The Ricochet Podcast - Me and My Shadow (Banned)

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

They say you are the company you keep. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya learned that the hard way after he started cavorting with a bunch of fringe lunatics bent on killing grandmas — Or no, wait… the other thing. It was time spent with fellow reputable, highly credentialed scientists that got him into trouble. With the released Twitter files that show he was placed on an actual blacklist... Source

Yes, well, you know, uh, no, yes, no. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. We've laid this out, you've heard from my MSC colleagues as well, where it was either Brittany or no one. That was the option that we were given. 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 Robinson and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs and today we talk to Dr. J. Shadow band no more. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! It's the Ricochet Podcast number 621. I'm James Lilacs of Minneapolis. A bit gray, slate gray, overcast.

Talking to Peter Robinson, of course, in sunny California. Perpetually sunny California. And Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Rob Long in also sunny Florida. What am I missing here? Son, ah well, I had plenty of that in Mexico. Now I'm back for the grim, long scrape of the winter duration. But Peter, you were in sunny Israel, were you not? I was. I was in sunny Israel, were you not? I was.

I was in sunny Israel with our producer, the Blue Yeti, on, you know, time zones, I'm so discombobulated, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday through to the first 50 minutes or so of Tuesday. So what does that make? Two and a half, almost three full days if you add it all up. You want to know my impressions? Well, you met with somebody who people may recognize. Correct? I think you sat down with

BB, something B, I don't know what the B stands for, but BB. Netanyahu. Yes. Yes, those are the impressions. Recorded of not worth it not worth it not even on the falafel okay but you know but i recorded an episode of uncommon knowledge with the man who has served longer as prime minister of the state of israel than anyone else and who was

about to and i think early next week is likely to be the case, that he's about to form a new government and be sworn in as prime minister again. That show just went live, Uncommon Knowledge with Bibi, my story, in which I interviewed him on his life and times and the book that he has just written. But here's what I want to tell you about Israel. I went to Israel after five days in Spain and five days in Italy, both very beautiful places, staggering history, charming people. But here's what happens when you get to Tel Aviv. You see cranes all over

the skyline, building, growth, and you hear the voices of little kids there are families everywhere and you it just feels like life life a country that has a future yeah uh yeah i know what you mean well i remember being in Finland many years ago, and I was walking along a path, and the path had painted on the ground pictures of who should use it. There's a bike path over here with a picture of a bike. There's a path over here for people who are walking. And there was a picture of an ideogram of a mother and a child. And because of the way that people had walked singly, they had erased the boundary where the mother held the child's hand. And I thought, this is demographic Europe right here, this sad, faded picture of a son-nurse relationship.

Great to hear a place that's not going down that direction. Well, we'll talk about that a little bit more and preview it because, of course, we want people to watch the Uncommon Knowledge piece. And Charles, I have a bone to pick with you. However, you do. I do. It's a femur. Laura, I'm waving it around like a monkey in 2001, you know, which led up to the greatest edit in cinema history, the most consequential. It's this.

Are you aware? I put this with my wife had to put together some food for a meeting, a little thing that the gals were having. I wasn't aware of that. No, you weren't invited. And the new thing here in the States, as you may have heard, is a butter board where you get different kinds of butter and you flavor them the like. And she was told to get Irish butter. And I thought, well, you know, that's expensive stuff. What's the matter with good old American butter? Why are we importing Irish butter when we've got American butter here?

So why are we giving money to red-headed people when we could be spending on our domestic butter? Okay. And then later a guy makes a statement, a perfectly reasonable, well, maybe a little bit inelegant, about the relationship between red-haired people and butter, saying that he believes that all red-haired people should be drowned in butter. And people like you jump all over him, not because of what he said, for the way he phrased it, when frankly nobody else is talking about the need to drown, you know, the relationship between Irish butter and American butter.

So I want you to defend yourself, exactly. You're just a kind of naysaying that I think is bringing this country down. What you're saying is that in order to achieve full mega-mega trickle-down, that's my favorite phrase to say because it's just so satisfying, comes out, mega-mega trickle-down, we need to drown redhead people in butter. Are you endorsing this? Right. That was the pith of the gist of a great piece that you did for the national review, where you were essentially saying you're tired of it. It used as an example of Donald Trump coming out and saying that we should

drown all red haired people in butter, which would lead then to the response to people saying what he really meant. We need to talk about this. Why are you criticizing him for this? And you were saying basically that you're mightily sick to the pith of the core of your marrow of this whole discourse right? Well I'm sick of two things the proximate cause of my sickness

is this endless drama out of Mar-a-Lago where President Trump says something or does something that doesn't help conservatism or the Republican Party or the United States in any way is then defended in what he did or said reflexively

by people who still think that they must be attached to him in order to advance conservatism and then he pulls the rug out from beneath them and of course this was a a tongue-in-cheek hypothetical he would come out and say we need to drown all red-haired people in butter but if he did say that you would have some people coming out and saying you know that is actually the one thing standing between us and national greatness and then the next day he would say, I didn't say that. I said we needed to butter the red hair and the drown. And then those people would say, see, the media once again jumped all over him. And my point is, at what point do we just say, you know,

this is a sideshow? Well, the media absolutely adored it. There was a story, I think it was in forbes which doesn't mean anything anymore forbes has been corrupted entirely by this uh by the habit of just letting anybody write for it saying the trump tied trump had a loan to a company tied to north korea well apparently they had a loan to daewoo which is a big big south korean company which at one point had some industrial relations to north korea or something like that completely overblown story but the headline was great so you you have both of these things working back and forth the constant

need to come up with a we got trump's now the walls are closing in and on the other hand the stuff coming out of Mar-a-Lago but I get your point it's all exhausting and nobody wants to go through that again do they look sometimes the epobrium that was thrown Trump's way it was entirely unjustified I'm not just talking about lights or Russiagate I'm talking about the response to normal political behavior. And sometimes it was worth enduring. If you want to make changes in politics, you're going to be shouted at. And if you're going to make conservative changes, you're going to be shouted at really loudly because you're going to inspire the press and academia and many corporations now to shout at you and so if on the other side of a fracas there is a change moving the capital to jerusalem or getting out of the paris climate accords or passing a tax cut or building a wall or

