

local pork. I would even prefer if they said, look, people, you know, is this mic on? Everybody? We know this is local pork. That's what this is. Even that would at least be some, I mean, I wouldn't have to feel so

disgusted at the heavy loaded moral preening that these people do when they spend taxpayer money on nonsense like if they just said look that's what we're doing we're just just pork that's fine i mean it's okay the politicians the politicians of course preen and lie and pompous but we have the press to hold them to account we have the national press to hold them to account so it's all right just relax the washington post the new york times they cast their cold skeptical eye on these people and make them tell the truth right yeah well i mean you'd think, like, I've never met a reporter in my life, I mean, really of any kind, I think on the right or the left, who wasn't one of those kids in school who was like, you know, actually, you know, really, actually, who was that kid? Right, right.

And I'm surprised that they don't do that anymore. Actually, the American infrastructure is this or that. It's much better than you think. It's not crumbling. Or actually, the American health care system has, when you factor in certain diagnoses excellent uh results they don't do that they like they they will only operate under crisis so the infrastructure is crumbling emergency rooms are uh are rapidly overflowing there are no icu units in miami-dade county available everything the climate the oceans are rising everything must be this sort of fox news alert cnn breaking news dramatic music um trembling lower lip kind of

we'll talk about this with bjorn when he gets here this kind of crisis it's like it's it's a it's this it's kind of like this weird neurotic love of the crisis that I find so strange. And that is in the infrastructure bill, this kind of like, you can feel it and it's pork. That's what it is. Hey, so Rob, could I, this is one of those, this is, excuse me. I'm about to ask a question, but I want to put a disclaimer right in front of it so you can slap me around. Because I am very much afraid that this is old man stuff along the lines of, well, in our day. Vertigo. My vertigo. Yeah.

Oh, my lumbago. The lack, the sheer absence in reporting, I'm thinking of the Washington Post and the New York Times in particular, the utter absence of any understanding of the historical context is flabbergasting to me. Do they not understand that this represents one more episode in a struggle that goes back at least a century, and that struggle is over the size and the role of the state? And that has been a defining struggle. Oh, it's just pork. Oh, it's Biden. We're correcting after... No, no, that's not all quite true. There's something larger and deeper going on here. You may not, you could portray it as politics as usual, but it fits into a larger historical context that does really matter. None of that. Zero. Zip. that zero zip and and the other bit is jerry baker i thought this was really perceptive jerry baker put this in his wrote this in his column in the wall street journal the other day that and i this keeps shocking me and you keep finding it tedious when i say it shocks me that you want to slap me reach you reach through the zoom and slap my good i mean like if i wasn't

dizzy i would do it that uh It still continues to shock me. But Jerry Baker just said, no, no, no, no. It's over. Journalism in America is simply not objective. There's no longer even an effort to be objective. They simply have chosen sides. They're on the side of the state. They're on the side of the wokeness.

Yeah. And if all that is true, we're just not getting reporting. All right. Does any of that strike you or am I overwrought again? I know. I think you're absolutely right. I think they chose that they picked a side and that it requires them to do so many weird things that now, of course, we know Governor Cuomo, the governor of New York. He was still the governor of New York. People keep saying he resigned. No, he said he's going to resign. I believe he resigns when he sees live photograph of him leaving the governor of new york people keep saying he resigned no he said he's going to resign i believe he resigns when he when i see live photograph of him leaving the governor's mansion he apparently doesn't have a place to go by the way he doesn't have a home so my i wrote my national review column this week it's sort of a fantasy sitcom and when he moves in with chris and

his wife um just hangs around in a shorty robe and like bosses everybody around um i i don't so what we now know is that the one of the leaders of the me too movement who started a organization called um times up which was if you recall it was designed to sort of pick out the predatory men and like you know and and move against this kind of predatory behavior. One of the leaders was counseling Cuomo on how he can get out of this trouble he's in. One of the leaders of the Human Rights, I think it's the Human Rights Foundation, I could be wrong, but the Human Rights Foundation

was a gay rights organization, was also counseling him on how he can get out of the trouble he was in. So it really is, as you say, it is about power. And there is something, the argument, I think it's hard for, you know, economic conservatives to make or libertarians to make, because it's like weird. And it's not that we don't want roads, or we don't want people to get better health care at a lower cost or we want homeless people in the street or whatever it is, right?

It's that we know that the state, when it begins to attempt to solve those problems, will inevitably try to solve the problem of the human heart, of your conditions, of your inability to conform, of your wrong think, right? It's just natural. It's a natural human impulse to say, I'm not just going to mow your lawn. I want to come in and I want to tell you how to raise your kids. That's what people do. And then at a state level, it's like, yes, I would be great if the government took care of all this stuff and did all these things and it was efficient and even if it's efficient but even if it's efficient it's still naturally going to go to um what are you reading at home i don't know if i don't think you should be reading that that's just human beings want to you know boss each other around that's that's human history

from day one. Now that we've talked ourselves into the slaw of despond, I'd like to note three... Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check. A career built around me? Check. Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus. We are leading the way in sustainable public transport, moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions. Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road to greener journeys.

Enjoy a career that's built around you. To apply, visit careers.busaron.ie today. Three glimmers of hope. Three political... All right, and then I have some hope points. Oh, you have some hope as well okay first of all i'm hoping listeners by now are saying wait a minute enough robinson and long where's lilacs and james lilacs is having technical difficulties we can see him at this point but we still can't quite hear him james will come in ah i think james is back welcome back yes thank you very much um i would my glimmer of hope is that um well i think it's going to be great when i take the computer that's on my desk and throw it through the window it'd be great

because that's gonna it's gonna simulate the economy by getting a glazier in here somebody to repair the woodwork and the rest of it and of course i'll have to i'll have to buy a new computer right after that and uh it will of course be a macosh, just like the one that is confounding me now. But we're back. So I take it that you guys were talking about the overreach of the state and how some people like it. And Rob was using the people's inherent bossiness. And that's true. People are bossy.

