The Ricochet Podcast - The COVID Doc and Tik-Tok

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

This week on America’s Most Benevolent Podcast®, another super-sized episode. First up, the Middle East is breaking out in…peace. That’s good, right? Well, depends who you ask. We discuss. Then, our good pal Dr. Jay Bhattacharya joins to bring us up to speed on the coming vaccine, the (very treacherous) intersection of politics and medicine, whether or not the lockdown was a mistake, and more. Source

I just wish you had a stethoscope around that. That's the international prop for I'm a doctor. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The president takes no responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, cozies up the dictators and fans the flame of hate and division. He'll wake up every day believing the job is all about him. I'm the president and your fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilex, and today we talk to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya about COVID. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 513. I'm James Lylex, here in Minneapolis on a beautiful early autumn day. Rob Long is in New York. Of course, there's nothing more beautiful than New York in autumn. And Peter's in California, which is one season all year round, humboring.

Although I understand it, come the depths of winter, Peter, it gets a little gray. Perhaps the temperatures skirt down to 69, 68 or something like that. But in general, what a week. What an interesting week. And I guess I have to sum up what they're saying on Twitter. I don't get it. Israel and Bahrain were never at war. What's the big deal?

Yeah, right. That's true. That's true true they were not at war um uh well i i think this is this is a fantastic opportunity for all of us to practice humility by all of us i really mean me uh because i'm going to point that out yeah because like you have look and not just me look everybody hates Jared, right? Even the MAGA hat-wearing Trump enthusiasts hate Jared. Trump hates Jared, according to a lot of reports. And the conservatives in the White House hate him. Everybody rolls their eyes and thinks, oh, please. Kushner decide to be the director, impresario, maitre d' of a Middle East peace process just seemed like the height of a son-in-law make-work job. And it turns out that this is a big success.

I really do. Wait a minute. So you're telling me that somebody who does not come from the foreign policy establishment that's given us the last half century of that being up to our nostrils in the swamp of that mess by accepting all of these old paradigms that perhaps a new fresh approach uh actually might get some so where's the final rule i'd say in hollywood to people's like sometimes you have to accept that the dumbest person in the room has the best idea that does happen more often than you think yes yes it does and and and as evidence of that i'm going to argue that it's a sleight of hand of the of you uh rob to give the credit to jared when the credit really belongs to donald j trump okay that's fair that's a fair thing he's the one who has jared the White House. He's the one who moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He's the one who ended the Obama administration's

deal with Iran. And this has taken place under his watch and as a direct result of his actions. And we have the first peace accord or formal recognition of Israel by Arab states since the Camp David Accords in 1978, 42 years ago. It is a remarkable achievement, and it belongs, obviously, it belongs to a number of people. But I don't think there's any way to gainsay that the chief share of the credit goes to Donald J. Trump. Wait, hold on once again peter you just don't understand please correct me this disastrous move by the trump administration flailing around as usual has pushed iran into the arms of russia and china and the idea that somehow we're now going to get a peace deal between israel and saudi arabia and that's going

to be all historic sa Saudi Arabia, the murder of Khashoggi, the journalist hero. Don't you see that the more flights you have between the capitals of these Arab nations and the Jewish state, the more emissions you have, and the more emissions you have, the worse global warming is? I mean, this poly, yeah. And what if the Palestinians who themselves were right, literally walking up to the table with a deal in their hand, and then this happened and the Palestinians had no choice but to shoot rockets into residential neighborhoods in Israel? I mean, I guess we're, how bereft or bankrupt our contemporary way of looking at things is. Because if you hate Donald Trump, you have to now figure out a way to make this not a success. Because everything's about Donald Trump.

Your lunch order's about Donald Trump. And if you love Donald Trump, you've got to feel like this is like part of a larger, you know, three-dimensional master chest that he's doing. This is a very, very, very positive moment in what I consider to be a very bleak administration, but it's very positive and we should celebrate it. And what's more interesting about it to me is that, look, those guys over there, they read the press, they read the New York Times, they read all the things they need to read, and they are looking at the polls and they are betting and they are betting people that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are going to be in in January 22nd or whatever date it is. That is a fair bet. That is probably where your money should go if you're a betting person. Right.

So the reason why they took this and they made this happen is interesting right they maybe two reasons one because they feel in their own weird egotistical way this is going to help uh trump win florida because there are a lot of jews in florida may be possible right or they could be saying to themselves we like the fact that this administration has decoupled all of these issues from the Palestinian issue, which is the opposite of what everybody's been doing for the past 10,000 billion years. We like the fact that this administration was not dealing with, was saying, look, we're not going to even touch that. Don't bring it up. It's not part of our conversation. And they liked it. It gave Bahrain and those countries an option an option to cut

the palestinians loose which they did that is incredibly interesting to me i don't know whether it's going to pay off in the few who knows but that to me is the literally the opposite of what everyone was saying for i don't know peter 20 25 i mean how long ever right forever and that's but also rob the other piece of the calculation I suspect, I am no master of Middle Eastern analysis for sure, but the other piece of the calculation I suspect is President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, if we have to start, if they win and if we have to start calling them that, are going to do whatever they can and quickly to reinstate some kind of deal with Iran. And if there is going to be an emboldened Iran, and if the economy of Iran restarts, and if Iran then has enough resources to begin causing serious trouble all over again for Israel and for the Arab states surrounding Israel, then we, the Arabs, and we, the Israelis,

need to get our act together right now before that happens. I suspect that that's also, answer correct, they're betting on a President Biden, probably, they read the polls the way we do. If you put a gun to my head and made me put money on it, I'd put a little money on a Joe Biden presidency myself right now. But they want action. They need a united front before iran becomes i think that's i think that's absolutely right i think that's that's actually that's very shrewd they are these are shrewd people um and they're you know look just work at a game theory what's in their interest in their interest if they have issues with the palestinian they they so if they support the palestinians really truly support them they're better off waiting right because

they can wait until january and they can still get this deal if they want to from the second Trump administration, or they can get a better deal for Palestinians under Biden. They clearly don't care. What they care about is, I hadn't thought about this, is exactly right, is self-preservation, which happens when you think about that when Iran is emboldened, Iran is now coming back to the table. There's a new Iran deal on the horizon. And that, to me, that's really fascinating to me. I think rarely do you get a moment when everyone, all the actors in this region, reveal themselves, right?

There was always that moment, and, you know, I don't know, it was Clinton did it. Everybody tended to do it in the end end the last few months of their administration's thing okay well let's just solve middle east quickly before i have to leave yeah i wonder sorry go ahead well i just say they always come down to one thing with the palestinians which was they get they get a deal and the the israelis come in and they play all the cards and they use all the cards they've been collecting and it all comes down to one thing and that's the right of return the right of return for self-described self-identified palestinian people who identify themselves as palestinians to come back to israel and vote which is essentially saying the end of israel and of course israel can never accept that and it is always revealed that

despite all of this this talk about peace the people uh representing the palestinian people do not really want peace right uh and then then the things break down and now we know what right i don't know what people brain really care about they don't care about the palestinians but thank god you know no i mean if we negotiated with the soviets and every time at the end of the day they said all right our final non-negotiable demand you must replace all your blood with borscht we would have said no. But we would have gone back to the table with them at some point again and again, because we had all of these nuclear missiles pointed against each other and we were in geopolitical conflict. The question is, why would the Harris-Biden administration,

slip of the tongue, sorry. Why would a Harris, there I went again. Why would a Biden-Harris administration want to pursue a deal with Iran? Why? What great national urge is there to suddenly run over their cap in hand and ask what we can do for them? Screw them. There's no national appetite to somehow reach a peace with Iran at this point. The idea that all the other forces in the Middle East are lining up and going along with the good guys, and that the whole Arab street and Arab boulevard and Arab diagonal parkway didn't explode in murderous rage when the embassy was moved to Jerusalem. Off that, not to be taken.

