The Ricochet Podcast - Heightened Risibility

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

We're erring on the side of positive expecttions again this week with Bjørn Lomborg. His new book is Best Things First where he sets his sights on cost effective, acheivable goals that will lift the world's poorest out of miserable conditions and inch us along in the direction towards those sustainable goals we hear so much about. The billions of dollars question: Are the world's prosperous ready for a tangible win-win?James, Rob and Steve aren't quite done with Barbenheimer; they discuss Ohio's pro-life prospects; and muse on words that make them feel sophisticated. Soundbites from the open: Truman's announcement of the atomic bomb's drop on Hiroshima and Oppenheimer.

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Read my lips. No new access. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and me, James Lylex. Stephen Hayward is sitting in for Peter Robinson, and we're going to talk to Bjorn Lomberg, the skeptical environmentalist, about 12 things we can actually do. So let's have ourselves a podcast. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima

and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 7,432. Nah, I think I got it wrong last week. I think I said something in the 300s, which was presidential elections ago. Decades ago, it seems. No, this is 6-5-4 in the waning portion of the beautiful summer in the year of our Lord, 2022. Kidding, 2023. I'm James Lottlix here in Minneapolis, joined by Stephen Hayward,

sitting in for Peter Robinson, who will be back. Peter's, you know, it's not like we're getting letters with cutout pieces of words from newspapers magazines demanding a ransom no he's we know where he is and he's coming back rob long will be along shortly uh steven how are you on this fine summer day i am just staying dry in a rare summer uh rainstorm out here in california and wondering exactly where peter is stashed in the witness protection program because i'm right well we'll see him like henry hill waving from the door in arizona somewhere as he picks up the newspaper i did hear the distinctive uh inimitable chuckle of rob long rob are you god i am here thank you james i um just briefly like not visible but i'm now visible and risible as they say when risible is one of

those words i don't i i don't use it because i'm never sure if i'm using it correctly so i'm turning to steve now and saying steve is it it's like bad right yeah but it's like bad in a sense like it's not risible is it's not uh i don't look this up but i i'm so i'm right with you i write the word sometimes i usually don't say it because i'm never i mean i think risible is the correct pronunciation but i always want to say risible which i think is quite wrong and but it doesn't mean it's worse than bad though i mean you would never say well you would say this is a bad piece of pie you know it's dried it's overcooked it's got flavor you would never say a risible piece of pie unless you meant that the the cook was so incompetent or

deliberately trying to give you a bad piece of pie i don't know if that i'm just making this up off the top of my head but i you know and i just looked it up it It means provoking laughter. Oh, yeah. It's ridiculously bad. That's also another one, right? It's so preposterously right. John Kerry as our climate negotiator. That's a risible spectacle. That's a risible. President Joe Biden.

That's a risible president. Yes. Okay. All right. The one word I do like to use all the time, because I love pronouncing it properly, is er, to er. Yeah. And I just like that,

because I just always feel very smart when I say, well, I don't mean to er in that respect. And the people are like, oh, I thought, oh, yeah. That was the great, weird George H.W. Bush. You know, he was in many ways a very admirable person, but he wasn't used to talking to people, especially on a campaign trail. And so he would almost always, when he would answer questions, answer using the concluding sentence of the briefing paper so when people

say well you know you know mr vice president when he's running you know you have a history of being sort of pro-choice on abortion and now you say you're pro-life so could you explain it and he and he his response would be like err on the side of human life which would be like like what does that even mean like you'd have that was like the 10th step of the proof he was trying to use and um and it was always baffle people so i but i i still like using the word er um but i did want to instead of erring since we brought up the topic um i think i don't even know what the i don't even know what the topic is like yeah i got bounced off by our by our office wi-fi The next thing I know, Rob is talking about erring as opposed to erring. When you err on the side of human life, it's like, oh, we made a mistake.

Nobody's dead. And Rob, how do you handle an err text as the academic said? Err text, yeah, right, exactly. So speaking of erring on the side of human life, Ohio is one more state that is kind of fundamentally conservative ohio along with missouri or kansas uh that have when they when the voters have given been given the option to uh restrict abortion laws or or the proxy option i guess because ohio was sort of a you know it wasn't a direct vote it was sort of a proxy vote um they have opted in conservative places

to preserve abortion rights um steve how much trouble is the pro-life movement in at this point i mean they got what they wanted, right? Roe v. Wade is overturned, but it seems like part two, they didn't have that quite worked out. It's like the marijuana legalization parties. Now what do we do? Minnesota, we have a marijuana legalization party that's looking around. I mean, they're going to be like the March of Dimes. They're going to assume, well, we cured that, so we'd better disband. Now we got all this

fundraising stuff going. Let's figure out something else to do. Anyway, Stephen, go ahead. Yeah, well, I think you overstated maybe a little bit, Rob. I mean, I think that the pro-life movement has misread public opinion. There's a large group in the middle who are, they don't like late-term abortion, they're open to some restrictions, like 15 weeks or something like that. But also, I don't think they're comfortable writing it in the state constitutions. And so, actually, you know, you live in California for a long time, there's always a built-in bias for a no vote, especially for a measure that would lock something in a state constitution. And so, this vote was like, oh, you know, 60-40 almost, rejecting, changing the threshold for

voters to make a change to the state constitution to 60%. That's because, for listeners who may not be following, there's an initiative that's been put on the ballot in the fall, I think by the pro-choice folks, that would write into the Constitution very sweeping abortion rights that are as radical as Roe versus Wade, you know, abortion right up to the point of birth. And it only needs 50% plus one vote to pass under the current system. I think a lot of voters, my prediction, Rob, is that that vote, when it comes in November, will be closer than the vote we saw this week. I think that it, I'm not sure that the pro-life community won't win at the end, but they do have to make arguments. And that's something that Republicans were totally

unprepared to do after the Dobbs decision last year. It's really a shocking failure to anticipate what would come next. I mean, we had the decision leaked, as we know, so they ought to have been gearing up and nobody seems to have done that. But can I ask you another question? Do you think there's something, is there something odd about this where, you know, whatever they do, polls, I don't mean just polls in the United States, but polls in Europe. Yeah. Everyone kind of comes down to abortion rights for first term, big fat question mark, second term. Correct. Pretty much an X on the third term correct that's kind of where that's where some people who to insist that they are pro-choice are that is where

some people who insist they are pro-life are neither one of those positions neither one of those positions pro-choice or pro-life, really embraces that big, wide, middle American argument. Who's going to get there first? I mean, who's going to get to where normal Americans are first? Because it seems like the pro-life movement keeps talking about conception and contraception, and the pro-choice movement keeps talking about well you should be able to abort that kid a few days before you know elementary school like when when when who's going to read the american public correctly first if i had a hunch i i but it's i don't know i have to

take odds on it i think republicans, although it's going to be difficult, only because, you know, look, the Democratic Party today, you know, it's an amazing thing I like to point out to people that within our lifetime, a Republican presidential candidate named George McGovern had two pro-life running mates. You know, the first Tom Eagleton and then Sergeant Shriver. And by the way, McGovern, you know, he was stigmatized as the candidate of acid amnesty and abortion.