People love to walk into the village square and tell people what they're doing wrong. But now we have this COVID machine apparatus that has oddly empowered a lot of people to say very curious things. They want Joe Biden to have the power to issue a mask mandate. When they float the idea of regulating interstate travel, they like that because they want to be the person who is happy when somebody cannot travel across the river to visit a relative because they haven't been vaccinated. It gives them pleasure to think about unvaccinated people dying. And they come up with all of these rules and say, wouldn't it be great if the people who don't believe in vaccines, they can't believe in ventilators either. And they parade this peculiar, perverted sense of moral outlook and drape it in the raiments of reason and

and and compassion it's just a bizarre thing so yes people are bossy and i wouldn't mind that i'm bossy too but now we have this attitude that we've got to boss people around for everybody's good when it's really about their good and where they stand and i'm a big facts guy but and i hate to derail it with what i just said but how do you think actually do you think that actually an interstate ban on travel is is it's a violation of the constitution for one thing um but i know i think you're right i think commerce clause come on yeah i think you're right but i think you're absolutely right about bringing that in because i think that's also part of the issue that we have now with these and i think i said this last week um everything has to be 100 solved like we well

i've been trying to figure out what it is about the the covid arguments that i hear that it seems like weird to me the disconnect um and it's the essential premise which that there are some people who believe that there was is and was a possibility to get to zero covid and that is just simply a fairy tale and it was always a fairy tale totally and we knew it was a fairy tale in we knew we knew that scenario would be a fairy tale that a a virus like, a respiratory virus like this, in November of 2019, right, before anybody had ever heard the words COVID, we knew that would be impossible to eliminate. And yet the arguments seem to me for the masks and the this and the that seem to be like, well, we have to get to zero. You're never going to get to zero. You have to learn to live

with it. It's here. So that kind of utopian attitude, I think, is something that certainly the left has been training itself to do forever, which is that every single piece of sort of natural, normal human negotiation needs to be eliminated for the perfection of the state you know yeah sorry but I can't this one makes me so angry even now even after 18 months of this stuff way way back if we if we turn the dial on the way back machine way back to when we were first told to stay indoors and mask up yeah remember two weeks to bend the curve here we spend the curve right and the and what they were trying to do was at least plausible. And that was, we're going to slow the spread of this thing so that emergency rooms across the country don't get overwhelmed. Fine. That was plausible. Emergency rooms did not get overwhelmed, even in New York, where they're expecting the worst trouble. They set aside the javits center as an overflow and they had a boat and they never used either one fine that was months ago how long has it been maybe i've missed something how long has it been since dr fauci or this uh i can't recall her name

now very well spoken but still the new director of cdc any public health official the president of the united states how long has it been since you heard anyone say here is what we are trying to do you're exactly right there is an assumption some kind of feeling that fauci has been talking about beating the virus we can beat the virus and there is some kind of assumption that they can get it to zero but they know right that on the the science there is preposterous so they won't state it out loud with the result that they're not giving us any end or goal at all what's their incentive to do so look we can talk about moving the goalposts everybody talks about moving the goalposts but it that it that line implies that you're playing the same game.

We've moved the goalposts and we're playing water polo. And before it was lacrosse. And then the goalposts were moved over there and it was some sort of soccer thing. We don't know. There's no incentive whatsoever for them to tell us that there's an off-ramp or an end date. Because, I mean mean if you were a

bureaucrat whose job consisted of going on television and looking smart and being profiled in vanity fair wearing your dark sunglasses would you not want to maintain the idea that you are incredibly important and necessary as a society i mean and you'd be able to back up what you thought by cut by talking about endless coming variants i think that part of it. I don't think part of it is also just the idea that the people who believe the most strongly in the benevolent effects of the nanny state are the nanny staters themselves. And the thing about being a nanny isn't just that you're doing everything for the child, it's that you assume that the child doesn't really understand the complexities of the world. So you are solving this problem. I'm not going to tell you the truth about it. You assume that the child doesn't really understand the complexities of the world.

So you are solving this problem. I'm not going to tell you the truth about it. I'm not going to tell you the truth about masks at the very beginning. I'm not going to tell you the truth about the fact that you're going to have to live with this virus because I don't think you can handle it. I think this is too complicated for your little brain. No, you're absolutely right. And that, I feel like, I feel that everywhere. Here's the good news. And I know we got to go to Bjorn because I, i actually i think these things are totally connected i agree but here's the good news

is that i mean this is anecdotal evidence which means nothing um my encounters with three young people in the past month uh two boys and a young woman young woman is um progressive woke kind of going to college she's you know she. She's in a very liberal college. She's a very liberal college. These are college-age kids. College-age kids. Okay, got it. She was here.

In fact, it was like this week. We had dinner. And she is my goddaughter. And we were talking about masks and going back to school. And she kind of knows already that I feel like it's stupid. And her goal is to be an environmental scientist and to solve the climate change problem. So she's like her progressive bona fides are pretty strong.