whatever you want to do great great. Have those fights. But the fights at the moment, and this is what I was saying I was sick of, are over nothing useful. It does nothing to help me, conservatism, the Republican Party, or the United States for President Trump to have dinner with Nick Fuentes,

who is a white supremacist. It does not help me or conservatism or the Republican Party or the United States for Donald Trump to say that we should terminate parts of the Constitution in order to remedy what he contends was an injustice in 2020, which was not. He lost the election fair and square. And I wonder at what point people are going to cotton on to this, because the whole argument for Trump, and this was sometimes true,

was, look, look he will like a battering ram go through anything for you he will deal with the slings and arrows he will become a poppin j for you but this isn't for you this is a sideshow and i think it's just becoming more and more obvious that it is now unmoored from the broader aims of the right we were discussing earlier another political person of interest and i'm sorry i heard you aspirate there peter but you'll want to get in on this too kristin cinema kristin cinema if you could repeat uh for the listening audience the remarks that you were making as we were chatting before because uh we have a including me i i joined a little late

i'd love to hear this about kirsten cinema's switch to independent status well i think that it probably won't change anything in the immediate term because she's going to keep caucusing with the democrats i hear and as a result she will be akin to angus king or bernie sanders who are technically not democrats either but it does say a couple of things that are important the first one is this is a repudiation of the democratic party sure she's not become a republican because she's not a republican but she was a democrat and now she's not and all of the criticisms that she leveled in that arizona republic piece in which she explained herself are criticisms of the Democratic Party. By definition, she's criticizing being pressured,

she's criticizing extremism, she's criticizing the party feeling as if it owns the seat that she occupies. That is a warning sign for Democrats, and I don't know if they are capable of seeing it given the euphoria over the midterm but that is a warning sign and it should serve as one the second thing I think is is interesting in the in the local sense is that it probably makes it slightly easier for the Republicans to take that seat back perversely enough, because the Democrats are still really angry with her. And there is a guy in Arizona, I believe you pronounce it, Ruben Gallego, who is desperate to run for the Democrats against her and threatened over and over to primary her and probably still wants to take that seat. And when parties fight a great deal, they tend to

lose. Look at presidents who have been primaried. They never win. Once you're primaried as a president, you're done. It was true in 1976. It was true in 1992. It was true in 1980. Jimmy Carter was primaried by Kennedy. And if the Democrats are split and fighting in Arizona, then it will give the Republicans, which have really collapsed in Arizona under Kelly Ward, a chance, especially if they pick someone like Doug Ducey, who has a history of winning elections there by a great deal. So I do wonder whether, perversely enough, she's actually helped the Republicans maybe dig themselves out of the hole they've created for themselves in Arizona. Charlie, I have a question. Charlie and James, I have a question for both of you. The morning after the election, pondering the effect of Donald Trump on the outcome, a line which I cannot find and I can only paraphrase, but somewhere in Hemingway's book, Death in the Afternoon,

about bullfighting, he has a description of the matador implanting the sword between the bull's shoulder blades in the final act. And the phrase is something like, the bull was already dead. He just didn't know it yet. And it felt to me as though, that's Trump. It's already in some basic way over. That just as you pointed out, right up until almost the day of the election, there was some prospect that Trump could once again say, vote for me, vote for my candidates. We're going to do this and this and this for you and for the country. And now it's clear that Donald Trump's message isn't anything at all like that. It's vote for me, you owe me. Vote for me, I need to have justice

done to me. It's just over. Am I getting ahead of the actual on-the-ground politics, or do you feel that some basic shift like that has happened as well? Well, I think so, but I'm inclined to see it. I mean, I'm predisposed to believe that's the case because it conforms to what I think. I don't want to give in to that because it just it, you know, it confirms my priors. It's entirely possible. But, you know, we live and spend a lot of time ricocheting elsewhere with people who are much more intent and interested and focused on these things than most people out there are. And I think for the people who give this less attention than we do, perhaps, I think, yes, that's it. Is that Trump is of the past. He's on the other side of a wall which descended in 2022, in 2020.

That's it. That's it. That's the way I feel. Yes. I mean, I've been going through this sort of psychological thing where nearly everything before 2020 is getting tossed out. It's just this huge steel curtain descended around the time of COVID and really bifurcated the world and our experience in ways that we're still coming to grips with. So to see politicians from that era attempt to make themselves valid again and rehashing, and nobody wants to be dragged back to 2020 for every single possible reason you can imagine.

I've got a sweatshirt that my kid gave my kid gave me it's like an amazon review 2021 star would not revisit um and that's how a lot of people think there's also the point about do we have nobody else is there absolutely nobody in the hopper nobody in the bench this is we have to the parties have to come up with the same gerontocracy every single time time for a break and i don't say that because a commercial is coming up, but it is. So before I go to that commercial, gentlemen, is there anything else that you would like to add? Because we're going to be talking about COVID and shadow banning and a lot of that stuff with Dr. Jay in just a minute here. It's fun to see the Twitter files come out, isn't it? Are you catching

this? Barry Weiss was the last recipient of the batch and what's fascinating to me is not confirming what we know either because we they said so or they lied about it or it's the reaction of the people in the left liberal media who are desperate to side with the people who are sucking who are who are silent who are silencing voices, reducing amplification. If it had been the other way around, if we had a conservative-owned organization that was obviously stymieing the voice of people on the left, they would be shrieking about fascist corporatism. But as it is, it's like, hey, private company, there's nothing to see here, move along.

It's almost as if it's about tribes rather than about principle. Almost. And we're going to get to our guest in a second here, but I just want to preen a little if I can. That's right. Myself, James Lyle. This was in the New York Times today. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Quoted by Frank Bruni. Each column. Now, what was he talking about? I wrote a column about inflation. I think about the price of eggs, something like that. How I now go for these liquefied airsats versions of the stuff, you know, the glugs out of the carton, like concrete, cement, whatever, because the eggs are too expensive. It was a funny piece, and I think Bruni chose a nice, funny line. But the point is, is that, yeah, eggs cost an awful lot more than they used to. Ay-yi-yi, inflation. It's got us all thinking about ways to cut back. I mean, I know that sometimes I'll look at something and say, no, I'm going to wait for that to go on sale.

And it used to be something that I used to pick up without thought before. Just nuts. Whether it's driving less or dining out less or buying less from the grocery store, we can all agree there's nothing fun about less. And that's why I started using Upside. Upside. Upside. It's an incredible app for anybody who buys gas, groceries, or dines out. It kind of sounds like everybody, right? With Upside, I don't have to cut back because I get cash back on every purchase.