The fact that Iran has been pasted since we smoked Sulamani, and that may have driven some of these people to re-examine what they're doing. What national appetite is there to go and say, Iran, we've got to do something about Iran? Let them hang where they are. Well, yes. And if they are wise enough to make James Lilac's national security advisor, that would be, I'd be a happy man. But they'll do it. What appetite was there to do a deal with Iran when Obama did the deal with Iran? It's the same set of people thinking the same set of thoughts that make no sense to me but they'll do it one final note on all this i this is speculation i don't quite i don't know enough to know whether this was really a driving force among the arab leaders but here it goes the arab world is running out of

oil i don't want to put it that way. Here's what we know for sure. We know for sure that oil is becoming a less and less important part of the world economy and that Arab oil is becoming even less important as a part of the world economy, largely because of fracking in this country. Right. Israel has figured out how to build a thriving and in places, particularly in tech, red hot economy without any oil at all. The UAE, which led in this, now Bahrain is coming in, other Arab countries may follow.

The UAE, of course, made a decision a quarter of a century ago to try to get off oil itself. And now oil exports represent only about 40% of the GDP of the UAE. And we know that one of the things that's been, we know because the press has reported, one of the things that's led to this agreement is exchanges between business people in the UAE and Israel. And I'm just wondering the extent to which some of the leaders realize they've got to get a foil and doing deals with the Israelis might help, and the extent to which there's a rising generation of Arabs who just would like to do business and don't. The Palestinians, that was 70 years ago. Business may be part, I just, business may be part of it. And if that's the case, that's wonderful

news. And it's long-term happening and this has been brought, I know we want to run into a spot, but brought to fruition. I'll just tell you one thing I heard years ago about five years after 9-11 from an old, at a conference I was just hanging out at filled with old spooks, old spies

were all there. And one of them said, listen, the most interesting thing that happened that no one predicted was there is now a Saudi intelligence desk in the Mossad. And there's a Mossad desk in Saudi intelligence, meaning that there's an officer from Mossad in Saudi intelligence there at a desk, like kind of sharing some info, but like out in the open and the same thing in the offices of Israeli intelligence. And that he said, can't help, but be good. That's going to be good.

That's going to create some kind of channel. That's going to create some kind of back and forth. And of course, his intelligence is about 99% technology. And that's going to, that's, back and forth. And, of course, intelligence is about 99% technology. And that's going to – I think this is good. And it took Trump – and I give him credit – it took Trump to rethink and reshuffle the deck in American Middle East policy. And I think that is the chief benefit of having an outsider in the White House. Rob, if you can't sell a sitcom about an Israeli and Saudi intelligence

guy, it would be good, right? You could also make a great cop buddy movie. They hate each other at first, but come to respect each other. A bad boys kind of thing. A lethal weapon. It's just gold. It's waiting to happen. You're right. Israel is a big tech, big hot tech company, but they also have energy. If you factor in the Leviathan oil field, they've got liquid natural gas coming out the wazoo, and that is an industry technical term. So there's that. The Middle East doesn't have as much LNG.

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And our thanks to Eero, E-E-R-O, for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now it's time to check in with Dr. J, Dr. J Bhattacharya. He's the professor of medicine at Stanford U, research associate of the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spolier Institute. How he does that all in one day, we have no idea, because he also holds courtesy appointments as professor of economics and health research and policy. He directs the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. And he holds an M.D. and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. But these days, of course, who doesn't?

Dr. J., welcome back. Last time we talked to you. I hope you're holding it all against me. No, as a matter of fact, I'm so incredibly disappointed with myself halfway through your bio that I can't even, it's hard to go on, but we push forward. So we talked last May 15th, what seemed to be a different world, but yet it isn't. Things have changed, but they haven't. We're still in lockdown, but we're not. Masks are great, but the mask mandate does nothing. We keep waiting for a date where we say we know enough, we know these things, these things are certain. Let's compare where we are now, September, middle of, to where we were

in May. Better? Worse? Do we know more? Do we know less? When are we getting out? What's the germ? Did it come from China? Was it man-made? Did the military release it? Those things. Small questions. So actually, let me start with what I think is good news. I think we know a lot more about the virus and what it does. And it seems to me like we're sort of turned the corner on this. Now, things could get worse. There's a lot we still don't know about this that's possible.

But from the data I'm looking at, deaths are down, cases are down. As far as our understanding of the virus, I think we sort of are now in a position to better understand who actually is vulnerable and design policies around that knowledge. So, for instance, the early days of the virus, we saw a tremendous amount of death in nursing homes. Older people, this virus is absolutely deadly compared to the flu. It's maybe two, three times worse than the flu for older people. For younger people, kids, it's actually much less deadly than the flu. So for instance, this year, more kids have died from the flu than have died from the coronavirus. And it's like not

a small difference. It's like two to three times more kids have died from the flu. That is a huge blessing. What that means is that kids don't face any undue risk relative to other respiratory viruses from this disease. We can take that knowledge and start to open up our schools. Schools are safe for kids. In fact, I go even further. If we don't open our schools up for kids, it's unsafe for the kids. It's better for the kids to, believe it or not, kids, it's better for you to be in school than not for your own safety. That is literally the opposite of what I'm, this is Rob in New York, that is the opposite of what Mayor Bill de Blasio is doing.

Yeah, no, the policy in the early days was literally the polar opposite of what we should have done. We quarantined the healthy and exposed the vulnerable. You think a reasonable policy would be the opposite. Let's protect the vulnerable and let the healthy go on with their lives. Because if you don't, there's harm to them as well. We should talk about that in just a bit, about what that is. But I mean, now we have a lot more knowledge about the virus. I mean, I can go back and start criticizing about early days but we you know there was a lot not known then you kind of sort of understand the the decisions were made then

but we shouldn't have our understanding of the virus frozen in amber from march and that's when i what i'm i'm starting to see a little bit on the policy side is uh is why why why should it be frozen in amber in march right we know a lot more now uh so so uh this is rob by the way in new york so um let me ask you two questions and tell me where i'm my assumptions are wrong um i read in the newspaper okay first of all assumption wrong to read the newspaper but let's let that one go i read in the newspaper that uh that uh the united states has just exceeded sweden Sweden in our infected fatality rate. We did all sorts of stuff, locked down things and quarantined people and shut down businesses and closed restaurants and bars. And we did all that.

And they didn't do any of that. Were they right and we were wrong? Yeah, they were right and we were wrong. We're going to look back at the lockdown as the biggest public health mistake in history. Because we haven't talked about what the harms of those lockdowns are, but they're absolutely devastating and enormous. And not just the United States, just worldwide. So I think we didn't consider those costs very deeply when we entered into lockdown. Again, I think that was not unreasonable then.

There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear about what this virus could do. We now know what it does to a large extent. We have an incredible amount of data about it. We also know a lot about what those lockdown policies do. So I think the excuse we had back then in March, April about the policies you could make and you could reasonably say, okay, these people are making reasonable decisions on the basis of what's not known. I don't think we have that excuse anymore.