McGovern's view in 1972, now that was before Roe, was this is a matter for the states to decide. That's the Republican position or the post-Roe legal position. And as we know, the Democratic Party now is, that is the litmus test if you even want to speak at a Democratic National Convention. And so I think that they're dug into the extreme abortion position because of their, you know, the fanaticism of the feminists and others in their party. Republicans have more running room, but it's difficult because, you know, the pro-life community is very strong in the Republican Party. And, you know, in places like Florida with a six-week ban and other places, I think they are out of step with majority opinion. And they're going to have to persuade people if they're going to want to have restrictions that significant. Yeah, that was sort of a big blunder, I think, for Governor DeSantis.

I was talking to my old dear friend, Ann Coulter, and sometimes Ann will just start yelling at me. And I'm not really sure what she's yelling about and she was yelling about DeSantis the six to six week rule or whatever what it was and I and I couldn't figure out why she was yelling at me because I'm as you know I'm not the governor of Florida um just kind of a habit with her and start yelling yeah but then I realized oh no she's making a political argument she's saying that was very foolish. He could have set the actual pro-life movement or the abortion restriction movement back by being that draconian. I'm not sure I believe that,

but I thought it was an interesting argument. Yeah, I don't know exactly the sequence of events there because, remember, it was a bill the legislature passed, and he has a lot of sway with the legislature, and he could have told them that's too severe, but veto vetoing that bill would have been i think equally damaging to him politically um so yeah he was caught in a tough spot and i'm not sure if he was paying attention or just what that was about well i think now we can probably posit that he might not have been paying attention he doesn't he's not he's not quite the killer candidate that i was hoping for

nope i mean he's got time to turn around it's i'm not making any prognostications but um i'm disappointed in his um performance how do you say a beer with a hint of italian sea salt for a crisp and full flavor flavor. Sale di mare. Sale di mare? Si, new Birra Moretti Sale di Mare. Available for you to enjoy in all good retailers nationwide. Salute!

Get the facts. Be drink aware. Visit drinkaware.ie Now in the future he will be seen as one more element that led to the inevitable assumption of gavin newsom as president of the united states so and that'll be fun hey from abortion let's switch to something that's a little less contentious global warming climate change all the rest of these things um but you know you can either talk to an ideologue about it or you can talk to about

somebody passionate about the case and knowledgeable and not running around with hair on fire. And that brings to mind, of course, Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, False Alarm, and most recently, Best Things First, the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest, and our global SDG, that would be Sustainable Development Goals, promises to them. Bjorn, welcome back to the show. Hello. Thank you.

It's great to be back. Well, you know, the obvious thing is to say we don't want to hear all 12 solutions because we have to leave something for people to get when they get the book. But let's pick a few solutions that, because the solutions that are always being fed to us are always sort of amorphous but dire. We have to stop doing certain things immediately. We have to stop driving our cars. We have to stop eating hamburgers. We have to stop getting on planes.

A variety of things that most people reject out of hand because, essentially, they're being told that their life has to constrict down to a little dot and they can't move more than 16 blocks. That's not what you're talking about. Some of these solutions, then solutions then of the 12 give us a few off the top of your head yes uh james so thanks a lot and it's great to be back um i should probably just preface this with saying that what the best things first book is about is all the other problems in the world uh so what we're trying to look at is, remember, everyone in the rich world will be talking about climate change, because that's, you know, that's what left when your kids are not dying from easily curable infectious diseases, and you kind of fix nutrition and all these other issues. But the reality is, when you look across the globe,

we promised a lot of things. The UN, and that means also the US and every other country in the world, has actually promised to pretty much deliver everything by 2030. It's something called the Sustainable Development Goals. We promised to fix poverty and fix hunger and fix education and fix pretty much anything you can come up with. So we're also going to stop wars, we're going to end corruption, we're going to end global warming, and everything else in between. We're also going to get organic apples and community gardens to everyone. So we've literally promised everything to everyone. What we tried to do with this book is to say, look, if you actually want to do good, where should you

start? Because we're failing badly on all of these promises. And so these 12 things that we're talking about here are not climate change, because it turns out that it's really expensive to do just a tiny bit about climate change. But it's incredibly effective to do something about very simple things. So I'm going to give you a few examples. Two of them would be maternal and newborn health and education. So the first one, this blew my mind. I didn't know. I'm pretty sure you didn't know either,

that it's still incredibly dangerous for most women around the world to give birth. So about 300,000 moms die each year. And perhaps depressingly, 2.3 million kids die in the first 28 days of their life. So this is not rocket science. They basically die because a lot of these things could have been avoided at very, very low cost. Let me give you one example. So about 700,000 kids die each year because they don't start breathing when they're being born. This happens in rich countries as well, but we have a very simple technological fix. So about 80% of all kids that are born come out fine, start breathing. 15% need the flap in the back that you get when you just get born and then you start breathing the last five percent need positive air pressure they basically need a mask on top of their mouth

get some air in there and then they go and they go and they're ready to go we need to get that out so we need to get women into facilities around the world and we need to have very basic things like detergent and antiseptics and we need to have these uh these medical masks they cost 65 and they can save about 25 lives over the next three years of the lifetime so what we estimate is by focusing on maternal and newborn health for about five billion dollars a year not nothing but you know in the big scheme of things and certainly everything else we're talking about it really is couch change five billion dollars a year we could save 166 000 moms from dying each and every year and we could save 1.2 million kids each and every year that translates into every dollar spent will deliver 87 worth of good that's just a fantastic

thing it's one of those things we should thing. It's one of those things we should be doing. It's one of those things we don't talk about, but we should be doing it. I'm dying to know because this is fascinating. And I do want to know the other things you have to mention, but who is responsible? We set up this goal then, right? And nobody sits down to figure out how we can achieve the end that you just spoke about. Who would be responsible? Who is responsible for doing the things that you're talking about? And if they're not doing it, what instrument should we use to make sure that this happens? Because it seems simple and obvious. So when everybody in the world comes together

in New York and promises to do all good things, of course, nobody is really responsible. Everyone is responsible. We've just all made these amazing promises, which is one of the reasons why we've just made all of the promises, because why wouldn't you? If you're already getting going, you might as well just promise everything. And so the reality is, it's both third world governments, so the poor country government that should be investing in these things, and they're not sufficiently. One of the reasons, for instance, in hospitals is, if you're're a doctor do you really want one more of those masks that'll resuscitate children well yeah in principle of course you would like that but you'd much rather have the mri machine that's more fun and sort of you know the machine that says pling if you know

the uh the monsoon python uh skid right so So the idea here is to say it's about those boring, slightly odd things that we really care all that much about. Those are the kinds of things. So yes, developing governments should be focused on this. Philanthropists should be focusing more on this. And again, it doesn't have the cachet of doing something grand, but it happens to just save a lot of lives. Or USAID and other development spending, we still spend about $100 and almost $200 billion a year on development spending.