And I said like, well, so what you guys can wear a mask. I'm not wearing a mask. I'm tired of wearing a mask. And I said, well, are you worried? Is it that your professors are older? And then she said they can get the vaccine. Whoa. And I looked at her like oh okay so can we now talk about capital gains tax but i mean i'm not gonna then the two boys because in general boys tend to be just from my experience and andrew gutman who's i'm gonna i we hope can do

a podcast for us soon is has already revealed that in fact for the these students and sort of woke kind of environments um the girls tend to sort of buy it sometimes um uh and but the boys are like just tell me what tell me what you want me to say you know so these two boys are the funniest young people i've met in a long long time they had me roaring because of their ability. And they're not, neither one of them is, I would consider conservative at all, but they had me roaring about the nonsense that they hear from the grownups. And it segued from, you know, critical race theory jokes to COVID. And I'm like,

okay, well, if you, if you know that that's absurd and you know that the old people are absurd, then I feel better. I feel better. And I don't know whether you can extrapolate that and say that's true for young people around the country. But my guess is that young people are laughing at old people legitimately and their professors legitimately and um with the last laughs on them of course because they're going to be funding my retirement

which will be glorious but for now there's that's i would say okay that's the i think that there's some light on the horizon that's not only light on the horizon that that's that's i'd send up fireworks right now on that anecdote alone because what's bothered me about this almost more than anything else the general supineness of the american public but kids kids are supposed to be defiant yeah they're supposed to mock their elders and your kids do i know i've been i've been at your dinner table boy do they ever well why they have such they i represent such rich comic material. How could they resist? Hey everybody, before we get to our guests and I know you want to hear them,

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StartMail. Sign up today and you'll get 50% off your first year. Go to startmail.com slash ricochet. That's StartMail with a T, S-T-A-R-T, mail.com slash ricochet for 50% off your first year. Startmail.com slash ricochet. And we thank StartMail for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And yes, I pronounce data as data and data because I know some people have their preferences and I want to give you all the word of your choice. Well, enough of our palaver. Let's welcome our guest back, Bjorn Lomborg, founder and president of Copenhagen Census Center. Bjorn Lomborg is the author of many books, including most notably The Skeptical Environmentalist. And

from just last year, False Alarm, How Climate Change costs us trillions, hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet. Welcome back. We had to have you because the U.N. has said, well, we had a nice run. There's no point unless we utterly deindustrialize and kill 90 percent of the people on the planet. It's going to be an uninhabitable cinder in a couple of weeks or words to that effect. Thanks for having me back while we're still here. What do you, while we're still here, what did you think of the report and what do we, what should we do about it? Well, I mean, first of all, it's a very, very long report. I wish most people tried to read it because then they realize it's not what you hear in the news.

It's a sober scientific report. You know,. It's more than a thousand pages long. It tells you all the reports that they have read. It tells you global warming is real. It is a problem. They also tell you it's by no means the catastrophe that you hear. And that, I think, is really what needs to be heard when people tell you pretty much any extreme weather that you hear about, oh, it's because of global warming. They mostly tell you, we don't know. And they also tell you about some of the things they do know that they're actually good for you. So I think you need to have a better conversation on climate change before we de-industrialize completely.

Bjorn, may I quote to you John Kerry, who is President Biden's, I can't remember his title, but he's the climate czar. He's the climate guy. Here's what he said. Now, listen to this carefully, because it does not seem to comport with your comments of just now. Quote, the IPCC report underscores the overwhelming urgency of this moment. All major economies, if my little comment there is, if it were that urgent, they wouldn't have written a 1,400-page report that takes 20 hours to read. All major economies must commit to aggressive climate action during this critical decade. We have a decade, Bjorn. It's the only way to put us on a credible track to global net zero emissions

by mid-century. We can get to the low-carbon economy we urgently need, but time is not on our side. Overwhelming urgency. And Bjorn says... He certainly says the opposite. That's absolutely true. He's also wrong in two ways. First, the IPC is not a policy informing report. They are policy relevant, but they don't advise any policy. So he simply hasn't read the policy. This is this is their in their fundamental charter that they don't do this. He wants to read this in that way, but they don't. The second thing, of course, is to remember the UN has pretty much always been telling us about a catastrophe. If you remember the first environmental conference the UN had was in Stockholm in 1972. And the organizer who later became the first head of the UN environment

program. Laptop, check. Spanner, check. Screw Screwdriver, check A career built around me, check Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus We are leading the way in sustainable public transport moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road

to greener journeys Enjoy a career that's built around you. To apply, visit careers.busseran.ie today. He told us back then in early 1972, so almost 50 years ago, we have 10 years to avoid the catastrophe. And we've heard that pretty much ever since. Look, it's a great meme and I get why they do it, but it's just not true. Really mean 10 years.

This time, yes, yes, yes. This time, they really, really, really, really mean it. So one last question for me, and then I know Rob and James want to go. Rob actually has questions prepared, so be flattered because that very seldom happens. So just to sum this up, the report that was published is being portrayed widely in the American press, which I know you read, although we're talking to you. You're in Sweden at the moment? All right. is being portrayed as having concluded that things are worse than we thought the day before this report was published, that we have less time than we thought the day before this report was published. And Bjorn says, no, no, no, this is just an update on the data.

It doesn't tell us anything terribly new. Is that right? Well, first of all, it doesn't tell us anything terribly new. It does tell you that if you want to achieve the 1.5 degree target, which a lot of politicians claim they want, then you are incredibly in short time. Yes. But that's been true all the time. Again, it doesn't tell you anything we didn't know. It does tell you a lot of the things that are being associated with climate change. And let me just give you two examples. So you remember being associated with climate change. And let me just give you two examples. So you remember the big floods in Germany, and of course, they were all blamed on climate change. If you actually read the report, they tell us, we don't know if

this leads to more or less flooding, which is also what we've known in literature for at least 10 years. They actually tell you, and I'm just quoting here, that the report has low confidence in, quote, changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events. They have low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale. This is just totally different from what you hear. It tells you you cannot now say that any of these floods are because of global warming. Remember also, floods actually affect fewer people, not more people. We have data since 2003, but that's true over that time period. It also tells you another thing, that you see more heat waves. Remember, as temperatures rise,

which they do, you will see more heat waves. That means more people will die from heat waves. That's absolutely true. You've heard this a lot with the North American heat dome. You heard maybe 800 people die. But actually, many, many more people die from this. A new study in Lancet estimated about 500,000 people die from heat waves every year. But, and this is what you haven't heard, the UN also tells us we get fewer cold waves. And this is very, very certain as well as temperatures rise. That matters because we have 4.5 million people that die from cold waves every year. So what the new study in Lancet that just came out last month shows is that the last 20 years of temperature rise means that we have seen about 116,000 more heat deaths every