So my second assumption is that there are two things we now know or two things we're smarter about than we were before. And they're both kind of equally important one is the disease but the second is the cure right we know more about the cures killed people for hundreds and hundreds of years but now we know that we had a cure here which is probably ultimately in the future will look look a little bit a little bit like leeches in its primitive foolishness is that is that i think is that a fair statement for our for a statement of our ignorance the the the breadth of our ignorance i think people will look back on this episode and and ask what on earth was the public health

community advocating it was an unprecedented uh intervention to lock down entire societies, the entire earth, for months. And I think Leach's is not wrong here. I mean, the evidence that supported that action, that absolutely extraordinary action, was nil. There's no precedent in history of doing such a wide-scale intervention. And so I think that is absolutely accurate. Actually, there's some more good news also I wanted to let you all know. So we actually do know more about actually how to treat the thing, right? So for instance, I think in the early days, the ventilators were the big focus on

how to manage patients with this deadly viral pneumonia that can happen with COVID. I think we mismanaged patients with those ventilators. We were too aggressive. We were too quick to put people under forced mechanical ventilation. And we killed patients as a result of that. Again, that was lack of knowledge. There's nothing malign about it. We just didn't know. And we're much better at managing patients' ventilators now than we were then. That's one huge positive. Another thing is there have actually been some therapeutic advances. So, for instance, our understanding of how to use steroids to manage the late-stage pneumonia is much better. That saved a lot of lives.

And continues to do so. It's why I think the case number seems less connected to the infected fatality rate, right? Because we have these better treatments. Can I just speak philosophically for a minute? Because, again, one more, and I know that Peter wants to jump in, one more sort of assumption you can tell me I'm full of it on. One of the problems we have as a culture, as a people, is that we simply do not, we believe you can eliminate risk. That once you identify, well, it's risky to go out there, you might get a respiratory illness, we respiratory illness we think well we got to stop you from doing that and there's this sort of sense

that the people demand a risk-free life there's a sense from the people they demand one there's you know everyone everyone here's my analogy you know the old lady goes and she buys a coffee from mcdonald's and it burns her and we all, that stupid lady, the coffee's supposed to be hot. But in the court case, it turns out the coffee was really hot and it had the lid on, all that stuff. We're all sometimes that old lady demanding a totally risk-free cup of coffee that's not going to burn us. And we're also the bystanders complaining that those old ladies suing everybody are ruining everything. Where are we as a culture, do you think? Are we smarter now? Or do we still believe that where's my vaccine? I should have had it two

weeks ago. Yeah, I think, Robert, there's a lot in that that's exactly right. I think we have fooled ourselves into thinking we can live a risk-free life. And so when something like the coronavirus comes along, we're forced to examine our own mortality. We react very, very poorly to it. That's as if somehow we could completely eliminate the risks of normal life. Now, coronavirus is deadly, as I said, for older people. I mean, I don't want to underplay that. And we should take some actions to mitigate that, absolutely, reasonable ones.

But we shouldn't. I mean, what i see out is that people and this is a harm that it'll be very difficult to over undo we people look at each other as if we're just sacks of germs that can infect each other yeah right it's it's well some of us are let's be honest we both know people who are sacks of oh no well you know my my my children when they were young they were they're they're they're both sacks of germs and an enormous source of joy, right? I mean, that's what humans are. We have to learn to treat each other like humans again, not just dangers to one another, which is, I think, kind of where we are.

You walk down the street and people walk to the other side now. Right, right. So that's an interesting analogy that we are like, it's like children. Everybody knows that children are these giant petri dishes filled with bacteria and it's going to affect you and their fingers and their feet and their faces are filthy. And yet we still take them in and, you know, and kiss them good night. So I guess so. So my other question, this is this is a political question, which doesn't have to be political. My bona fides are not a fan of Donald Trump. He gets a lot of fair criticism for all sorts of terrible things that he's done.

But every now and then he blurts out this horrible, blunt truth. It is what it is. To what extent, on a scale of one absolutely absolutely truthful to 10 whopping trump lie where does it is what it is belong for you i think it's pretty close to one rob i i think um you look at sweden they had a very very uh measured response it's not that they had nothing i mean people they told people here's what we think the risks are and people we you know they social distance uh that you know they did some things but they didn't shut their society down. And yet they're basically roughly, as far as the death rate is concerned, where we are.

Right. It is what it is. I mean, I don't, I think there are some examples you can point to and say, well, look, they've had a success, right? So if you say, okay, look, New Zealand identified the disease early and shut it down, shut down their society in a very draconian way for some time. And then for 120 days, they had no virus. No one on the island was allowed to leave and no one was allowed to come into the island. They've had a 10% hit to their growth rate. You have seven years of growth dissipated over a month. And then 120 days later, the virus comes back.

Right. And it starts to spread and have to close society down again. We cannot run our society like that, where the only goal is to have zero COVID. We've only eliminated one infectious disease in the history of mankind, smallpox. And that took an enormous hundreds of years effort to get to that point. We can't structure our society around zero covet that's just a mistake and i think that's that's at the root of the poor thinking around covid uh code policy a sort of standard public health dogma you can't have zero covered we can't

have zero risk we have to accept that there's going to be some risk mitigate it to the extent we can um but also realize that the cost of the mitigation can't overwhelm us as the lockdowns have. A bag of germs, a bundle of joy, zero rates. You guys are describing my investment portfolio. I mean, we've all heard for years that it's important to have a diversified portfolio, your stocks, your bonds, your mutual funds, that kind of thing. But if you've ever looked at a breakdown of the most successful portfolios, you'll typically see a diversified set of real estate. So why isn't it one of the first asset classes you consider when you're looking to diversify? Simple. It hasn't been available to investors like you and me until now, until now, thanks to

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So, as you have said, the public health officials, we'll come to that in a moment, it's an amorphous group. Who are the public health officials? I'd like to ask about that. But the public health officials, Fauci and others, have failed to take into account the costs of combating COVID by way of a lockdown. And those costs, as far as I can tell, are known, not just in terms of common sense, although we certainly ought not to disregard that the way we have been doing it, but sociologists and economists know that for every uptick in unemployment, you get a certain increase, a known increase in domestic

violence, opioid abuse, even suicide rates. We know that when you scare people away from going to the hospital, they don't show up for their colonoscopies and their cancer screenings. In fact, I believe there's even evidence that people who know they have cancer are too frightened to go to the hospital to receive their treatment. We know that hospitals across the country, the Mayo Clinic was the one that caught my eye because, of course, it's one of the greatest research institutions in the world. And the Mayo Clinic, because everything got shut down for a good long time except COVID, the Mayo Clinic apparently is going to be running a deficit this year in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And that makes me sizzling angry because whereas at the very beginning they had a rationale, again, the public health officials were going to bend the curve down

so that hospitals don't get overrun. And that made sense. And we did it. And now I can't hear, I can't, nobody has, nobody is stating a rationale. And yet this lockdown is continuing and it's easing here and easing there. Here in California, we're still very substantially locked down. And I'm furious. Tell me why I should calm down. I don't, Peter, I don't, unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to be able to calm you down. I also am quite upset about this, about those costs. And I think, let me just add to the litany of costs you said that makes me incredibly, I'll just give three numbers that have like shocked me to my core.

So one is one in four kids, or I call them kids, between 18 and 24 in June seriously considered suicide in the United States. That's a CDC study. One in four seriously considered suicide, young adults. They're the ones that we've imposed these costs on, right? So you can, you know, it's, I mean, I can't, the extent of that statistic is so shocking to me, I can't begin to convey how upset I am about it. The UN estimates that 130 million additional people will starve as a result of the lockdowns this year.

Around the world. Around the world. And millions and millions of additional cases of tuberculosis we will have worldwide. Because tuberculosis you have to treat over a long period of time with antibiotics. And around the world, they'll have these centers where people, poor people who get tuberculosis and come get the antibiotic come weekly. They shut those centers down. They shut down worldwide. They shut down vaccination campaigns.