We should focus some of that money on those particularly effective ways. So we all share that responsibility. But what I'm trying to do with this new book, The Best Things First, is basically to get everybody to focus on there are 12 amazing things that for very little money could do amazing good. Why don't we do more of that? So that's really the basic idea. The other one, let me just give you one on education, because everybody sort of agrees that education is incredibly important. But the problem is we've managed to get almost all kids into school. We're technically teaching them to learn, so they become literate. So they've actually learned to sort of identify the individual words.

So we have about a third of a billion kids in school in the poor half of the world, and we estimate that 80 percent of them are failing really really basic things let me just give you one of those examples they ask uh 10 year olds so they give them a sentence to read and the sentence go vj has a red hat a blue shirt and yellow shoes what color is the hat the answer answer is red, right? But unfortunately... Wait a minute. I'm working this out. You want to kick off... I'll take your word for it. I'm not a mathematician, but I'll take your word for it.

Yeah. The terrible thing is 80% can't answer this question. And the simple point is you have learned to identify the individual words, but you can't string them together into this question. And the simple point is, you have learned to identify the individual words, but you can't string them together into a sentence. And of course, that means you're not going to be very productive when you grow up to be an adult. That's one of the things that education helps you with, that you actually become proficient, and you become productive. So what we estimate is, if we could make kids more, learn more learn more learn better they could become more productive they would help both their societies and of course themselves and their families become richer in the future uh there are some really really good ways to do this there are also some really bad ways to

do it so a lot of people will argue we should have more teachers we should you know pay teachers more and that's all well and good but actually turns out indonesia did this so they promised to double the spending on teachers they have one of the lowest class ratios in the world they doubled the spending on teachers and because of the way they did it and they did in different regions at different times uh you could actually do a pseudo randomized controlled trial study uh and one of the most famous papers is called double for nothing it basically investigate that yes you doubled the pay of teachers it made the teachers more happy by the way not surprisingly but it didn't actually change the impact on the students there was no learning

impact the way you should do it and we know this very very well is to teach the individual student at his or her level. So imagine a class of 50. You know, they're kids that are far ahead of the teacher, and they're kids that are struggling terribly. The teacher should teach each one of those at his or her own level. But of course, you can't do that if you have 50 kids. But what you can do is to put them in front of a tablet, one hour a day. the tablet has educational software and that tablet very quickly finds out exactly your level and teaches you at that level what happens if you do this one hour a day you're only doing it one hour a day because you have to share this tablet with many other kids but if you do that one hour a day at the end of that school year

you've had seven hours of still boring not very effective teaching and then one hour of tablet you have actually learned what you would normally have learned for three years so you've just gotten much much better now remember it's still not terribly well but it means that these kids will become much more productive in their in their adult life we estimate this will cost about 10 billion dollars in total but the benefit to the poor part of the world will be that they will be about 600 billion dollars better off each and every year this is just astounding so you know about 65 back in the law so but i think of you as a an environmental, because that's the most important problem that we face.

Because I read the newspaper and I watch television, I keep up with the news, and Hawaii is on fire, and there are wildfires everywhere, and the weather is getting worse and worse and worse, and climate change is going to destroy the world very soon. In fact, depending on who you talk to, it's overdue. The destruction of the world and the destruction of our oceans is running late. It should have happened a few years ago. And it just soaks up all the attention. All of these little kind of, what do you want to give everybody an iPad? All this stuff is like, so what, man? The world is on fire.

Why are you trying to get me to get an iPad for some kids in Indonesia? I don't get it. And moreover, you're talking about more kids surviving, which means overpopulation. Wait, now you're getting ahead of me there, James. I was about to nail him on that, too.

And more productivity, which is more earth-destroying. Better we have fewer people. They don't do anything. Yeah, yeah. Those are very good points, and I think a lot of people have them in their heads. And so I should just say, I've never just been the environmentalist. I know. For more than 20 years, I've run the Copenhagen Consensus, which is really a center where we work with more than 300 of the world's top economists and seven Nobel laureates,

and trying to assess where can you spend an extra dollar and do the most good. Now, one of the things you should spend money on, because we're a rich civilization and we can walk and chew gum, is fixing climate change smartly. But there's also a lot of other issues. If you ask most people around the world, they actually, and not surprisingly, care about the fact that their kids might die tonight from malnutrition or from easily curable infectious diseases. That's their main concern. And, you know, we would be the exact same thing

if we were at that point. So let me just... But isn't that what the environmental movement is trying to do? They're trying to get the emergency on the, as, as, as imminent emergency number one. I mean, if you read the paper, they are basically trying to convince you that your children are going to die tonight if you don't, I don't know know put your plastic in a recycling bin yes and and i i think that's just simply that's just simply wrong uh you know when you talk about the world is on fire uh uh i i just uh recently pointed out that the nasa satellite studies actually show that so we have had satellites we will put that link it's a great piece of wall street journal we're going to put that link in there you go to the show thank you uh so uh uh since 2001 we've had satellites since 2001. We will put that link. It was a great piece of the Wall Street Journal. We're going to put that link in there. Go to the show. Thank you. So since 2001, we've had satellites cover the entire world,

being able to pick up where is the world on fire, where is it not. It used to be about 3% of the world in the early 2000s was on fire. The last year, in 2022, it was at 2.2%. It's never been that low. Now, this doesn't mean that obviously the 2.2 of the world that did burn that's terrible for those places but it's still much much better than three percent burning and we need to recognize that why this is happening mostly because people actually don't like fire and so we take active measures to make sure that it doesn't burn this is smart sometimes it's a dumb like in in california if you don't actually make a script of fires you

have buildup of fuels and there are lots of you know bad political arguments and and and bad so-called solutions to this but the fundamental point is to recognize this is not a world that's getting worse and worse or what's spinning out of control this is a world where mostly we live longer we're better and better health and we have many many different benefits and when you're talking about these things for instance on fire you need to look at the global data just like when you look at how many people die from climate related disasters like floods drought storms and wildfires. Turns out that 100 years ago, about half a million people died each year. Last decade, about 10,000 people died each year. We've seen a reduction of 98%, again, because when you're rich, you're more resilient.