year because of global warming, but 283,000 fewer cold deaths. Overall, global warming saves 166,000 lives every year. Look, I'm not saying that, hey, let's have more global warming because eventually this will turn into a bigger problem. Why aren't you saying that? I mean, you want people to die? So, Raul, I just said, so overall, in the long run, as we move further away from the temperature that we have, the temperature that we have adjusted our infrastructure and our system to, the more we will have costs. So, you know, to take a simple point, both Boston and Miami are well based in their local climates. And if it got much hotter or much cooler for both cities, they would have to incur costs. So the point here is

simply to recognize you are not hearing the full story. And of right now, actually extreme weather probably kills fewer people, mostly because heat and cold deaths vastly outweigh everything else. Remember, pretty much all of the people that died this year from what could possibly be called climate-induced disasters is on a scale of about 4,000 people. So 166,000 people is really what matters here. Okay, so our listeners don't know this, but our viewer, the people who are watching us now, by the way, if you're a Ricochet member, you get to watch. So Bjorn is sitting in this kind of, you know, looks kind of glamorous office, kind of home office, surrounded by plants, which I think suggests a little bit of a sense of humor.

Overgrown. Because, of course, they're all going to die. We all know that they're going to die. Only if I don't want to. Only if you don't want to with a precious resource. Yeah. Right. Teaching us how to eat bugs and roast.

So one of the things I always think when you come on, when you read your stuff, and by the way, you had a wonderful piece in the Wall street journal which we'll link to um is that is the thomas souls bedrock foundational belief which i try to say to myself every time i'm about to say something which is that there are no solutions there are only trade-offs And it seems like all you're saying is, hey, let's look at the trade-offs. And for that, the climate change community has written you out. I mean, how hard is it for you to say something fairly moderate and, you know, basically a basic truism, like there are no solution, only tradeoffs in the current community.

It's becoming increasingly difficult because we are increasingly not listening to what the UN climate panel tells us. Remember, the Guardian summarized the UN climate panel report. I think you'll find this humorous. In their headline, they summarized it, and with quotes, mankind is, quote, guilty as hell, quote, of climate crimes of humanity. And I might not need to point out, they say no such thing in the report. But it's just become irrelevant what's in the report. But I want to get back, obviously you're right that there are only trade-offs, but I think we first have to tackle another issue, which is the sort of AOC argument. I don't know if you remember back in 2018, when everybody thought we only have 12 years left, she was saying, and it makes some sense. Well, if the world is ending in 12 years,

why the hell are you worried about money? If it's a meteor hurtling towards Earth and we're all going to die in 12 years, then obviously our only goal should be to spend as much money and throw everything in the kitchen sink. And Bruce Willis said that metaphor, sorry, that meteor, right? You should do that. And that's why before we can get people to think about priorities and trade-offs, we need to get them to realize this is not the end of the world. I have a chart, which I find amazing that is not talked more about. But if you look at how many people die from climate-related disasters, so floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures. We have good data from the so-called International Disaster Database.

They've been mapping this out, all the big disasters in the world. And if you go back 100 years, on average, about half a million people died each year from these climate-related disasters. Half a million people every year. from these climate-related disasters. Half a million people every year. A century ago. A century ago. Last decade, so the 2010s, about 18,000 people died each year. So we've seen a reduction in 96%. If you look at 2020, the number was 14,000. If you look at 2021, which of course is only seven months in, but if you extrapolate that out with what is usually happening in the last five months, we see about 6,000 people die. You need to know that we're not seeing more and more people die.

We're seeing fewer and fewer people die. And remember, this has very little to do with climate. It has everything to do with the fact that we are much richer, that we are much more resilient. We have a capacity to deal with these problems. So why won't people hear the good news? What is the problem? This seems like you're telling me good news. You're telling me that this is something that can be managed and something that could be adjusted and and and and and that there are there the past 10 years in terms of emissions for the united states anyway have been really really good um why why the resistance i mean joe biden just told opec

to pump more gas this is after at least 10 years of the united states of america being a net energy exporter why well why won't he why won't when people come to me and tell me good news i take it like i'm i'm not even gonna look under the hood if you tell me hey everything's gonna be fine i'm done i'm not gonna double check you why are why hey, everything's going to be fine, I'm done. I'm not going to double check you. What's the resistance? I think there's two things to this. One is, you just simply don't sound as smart if you're saying things are actually good. If you look back in time, there's this wonderful statement back in Judean times that prophets that made good news were automatically seen as false prophets. We just assume that that can't be true. That guy is crazy.

So you're just not taken as seriously. Although, of course, if you look through history history those are the guys who consistently have been right uh the second part of the thing is it's just much more powerful if you're a politician to conjure up a big threat if you have a big threat you can tell people but i am going to save you and you know that works a lot better than hey things are actually moving the right direction but you know what i'm going to adjust it so it'll move a little faster in the right direction. That's not nearly as aspirational. It's much more true.

And it would probably also help us a lot more. But unfortunately, it doesn't play as well for the punters. And it also, this dread plays into this preternaturally attenuated adolescent state of despair to show how important I was listening to a podcast. I stopped listening to it a while ago. The guy used to talk about he was so paralyzed by climate fear. He would sit in the shower and rock back and forth, and it guided everything that he did. He was obsessed by it.

It had become a way of thinking, a mode of thinking. Now, when I was a kid, we didn't have global warming. We had global cooling, and we also had pollution. We had the Indian, who wasn't an Indian, in the commercial crying because of the way the landscape had been despoiled. And let me tell you about this. At the Howard Johnson restaurant, the kids were given a little coloring book to do, and there was eco-instructions there. And one of them said that by 1980, if we didn't stop, the earth would be so girdled by pollution that light waves would bounce off and we would die. So all of us kids grew up knowing that we had to do something about pollution.