Now, there are some things that I would just not do, not buy, because they've moved into the realm of a treat. It used to be just sort of a standby, but here in the new economic world in which we live, gosh, that's something maybe I should save for later. Don't have to now because you earn cash back on essentials like gas and groceries and dining out. You can get started easily. Download the free Upside app.

Use the promo code Ricochet. That's right, Ricochet, and get $5 or more cash back on your first purchase of $10 or more. So you're already getting ahead of the game here. Then claim an offer on whatever you're buying on Upside. Check in at the business, pay as usual with a credit or debit card, and you get paid. You get paid.

Forget credit card rewards or loyalty programs. You can earn three times more cash back with Upside. Upside users are earning more than a million dollars every week. That's probably why they have a 4.8 star rating in the Apple store, wouldn't you say? Download the free Upside app. Figure it out. Take a look. See what you can do with it.

Use the promo code RICOSHET to get $5 or more off cash back with your first purchase of $10 or more. That's $5 or more cash back on your first purchase of $10 or more using the promo code RICOSHET. And we thank Upside for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, our own Dr. Jay. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. In 2020, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, the precursor to the fabulous Barrington Declaration. And somebody on Twitter said, you know, if you really wanted to make it more taken seriously, you shouldn't have called it great.

Well, that was where they convened. And what they came up with turns out to have been a blueprint for the way the world ought to work. It didn't. But having signed his name to this, wouldn't you know it, he made himself the enemy of the people, so to speak, at Twitter, which decided to, well, Barry Weiss tweet stormed about the Twitter files. And Jay, your name came up. Tell us how you felt about that and exactly what you found that they did. Well, it turns out, James, I'm on a blacklist, which I thought the United States had sort of put behind us in like the 1950s, but I guess that's the modern way now. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it can't be good. I've been on Twitter for about a year.

I mean, in 2020, when I wrote the Great Back to the Declaration, I wasn't on Twitter. I figured, you know, the message, I could get the message out without Twitter. I told my, I mean, I'm an academic, James. I don't my my my goal wasn't to like learn how to manage media so i was never on twitter before uh but in 2021 i joined and um i mean i've had some success but i applied three times to get verified and they turned me down you know that little blue check mark you can wear like your official and all that um and then because who who had ever heard of you, Jay? Let's face it. You got up to 200,000 and plus followers in just like that. You were all over the national news. Who would ever have heard of you at Twitter headquarters?

I mean, it's basically a social credit system, right? It's a system designed to like tell people, look, I'm bad. I have dangerous ideas. Don't listen to me. And I think that that's really the purpose of something like that. It's not possible with the internet to squelch ideas if they happen. What happens with this kind of mechanism of social control is to tell the world this idea is too dangerous to discuss. This person is too dangerous to think about or listen to. I mean, in 2020, after we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration,

four days after we wrote it, Tony Fauci got an email from Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health. And it called me, the other two signatories, the main authors of the Great Branch Declaration, you know, Martin Kulldorff from Harvard and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, he called the three of us fringe epidemiologists. And then he called... Let's just back up for... Sorry, I just want to back up for the people who aren't familiar with the particulars of it. The reason that they wanted to call you fringe and put together a devastating response to de-platform you or suppress your ideas, what was it in the GBD that made their hair stand up? The main problem in the GBD, the reason why the NIH, Francis Collins and Tony Fauci reacted this way, was that it posed a challenge to their authority.

The main problem for them was the location of the people signing it, writing it. Nobel Prize winner signed it. We had tens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists signed it. And the authors, the main authors are from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. If that's true, that lockdown isn't the only scientific way that there isn't a consensus on lockdown then what are they doing telling the world that all the only way to address the pandemic was a lockdown the problem for the gbd for them was that it shattered the illusion of of consensus that they wanted to maintain in order to get their way on policy that's why they organized the devastating takedown of the premises that's why they organized the devastating takedown of the premises. That's

why they organized the propaganda campaign. In the UK, we now know that Matt Hancock, the chief health minister at the time, engaged specifically propaganda techniques within the government in order to suppress the spread of the ideas of the Great Branch of Declaration, to delegitimize and smear its authors, specifically Sunetra Gupta, who teaches at Oxford University. She's like a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford. So, it was— Hold on, you're moving a little fast on Sunetra. Sunetra Gupta doesn't just teach at Oxford.

Sunetra Gupta is one of the leading epidemiologists on the face of the planet. Is that not correct, Jay? I think she's the most important epidemiologist in the world. And Boris Johnson, then the Prime Minister of Great Britain, had had Sunetra Gupta come into No. 10 Downing Street to counsel and advise him. And Matt Hancock and others in the official health apparatus of Great Britain didn't like the advice that she was giving to the Prime Minister, and they engaged, as you say, in an orchestrated, intentional,

designed propaganda campaign to smear her and to suppress her ideas, which were your ideas, correct? Yeah, that's exactly what happened in the UK. Okay. In the US, we have the devastating takedown. You've lived through this, so you're sort of used to what happened. I want to restate the enormities of what's taken place here once or twice. It's just unbelievable. All right. Yeah, it is absolutely remarkable. Can we also, Dr. Fauci, two things have happened in the last

couple of weeks that concern you. One is that Dr. Anthony Fauci was deposed by several state's attorneys general, and Dr. Fauci was asked about Jay Bhattacharya. As I recall, he was asked, are you aware, excuse me, he had signed on to the notion that you were a fringe epidemiologist, and they asked him if he was aware of your credentials, and he said? He said he had no idea what my credentials were although how he would know to say i was a fringe epidemiologist and also not know what my credentials were or sinetra's credentials or martin's credentials martin kuhldorf of harvard a biostatistician a professor at harvard then um still actually uh it was still it was so he didn't know any of our credentials. In fact, it was remarkable, Peter,, I think it was like 195 times in the seven-hour deposition. He said, I don't recall.