We're going to see a resurgence of polio worldwide. We may even see polio in the United States for the first time since 1979. I mean, I think the costs of this lockdown are so astronomical that economists, we'd like to measure costs, but I don't know how to convey the size of the... When you shut down civilization for months, you're going to have these costs. Civilization matters. People's lives are extended because of the civilization we have. And to say, okay, we can just put it on pause for a few months and everything will be fine is a huge, huge error. That I can't, I can't, it's, I mean, I'm angry too, Peter. Jay, one more question for me.

James wants to come in, of course. And I'm not quite sure how to phrase the question, but I said earlier, it bothers me that the public health officials is an amorphous designation. And as you know very well, an interview that I did, an uncommon knowledge interview that I did with our friend Scott Atlas, just got taken down by YouTube, censored by YouTube. There's really no other word for it. And they said it was because Scott, the conversation violated prescriptions or advice, or I can't remember the exact phrase, but it named WHO, the World Health Organization, and then it said local authorities. And I thought,

local authority, well, of course, there are county health officials in every county. I looked it up online. There are 3,151 counties in America. I suppose the law may vary from state to state. Offices may vary from state to state. But some huge number of those all have county health officials. Nobody knows who these people are. Whether they're elected or not, nobody really understands who they are. There's the CDC. There's the National Institutes for Health. There's Fauci.

There's Birx. There's the Coronavirus Task Force. There's the President of the United States. Governors have something to say about it. It strikes me that not only was all this a terrible idea, but it represents a flaw in our democracy. People were able to shut down the economy. They're still holding it down, who are not democratically accountable. On top of that, you've got the legal system. People who run colleges and universities are very intelligent, of course. They know perfectly well that the students themselves are at very, very small risk. But they're getting told by their general counsels,

you can't open up because one case will open this institution or that institution or the other to some vast lawsuit, and we have no idea how it will come out. This is all unprecedented. So, I guess what I'm asking is, is our democracy up to this in some basic way? Yeah, so there's two separate issues I want to address separately, Peter, because both are incredibly important. One is on the question of scientific censorship. It has been absolutely shocking to me to see my colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere in favor of suppressing scientific discussion. And your interview with Scott is just one example of that. In fact, I think nearly 100 of my colleagues sent an open letter saying that Scott Atlas,

who's the special advisor to the president on COVID, is purveying pseudoscience. A couple of colleagues wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times using those words, which is absolutely disgusting and false. And what's especially disgusting is in their attack on them, on Scott, they impute to him positions he doesn't hold. They accuse him of not believing in handwashing. That's just a lie. They accuse him of being in favor of a herd immunity strategy where we ignore, do no mitigation at all. And that's also a lie. Scott has explicitly said he's not in favor of that. This is part of, and always the excuse is the same. I mean, I've faced this myself in the context of my comments on this, on the epidemic.

The excuse is the same. Look, Jay, if you say that, you're going to cause the public to not obey the public health orders. It's too dangerous to say that. You can't, there's a brilliant scientist a there's a a brilliant scientist gabriel gomez who's written a paper uh the very very careful mathematical paper arguing that the herd immunity threshold might be much lower than we think it is the herd we can talk about her immunity later but like that it is a fact about how diseases happen so if she's right it's it's a really important fact to know uh because it changes how we optimally deal with the disease

she may be right she may be wrong i i don't know. In any case, she can't get her paper even reviewed because editors are saying to her, we shouldn't tell the public this fact because we shouldn't even be discussing it because people will stop listening to the public health officials. It's a form of population control, and it's anti-scientific in and of itself. So yeah, I think that, so there's that element of this. Science, I think, has been corrupted in that sense. What science is to me is, there's some data we look at. You and I disagree, Peter, on what the data mean. We figure out, okay, we can look, collect some other data to help us resolve the difference. Then we look at other data, and maybe it resolves the difference, maybe it doesn't. We just move on. It's a conversation where you have the conversation,

you have the data, you have the conversation, you have the hypothesis data, the hypothesis data. You move on. It's an iterative process that involves discussion, open discussion among people who are honestly looking at the data to try to reach conclusions about it. That's not what I've seen. What I've seen is an attempt to suppress that conversation within science itself, in service of these public health orders, which, as we discussed, had very little data about it at the beginning. The second thing you asked, Peter, is about who are these public health people and legal structures that enable them to implement such extraordinary measures on the basis of almost

nothing i completely agree with you peter that needs to change the the legal structures that allowed this to happen i'm not saying that we necessarily should not ever have such a power you could imagine a a a virus or some other pathogen that has really catastrophic effects uh much worse than covid and you want to be able to have some of those powers that available but the the the data requirements the checks and balances in order to implement that power need to be vastly vastly uh expanded so that we don't just, on the basis of almost just terrible projections that have exposed turned out to be horribly wrong. You can't just make those projections and then shut the economy down unilaterally. 3,151 public health officials

everywhere have that power, or 50 governors, or even one president of the United States. You need to have checks and balances in place for extraordinary measures like that can be implemented. And the legal structures, the constitutional structures, or whatever, I'm not a legal scholar, but whatever they are, need to fundamentally change to not let that happen again. If you're going to propose an extraordinary measure, you need extraordinary data to support it, which we didn't have. Dr. Jay, last question here. When I walk out of the store, I always rip off my mask like I'm one of those TV doctors who's just had a really grueling, frustrating surgery session. And when I do that and I walk through the parking lot unmasked or

with it at half-mask tucked below my chin, I get hard looks from all the people who are wearing them, covering their face outside in a parking lot in the sun all the time. The masks everywhere, wherever you go, mentality seems to have set in. And I don't see that going away for a long time. At the same time, I see an awful lot of data. And maybe you can tell me a simple, stupid layman where I'm wrong about this, where if you look at all the charts from New Zealand to Peru to France, where the mask mandate went in, it didn't stop the cases from just jacking up. Now, you can say it would have been worse without masks, but we have this almost religious attachment and belief in masks now. And the culture that you and Peter have been describing doesn't seem to be one that's going to be won't to give it up. The plastic barriers aren't coming down. The fear isn't going away. What will it take exactly for people to say, I can take this mask off in a grocery store without fearing that the COVIDian miasma is

putting its tendrils up my nostrils and into every pore. That's a nice term, James. I think the evidence on masks, I mean, just frankly, I've read it and it's mixed. There's some evidence that it might help in crowded indoor settings. You know, like, for instance, there's this physical evidence of, like, if you blow through a mask, how far does the air go? It's some reasonable... Right. If somebody is shedding like crazy, if they're symptomatic, of course I can see that. But I mean, even assuming that half the people in the grocery store are asymptomatic, is this really helping? Or am I just... Yeah, I mean, I think, but that's what you, the evidence you cite, which is you put a mask

mandate in place, and there doesn't seem to be any effect on the disease prevalence. You know, like you put it in when the cases are increasing, no effect. When it's decreasing, there's no effect. That is, I've seen studies like that. They're floating around sort of kind of like Samus dotted among scientists that won't, you know, you have to sort of kind of like samistad among scientists that you have to sort of share it secretly or else someone will come after you. I think the evidence on masks is mixed. I think we've landed on masks because we want to give ourselves some sense of agency over this because we do have fear about this. And the masks provide us some modicum of control. I heard Dr. Redfield, the CDC, had testified saying that masks somehow inoculate you against

are better than a 70% effective vaccine. There's no evidence of that. I mean, I think we shouldn't overstate. I think this is one of these, again, this is one of the things where I think we should communicate to the public clearly what the state of the science actually is and not presume to say because I want you to wear a mask, because I want to force you to wear a mask, I'm going to overstate, which is, I think, some of the instinct of the public health officials. Hey, Dr. Jay, I know you got to run, but I got a couple, just a couple things to wrap up. One is

there's a credibility problem with everyone, really. I mean, Bob Woodward comes out with a book and says Trump said, you know, he knew that it was going to be a bad scene, that COVID was going to make its way through the country, and yet he didn't say anything, or he said it mitigated in his public speeches. But isn't that kind of the same thing we see now with sort of the distortion of the mask research and the distortion of the lockdown research and all that, that we are now teaching Americans to read all medical and scientific information primarily through their lens of their preferred candidate for president. And how do you get the credibility back? I don't see how you get it back.