And as a matter of fact, we did. Laws were passed. Things got cleaner. And that's great. A little bit of an overreach now, but still. So what do you say then to the people who say, look, we did, we did something about pollution then. Why should we do something about global warming now? Even if it doesn't solve it, it's doing something. This is the doing something crowd. Sorry if I've missed out on that. We should definitely do something about global warming.

So global warming is a real problem. Climate economics will tell you uh uh if we don't do anything about climate change this was the conclusion of the the latest u.n report of the the climate uh the economics version hasn't come out yet uh so this is the one from 2018 uh and they estimate that if we do nothing it'll the cost will be equivalent to 2.6 percent of global gdp by the end of the century. So that's not nothing. Remember, it's a big sort of recession. So it's not the end of the world by any means. We should definitely do smart stuff. So we should do a carbon tax. We should also focus a lot on innovation. We should obviously focus on adaptation. There are many other things that we can do.

We should do this smartly. But we should do this with Rob's point, realizing that there are end up, the solution or the proposed policy that should solve it will be more costly than the problem you were trying to fix. We need to know this. And so this gets back to your question, why shouldn't we be worried? Well, we should certainly realize it's a problem, but it's not okay to scare kids witless. It's not okay to make everyone believe this is the end of the world and we need to act right now and we need to do everything. It's a meteor hurtling towards Earth because, first, it's not. Secondly, because it's very likely it'll end up us making really bad policies. And thirdly, of course, it's not going to work for most of the world. You might be able to scare Americans and well-meaning Europeans, but you won't be able to scare most Chinese and Indians who honestly just want their kids not to die from easily curable infectious diseases.

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That's spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash Ricochet5. Bjorn, I have two questions, but they're very tightly related, I think. So I'm going to string them together and then just drop them in your lap and stand back. So here's item one. You just said we need to make sure that the cure isn't worse than the problem. Excuse me. Both of these questions put the matter of climate in the context of the lockdowns we've been through. And here in California, they're having us mask up again. All right. Item one, question one. Throughout this lockdown, at least in this country, Sweden is quite different, but in this country we have seen, and it's gone on for a year and a half now, to my mind, this is obviously the way I see it,

if you see it differently, say so, a staggering unwillingness on the part of public health officials to consider costs at all. This is policymaking 101 in any college course. Of course, it's cost-benefit analysis. But we have to lock down the economy. Well, wait a moment. What will unemployment do to people? We know that when there's unemployment, opioid abuse goes up, domestic abuse goes up, depression. There are costs. So we have just been through this 18-month-long period when the government public health officials have shut us down and refused to engage in anything that even begins to approach a rigorous weighing of the costs. There is some deep thing that I just don't get where the John Kerry's of the world when it comes to climate are perfectly happy to do exactly the same thing. Off we go shutting down the economy without considering the cost. Why is that? Now, here's the second question, because it's in some ways a similar related.

You'll see. As Rob never tires of pointing out, we just created a vaccine in record time and at relatively little cost. Sounds like a lot compared to my own budget, but some single digit number of billions of dollars. And we have vaccines. Are they perfect? No, they're not perfect. But they have decoupled infection from serious illness. And we got it done in a year. Are there parallels in climate where we can say,

instead of shutting down the economy, are there projects we can undertake? Are there research projects? Can we have, okay, you get the questions over to you. Yeah, no, Peter, I think those are two great questions. And yes, they are very related. So on the lockdowns, obviously, a lot of countries, most countries have decided on lockdowns. And if you're a very rich country, that might be an okay idea. Sweden has obviously done differently. There was a study actually done in Sweden showing how much people are willing to pay

to avoid being shut down. And that actually is more than the typical value that you would associate with the extra debt that you also saw in Sweden because they didn't shut down. So there is obviously a trade-off, and you can have that conversation. For poor countries. We have done some of the first cost benefit analyses that showed it was vastly a bad idea for poor countries because they would basically have less schooling. economies. And also remember, because their age population is such that many fewer people are actually at risk, and their healthcare system was so low that it was hard to actually lower the curve sufficiently. It was a very bad idea to shut down. We've actually helped

several countries to not shut down, and that was probably a very good idea. When you say we, just for clarification, when you say we... Sorry, my Copenhagen consensus has worked together with the Malawi Development Agency and with the with the Ghana... Sorry, can I just say that again? So Copenhagen consensus has worked together with the authorities in both Malawi and Uganda and, uh, and, uh, Ghana and India and several other places. So the fundamental point here is yes, you need to look at the cost and benefits, but that's also what you're starting to see. Now, people are fed up with lockdowns and you can't have lockdowns all the time. Remember what UN wants us to do with climate by 2030. They're very honest about this. They said 2020 almost got us to the first year of cutting carbon emissions. They want us to cut 7.2% of carbon emissions. We only managed six. So we didn't have quite enough lockdowns. In 2021, they want two reductions equivalent to two lockdowns.

In 2023, they want an equivalent to three lockdowns and so on. So eventually by 2030, they want us to have 11 size of the lockdowns we had in 2020. You will see popular uprisings way before that. And that underscores your main point, namely that if there is two options, one is to have everyone be miserable, and the other one is to have innovation that means very few people have to be miserable, the latter wins out. Fundamentally, you can't lock people down all the time, but vaccines are a really good idea. Are there an equivalent to global warming? Well, yes, I think there is.

But obviously, we don't know what that is yet, because then we would already have done it. But to give you an idea, so Bill Gates is arguing that fourth generation nuclear is going to be fantastically safe and incredibly cheap. Now, that may be true. Remember, that was also what we were told about the other three generations, and it may not be true. Likewise, a lot of green energy proponents are telling you that solar panels and batteries are going to be phenomenally cheap. That may be true. Craig Vendor, the guy who invented the, uh, or cracked the human genome back in 2000, he's arguing that he wants to develop an algae that soaks up sunlight on the ocean surface.