I don't know. Why did he change his mind on masks in 2020? Well, I don't know. I mean, he couldn't remember the papers that made him change his mind from like masks are bad for you in February to masks are good for you in March. You know, we put our faith in these scientific bureaucrats to manage the scientific bureaucracy, which is tremendously important. Basically, every biomedical scientist or note gets support from the NIH. When these officials abuse the power in this way is it's not just that there's a

censorship regime it's not just this propaganda regime it sends a signal to other scientists to stay quiet like it's a you know nice career you got there would be shame if something were to happen to it um because they the they don't just give funding they give social status to scientists i don't get tenure at stanford if i don't have IH funding. Jay, you said we put our trust in these public health bureaucrats. But Jay, my friend, you put your trust in them at first as well. I remember saying, Jay, what do these people think? Excuse me, for everybody's, for the benefit of our listeners, Jay Bhattacharya, Jay's one of my best friends here at the Stanford campus. And during the COVID lockdown, when we were all supposedly banned from the campus, Jay and I would slink off and have cups of coffee together to keep each other sane, or at least he was kind enough to keep me sane.

And your first impulse was to extend a kind of generous patience to these people. Oh, I'm sure Fauci is doing the best he can. It's just that the correct data isn't reaching him. Over and over again, I was ready to rise up with a pitchfork and march on Washington after these people. And you kept saying, no, no, no. If only the czar knew. Yeah, if only the czar... And your opening position was, let's be patient with them. They're overwhelmed. They're in a difficult position, but they're good people, and they're operating a public health structure which is fundamentally sound. When did you decide that that was just not the case? It took me a while, Peter. I mean, I've lived in this area for a very long time. I've worked in this area. It's hard for me to

think about fellow scientists as not operating in good faith. Science absolutely requires that I assume the good faith of people who disagree with me, that they're doing it because they have legitimate intellectual reasons to disagree with me. It can't work if there's no good faith. And if the leaders of the scientific bureaucracies and professions act in ways that abuse their power. It destroys the possibility of good faith. That's the realization I've come through during pandemic. I mean, I look back at those. I mean, I think I was naive, Peter, in those conversations, but I don't think I was wrongly naive.

If you'd listen to me sooner, buddy. I think you have to have some kind of assumption of good faith if science is to work and i hope that we can get back to that i mean like that what's what's happened during covet is uh you have uh essentially scientific leaders scientific bureaucrats creating a situation where scientists can't think that they're that their interlocutors are engaging in good faith we have to disagree with each other scientists that's what we. It's that disagreement that leads to discovery. And, you know, we look at data together, try to interpret it, and try to come to some sort of consensus conclusion about it. I mean, it's hard. But if I think that the other person on the other side of the discussion essentially wants to

do a devastating takedown of me instead of an actual discussion, a good faith discussion that might convince him that he's wrong, I mean, or might convince me that I'm wrong. Well, we can't do science. And if Twitter then turns around and puts me on a blacklist, very likely at the behest of the government, I mean, we don't know that for certain, but it seems likely, that is a violation of my civil rights. That's a violation of my free speech rights. And that consequence is that, not just for me, is because we have this tremendous policy going on, these lockdowns that damage the lives of children, the poor, the working class around the world. There needed to be an honest, open discussion. I mean, I was fortunate enough to be sort of at the front lines of the other side of that discussion. But the world was denied that by the actions of Twitter and by the by the suppression actions that the governments took around the world, especially the American government, I think the UK government. initial insistence that a lab leak theory was conspiratorial nonsense and that actually we

have to look at the wet market and natural origins a lot of people looked at that and said well the reason that they're being so nervous about the lab leak theory and shadow banning anybody who talks about it and shouting them down as a conspiracy nut might have something to do with their their devotion to the train of gravy between the nih and eco-health and the labs and the rest of it. In other words, if this gets out, the money may dry up, and the catastrophic consequences of what they were doing will be laid at their feet. And hence, nobody could talk about it. That really wasn't science, was it? That's one of the things that made me say, wait, I'm supposed to trust the scientists here. Scientists don't seem particularly open to exploring all lines of inquiry.

And this lab leak led to the death of millions and millions of people with policies that have harmed tens or hundreds of millions more. You know, I think that means where does public trust in science go? Where are we all just mad scientists cooking up things in our lab without any regard to the harm we might do to the whole rest of the world? That's what's at stake at that lab-like discussion. And you can see it in the FOIA emails between Fauci and his cronies very early in the pandemic. They spent January and February 2020 not so much worried about the pandemic, it seems to me from looking at the FOIA emails, but about creating this impression that the lab leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory. They worked with scientific journals to create the impression that it was a settled science, that there was a natural origin. I mean, I don't know for certain if it's natural origin or lab leak, but it's certainly not settled science.

And it certainly wasn't settled science in February 2020. It's not just that the money would dry up. Their reputations would dry up because they funded this work. If it's a lab leak, they're going to go down in history as among the most irresponsible scientists that have ever walked the face of the earth that caused tremendous catastrophic damage to the world that's what's at stake here that's why they acted in this way i mean i still again i don't know that the science is that settled i'm not this is not my particular expertise but from what i can tell and from the

scientists i've talked with there's still a considerable reason to think it might have been a lab leak. We need to know that. And this is another place where our scientific leaders suppressed an open and honest discussion around it and denied the American people, the people of the world, an honest answer to this question. How are we ever going to maintain trust in science if this is how our leaders in science operate? If the people that we entrust with tens of billions of dollars and the reputations of basically every notable scientist, biomedical

scientist, how are we going to have people trusting science again if that is how they behave? It's absolutely irresponsible. Hey, I'm going to interrupt you for a second because I've got a little bit of business to do. I wouldn't exactly call it business, though. It's more like pleasure. The pleasure of the holiday season. You get together with your friends and your family, exchange your gifts with your loved ones and all the rest of it. It's the most exciting time of the year. We love holidays around here.