It's going to take a long time to repair the damage that science has done to itself, the public health has done to itself. And especially the politicization of it is absolutely shocking to me. To me, from the beginning, this has been I want to understand this disease, I want to understand the science around it. And it seems to me like that spirit has been corrupted by this, by the election. The discussion is worse here than it is in other places, whether the election isn't this overwhelming, looming thing.

I mean, maybe after November it'll get better. I don't know. I hope so. But the damage done is very difficult to repair. I mean, it's going to be, like, who, I mean, if I'm out, if I don't read, you know, if I'm just a regular person who doesn't, I mean, I'm lucky because I get paid to read the literature and all this. But if I have other things to do with my life, then sit there and, like, refresh MedArchive every day. How do I view the people that are telling me these things? At the end of the day, it's a matter of trust. and i think in some sense we betrayed we the scientists have betrayed that trust and it'll be difficult to get that back okay so you're you're a doctor but you're not my doctor

and you're not everyone listening to this podcast doctor stipulated at the outset but as a doctor you know what do i do now like do we actually are we actually after all of this going right back to the wash your hands more often and you carry purell around and maybe wear a mask if you're on the subway what what are the three things that people listening this should do just because this is out there i mean if you're older let's say 65 or above or and you have pre you know pre-existing conditions that predispose you to a very, very bad outcome if you get sick, I would take a lot more precautions, right? So, I mean, those certainly, those are the ones that people say for, now, partly because

those are the ones we have available to us, rather than, but so I think that is really important. If you're older, if you're younger, I mean, look, we've had protests with young people all walking around yelling in other people's face. I just, we don't, we haven't seen the death. There's a reason we haven't seen the death. It's not, it's, if you're under 30, it's not as deadly as the flu. It just isn't. I mean, that's just a fact. It may not be politically right to say it, but it's just a fact. And you can't expect people to act as if you were facing a huge, deadly threat when they're not. So I think we have to

understand this age stratification, and the strategy we use needs to respect that age stratification of risk. And until we do that, until the mitigation strategies that we recommend correspond to that reality, you're going to see resistance to it by people who say, why should I do this? What am I really getting out of this? So just a thought experiment. We had said, I know we can't do this, said in February, a more thoughtful, sane, measured strategy to protect the people who are vulnerable and to sort of let the people who are not vulnerable go back their lives and we had said okay all that energy we're spending is screaming at you to put on a mask and all this other stuff and staying indoors and all the other things and closing schools we're going to put into taking care of elderly shut-ins who are now

shut-ins and now i think i mean you mentioned the younger people and suicide rates but there's a huge increase in older people and depression and older people and incredible loneliness in that group. What if we had done that? And instead of our mitigating strategy being we're going to mitigate the risks in hospitals, we're going to mitigate the pain among the older people who we now need to isolate. How different would things be now? I mean, you can sort of see this in a place like Sweden, right? So the mistake they made very early on was they didn't know, and partly we didn't know, that the elderly needed special protection, that nursing homes needed special protection.

They corrected that in April, where they really shut down nursing homes, really severely. I think they're just now releasing those shutdowns. They've worked from, I understand, to address that kind of loneliness by putting in programs where the testing resources are focused on, if you enter a nursing home, you're going to need a test. And then allowing family members to come in. I mean, I personally have had a friend who died in a nursing home alone. So it's absolutely a painful thing. But you can understand in the context of this disease, which is deadly to people that are older, it's a sacrifice. You're asking people to pay, but it's a sacrifice with a return. That policy makes sense to me. The policy of let's shut down the schools, let's force everyone to stay home from their work, let's shutter everybody's business, it only marginally protects the elderly.

And it imposes enormous costs on people that don't face a huge additional risk from this disease. I mean, again, it is deadly in young people, too, but it's not as deadly as the flu for under 30, say. It's an additional risk that we face in our lives, and we just accept that we have that risk and decide what to do about it. I think in that sense, if we just communicated that, people would have social distanced, I think, naturally. Some people would have worn masks naturally. Everyone would have washed hands more naturally. That is the right policy. So I was talking to an epidemiologist friend of mine last week, and I made this analogy. I said, well, you know, what are we going to talk about the future, right? Respiratory illnesses and contagious ones are in our future. So the analogy, it was an earthquake, right? The earthquake comes,

shakes the ground, buildings fall, we build up the buildings better. And we prepare. And everybody, when I was living in California, everybody knew you live in California. We know there's an earthquake coming. We know it's coming. We just try to prepare for it. And he said that's the problem with that analogy is that all earthquakes are the same. The ground shakes.

That's all. They're just ground shakes. All viruses are different so it's entirely possible that the next one covid 22 covid 23 god forbid is going to be different and it's not going to be old people in rest homes it's going to be you know red-haired people or left-handed people like me well who knows right hold up but hold but hold on i gotta say this all earthquakes are the same yes but every locality has different building codes true and that has a, the infrastructure that you have. Right, but what I mean is that the disease is the same.

The earthquake, the earth shakes. So my question is, what generically, I mean, that is not necessarily COVID-specific, COVID-19 specific, can we learn from this experience? What didn't we do that we should do about learning about the specifics of this disease and acting on them that we may be able to learn from next time COVID-22? Well, I mean, first we need a science that's open to disagreement among scientists and in public communication, which that's really important because what happened with COVID was we were addressing, we were using Ebola policies for respiratory disease that were much more widespread. This dogma of let's test, and remember the early days,

we don't have enough testing resources. I mean, the U.S. now has more tests per capita than any country on Earth, I think. Maybe Russia, I'm not sure, but it's pretty close. Let's test, let's contact trace um we we let's test let's contact trace and then let's isolate that was the dogma but still the dogma um as if somehow you could control a disease that has affected that that is i think impacted i mean if i if the antibody size is right so how many are we were 60 to 100 million people already um in the united states

alone so now that that is it's that that dog dogma cannot work with a disease that is that widespread. You can do contact tracing. Essentially, you'll end up identifying every single person in the United States as a third contact. What is it, six degrees of separation, right? Right. So that dogma works fine for venereal disease. If you've got a disease that's spread literally one person to one person, there's not that many people. You contact trace backwards and you isolate them, and then you treat the people because you have effective treatment for most venereal diseases.

So that dogma works for that. It worked potentially for Ebola, a disease that's incredibly deadly. It's contagious, but you can identify and isolate very, very – potentially for ebola right the disease that's incredibly deadly very it's it's it's all it's contagious and but you can you can identify and isolate very very you know it's not it's not so widespread that you have to like set the set the contact tracing circle to infinity um right right i mean i think that the the problem was we we used our thought process our policies the dogma that was appropriate for other diseases and applied it to this disease in a completely inappropriate way and i think that is the central problem even to now

about about the standard public health uh thinking on this it's not ebola it's not venereal disease the the kind of public health control things that would work in those cases don't work here now you can see it. I mean, the evidence is all around you. Like, they've tried it. Countries around the world have tried it. That's why they launched the lockdowns, because they realized it wasn't working to begin with. And so I think, you know, I think we have to be open to the data.