And it soaks up sunlight and CO2 and basically produce oil. Then you can harvest the oil on the ocean surface. And because it just soaked up that CO2 it's CO2 neutral. So you can basically harvest oil all around on the ocean surfaces and drive your entire economy on fossil fuels and emit no CO2. Again, this is not commercially viable. But the point I'm making here is there are thousands of ideas of how we can solve global warming. Bill Gates, solar and batteries, or these, algae, and many, many others. What we should be doing is investing a lot more money into research and development into all of these ideas, because we don't need a thousand ideas to come true. We just need one. Hey, Bjorn, I'm sorry. Just following up really quickly for the scale of costs on that very point

you just made. As I recall, the Green New Deal and the Biden administration's embrace of they were calling it for spending on something like the order of $3 trillion over a decade, as I recall. What would you work? If we gave you the budget instead, and you said, No, no, no, not the Green New Deal research, what would you spend? So we've argued, and look, there's no right number, but we've argued that we should spend globally about $100 billion a year. That would be a six-fold increase of what the world is right now. That's pocket change. That's pocket change. And also remember that while Biden is proposing to spend this in the US, and there's a lot of

different numbers, he's also promised to spend $2 trillion in four years. There's a lot of different numbers out there. But the fundamental point is, it's a much, much lower number. And it's something that also has the plausibility of actually being able to get everybody else, so the Chinese and the Indians and the Africans to have them spend proportionally to their GDP, the same amount. Plus, of course, instead of constantly having to force everyone to do with less at higher costs, the lockdowns of the world, if we innovated something that was actually cheaper, everyone

would switch. So the beauty of this is it's innovation that has always solved every problem or every big problem in the world. And this is how we're going to fix global warming again. Right now, it feels like a battle between the rich and the old and the poor and the young. And that's the same argument we're having with covid that we're having with climate change that poor young countries are going to suffer rich old countries embodied by the richest oldest face i can think of which is former secretary of state john kerry they're going to luxuriate in you know a little maybe shorter growth smaller growth but they're going to be be fine. John Kerry doesn't limit his use of his private jet.

That's something that poor young countries can do, and young cultures can do. But if you could innovate a new, I mean, algae-based energy source plentiful cheap uh clean energy would be enormously beneficial to poor young countries right so if you care about the poor and the young you should be arguing against these kinds of un draconian biden carry right? You should definitely be arguing for research and development because that's the only thing that's really going to solve this. I think I'm going to draw it a little differently because I think the main point here is it's rich people saying, you know what, we can live with a little less. But obviously the rest of the world

actually have other demands that are much, much more important. And what we don't get is we matter less and less. Remember, the whole OECD, so not just the US and Europe, but Japan and Canada and Australia, New Zealand, everybody else, emits less than a third of all emissions right now. And over the century, they'll emit less than a quarter and potentially much less than a quarter. Most of the global warming that we'll see in the 21st century comes from India, China, Africa, Latin America, and Russia. And those guys are not likely to say, oh, yeah, let's get poorer, but then at least feel green and virtuous. And so even if you don't care about this argument, the only realistic argument is to recognize you're only going to get those guys on board

if you can get richer and fix climate change. And the simple point, I try to tell people this, and it blows their mind, if you run the UN climate panel, climate model, and take away the entire OECD tomorrow. So imagine all of the US stopped everything to do with fossil fuels. Let's just remember how terrible a world that would be. You guys would either be cold or warm, and you wouldn't get fed, and you wouldn't be able to drive. You wouldn't be able to get anywhere. We obviously wouldn't be able to have this conversation.

And we would do that across the entire rich world. But even if we managed to do that and did that for the rest of the century, the impact by the end of the century would be a reduction of temperatures by 0.7 degree Fahrenheit. We would be able to see it, but only just. And that's because the majority comes from China, India, Russia, and Africa, which will be about 2 billion people by the end of the century. We don't get it when we focus about, oh, rich, well-meaning Americans got to cut a little bit. No, and especially not, of course, by becoming poor, because that's never, you know, Germany very clearly has decided they're going to cut very little, but make it really, really painful. No, that's not the

way to convince poor world governments to say, oh, we want to do the same. Of course they don't. What you say is great. And I love listening to you because there's optimism, there's a sense of innovation, and there's hope and there's freedom in what you say. But unfortunately, the people who control the governmental apparatus, optimism, innovation, and freedom doesn't always seem to be in their wheelhouse, doesn't seem to be their objective. So I guess my last question to you is, do you trust that the institutions that run these things are going to have a moment where they realize that innovation, freedom, and opportunity is not only a good thing, but it's what's going to get us out of the very mess that they're so worried about? Or do you think that they'll just institutionally go on and on and on as they always have, trying to keep control rather than do something really brash and exciting? What do you think? Unfortunately, it seems like they'll

certainly go on with saying we need to cut more and more and we need to make it more and more hard for everyone. Just to give you one example of the vegetarian approach. I'm a vegetarian myself for ethical reasons. So I love the idea of there being more vegetarian restaurants. But you mean all those plants in the background are snacks? No, no, you can't eat those, but yes. But fundamentally, you also got to have a sense of proportion. So if you estimate how much do you get out of becoming a vegetarian, you cut about 4% of your emissions. And remember,

because it's cheaper to be vegetarian, you end up spending so much extra money and other stuff that you'll probably only cut about 2%. That doesn't mean it's not nice if you want to do it, but this is not what's going to save the world. This is not what's actually going to cut carbon emissions. And that, of course, is part of the argument to this. I think more generally, if you talk to people who are really, really scared about global warming, I think it's wrong. I think there's little evidence to support their views. But if you're really, really scared about global warming. I think it's wrong. I think there's little evidence to support their views. But if you're really, really scared about global warming, you have to question how scared they really are if they also say, but I don't want to use nuclear. I don't want to use this oil that's CO2 free. Clearly, if you think you're arguing that this is the end of the