So, okay, I know Steve wants to get into this, and I just have one more, because I always ask myself, you know, whenever I'm confronted with almost any question, what would Thomas Sowell say? I feel like that's good. The one phrase that Sowell uses all the time and it's in my life. I can't get rid of it.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. The solution to emissions, people think, are electric cars which run on batteries which use cobalt and cobalt is now dug in africa by children their fingers it's a it's i mean to say dickensian is not even approaching the misery of the the child labor happening to dig cobalt out of the earth. And in a phone battery, it's a tiny amount of cobalt. In an EV battery, it's a huge amount of cobalt.

More EV batteries means more misery off screen. We don't have to see it. We can still drive around in our fancy EV cars. And that is a trade-off. But people don't ever think of the trade-offs. So your argument is, well, you know, let's do what we can around the edges, make life better for more people in the most efficient way, and we'll tackle climate change so if i'm talking to a climate change activist i say well i just spoke to be on lombard he says we'll get to that in like i i i think i think the the argument is more hopeful than that uh so first of all we're rich and smart civilization as i mentioned we can walk and chew gum we can actually both be working smartly on climate. But instead of

maybe spending $1.2 trillion, as we're spending right now, mostly in buying solar panels and wind turbines that are not terribly effective, we should be spending much less money, but much smarter on green energy R&D. So fundamentally, if we can make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels, we can make everyone switch, than fossil fuels we can make everyone switch not just rich well-meaning americans and europeans but also the rest of the world which of course is china india and africa which is going to be the vast amount of emissions right in the 21st century so that's the way you go you know uh there are constant arguments that maybe we've cracked uh fusion now well i would still hold off on on buying uh on buying

the stocks yet but you know but if we can actually make that happen we're fine we have plenty of energy for the entire civilization at very little or no environmental impact that's how you solve problems that's how the u.s became the biggest reduction in uh certainly over the last decade, in greenhouse gas emissions, not because of Obama or Trump, but because you had fracking. And fracking basically meant that gas became much cheaper than coal. So you switched a lot of your, especially electricity production, from coal to gas. And since gas emits about half as much CO2 per energy unit, you reduced your emissions dramatically.

Not because that was the main point but simply because green innovation made it cheaper but at the same time we can also and you you mentioned think around the the edges i actually think this is a little more so just to give you the blunt uh sort of uh basic bottom line of of the book the best things first the 12 uh amazing things the world can do we estimate the total cost of all these 12 things is about 35 billion dollars a year now admittedly i don't have that i don't think any of you have that that amount of money but yeah steve's got it in in the big scheme of things this really is couch change, right, for the world. $35 billion a year could save, and this is the astounding thing, it could save 4.2 million lives each and every year.

That's not tinkering at the edges. That's, you know, sort of every seventh death in the poorer part of the world that we could avoid. And it can make the poorer part of the world, so the poorest 4 billion people in the world, it can make them $1.1 trillion richer each and every year. That's almost $1 per person per day for the 4 billion poorest people in the world. We could basically spend $35 billion and do on average about $52 worth of good with that for every dollar spent that's just astounding so we should certainly be addressing climate change but do it smartly and that leaves tons of money to actually do all these other things that for most people are much more important i

would argue certainly morally is also an important thing to do so instead of telling your your environmental friend you know, no, no, we'll get to climate change in 30 years and say, let's fix climate change smartly, but let's make sure it doesn't soak up so much of the oxygen that we don't also address many other issues that are actually much more important. So Bjorn, it's Steve Hayward out in California. Great to see you again. I forgot to wear my black Bjorn Lomborg t-shirt. It's blue. It's blue. Well, I'm colorblind. The last time we were together, I dressed listeners just like

Bjorn to look like a, except I don't have the physique. I want to continue on this climate thing for just a moment. I mean, of course, we waste shocking amounts of money. We're going to spend $400 billion on green energy in the U.S. That's more than 10 years of your budget for making the world a better place, right? And get very little for it. On the other hand, I wonder if we're not, and of course, climate hysteria is, you know, ratcheted all the way up to, you know, 11 and beyond. I wonder if we might not be at a turning point right now, happening in real time in front of us.

And what I mean by that is, you know, the head of the UN said, we now live in a time of global boiling. But then, and I bet you caught this, the new head of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said when he, a week or two ago, said, you know, we need to cool it with the climate panic. Cool it, by the way, the title of one of your books a few years back, Taking Your Advice. And then the other thing I notice is all around the developed world,

governments are trying to gracefully back away from some of their net zero by 2050 commitments. It's happening all over Europe. Both parties in Britain are trying to back away from it gracefully. And then the other thing I notice is, you know, France last week, France for a while said we're going to move to wind and solar as our nuclear power plants age out. Well, they just announced, no, actually, we're going to do a whole new generation of nuclear plants. Canada just yesterday announced that they may restart a nuclear power plant they closed down 10 years ago. And here in the U.S., we finally turned on our first significant nuclear power plant, first one in 40 years. I'm starting to think that realism is finally overtaking the rhetoric.

And I don't know, what's your sense of things? Are you optimistic that with all the foolishness we have to put up with, that reality is finally starting to gain the upper hand? So I'll say this much, Steve. You're absolutely right that when governments are faced with the realization that this is going to cost literally trillions of dollars, remember, more than what we spend on most things in the world. And remember, you know, it assumes that India would spend 9% of its GDP. It assumes that the world would spend about a third of its global tax intake. And this is in the most optimistic case. That's never going to happen.