In the early days, it's always going to be we're not going to know fully. And so we have to respect that. We have to be honest with the public about that. And we have to allow open, public, scientific discussion around that so that we can see what looks most promising, what looks right. I think that suppression of scientific discussion, which happened on the very earliest days of this disease, has been probably the single worst thing that has happened in this. Not just for the trust going forward, but also for the decision-making early on. So political correctness or political theories, political concerns in the humanities, eh, you know, so the English department at Yale is filled with nuts. Big deal. So the psychology department at Stanford

is filled with loonies. Big deal. But when the when it's the CDC or the scientific community, the viral investigation community, people die. Yeah. No, I think that's really right. I mean, I think it has, in this case, literally

has led to many, many deaths that could have been avoided if we'd been more open to scientific discussion. Jay, do you have time for one more question from the angry man? Peter, you know, you're the sweetest angry man I know. Okay, so Rob just asked about the future. My question is about the present. Again, I'm not sure how to put it because I can't describe the arguments concerning vaccines. I don't understand them well enough. But now I hear people say, well, we won't trust Trump to tell us when we have a vaccine. And then there's a scientific argument that the prevalence is now so low that it's going to be very hard to test a vaccine.

So as best I can tell, the current position of, again, the public health authorities, we use that phrase, is now two points. Point one, we're going to keep this country locked down until we have a vaccine. Point two, we're not sure we can ever get to a vaccine. C point one, what's the way out? Yeah, I mean, I should say I've been amazed and pleasantly surprised by the progress that the vaccine folks have made in producing candidates that look like they're promising for vaccines. If the vaccine comes and it looks like the data suggests, show that they're safe and effective, I'm going to be very, very happy. I mean, I think that will be a really good day for everybody.

But I think we should wait. We should look and see what the data actually end up saying. So that's one thing. So I don't want to downplay the vaccine. Actually, the fact that the vaccine safety debate is getting caught up in this political thing is absolutely shocking to me. I saw, I think it was Kamala Harris, basically down talking, like saying that the vaccine safety evaluation by the FDA wouldn't be rigorous. I mean, I've worked with the FDA. If anything, they're conservative to a fault about safety. They will not let, if there's any negative safety signal, they will not let it go.

So, I mean, politicization about the scientific investigation of the vaccine is just a huge mistake by either party. The second part of your question is really the more important one, though, Peter. Can we just, can we have a policy where we say, okay, let's wait and see, we just shut the world down until the vaccine? That's crazy to me. It's not worth the gamble. The costs are too high. We're going to wait. We talked about 130 million additional people that are going to starve. I mean, I think that asking those people to pay the cost so that we can get the hope of some vaccine later is not moral. It's not right.

It's not just. We shouldn't do it. Well, this is the end of our first segment. We have another nine hours to go with Dr. J. And you'll be hanging on every word, as would I, because it's just endlessly fascinating and there's so many details and moving parts and the rest of it that's great but we know you got a life to go to after all you have 17 jobs according to your description at the top of this segment so uh so i imagine one or two of them may have suffered a little bit while we've been talking so go do what you have

to do and make things and invent things and be brilliant and the rest of it. And I hope the next time that we talk to you, we will be gambling about in the Elysian Fields, maskless, going to stores and only compulsively washing our hands every 47 seconds instead of every 23. Jay, thanks a lot. Jay, thanks so much. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, guys. It was really fun to talk with you. I hope I didn't come across as angry no no i can handle that for both of us jay uh that's just great bye-bye uh rob not to

be pedantic although of course when i say that that means that's exactly what i'm going to be yeah what i what i meant about the building code thing is that and i'm not saying anything you don't know is that if if there's an earthquake in india everything falls down because it's built cheaply if it if it happens in spain in the 18th century so you know it depends on the location well but yeah yeah my point was that earthquakes are all the same in in the way that viruses are not all the same i know right What I'm saying is that, though, is that the way the system responds to it is what's different now. Because we thought we had building codes in place that would keep this stuff from happening. I mean, that if an earthquake hit a place it was used to, it would. But now we know, all of a sudden, we saw the CDC and everybody else not behave like they do in the movies.

All of a sudden, we're taking a look at that and saying that when it happens again, what we thought was going to save us, actually, the codifications built into the system are insufficient. And, I mean, we have to admit, it was this bizarre mix of fear and failure and butt covering and all the rest of it. But I think Dr. J said the right thing, which was that we were following a protocol for a disease that this wasn't. You were acting like it's Ebola and it wasn't Ebola. That each one is different and the next one may not be old people are at risk and young people aren't.

The next one might be like the Spanish flu where young people are at risk and old people aren't. So that's the problem is our response has to be based on what we know or what we don't know about the virus and not instead going back to an old pattern. So it isn't the same thing. It's like it isn't the same thing as building a better building. It's because it's like building better building codes and then having a wildfire.

They're different. Different disasters. Tonight on Ricochet, ill-chosen metaphors collide in a series of different assumptions. You're right. But that was my point. My point was that was the wrong assumption. That's what my friend the epidemiologist is saying, was that it isn't like an earthquake. Because earthquakes are all the same.

The earth shakes. You just build a better building. The viruses have different effects on bodies. They're not the same as an earthquake. It's like earthquakes and floods and fires and mudslides and viral epidemics. They're all terrible, but they're all different. And the same thing with viruses. They're all different.

But aren't earthquakes different in the sense that if you have one along the San Andreas Fault, it's basically dry and stuff cracks. If you have it up north in the Pacific Northwest, you have liquefaction of the soil, which is a different catastrophic reaction. Maybe. We're going around in circles. But my point is only this, is that what we've learned from COVID may not apply specifically to the next one. The next one will have to be something different. And what we need to learn, I think what Dr. J was saying was like not to run and to sort of politicize a response before we know something. And if we don't know something to be willing and humble enough to say, we don't know it, um, which we weren't. Uh, and that, that to me was the, is the, that, that's the only way to prepare for the next one is to, is to prepare the, uh, is to be very disinterested scientific inquiry, which seems to be impossible today. I prefer to belabor my point, but you're right. No, you're absolutely correct. I just wish that,

I hope that the next one has some sort of easy symptom. Like the people who have it, they're plaid. You see somebody plaid coming down the street, that's fine. Or the instant you get it, all your hair falls out. Now, of course, we'd have to factor in bald people. But if somebody you're talking to sneezes and all his hair falls off, you know he's got the new one. That would be absolutely horrible because, guys, you know a lot of our identity is wrapped up in our hair, right? Oh, nice one. Nice one. I was scrolling trying to find that one, but yes.

Oh, boy. I was trying with the earthquake one, but obviously that wasn't going to go so i had to go with this uh when it comes to your hair how it feels after you get a fresh cut which i just did by the way i'm looking fabulous to the way it's perfectly styled before you're going on a lot of your identities wrapped in your hair and that's why we get in to our 20s and our 30s you know and we start noticing it's starting to go first signs of hair loss. It feels like panic time. I was there a long time ago.