And if you want to enjoy them to the fullest, you need to get good sleep. I was talking to somebody the other day who was just getting bad, bad sleep. They can't get to bed when they wake up, all the rest of it. Part of it, there's a young person too, so I'm not talking CPAP and, you know, aphasia and all the rest of it. Just too much coffee, too much nerves, the rest of it. I'm not saying that great sheets solve everything, but great sheets are absolutely essential to get your best sleep. And it's easier to get them than it sounds. All you need is the softest, most luxurious organic cotton sheets from Bowl and Branch. You knew I was going there, didn't you? Right. Well, that's because when you talk sheets, that's the best. Bowl and Branch. They're made from the

finest 100% organic cotton threads on the planet. They make a difference. You can truly feel night after night. And as I say every week, I can honestly, truthfully tell you that they are incrementally softer than they were the week before. Some sheets, you wash them and you wash them, they get threadbare and they scrape and they tear and the rest of them and out they go. No. Years later, my Bolland Branch sheets, after innumerable washings, are just absolutely buttery soft. They're made different so you can sleep better at night. In fact, they're made with the finest 100% organic cotton on earth. They're all seasoned sheets that have an unmatched softness to start,

and they get softer with every single watch, as I have noted. The signature sheets come wrapped in beautiful holiday gift box. I mean, you can actually just take the box and give it to them. It's great. The unboxing of the Bowling Branch is kind of like an Apple product, except it's so much softer. Best of all, Bowling Branch gives you a 30-night worry-free guarantee with free shipping and returns on all orders.

Bring home a better night's sleep this holiday season or give it to somebody else with Bowling Branch bedding. For a limited time, get 20% off your first set of sheets and free shipping when you use the promo code RICOCHET at BowlingBranch.com. That's BowlingBranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com.

Promo code RICOCHET. And we thank Bowling Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. So I was going to ask you about the means by which this groupthink was contrived. What you have here is a party line, essentially, and then you were on the wrong side of it.

There's two ways that you can develop party lines. One is you have someone at the top or a few people at the top who instruct everyone else, bully, pressure, cajole everyone else into acquiescence. And the other way, and I think we've seen more of this recently with the progressive takeover of institutions, academia to some extent, the media and corporations increasingly is that you just put enough people in positions of power and they all arrive at the same conclusions at the same time organically because they have the same priors do you think that the consensus that you found yourself on the other side of came about because a few people of

influence decided to put their foot down and everyone else ran along out of fear or the desire to fit in or do you think that the problem was that the institutions in this country are culturally monomaniacal and you weren't going along with that charlie i think it's a little of both right just just imagine back to february 2020 where the consensus was let's treat this like we treat other respiratory virus pandemics you know try to find out who's vulnerable develop therapeutics lockdown no no shut down plans from china that's racist know, think back to that. And then the almost magical transformation within days to the exact opposite approach that we followed in those three years. That doesn't happen unless a small group of leaders really has a bit their thumb on the scale.

You started seeing, I mean, almost overnight, you had New York Times stories, Washington Post stories, all pushing in the same direction. You know, The Guardian went ballistic. The New York Times publishes a piece saying we need to go medieval on the virus. Emails from that era, FOIA emails from inside the NIH revealed that there was a huge influence from the Chinese example of the lockdown they did in January. The NIH officials that went to China, this guy named Cliff Lane, who was Tony Fauci's deputy, went to China in this UN junket and came back with the idea that what the Chinese did had worked. I think that had tremendous influence on the American government. I suspect it had tremendous influence on governments around the world. And overnight, the scientific leaders got in line, pushed the idea of this lockdown,

instead of having this debate. And it was absolutely groupthink. And then our culture is set up so that once you think that science has reached a consensus, we're just going to do it. You can't push back against the science, then you're some anti-science nutcase. And I think that kind of cultural power is tremendous. It absolutely rules the world. It's hard to get media to pay attention to the other side when there actually is a debate. And we saw that in full force very early on in the COVID debate and ongoing for the last three years. I think that's the reason for the takedown. You can't have heretics when we have a high pope who is the

science that decreed on high that we must lock down. Because there's a conflation here as well between science and politics in that the scientific analysis obviously has to feed into what are ultimately value judgments. And that's another thing that I just thought was so annoying. You know, you'd have two people who obviously were talking about the same virus and agreeing upon the likely effects of it if it entered the human body, but disagreeing as to what the trade-offs should be in a free country and a country that has to balance various imperatives. And I don't know how much damage you think that's done to the notion of science itself in the minds of the public. That's tremendous. Scientists should not rule the world,

but we might be good at advising people who do rule the world about certain aspects of that rule, but we are very far from having the wisdom to order every single aspect of human behavior as we sort of put the pretensions we've taken on the last three years. I mean, and I think the way that scientists behave, it's not just that they took on this mantle themselves. There's actually a very narrow group of scientists that took on that mantle. You know, are you an epidemiologist, Charlie? I mean, that was the question, right? Yeah. But, you know, it's ridiculous. Epidemiologists have a narrow set of expertise that allow them to answer a narrow set of questions. They don't have the right to say, is it right to say

goodbye to my father in a funeral alone? Is it right to separate newborns from moms because of some risk of COVID? Is it right to close my kids' schools so their future is harmed? Is it right to shut down church worship? Is it right to shut down mosques and synagogues? Is it right to shut down church worship? Is it right to shut down mosques and synagogues? Is it right to shut? Those are like very, very broad decisions that impact the lives forever, basically, of people when you make them. Those are social decisions that require social input from, and we have, liberal democracies have ways of managing those kinds of conflicts. Science is only one small part of that somehow the last three years we see now what what a scientific technocracy

looks like that's what we've lived in the last three years it's miserable yeah jay jay on that point we know we knew pre-covid something about what throwing people out of work does, right? Angus, what is his name, Deaton, is it? The economist at Princeton had done study after study, and in fact, he'd published a book just as COVID hit. Angus what? Angus Deaton, yeah. He's a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Angus Deaton, right. And had actually sort of worked out almost a kind of algorithm, not an algorithm because it's based on observation, that for every increase in unemployment in a region, Southern Ohio, bits of Pennsylvania, you get so and so much increase in alcoholism, so and so much increase in domestic violence, so and so much increase in suicide. This was known. All right. Maybe not with precision, but it was known. Economists thought this was something that we could measure. Now that these FOIA requests, FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act,

now that information is coming out, now that Dr. Fauci is being forced to submit to depositions, are we learning that at least the public health authorities ask themselves, is the lockdown, which is going to throw some large proportion of Americans out of work, worth, is the benefit of the lockdown worth the cost of the lockdown? Is there any evidence that they ever engaged in the most basic exercise in public policy, which is balancing benefits against costs, because we knew well enough already how to estimate the costs. At the beginning of the pandemic, if you suggested that there may be any cost at all to lockdowns, you were tossed out as a grandma killer. I mean, I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

That is just madness. It is madness. I mean, essentially, the lockdowns themselves, I think, killed tens of millions, certainly starved, put people on the brink of starvation, tens of millions of people. That's the UN estimates. Threw 100 million people into poverty worldwide. The lockdowns were responsible for, I think, tremendous, 100 exact numbers we're going to debate about forever. How many lives the lockdown saved? I don't, I think the best guess answer to that, I mean, you could convince me it's maybe

some, but my best guess answer is basically zero in terms of like actually preventing death. What it did, you know, you have a society that's incredibly unequal. Only a small fraction of the world's population can afford to lock down, stay home, stay safe. Think how privileged you have to be able to be in order to be able to do that. It's not a surprise that the lockdowns failed. They had to fail. People cannot abide, the vast majority of people here cannot abide a lockdown. You can't sit in your home, order Uber Eats if you're a slum dweller in Mumbai. You're just not going to be able to do that.