world, but there are things I don't want to do to avoid the end of the world. You don't actually mean that it's the end of the world. But here is my answer to your question. At the end, it will become phenomenally expensive and most of these politicians will be booted out of office. If they don't change their their tune, they're going to be booted out of office to populists like Trump or, you know, Bolsonaro or that kind of thing that are simply going to say it's not happening or, you know, just not doing anything about this. And that would potentially be much worse than many other different aspects. But I think fundamentally what we saw in France in 2018, when the president tried to just slab on what was a 13 cent tax on gasoline, and people just erupted and said, we're not having it anymore. You're seeing it a little bit now again in Europe, where both gas prices and electricity prices are rising

enormously, partly because of incredible increases in carbon costs. And people are not going to take that in the long run. That is why they will eventually have to stop. The thing that I worry about is that we will have spent trillions and untold trillions of dollars and will not be very much closer to actually fixing the problem, which is why I would argue, why don't we do the smart stuff that's cheaper, that's better, that actually works and won't get you booted out of office?

Yeah, they're probably still not going to listen. I hope is that we get that fourth generation nuke. My fear is that the response to rising utility prices will be to nationalize all the utilities and keep the costs down artificially while printing vast amounts of money. Yes, because that's how it works. Yes.

Bjorn Lornberg, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been great. I always feel better about these. It's not that I feel bad about global warming, but I feel even more hopeful and optimistic after we talk to you. We just have to make sure these things happen and more people listen to you.

So write another book, and we'll talk about that when it comes out as well in regards to Sweden. Thank you. Thanks, Bjorn. Trust the good news. Take care guys bye-bye uh yes indeed well you you might want to think um the bug eat the vegetarian thing we didn't talk about bugs because apparently that's one of those things that just delegitimizes you if you start talking about bugs right rob have you heard this peter oh yeah people are eating bugs yeah no but but if you say that i'm not going to eat the bugs and i'm not going to live in the pod that has now become something

that the left uses to make fun of the people who don't want to right now that's that's a little too complicated just a second uh but as far as living in the pod a lot of us do or at least we did when we were at the office right and we were at the office and your little veal pen there sometimes you're worried about whether you get a call a call from HR. Well, listen, the people who run these things, and maybe you are one of those people who run things, have your own HR problems too. Like just doing HR. When you're running a business, HR issues can kill you. You got wrongful termination suits. You got a minimum wage requirements, labor regulations, and HR manager salaries are not cheap. No, it's an average of $70,000 a year. Well, Bambi, spelled B-A-M-B-E-E, was created specifically for small businesses.

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And we thank Bambi for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, before we go, we're not going soon. We're not dropping off soon. So don't go running off and going to the end of the podcast, folks. We usually at this point in the lazy days of summer, although it's the crazy season, right? Is this still the crazy season or is the advent of the 24 of the Twitter-driven news cycle mean that it's always the crazy season? Remember when August used to be just sort of silly and meaningless? No news.

Yeah. Yeah, no news or obsession over something and then we all remember think back on it they can't remember in august we were all concerned about x and actually y happened and freaked somebody out stock market crashed or 9-11 or something like that um i'm not saying that i hope that doesn't happen i mean i'd like to if we can keep talking about trivialities that's a good sign but um real life off off intervenes but these aren't the things we're facing now aren't trivialities i mean when you when you have a ramping up of the covid again not no i shouldn't put that the whole covid panic does it seem to you guys like yes yes but there and that there is an almost happy don't say gleeful but satisfaction having the narrative back

yes i agree i agree oh i think thrilled why in a weird way people are thrilled to have the delta variant oh good this isn't going to go away we can continue to feel superior when we put on masks just bizarre i i think there there was something pleasant about being relieved of a lot of responsibilities and there's something pleasant for a year and people saying well i can't do that well we're gonna be able to do that well obviously that's canceled um the retreat i mean retreating is something that people gravitate to, unfortunately. But the trouble, again, is that rich old people aren't telling younger, poorer people in America, as I said before, well, you're just going to not go to school. That's that. You're just going to have to sit in front of a computer now.

That's that. It's out of your safety. And then we go on this bizarre jag that's so strange to me about the young people, and even the New York Times is reporting some kind of portraits of young people who are dying. It's some infinitesimal, I mean, it's not emotionally trivial, but it's a statistically trivial number. And of course, it is terrible if you have a respiratory ailment

or you have what they call comorbidity or you are in some way more at risk to hospitalization and death from this virus. You should stay home, absolutely, and get vaccinated for sure. children in america need to be punished because some rich old people and that's really what it is they're like well you know everyone's got to suffer just like us is crazy especially as the infected fatality rate numbers are going plummeting and the vaccines are basically successful at as jay batacharya said on this very podcast two weeks ago defanged the virus it's just crazy to me and i think what what offends me is all right the people who claim that i believe the science i believe the science i believe the science are not actually following the science correct correct and if you had a choice between people who are freaking out over statistically trivial numbers and demanding masks and lockdowns, etc., and people who believe that the Earth is 5,000 years old, which there are people who believe that.

The people who believe the Earth is 5,000 years old are routinely mocked and derided by the smart people around the country mostly on the coast it's like oh can you believe that i believe science i believe science and yet if i had a choice between who's doing more damage to the world right now people who believe the earth is 5 000 years old or people who believe that um that we need more mask mandates and we need to keep the schools closed and yet the people who believe we need to keep the schools closed are absolutely utterly convinced of their sophisticated uh reading and knowledge of the science and absolutely convinced that the people who believe the earth is 5 000 years old are uh you know credulous rubes and superstitious uh i don't know, whatever.