So fundamentally, you're right to say this is not going to happen. I worry, though, that the sentiment still seems to be, all right, so we're not actually going to achieve what we promised, but we are going to try to spend as much money as we possibly can get away with within the green conversation. And again, from an efficiency point of view, and certainly recognizing that there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs, we really need to understand that if we spend a truckload of money on green, and especially if we do it as way we've done right now, which delivers fairly little at very high cost,

we're basically throwing away an opportunity to do so much more good and also be more efficient with the money that we should be spending on climate. So my worry is, yes, there's, you know, things are not quite as bad as they could have been. But I think if you ask most people, they think when they see this constantly on the news, here's another fire, here's another flood, here are more heat waves, we're all going to be killed, we're all going to be doomed, we need to spend as much money as is necessary. Oh actually i don't want to spend all that much but spend almost all of it that's not a good sign of anything and of course what we really forget i was just this morning i was uh on a on a uh on one of

the uh indian g20 uh meetings in mumbai uh virtually uh and and you know uh they care a lot more about all these other things that we just talked about, because if you're not as rich, you have other and more significant priority. So I think we need to recognize we're not going to get most of the world on board with our sort of very elaborate and very expensive policy. We need to spend smarter and cheaper, but we're not there. So I would argue there's two parts. One is the climate bit, where you start getting people to realize you think this is the end. We've heard a lot about heat waves. And absolutely, it is to be expected as temperatures rise because of global warming, we will see more heat waves. And those will be more deadly unless

we make sure that people can actually afford to have air conditioning and turn on the power when they need so uh remember in in phoenix uh uh the financial times did a a study on this and pointed out that there were a lot of people uh dying from uh sort of upward 400 people uh dying in in ph heat. Most of these people were homeless. Most of them were drug addicts. It's unclear to what extent there was a strong or small overlap on those. None of them died if they had access and could afford to turn on their air conditioning because you don't die from these things.

Similarly, of course, you need to recognize that many more people around the world both in rich and poor countries many more people die from cold uh so about nine times as many people die in cold globally in india it's still seven times as many we have this idea that heat is really dangerous yes you should certainly take care in heat but cold globally is much, much more dangerous. And again, what you need is cheap energy. So we should make people aware this is not the end. There are problems. There are also benefits because we actually see less cold waves.

And that means a lot fewer people actually die from coal. This should be welcomed. We should be celebrating that. And at the same time, of course, we need to remember, for the 4 billion poorest, there are many other issues. And what I'm trying to do with the book is really try to get people enthusiastic about, look, it's not just that there are a lot of problems, there are a lot of really, really cheap solutions. There are things that we can do that cost, compared to most of the things we're talking about, a pittance, and would do an amazing amount of good. I would love to see us not just wallowing in this the world is ending kind of thing, but actually saying there are a lot of things we can do and not just the climate.

You know, you're right. You're right. But there's an attitude amongst the misanthropist Malthusian element that regards humanity as a virus, as a plague, as an imposition on this earth, an unnatural imposition, that the more we have of people, the worse off the world is going to be. And that's why when you talk about things like nuclear power, and I'm sure you've seen the stories this week about nuclear fusion, right? A little bit more hint, you know, it's always the greatest power source that's not quite there yet, but they're getting closer. And there's the sense that if we unlock a key and we have unlimited cheap energy, too cheap to meter, that there has become this sort of moral halo that surrounds the

idea of reducing consumption and reducing all the things that we do that it's almost detached from the actual perils that we may follow that that there's this moral construct that is even if you had the cheapest power in the world that they still would say we shouldn't consume that we are that we that you and and that's the difficult idea that's taken seems to have taken root in the culture that needs to be dislodged, written branch, says me. But I think it's taken root for a very long time. And I love this expression. I didn't come up with it, so I can say that.

But it seems always to be that when people say there are too many people, it's just enough of me, too many of you. That's really good with that sort of conversation. And, you know, that I think is really hard to defend morally for most people when you push them on it. And, of course, it also has absolutely no purchase for most parts of the world. They're not going to say, oh, yeah, I'm sorry, I have too many kids. And, of course, remember, one of the things that happen when you actually start saving people is that you get fewer kids. You get fewer, more people. We're not in a situation where this is a runaway sort of the world that's going to be hugely overpopulated.

Probably most parts of the world is going to be worried about us being too old and having too few kids uh towards the end of the century uh but the second part is the idea of of worrying about well maybe it's maybe it's good that we don't have all that much we should start talking about degrowth and all those kinds of things uh again first of all i think it's worth pointing out this is just no purchase for most people uh you know certainly not in the poor part of the world, but really not in the rich part of the world either. So, you know, it's a few academics who, funnily enough, you know, fly into conferences in nice places and talk about how everyone else needs to grow. But but but but I think fundamentally what we have to recognize is that we saw the very same thing back in 1989 i don't know if you remember there was a brief bout of where everybody believed there might be cold fusion it was called

back then uh and so a los angeles reporter called the environmentalists and said let's assume that this is actually true it turned out not to be true let's assume that this is clean what do you think and they were all against it yeah this is clean what do you think and they were all against it yeah this is back in 89 they were like oh that's the you know uh the the argument is oh but a green bulldozer can can fell trees just as well as a as a as a dirty one right and you know it's like uh paula ehrlich was it was like giving an idiot child a machine gun uh and yeah and and what that tells you is that, yes, these people are going to object no matter what.

In some sense, that seems to indicate that this is something entirely different. It is the world where they want to focus a lot more on having enough and, you know, finding out what's the meaning of life with yourself and not having a lot of extra stuff with it and stuff like that. That's great. Hey, I'm happy if they want that but they're not going to foster on the rest of us

and i don't think most people are going to allow them uh so so again my argument is it's much much better to keep this on a positive point to say look there's the real problem with global foreign it's not nearly as bad as what you're telling us uh but it is a problem and we should try and fix it but we should fix it smartly instead of stupidly as we've done uh for the last 30 years which is basically wasting trillions of dollars and achieving almost nothing but that doesn't mean that there's not a lot of other issues as well like kids not being uh educated well enough uh like these all theseasingly, we're also looking at chronic diseases. For instance, remember, most people die not from infectious diseases or climate,

but from heart disease or cardiovascular disease and cancer. It turns out that cancer is pretty expensive to deal with, but heart disease is incredibly cheap. It's basically about getting people hypertension drugs. We know this. It works well in the rich world. That's why we dramatically reduce the cost of hypertension and the deaths from hypertension. We're estimating that we could do the same in the poor part of the world. We could save one and a half million people, mostly older people. So we would save them on average about five or six years. But that's still incredibly good. That's really worthwhile. And what we find is, yes, this was, you know, there's a lot of chronic disease, it would cost about $4.4 billion a year, but it would save 1.5 million people from dying from

chronic diseases. There are a lot of these smart things. Let's emphasize those amazing smart solutions. So, hey, I'm now referring to this week and last week. We had Marion Tupion last week who wrote a book called Super Abundance. And so this week and last week, I mean, these are obviously very different books, but they are kind of positive. I mean, this is sort of good news two weeks we've had, right? I mean,

all the other news, I don't know if you've noticed, is really really lousy, but you guys seem to be giving us good news. I guess what I would say is that I'm looking at all the things that you say are kind of wrong that would be easy to fix,

or not easy to fix, but we could fix sooner. Yeah. And we don't do it. And so part of me is optimistic because it seems like you've set out very concrete problems that have very concrete solutions

that are actually kind of well within our wallet. And we don't do it. So my question is are you optimistic about possibility but pessimistic about what might happen are you optimistic about both things because it's very easy for me to read your book and say man here's what we ought to do and then realize that we're we're never going to realize that we're never going to do it. Are we never going to do it? When did it work?