Even 80% of the American population don't have jobs that can be replaced by Zoom. It was bound to fail, and it did fail. I don't think it saved a thing. At best, it delayed when the laptop class got infected with COVID. I mean, it didn't even protect them eventually. Jay, you're such a sweet, reasonable person that you say these things. I just want to put this on pause for just a moment.

You are telling us that the lockdown saved no lives, but cost around the world, and particularly in poor countries, excuse me, in countries that may not be india is no longer a poor country but it has a vast population that's poor among poor people it cost as many as 100 million lives i don't know if it's 100 million dollars i wouldn't say that i'd say i'd say through 100 million people into poverty less than two dollars a day the income the estimate for number of people that die of starvation, like there was an estimate from the UN in March of 2021.

In South Asia alone, 230,000 children had died of starvation as a consequence of the lockdown. It was starvation and skipped immunizations. So what you're telling us is that the public health authorities did us no good and caused as much damage as a war. And Dr. Fauci has the temerity to sit there in deposition and say, I don't know. I can't recall. You must understand the pressures we were working under.

It is an outrage. Am I making too much of this? I think when you characterize it accurately i think the problem i mean like if i were in issues i wouldn't want to take credit either uh i mean i think the problem is that uh what what happened was deeply irresponsible you know if if we'd had a debate and we uh the other side had squarely lost it in a fair hearing, it would be one thing. Okay, we made a mistake, but we tried to engage with the other side. There wasn't enough evidence for the Great Barrington Declaration to be right. That's one thing you can say. That's not what happened.

What happened was an unfair squelching of that debate, a use of propaganda techniques, psychological techniques, and social credit suppression to make sure that debate didn't ever happen, that the people who tried to engage on the other side of the debate were smeared and demonized. That is, so, you know, you're sort of, it piles on the responsibility of the leaders that did that, because now their strategy better have worked, better have saved millions and millions of lives, or else what have they done? I think that's the situation we're in. Has anyone apologized?

No. Yeah, I think, I mean, there's been some apologies. Like, personally, I've received some very kind people. And so many, all the movement in the public has been in the anti-lockdown direction steadily for three years. I think we're very, you know, we are the majority now. The issue now is not so much one of apologies to me. There's two issues to me.

One is, how do we fix some of the damage? There's still people suffering from the lockdowns. All these kids that had lost, you know, two plus years of education, many, like, you know, in poor countries never came back to school after the school was skipped for two years. How do we fix that? How do we address the vast learning loss, especially in poor minority kids in the U.S. as a consequence? How do we repair the damage that we've done to the lives of people that are suicidal or depressed as a result of the anxiety we caused them over the over this i think we have to that's the first and most important priority let's fix some of the damage that what that can be fixed and then the second is let's do a post-mortem so we understand what went wrong soberly and so we and set up structures and

reforms so we never do this again we haven't to have an honest discussion finally at last, ex post at least, so that we can make the reforms that needed to happen. I think those are my two priorities. I don't really care about apologies at this point. I kind of do. I'll tell you why. I'm sitting here. I do. And I'm alone in that because one of the things that frustrates and infuriates me about the lasting consequences of the lockdown is something that a lot of people aren't bothered by at all. I'm sitting here on the 12th floor of a gorgeous office building that stretches 52 stories up into the sky, and I just realized as I look straight around me, I'm looking at dark windows. There's no illumination behind them. Oh, there's a light up there. Oh, there's a light up there.

Somebody's home there. But are these skyscrapers behind me? No. This is a city that was murdered by this, by the lockdown and has yet to come back and won't going back to the lenders this week. The largest hotel in the state is bankrupt now and is going to go back up on the block, all of which means the tax base shrinks and it's all offloaded onto the people who live in the city. So I want an apology for that, because the lockdown was so extreme and so tight and so hard, and so, well, another two weeks, another two weeks, another two weeks, that it permitted a societal change the likes of which we never expected to have. The end of office culture, the end of downtowns. We never thought that we would see

that in our lifetime, but it was in a stroke, It was accomplished. And it's not a good thing. We had been coasting for years with this wonderful elation about the revival of the American downtown and we killed it. That's not a question. My question maybe is this. I've had all my shots like my dog. I've got the papers and the tag to prove it. I had the first two. I had two boosters. I was going to get another booster before I went down to Mexico because who knows what sort of stew is going to be in the plane, but I didn't, and I'm fine. I've had COVID twice, and because of my absolute rude physicality, I was able to just shr shrug it off but we're told we should get the new one which is based on a study of eight mice i think what do you think about the the most latest biavalent or ambivalent by curious ambivalent vaccine what's your opinion uh so actually can

i comment on the first thing you said james i think it's really really important i mean i think the closest analogy i can think of although this wasn't a war the closest analogy i can think of is is a war you know i've read uh history of the world war one which called it essentially civilizational suicide we followed out our civilization we just we we uh and i don't i hope we can get it back but the i mean I was listening to your conversation before I came on about the pre and post-2020, how the pre-world feels like an old, bygone era. I don't think that's wrong. I think we have engaged in something close to civilizational suicide, and we have to, like, come to terms with that. You know, because i the the faith and confidence in our institutions the basic institutions that everyone agreed were for were were bedrocks of our societies

people don't trust anymore people don't trust public health people don't trust science people don't trust i mean never trust the government which is probably healthy but you know that that that uh i think uh having this kind of people don't trust doctors. That kind of collapse, society-wide collapse in institutional confidence and trust is going to have tremendous consequences going forward. And we have to come to terms with that, figure out how to repair that. On the boosters, it's hard to answer your question in any clear way because, first, it was approved on the bivalent boosters were approved on eight mice. It wasn't approved on human data. There's been some human data. I don't think it's unsafe, but I don't see that it protects you against getting COVID.