And I'm not really drawing a contrast, but I'm not really coming down on one side or the other, except that if you believe that we need mask mandates and keep the schools closed, you are not following the science. Stuff like that's going to get you kicked off the Twitter and banned out of YouTube. I'm telling you. Unless you use the VPN. Yes, yes, I know. Although you're technical, gearheads are going to say VPNs and Twitter and YouTube and banning and cancellations, completely different things. Well, you know, sort of, kind of, no. Yes, but no. You ever read that fine print that appears when you're browsing in incognito mode? It says your activity might

still be visible to your employer, to your school, to your internet service provider. How can they call that incognito? To stop people from really seeing the sites you visit, what you need to do is do what we do here, use ExpressVPN. Think about all the times you've used Wi-Fi at a coffee shop. I feel unclean thinking about it. Or a hotel, or even your parents' house. Without ExpressVPN, every site you visit could be logged in by the admin of that network. And that's still even true even if you are in an incognito mode. What's more, your home, internet provider, Comcast, ATT, whatever, they can also see and record your browsing data. And in the US, they're legally allowed to sell that data to advertisers. ExpressVPN is the app that encrypts all of your network data and reroutes it through

its network of secure servers. So your private online activity stays just that, private. Express VPN works on all of your devices, and it's incredibly easy to use. The app literally has one button. You tap it to connect, and your browsing activity is secure from prying eyes. So stop letting strangers invade your online privacy. Protect yourself at expressvpn.com slash ricochet. Use this link, expressvpn.com slash ricochet, and you'll get three extra months free. Three extra months free at expressvpn.com

slash ricochet. You'll learn more there, but what you'll learn will make you want the product today. We thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Oh, I know Peter's got to go, but we have to get, before we go, our traditional late summer watching list. How are you guys spending the waning days of August amusing yourself with the Idiot Box? I'm desperate for your recommendations. We just finished, let's see, we went through Line of Duty,

and then we finished Unforgotten, all the episodes and all the seasons and all the episodes and both of those and now we're really and then we went back east for a little family vacation now we're home we need something to watch and we got bupkis sorry i have no recommendation i'm desperate for recommendations because it's good in the third season it takes a long time to get up there though yeah yeah first two seasons rob i think you were showrunner for bupkis in the fourth season weren't you uh well they want to bring me on to solve some problems like you know you can't i couldn't pick bupkis i was watching a show about a uh sort of uh dower or actually doer i think it's pronounced

uh female detective who is dedicated to what she does, but she's worn down by the world. She's trying to quit smoking. She's got teenage children who are a bit of a problem to her and her divorced husband as well, who didn't understand what she did, but she's got a strong community of women around her that help her keep her balance and centered. I forget the name of the show, but there are 47 series like it. So you probably could just watch anything and that character will pop up. I was so lost that I too, like Peter, I had bupkis. And I had a brief window there where I have HBO Max. And I thought, oh, how long has it been since I watched Rome? So I watched Rome again, two episodes a night, burned through.

The great thing is having seen it two or three times, I did not have to lavish as much detailed attention on it. But once again, it's one of those shows that periodically i have to re-watch it's like deadwood every three or four years i have to re-watch deadwood and it's a pleasure to do so to see what i've forgotten to meet the old characters so i do have bobcus i don't know i'll probably end up watching a perry mason something like that. Oh yeah. That's always that. That's always my problem when I turn it on. I am not watching anything. I, a friends of mine decided a couple of months ago that we should have a zoom

book club. So it's like four or five guys are now getting together in zoom. So I have to catch up to the book. And that's what I'm reading. It's not a good book, but it's sort of interesting and science fiction and we each get to pick one. So now I'm up next. And so I got to find a book for these guys to read. That's what I'm doing. My wife is reading a book that takes place during the French Revolution. And apparently the French Revolution in this instance, and it's some sort of magical realism is controlled by an evil, satanic, magical genius who controls an army of dead.

And I kind of like the idea that everybody who is decapitated in the reign of terror rises from the grave and staggers around to their pity. But I think it removes the French from the responsibility of having to own up to the actions of how their particular version of what we did curdled so quickly and ended up so disastrously. Well, I would like to say that this has ended up quite well and not disastrously at all. On a note of hope, I hope you've enjoyed this show. And by the way, StartMail, Quip, Bambi, ExpressVPN, can you have a better suite of products?

I don't think so. Support them for supporting us. And of course, we know that you should join Ricochet today. If you haven't already, get there, do that. Oh, by the way, the best Ricochet radio show, hosted by moi, is going to be playing around the country this weekend on Radio America Network. Check your local listings.

And take a minute, he said, to leave that five-star rating he begged for the 9,000th time. Actually, for the 556th time I've done so. I should have done it last week when it was podcast number 555. That would be the perfect way to tell you to go give us five stars. But no, you know, we'll just continue to remind you,

tweak you as they say, Peter's already gone. We wish him well, Rob, you're still here long enough to say, well, long enough to say goodbye. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

Next week. next week It's gonna get easier Ooh, child, things will get brighter Someday, yeah We'll put it together and we'll get it undone Someday when your head is much lighter Someday, yeah We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun Someday when the, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun. Someday when the world is much brighter.

Ooh, child, things are gonna be easier. Ooh, child, things will be brighter. Ooh, child, things are gonna be easier Ooh, child, things will be brighter Someday, we'll put it together and we'll get it undone Someday Someday, we'll walk in the rays of our beautiful sun Someday Right

Ricochet Join the conversation. Someday, someday Someday, someday Someday, someday Ooh, child, things are gonna get easier Ooh, child, things are gonna get easier Ooh, child Things are gonna get brighter Ooh, child Things are gonna get easier Ooh, child

Things are gonna get brighter Right now Right now Right now Right now Right now Right now