When did this kind of thing work? So two things. I think, first of all, all of the things that we look at are well-proven things that you can do. And again, we're not assuming that people will be magically phenomenal at doing this, we're assuming that people will be incompetent, and they will be corrupt, just like they normally are. And even then, with all the you know, yes, some of these iPads are going to get stolen, some of these teachers won't use them, right? Some of the kids are not going to actually pay attention, all that stuff. that's all included in the estimates of what we

find is such an amazing opportunity so these are these are proven things that we know we can do and look they've happened a lot of places so uh uh you know we're working with malawi one of the poorest countries in the world they're actually rolling out ipads to all of their primary students across the country right now so So these things are happening. We're just trying to push this a little further. Is all of it going to happen? I think that's your real question. I would love to be able to say yes. The true answer, of course, is no. What we're trying to do, we have a saying in my organization, it's not about getting it right, although I would love that,

it's about getting it slightly less wrong. We're trying to move the world a little bit towards being smarter about this. I actually find that a lot of people pick up on this and say, yes, these are the kind of very pragmatic, very simple things that we can all agree on. I think that's also an important part of the conversation. I'm going to ask you to be a little bit of a shrink. I know we've got to let you go. But why do we, as a culture, maybe as a people, why are we always gravitating towards the Armageddon, towards the end time scenario, towards the giant disaster, rather than,

and I have my own theory, right? Which is that it's much easier in a weird way to think about this huge tidal wave of misery that's going to hit us than it is to say, well, actually, you know, if you roll up your sleeves here and you do this, this, and this, and this, I mean, it's harder work to do what you're talking about than it is for me to sit and complain and to march.

And yeah, sorry. A short little wrap-up question from Bob or Rob Long there, which is hours of discussion as to why we believe this. Why are people people? So, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to be able to tell you the shrink answer, but I think that it just simply has a lot more sort of commercial appeal. It has much more interest appeal to talk about all the stuff that's bad. That's why you constantly see this.

This is just clickable in a totally different way than positive news is. Just to give you one example, there's a study where you gave people a pile of good news and a pile of bad news. And you ask people beforehand beforehand which one do you want to read and everybody said the positive news and then of course in actual fact we all end up reading the bad news because it's more fun so so the the truth is yes we have this terrible sort of negativity bias uh one of the things that i think is totally overlooked uh and and really is the argument uh that we need to emphasize is if you look at the last 25 years, each and every day, the world has lifted 138,000 people out of poverty, each and every day of the

last 25 years, every newspaper in the world could have had this in their front page every day for 25 years, last 24 hours, 138,000 people were lifted out of poverty you never heard it because it just happened every day uh and and so in that sense we need sometimes to sort of take a step back and realize yes there are lots of problems but fundamentally we are actually a civilization that solves more problems than we create that doesn't mean we shouldn't fix climate change it doesn't mean we shouldn't do all these great things that you've never heard of, you know, with moms and kids dying and something we can do something about incredibly cheaply. But we should take our time to not just wallow in the self-pity and this terribleness and actually say we can make an incredible change. That's what, you know, best things first is about. I agree. I know we got to run, but do you think

that psychologically we need to make our peace and embrace prosperity? Because the prosperous nations love to complain about it. When you tell prosperous progressives that people in Africa

are being lifted out of poverty, they're being lifted out of poverty they're not or india especially they're not as thrilled about that as they should be right i don't know i'm i'm not gonna bet against human nature i i just simply think it is what it is uh but but what we need to do is to tell people look every once in a while i'm glad you had to be on uh last week every once in a while, I'm glad you had to be on last week. Every once in a while, let's take a step back, realize things actually going much better, and then say, all right, this doesn't mean I'm not tomorrow, I'm still going to consume a lot

of bad news. But at least I should recognize that there are some very concrete things I can do if I'm smart about it. If I'm just going to wallow in this self pity, I'm going to do dumb things. Why don't I do a little less dumb things and a little more smart things so fix climate change effectively by focusing on r&d green out r&d and then fix on these 12 simple smart things that would make the world amazingly much better that's the problem simple and smart because we like to wallow in grand visions of apocalyptic nonsense because we're bored. We're bored and we're comfortable, and we fear somehow that we are deserving a comeuppance that will come in the form of these things. And you're right about the sensational news that people will choose, warming climate change to blame experts suggest i mean so it's it's a new you know religious doctrine into which they can plug all these things best things first though is what we best consider and that's bjorn ormborg's latest book the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest and our global sustainable development goals promise

oh oh here's the problem. How do we do to answer Rob's question? Everybody else, how do we get them to go along with it? We tell the people who are doing these programs, look, these are going to have noticeable effects. These are going to be really effective and they may actually solve some problems for good, but don't worry. You guys will all still have your jobs. I think once they're assured that even after we solve problems, they'll have their jobs. they'll be on board because as long as there's still problems, the money flows. Bjorn, as always, a great pleasure. We learned so much and there's so much more we can talk about. So we will have you back soon as possible. Thank you. Thank you for wrapping up Good News August. Yes,

that's what it's been. Good News August. Gentlemen, interesting thing here in terms of energy consumption and the like. Rob right now is trying to figure out if I'm going to a commercial. I'm not. I kind of am. I'm searching through the rundown, seeing what the hell is he doing. It's probably a dynamic insert, as we call it in the business. No, I am on battery power. That's what she said. That's what she said.

That's what she said. Good thing Peter wasn't here. He blushed so hard. That's why I did it. Steve's here. Steve's fun. He's a man of all men. Peter can stay out for a while. Let's have some jokes. It'll be good news working blue August.

If this room worked blue, you have no idea i know i know i'm on battery power which is interesting and i can't get any of my cords to work here i lost wi-fi before i'm having all these technological situations i'm looking at a countdown ticker here that says i'm going to be out of business shortly the good thing is i got new time enough here for rob a to tell you about the necessity of meeting up in person in the flesh with Ricochet people. You can be as blue as you want. And then also to discuss the other issue of the day, which we'll get to, he said, promoting it in a second.