If you already had COVID twice and recovered and you've had these other shots already, the marginal is basically zero, as far as I can tell. But I wish I could answer that question with more confidence. If only our federal agencies had required more data to be produced before they approved it or recommended it, you know, at a society-wide level. It's very hard to answer a question when you don't have excellent data, and we don't. Yeah. Well, we'll find out. Last I heard is that it practically has zero effect on the new. Again, you know, I like the idea that if I get it, I don't go to the morgue or I don't suffer consequences because I am getting up there. But on the other hand, no, I just why don't you just do the fluoride thing and put it in the water? No, I'm just kidding. It's a whole different other conspiracy.

Dr. J, it's been great to talk to you and great to hear you amplified and boosted on our show. And, you know, we'll talk again, I'm sure, because... If I'm ever blacklisted on your show, I'm going to beat up Peter. So it's all... I have a remedy. Listen, by the way, could you... Here we are. We're about to close the show and you're talking about civilizational suicide. This is really no way to go into the weekend. Jay, can you

give us a little, give us an upbeat to close on, would you please? Out of that, out of the ashes of that came a new better civilization eventually. World War I, you mean? Out of the ashes of World War I. World War I came World War II and the rise

of transnational progressivism. We had 70 golden years, World War I. World War I came World War II and the rise of transnational progressivism. Come on, we have 70 golden years, James. I mean, you know, there's something about that. I'm ever hopeful and it's never black and white and it's never the end of the world except when it is. Jay, thanks so much. It's always great to talk to you. We could have you on for another hour.

But enjoy your moment in the spotlight here as people take a look at your work and hopefully, I hope, read the GBD because it is a seminal piece of work. Good day to you, sir, and have a great weekend. Thank you, James. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Charlie. Take care, Jay.

Thank you. I want to say one thing, though, on a cheerful note. It's a cheerful gripe, if you will. Yesterday, I bought my daughter's Christmas present and I can say this because my daughter doesn't listen to the podcast. I bought her a new computer, a laptop. She's going to need it because her old one is, is, is chugging and it's slow and all the rest of it and it's outpaced. So I bought it at the store and then I asked if I could have a bag so I could carry out to my car. And they said, the bag is 11 cents and i said i just paid you this amount of money

for this object and you're telling me that i have to pay you 11 additional cents with my card because i don't have the change of course to get a bag the clerk said yes the line must go up there's no way i was going to get a bag out of those guys the line must go up that's what he said the line what does that mean i I don't know. I responded by saying the roads must roll. Keep them rolling. So, you know, which he didn't get either.

So the good thing is that the, you know, I got it home without getting it robbed, and she's going to love it. It's going to be the coolest gift ever. And I, you know, as dad, sort of have a reputation for being the guy who gives cool gifts at house. Technical gifts, because I know my way around that kind of stuff. Not like Charlie, but I know my way around that stuff.

So everybody has that thing where they're giving somebody a gift and there's a feeling they want to elicit, right? Well, giving a great gift can make you look good. I'm not saying that's the point of it, but it doesn't hurt. It doesn't help. Giving the gift of Harry's to the man on your list can make them look good too. Now, my daughter doesn't need Harry's, but if you know a guy who does the scraping thing, it's for him. This holiday season, you can treat yourself or a loved one to a quality shave with Harry's Starter Set. It's got everything you need for a smooth and comfortable shave. The perfect gift to look fresh for the holidays and the new year. I love this stuff because,

first of all, the Harry's blades are great. I've never, not a nick and a carload, as they used to say. That was cigarettes. Never have I drawn blood with these things. It makes all of the little curves and angles. And I got a dimple too. As I once described it, shaving a dimple is like painting a golf ball after it's gone down the hole. But Harry's gets it every time. Never cuts, and the blades last forever. They're just so smooth. The starter set will give you, what are these blades? Five-blade German-engineered razor, might I say. A weighted handle, which feels good. I've tried a lot of these other places, and the handles are just cheap, feel like you're scraping your face with a hummingbird bone. Foaming shave gel. And let

me tell you, foaming is the word here, the important one. This stuff is great. It really foams up, so you only have to use just a little. And you get a travel cover, too. $13 for all of that. A $13 value? No, it's only $3 when you use our link at harrys.com slash ricochet. Plus, you can reschedule your blades to be delivered whenever you need them, and each refill is as low as $2. Harry's new holiday gift boxes include premium shaving and grooming products and gift boxes, nice enough to go right under the tree. No wrapping required. They sent me one of these things.

It's great. It's gorgeous. So check off all the guys in your list with a Harry's starter set. They're going to love you. First-time buyers get a $13 value for just $3 at harrys.com slash ricochet. You cannot beat that deal for Blaze anywhere in the world. You can't. And check out Harry's gift boxes, but act fast.

The offer's for a limited time with limited stock at harrys.com slash ricochet. And we thank Harry's for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Three bucks. I can't believe it. Usually here, this is where Rob comes on and tells you all about the promos, but Rob flounced off somewhere. Where'd he

go? Do we know where in the world is Rob Long? He's in L.A. doing meetings, taking Where'd he go? Do we know where in the world he is? Rob Long? Do we have to? He's in L.A. doing meetings, taking me. Isn't that the phrase? They take meetings in L.A. The rest of us attend them, but they take them in L.A. Okay.

Well, there's that. So there's no L.A. meeting that he is at at the moment. Well, we'll tell you this. Ricochet meetups are the. What is Ricochet? You're asking if you just found this. It is a website where people talk about things. I know there's a million of those, but it's a member site where people form a community that you're not going to find on Facebook or Twitter or the rest of the places. Why? Because it costs money. Just a bit, just a little bit. We'll have skin in the game, as Rob said, but that makes it a civil place because, you know, people belong to this organization. But it's not just in cyberspace, as that old tiresome term is. No, it's in, I don't want to use the meat space term, so I won't. But people meet up in real life.