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And this week comes from Kirky and Wander. Kirky and Wanderer, the very name that the person shows makes me think of James T. Kirk, of course, wandering somewhere, overacting in a desert. The post was, say goodnight, blue eyes, and it's a testament to George Burns and his best friends. Quote, the morning after Christmas of 1974, the hack violin player died. Ten years earlier, the pixie-like Catholic girl cried for her Jewish husband who had died suddenly of a heart attack, and that same hack violinist had held his best friend's arm through the long funeral service, stopping only to carry the girl's coffin. It had been a long 55 years. It's a story of the friendship between Jack Benny and George Burns. You may think,

who cares? A, if you don't know anything about the culture of the times or the people, it's a great read. Two, if you do know something about it and you're interested, it reminds you of the personalities and the things you may not have known at the time. And three, it's an example of how Ricochet isn't just people banging drums and throwing pots and pans about politics and COVID and the rest of it, we do culture here and now. And there's a great member base that knows that they weren't there at the time, but like sensible, smart, curious people, they cast their mind over the entirety of the American experience, both cultural and historical. So we've got an opportunity for people to talk about George Burns and Jack Benny,

whether or not they remember him watching him at their grandfather's house, or whether they came to him later in life to discover a piece of American culture that still exists to this day whether or not they remember him watching him at their grandfather's house or whether they came to him later in life to discover a piece of american culture that still exists to this day in all of its shining amusing glory uh gentlemen that's the sort of thing that we we like to do on ricochet and i know that you're both jack benny fans are you george burns fans oh definitely no absolutely george burns great i mean he was uh, George Burns was one of those guys who knew it's really hard for a big star to understand that you're the straight man. Right. And so for years, he was just the straight man.

And the straight man just stands there and delivers straight lines to the funny person who then is funny. And then you stand there while she, his wife, gets all the laughs. And for a lot of people that's awfully hard to do but for true geniuses they're just sly and they they just make it happen and um and i think part of those guys like benny and george burns they're there they they were they had already been on stage for so long in front of audiences, live audiences, and live audiences that were drunk or throwing vaudeville touring around, all that stuff, that they had so much experience that they knew they could play the long game. Whereas I think people who don't have that kind of experience, when they go on stage and suddenly, you know, there's an old story. I shouldn't even, this is the going, I know we want to wrap, but the old story,

true story. A friend of mine was once working on an old sitcom and it was a horrible sixties or seventies sitcom. And this, the joke was, his twin brother came to visit, right? So his twin brother came to visit and he plays his twin brother, right? So he's playing his twin brother and they're doing split screens and doing split screens, and they're doing reverse shots and all that stuff. And at one point after one run through, he yells at the writers and says, this is garbage. I can't play this.

My brother is getting all the laughs. And that just shows you the myopia of some people versus George Burns and why George Burns was so great. And then towards the end, after Gracie died, he got to be the comic man himself. People thought of him as the funny guy because he'd been waiting in abeyance for all these years and had the skill to show. That was great. That's a great story, and it's so true. Rob, I mean, you've been in a number of writing rooms right is there i gotta ask is the guy who's the funniest always the guy who's the or the or the

woman of course highest paid um often that is the case that is often that's how you know that's often the case or or at least. Or does the least amount of work has the fewest hours. When I started writing, there were two guys who came in and they did a day a week and they were paid an astronomical sum for sit there for one day and just make jokes. But it was worth the money. So if you got some guy then who was just sitting around the writer's room complaining about being in debt, you can look at him and say, if you were funnier, you wouldn't be in debt. And that's the line I want everybody to take away from this show. Because being in debt sucks, frankly, the language. You got your credit cards, you got your student loans, you got your mortgages. It doesn't matter

what kind of debt. Being in debt flat out sucks. Well, there is a way to defeat your debt thanks to bills.com. If you're losing sleep over your maxed out credit cards, paying huge amounts of interest, or stressed out thinking about your mortgage payments or your student loans, can't sleep, bills.com can help you take back control of your life. The first step to lowering your monthly payments and becoming debt-free is to get a free debt assessment. They'll do that for you. Only takes a few minutes. Could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars each month. From debt settlement to personal loan consolidation to student loan to mortgage refinancing, Bills.com, they got you covered. They're part of the Freedom Financial Network, which has been in business since 2002, and it's settled over $10 billion in debt. You

can be part of that, too. Take the first step to defeating your debt. Get your free debt assessment today at Bills.com slash Ricochet. That's Bills.com slash ricochet. Bills.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to bills.com for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. We got one more thing that we want to ask you two before we head out of here. But before I do that, I got to remind everybody to go to Apple Podcasts. Give us a five-star review. That's great. You already did it? Fantastic. Log on under another name and do it again. Pretend it's 1960 and you're voting for Kennedys. Maybe not. I want to note also that, well, I'll tell you that at the end. I'll just say this. What do you want to leave us with this week, gentlemen? There's the Time

Magazine piece about how daylight savings time should be made permanent or there's some little bit of cuties related pop culture outrage that you'd like to address i'll leave it up to you uh rob peter what's the last thing you'd like to talk about fulminate this week besides earthworks peter you beat it on a roll fulminating at some point i want i don't even know if it has to be right now but at some point, I want, I don't even know if it has to be right now, but at some point, I want Rob to explain to me why TikTok matters. I can't understand these ridiculous little videos. As best I can tell, that's all it is. And it's been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal day after day after day. President Trump is involved in the, what is this ridiculous little thing?

What is it or why does it matter well i'm afraid you're going to have to do both for me so oh well i mean i don't want to belabor this i it is a a little short video app where young people mostly can send viral little short videos to each other and they can and it and it has stripped away a lot of the choice and choosing that you make to see videos so that you basically turn it on and it delivers to you a series of complicated algorithms based on what you've looked at, what you've scrolled through, who you follow, who you follow follows, all that stuff. And it kind of serves you up this kind of endless, endless scroll of little videos. And young people do, mostly it's they do little dances they tell little jokes or they lip sync other things um it is in fact i think i did a piece for this in commentary hugely hugely magnetic uh and um and actually incredibly benign and i i'm not sure

what the true reason for um for the argument uh you know the if it's sort of the the the trump administration demanding that the chinese divest themselves of this asset it goes back and forth from uh uh it's it's it's it's embedded code in your phone that allows people to eavesdrop your phone which doesn't seem terribly persuasive to slightly more persuasive which is that all the young people are on it and if you wanted to you could propag propagandize them by making them watch videos that undermine American democracy. That's possible, too. That seems to be what they argue now. The past two weeks, the argument's been entirely about the content and not about the operating system that it uses and the way it interacts with your phone. But also, a lot of it is just this kind of

general trade policy which is if you won't let us do x and y why should we let you do a and b and so we chat is in there now which is the number one messaging service in china and the number one messaging service between uh mainland china and the united states and um and and it's incredibly encrypted it's very hard to read uh and also tiktok and things like that this is all part of a larger trade strategy which isn't necessarily a bad thing um why any american company would want to buy it especially unrelated to it like microsoft or oracle seems bizarre to me and the reasons for it are are ever shifting um but if you're concerned about propaganda from a foreign nation um which it didn't seem to me that the trump administration was that worried

about um then i think you have a case to make and if you're worried about i think if you're worried about operate the operating system in your iphone or your android i think you have there's less uh validity to that argument but i i'm not licensed to practice uh technology uh engineering in the state of new york got it peter just assume that anything coming from china has an element of malware built into it i think that's actually yeah people know this politically you know tech tech tech in terms of technology yeah people who know you say people who know even more than rob and you about this stuff tell me that that is exactly what I should assume. Yeah, but my argument is that that may be true, although I don't think it's in any greater number than any other crappy stuff that you put on your phone.

And the phone itself tends to be pretty good. I mean, Apple's pretty good at creating these kinds of operating systems. But I would say that the benefit for america is that if people in china are looking at tiktok here's what they're seeing they're seeing a bunch of happy hilarious young american children young people many of whom are in amazing physical shape doing incredible stunts in in in front of their gigantic houses middle-class houses in america have huge kitchens with granite countertops there are middle-class houses in America have huge kitchens with granite countertops.