I do have to say to Reworking Blue, if you do go to one of the Ricochet meetups, they are fun. And you know, there's, we, as you know, we have a very strict dress code for comments and posts on, on Ricochet. We try to keep it clean. And that's what we, that's kind of what we try to do at Ricochet. You know, you join Ricochet and be a member and you know that you're going to have good civil debate or conversation or even civil small talk, either way. But when you get together in real life, IRL with members and you have a couple of cocktails,

it gets salty and it's a lot of fun. And I don't think it got any saltier than it did when we were in New Orleans, but that seems to be the place for it. When in Rome, right? So if you love Ricochet, please go and check us out and see if you want to go to a meetup. If you are listening to this podcast, you think, what is all this Ricochet stuff?

Go to Ricochet.com. We would love to have you join our club. The reason we want you to have you join is because we keep it civil. And I say this all the time, or I used to say it all the time, but it bears repeating, that if you pay a little money and very little money every month to join a club you have skin in the game and that's one of the ways we keep the conversation civil interesting lively and um fun to join and you get such great you get you get such great stuff i don't know if you saw in the member the member feed is not just a bunch of people be you know convention about this or that jenna s wrote a just a great piece about american graffiti and american culture and the

rest of the way that now we're still capable etc et cetera. It's something that I've read in various forms over the years, but she is, she's a member. She's a mom. She works a job. She doesn't make her living putting words together, but she's like better at 87, 94% of the people who do. Embarrassingly, yes. Which I just love. And you can find these people on Ricochet. Anyway, going ahead, Rob. Yeah, absolutely.

And also when things happen in the world, I mean, there's a whole bunch of very, very smart military members who are giving us info. When things happen in construction, whenever things happen, there's members of Ricochet kind of joining the conversation there. But that's online. We also meet in person, IRL.

If you want to meet up with us, we would like to meet up with you. So please join Ricochet. The next meetup, well, the next scheduled meetup that I knew about was in Cookville, Tennessee, Labor Day weekend, September 1 through 4.

Go to ricochet.com, go to member feed and check that out. We'd love to see you there. But this just popped up, which is August 28th in Montgomery, Alabama. Paul Ray, who is a long-time

Ricochet contributor, wonderful guy, brilliant guy, and kind of a weird, wry sense of humor character, very kind of sly, very funny guy. We call him the Wryye ray is that what you the rye ray yeah okay he's also brilliant like you know a brilliant presidential story and brilliant um american historian um and constitutional scholar he's giving a lecture at the air war

college in montgomery on august 28th and so some members are thinking about meeting up before or after paul ray's lecture if they are uh Rickshay members that I know and love, they will be meeting up before and after. And so if you like to join, join them. And Montgomery, by the way, if you haven't been, has a couple amazing things to see. If you're a Hank Williams fan, that's his birthplace, and there's a beautiful statue of him sort of in the center town,

and a museum for him. And there's also the, and this is'm i'm mispronouncing it i'm not calling it what it is uh it's the national memorial for peace and justice which sounds very vague but that's it's really it's really the lynching museum and it's it's moving but it's incredibly fascinating it's beautiful and it's kind of very sobering, but not... It's exactly how America really should be acknowledging

the past in a way that isn't accusatory and screaming and yelling and marching the streets. Sober, thoughtful, and beautiful. Physically beautiful. And Montgomery's a beautiful town, and it's really worth visiting. I would go for Paul Ray.

I'd go for Paul Ray, stay for Hank Williams. Stay for the lynching museum. And for the Ricochet meetup. That's August 28th. Those are the meetups we have until the end of the summer, and there'll be more in the autumn. If these appeal to you, please show up and join and say hi.

If the idea appeals for you but that's the wrong time the wrong place here's what you do you join ricochet you post something on the member feed you say hey how about here and that and then and people will show up because ricochet members will show up oh yeah it's like adding water to sea monkey powder they just exactly we're going back and forth on slack a little bit about the apocalypse thing here and steven said uh we're hardwired for apocalypse and perry who's behind the boards was saying apocalypse makes us feel instantly interesting and relieves responsibility win-win uh it's true we we do love this and it it brought to mind i mean i hardwired for it could be just being chased

by saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths and the rest of it and just thinking that's the end of the world. It's built into us. But I saw Oppenheimer, and I'm not going to give you a review. It's a good solid, impressive piece of cinema. I think the fifth hour drags a little. Oh, man. I'm out.

And Oppie was a communist. He was. He was a communist. Sorry. But it's... I was one of the few people in the movie theater, and I don't say this to buff myself up, but you probably agree. It's like, yes, Edward Teller. It's good old sweaty head. But at the end of it, we're supposed to walk out of that movie feeling horrible and feeling miserable and all the rest of it. But the apocalypse that it prefigures is not with us yet. It's not off the table.

But I did not come out of that movie feeling incredibly depressed because the end scenes are imaginary. And we used that thing and it brought a conflict to a close fairly quickly. So the debate about it has been interesting subsequently. There on Twitter, a lot of people were complaining that for a movie about it, it centered the white men, and there was absolutely nothing about the Japanese people who became apparently a put-upon ethnic minority in the context of the Oppenheimer movie. There's nothing about their context of the Oppenheimer movie. If I can interrupt, James, the latest complaint yesterday in Nature magazine is not enough of the women who worked at Los Alamos are depicted in the film. So, you know, we're getting the whole spectrum. Okay, yeah.

All right, well, good. So, I brought that up only, I guess, that this is going to stand as a fascinating, Rob, you can get into this here because you're a writer and you guys are in strike, right? Is that this is going to stand as an interesting summer with two cultural bookends, the likes of which I don't think we've seen, in which the culture, actually, the overculture, the pop culture, everybody made a point of binding together Barbie and Oppenheimer. There's no better way to bookend the culture. And it's great because the Barbie movie, as we talked about last week, is not a stupid, vacuous, vapid movie. It is if you want it to be, but it isn't. So this is a really interesting cultural moment that I think is

pretty interesting and good and salutary. I just don't have the perspective that people will have in 2043 to tell me how it all turned out. So that's my statement. Stick into it. Don't even know what I said. Rob, you may ignore what I said and go on something completely different or restate my point and make it as your own.

No, I will. I would like to do the last, the latter. I would just say that, you know, Ira, you know, everybody's wondering about media, blah, blah, blah. What happens? What happens? What happens. What happens is it all gets busted up the way it always is. And then the companies, the big companies, they have to break themselves up and get spot and sold and there'll be some corporate sharks coming in, M&A. But what happens is it's not going to change the business.