And as Rob will tell you, that's, you know, one of the great things about a membership. This spring we were in New York. It was fantastic we were there. Charles, you dined out with some Ricochet Cosmopolitans last week, I think. There's some stuff coming up in Pittsburgh, Sarasota, Vacaville, New Orleans. Go to Ricochet.com and you'll find the details. Now, the great thing about it is

if you join Ricochet, and you must do so because it is a place that you've been looking for all your life on the internet, Ricochet will come to you, as Rob likes to say. Now, that sounds like a threat. You know, it's like everyone's going to show up at your door all of a sudden. No, they won't be there with hot

dishes and covered dishes and Tupperware and the rest of it. But you can say, hey, it's me. I'm new to Ricochet. I live in X city and I'd like to hold a meetup and people will find their way to you. And you meet friends and meet people you it's one of the things I love. Now I would love to go to every single one

of them. I'm choosing the one that I go to next. But that's just the thing. That's the great thing about Ricochet. Ricochet.com slash events. Or find the module in the sidebar on the site. The great site, Ricochet.com, which has looked, I don't know, it's had a consistent look for many years now. And I'm thinking it might be time for a refresh one of these days. Anyway, Charles, Peter, before we go here, we swapped a basketball player for an international arms dealer.

Okay, and not the Marine. What do you guys think about this? I have not followed the story. I will think about it whatever Charlie tells me to think about it. Charlie, okay. James, before i answer your question it made me think that if this were a sitcom your daughter would on christmas day open this computer and look it up and down and then return her gaze to you and say is there a bag right which i would not put yourself, would not put past your clever child that she has. Then you'd kick yourself.

She actually, she literally wrote a, wrote a sitcom this last year in, in, in college. So yes, I think this is possible. She will.

I, I answered this question on the editors podcast at national review. And I said, I hate these sorts of questions because whatever you say, you end up sounding either naive or mean. Right, right. If this person had been a member of my family, I would, of course, have wanted any deal

that would have brought her back. But the American government can't proceed in that manner. And as saccharine as we can sometimes sound about what we will do for Americans abroad, it's not really true. It wasn't true in Afghanistan last year, clearly, but it's also not true on the merits. When Bo Bergdahl was brought back the Obama administration kept saying

to any critics this is what we do we bring our guys home and I thought at the time that's just wrong if the price of getting him back had been one of our aircraft carriers we wouldn't have said well that's just what we do we bring him. So at some point you have to have a balancing discussion. And clearly the mother of the person in question is not going to be particularly interested in that. But if the mother of the person in question were involved, they would have to recuse themselves because we don't make national decisions based on sentiment or we shouldn't. And so I hate these questions because if you say, I think it was a bad deal, you sound as if you don't care about an American citizen. And if you say, I think it was a great deal, we should bring our people back,

then you sound as if you're in favor of releasing international arms dealers. I think having reviewed this over the last day as a non-expert, that this trade was imbalanced and should not have been made. We left some people there too. It wasn't as if we said, well, yes,

on the one hand, this arms dealer gets out and can go back to being a massive menace on the world stage. But we got three or four people out and that's what we had to do. I, so I'm aware that I sound mean and heartless, but no, I don't think this is a great yeah that's true you want to have gotten three or four people out for an international arms dealer

you've now said that you've now set the value of an international dealer at one american citizen um and you're right of course obviously we're not going to do everything if putin says all right you can have her back but i want you to kidnap zelensky and bring him to my docker we're not going to do everything. If Putin says, all right, you can have her back, but I want you to kidnap Zelensky and bring him to my DACA, we're not going to do that. But it seems like we gave away an awful lot. Then again, in the Bo Bergdahl case, didn't we trade a whole bunch of Taliban guys or Al Qaeda guys who promptly went back to work in the same field, beavering away in the explosives industry? Yes. I think we did. Yeah. Which was grand. Fantastic. All right. Well, there you go. Anything else on the international stage that you guys would like to talk? Oh, that's right. We's going to be great. I can't wait to listen to it. We'll leave you then perhaps with this, Peter.

Is there something you would like to tell us to tease that, that you found revelatory about your time with him? Here's what I found really, all of it was interesting. This is a consequential figure. This is a man who has done things, made real difference on the world stage in all kinds of ways. And what's remarkable is, although he's already served for prime minister, he's been sworn in, I think, three different times for a total of 15 years, he's still ambitious, I think personally ambitious, but the way he would put it is ambitious for the country. Here's the piece of the discussion that I found almost most striking,

and that was the discussion of his time as finance minister. Israel was founded by socialists. The quintessential Israeli entity for the first three decades or more of the existence of the state of Israel was the kibbutz, people working on an agricultural establishment, plowing ground, growing stuff, little farms. And Bibi Netanyahu, his finance minister, opened up the Israeli economy, rolled back the size of the state. It was almost a kind of Reaganite, cut taxes, roll back the size of the state, decrease regulation, and now the quintessential Israeli entity is a high-tech startup. Just a transformation, not only of the Israeli economy, but of what it means to be an Israeli, the way they think of themselves.

The phrase you'll hear in Israel over and over again is startup nation. Startup nation. So that is fascinating. He knew what he was doing, and much of it, the other piece of this that comes out again and again and again, in many places it's a subtext, but in certain places he'll just say it, was the example of the United States. Bibi Netanyahu knew that Israel could achieve in circumstances of an open economy because he had studied at MIT and he'd had a brief career as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. He had seen tech startups. He'd watched the American economy at its best. At its worst, it's listening to the

Harvard Economics Department, but that's not what he was doing. He was at MIT with engineers, and he went out to the Boston Consulting Group. That I found just fascinating. Needless to say, I hope viewers do as well. More of that as well in the conversation that Peter has with Suna Bibi, again, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. And at this point, the number of times he's cycled in and out of the office, I don't know if he, does he pack up and leave after he's tossed out, or does he just, like, sort of leave the stuff in the bottom drawer and say, I'll be back for that in six months? Yes, that's right.

Mr. Netanyahu, we've kept your office warm for you. Right, right. They don't even change the chair because, you know, the foam contours of his buttocks are probably still there somewhere in the memory foam. And on that happy thought and image, we leave you. Podcast brought to you by Upside, by Bowling Branch and by Harry. Support them for supporting us and join Ricochet today. Why don't you? Thanks to Peter and thanks to Charles and thanks to everybody who's saying, wait a minute, you're going to ask us to leave a five-star review at Apple, aren't you? No, I'm not. It's been great to talk with you guys. It was a great show, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 next week. Next week, Ricochet.

Join the conversation.