People like movies and they like TV shows. They want to laugh. They want to enjoy. They want to get... They like stories, right? So everybody who writes stories or acts and stories is gonna be fine um the people who are investing in these companies are probably not gonna be as fine uh which is okay that's called capitalism that's perfectly legitimate um i would just say if i were giving advice to um studio heads and media investors which i attempt to do all the time and they never listen because they're stupid. They should listen to me. I would just ask them to cast their minds back

to summers past. Now, I'm sure Barbie is a great movie and I'm sure Oppenheimer is a great movie. I don't probably do that. But in the summers past, I write comedy, so I focus on that. I remember two or three or four or 10 comedies coming out, one every weekend.

Yep. Loud, noisy, Adam Sand out, one every weekend. Yep. Loud, noisy, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller. John Candy. John Candy, yeah, that was like really old. But like, you know, Will Ferrell, Anchorman. I mean, the summer had these big, fat, funny comedies. And you would go and you'd laugh and they were crazy. I remember seeing Anchorman and thinking, this doesn't make any sense.

And it was hilarious. I remember seeing Zoolander in a crowded theater. And there's this ridiculous, these models, these male models are like dancing around a gas station, having a water fight with gasoline. It's so crazy. And it's hilarious. And where's that comedy?

Where are those? If you're sitting in Hollywood. Yeah, they they're not two times are too dire for comedy yeah yeah right well although i think you guys haven't seen either movie yet is that am i correct in that i i have i've seen them both okay well i've seen them both too james so and i think that uh i think a lot of barbie's got some really funny stuff in it uh now it's not cast as a comedy it's a whole lot of things i do think that a lot of Barbie's got some really funny stuff in it. Now, it's not cast as a comedy. It's a whole lot of things. I do think that a lot of people on our team have overreacted to Barbie in the way the patriarchy is overdone, in the same way that the left can't get blazing saddles, right?

We always say, well, they can't get it. They can't get it today. Back then, when I went there as a liberal kid in high school, I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen because it freed a liberal approach to culture and humor and everything else, freed us all from the old strictures of racism and the rest of it, and we could enjoy it for what it was. For all the times that it poked a thumb right in the face.

But now, if you it's down to identity politics it's completely forbidden yeah well i think i mean as long ago is body shame throughout the whole thing i mean i thought the uh the whole patriarchy business and barbie was was so over the top that you had to realize it was mostly satire couldn't take it seriously but on oppenheimer so a quick story i was at the reagan library for a long conference about Reagan last weekend, and one of the panels was about the day after. Remember that thing on ABC? Oh, yeah, right. I remember that. That had like a Super Bowl level of viewership. Oh, my God, right.

It was a big political problem, and boy, if you see it today, you can find clips on YouTube. It was really clunky. I think Oppenheimer was less apocalyptic. I mean, yeah, it's implied there. It has to be with nuclear weapons, I think, James. But it's a little more open-ended, and that brings me back to just one point about the apocalypse, and then I'll shut up, which is the problem with the modern, and I'll put it this way, secular apocalypse is they lack the hope you have in the end times of any major religion, right? The apocalypse in the Bible and in other faiths is always hopeful. It's going to be the redemption of the earth and the redemption of humanity. The environmental apocalypse from the beginning has always been hopeless. And that's why I think it ultimately doesn't work. They don't offer any kind of redemption or hope for humanity.

The redemption comes from saving the earth. The redemption comes in becoming selfless, Christ-like figures who are willing to expire so that an undisturbed, verdant paradise can spread and sustain. And that's why sustainability is, again, sustainability is the version of being saved, is the version of entering grace. It has all the same terms, it has all the same satisfactions, but it has none of the transcendent human moral emotional qualities that we ascribe to the great religions it's just it's paganism with a with a with a self-hatred of humanity built baked right into it and i say it's spinach into hell with it yeah i would just like to um one of the one of the most important or meaningful books to me that i read long long

time ago was by paul fussell who wrote a wonderful book called class and then he wrote a wonderful book essays called thank god for the atom bomb yeah right and i was looking for it and i was looking for this one quotation because he talks about people having second guessing the dropping the atom bomb and he talks about john kenneth galith, who at the time was a wartime economist, and he was persuaded that Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. And so the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. It meant, you know, at most two or three weeks. Of course, there was no indication that we're going to do that at the time.

And of course, Allied casualties were running over 7,000 per week. So two or three weeks. Of course, there was no indication they were going to do that at the time. And of course, casualty was running over 7,000 per week. So two or three weeks is 14,000. And this is one of his big paragraphs that I remember reading when I was, I think, 20 or 21. Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed or wounded. Three weeks more,

21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the 15th, the war pursued its accustomed course. On the 12th of August, eight captured American flyers were executed. Their heads were chopped off. The 51st United States submarine Bonefish was sunk and all aboard drowned. The destroyerer callahan went down the 70th to be sunk and the destroyer escort underhill was lost that's a bit of what happened in the six days of the two or three weeks posited by gulberg is what we should have been waiting what did he do during

the war he worked in the office of price administration in washington yeah i don't demand that he was experienced that he experienced having his ass shot off i merely note that he didn't and because fossil was at that point training on iwo jima for the invasion of the mainland my uh my father was a navy air flyer operating out of the philippines at in july and august of 1945 and he was a flyer the the whole war, mostly out of Australia and the other islands. And he said the last six weeks of air operations were the biggest losses of the entire war. He lost almost half his squadron. They had not stopped fighting, right? And we forget all that. Yeah. Yeah. No, my dad was on a ship in the Pacific as well, headed there to fight. He was a machinist, mate, but his battle station was manning a gun on the deck uh so yeah my daughter and i were having this conversation

and she was just i mean she was not she was just exploring the morality of the whole thing as one does when one is young and i just had to pull you know the unfair note well you're you're here probably because it happened yeah it would but in a, it's not unfair because it's a choice that we all have to make. We all have to say, would I sacrifice my existence for this, for Object X, for Historical Act X, for this thing? And, you know, as I was saying before, you know, as the quote that Bjorn had, more, you know, the problem isn't me, more of me, but less of you. However, we want more of you and we want more of you to go to apple and give us five stars and we want all of you to come to ricochet very soon and see what 5.0 is going to be like and for those of you who are saying i i'm

sorry i don't get it you got it he nailed it perfectly with 4.0 this is perfection itself who's saying that? I know. Would they like to invest? The usual straw man that I invent for such things. Just it was a person that I was arguing with in the shower, and I won that this morning, too. So that same person is now saying, how can Ricochet get any better? Well, just you wait.

Show up, and you'll see at Ricochet 5.0. Stephen, great as ever. Rob, great as ever. We thank our guest, and we thank you for listening. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4, for now,.0. Stephen, great as ever. Rob, great as ever. We thank our guest, and we thank you for listening, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4 for now. Next week. Next time. Bye, guys. Ricochet. Join the conversation.