There are middle-class kids saying, here, here's a picture of my room. Here's my bathroom. If I'm sitting in some benighted little concrete, the Stalinist slab in China, in Chi-Com town, and I'm watching these middle-class American kids running around dancing in their gigantic houses, I'm thinking to myself,class American kids running around dancing in their gigantic houses. I'm thinking to myself, there's a problem here. I want that. I don't want what I've got. And so I generally think it's a good thing. I agree with that. If they see it, I have no idea whether or not the content, the Americans, whether or not there's the great Chinese firewall keeps

out any IP that's coming from us. Could you know the other day when i opened up a fresh box of uh match masks there was a little piece of paper you know i always get the inspected by number 42 yes yes yes this was a little thing that was a guarantee of quality from the chinese manufacturer and it had been inspected by this numbered person it came from this factory and the quality was absolutely, completely assured. And I looked at this little thing, which had the design. It was odd. It looked like it was designed by somebody who did Chinese firework labels in 1962.

And I looked at this thing, and I had really bad thoughts that they made this, it got here, and now they're selling us this. And I just, you know, guarantee of quality aside, what I see every time now that I feel some manifestation or iteration of their culture, their government, I feel a sense of malevolence from them. And I react almost negatively to almost anything that comes up. And this is a total ship because, I mean, years ago I was, well, China's getting rich. They're going to be, you know, they've got the problems, but we're going to all get together. Capitalism is great. And I've shifted so totally in that, that if TikTok turns out to be the most innocuous

thing in the world, and we still manage to decouple it from them, great, fantastic. So what I'm here to tell you is, that ricochet is american owned american made and all every single day it comes up with something new and fresh at ricochet.com where you should go now and join why because if you join we're not going to bring back rob's sponsor membership pitches right i'm not saying it's a threat i'm just saying saying, Rob. No, I think it's a fair threat. Hey, guys, I'm sorry. This just came to me. Sure. We closed the show.

I want to ask you each, I'm going to give you the opening scene, and all I want is the next scene. And here's the opening scene. Rob Long is trying on a brand new jacket. He's fumbling around. He reaches in the pockets to make sure they've been opened. He pulls out. It says, inspected by number 42 and then he turns it over and it printed on the back it says help me okay what scene two

in real life or or the movie no no what you were going to pitch i'm doing this just to help your career, Rob. Oh, in real life, I'm like, eh. You know myself. In the movie, I put it away. It is what happens. In the movie, I put it away. I refuse to call to action as every sort of great adventure begins. First, you say no. And then I find another one somewhere and i think i gotta this is this is now me specific and then i go and find out who inspector 42 is then it turns out it's actually

a trap oh or something beautiful beautiful okay i would i mean of course you have to find another one right that yeah after you about 17, 20 minutes into that, after we've established this thing. The question is whether or not your character then goes to find out where they're coming from. In other words, he talks to the store owners, where are you getting this from? Who's your wholesaler? And he becomes so consumed with curiosity that he actually breaks into the wholesalers, gets the next shipment, starts rummaging through all the pockets to find them. And finally, he gets, you know, he finds one from number 43

who says, you know, I'm okay. You help number 42. And eventually perhaps number 39. I mean, you can assemble all sorts of things in this, but I would love for somebody to point out this is just an old take on the tired Chinese fortune joke from about 1967,

68. I mean, really, I'm not going to take any of these guys seriously because that was like a bit. Help, I'm being held captive in a Chinese fortune factory. All right. What brought that up, Peter? No, it just came into my mind. I thought to myself, we've gone long anyway. We've solved most of the world's problems between the Middle East opening segment and then the long, beautiful conversation,

fascinating conversation with Dr. Che. And I thought I was just going to have a little fun with my two friends. Okay, you want to have some fun? Here's the thought I had today. Yeah, I want to have some fun. Okay, here's the thought I had today. I know we want to wrap, but here's the thought.

Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania for years and years and years was, you know, the old saw about Pennsylvania was it was Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and in between was Alabama. Right. And that's how they voted. That's why Democrats usually won Pennsylvania because they won Pittsburgh and they won Philadelphia and in between was Alabama. But it turns out that over the past 25 30 years that the that the alabama pennsylvania has become saudi arabia has become a an energy state and prosperity has come to that region and that prosperity is entirely based on an industry that one party supports and the other party despises and the party that despises it is

wondering what happened what happened what happened and they're going to get into demographics and they're going to think about this and they're going to think about that and they're going to talk about the forgotten man and all that stuff and the truth is that one party is identified with energy producing business and the other is identified with energy with stopping energy producing business and curtailing it and that's perfectly fine if you're not in if you're in a state that is not an energy producer but if you're in a state that is an energy producer texas oklahoma pennsylvania it's it doesn't matter how you feel it doesn't matter it doesn't matter how you feel about immigration doesn't matter how you feel about taxes doesn't matter how you feel about any of those things those are all secondary to the fact that one group of people is going to

put us back into the poorhouse where we were we're going to make us alabama again and the other group wants to make sure that we stay prosperous and joseph rob Biden grew up in Scranton. He should know better. Which is in all kinds of ways the capital city of the part of Pennsylvania you're describing. And all those played out coal mines, they're gone. And Scranton was a backwards, not backwards, but a depressed town for three or four decades until people figured out how to frack. And Scranton is a happening town again and there are a lot of farmers in northeastern pennsylvania who've made real money by selling the rights to fracking on their land and they look at joe biden and say wait a minute he's a

hometown boy but he's against us he's against us on fund on the fundamental level it just it just you get it gets down to this fundamental bedrock where all of the other extraneous issues are really just satellites to the giant planet. And the giant planet is, you want to take away this business. more to uh to um has done more has been more beneficial to a climate change yes concerns and more beneficial to the climate in general than any number than a million billion trillion gajillion fazillion paris uh climate accords and um it's just like this weird rhetorical trap that the that the other the challenger party is in now. They just, and they can't get out. So they got to figure out a way to win the White House and lose Pennsylvania, which I suspect they'll do.

But it just, what's interesting is just that I don't think it, you don't need to look that hard. That's my, a state transformed itself through a certain kind of prosperity. And I believe that's what's great about America. Except it's the wrong kind of prosperity. Yeah, right. And it's happening to the wrong people. They don't spend their money correctly. They buy big F-150s. They buy bigger houses that they don't need. And they don't do the sensible thing, which is to take all their money, move to a dense area, have a very small apartment and spend their time in an art museum looking at a square that is filled entirely with a color black and contemplating how this illustrates an existential reality.

Yeah, right. I mean, the difference is that it's a big country. You can live any way you want. That's great. But it's just interesting how a state can go from one thing to another thing. And and no one could have predicted it. That's what's great about a vibrant free market economy. No one could have predicted that the middle of Pennsylvania was a little Kuwait.

It was supposed to be a little Alabama. That's the great thing about free market. No one can predict it, and no one should be surprised when it happened. And we should all hope for the best because this is the system that allows the best to happen. Hey, this podcast was brought to you by Arrow, Fundrise, Bills.com, and Keeps. Lots of great sponsors. You can support them, and you support us as well, and you make your life easier. Better Wi-Fi, better hair, better financial statements. It's all there if you just listen to Ricochet. And go to Ricochet.com, join, and

we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet. And it's going to be fun, too, this one, because masks, virus, vaccines, oh, lots to talk about. And we'll see you at the comments then at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas.

Long one. Tick-tock, listen to the clock. T Tick tock, listen to the clock. Tick tock, listen to the clock. What time is it? Listen to the clock. I've just got to know. Listen to the clock. What time is it?

It's five o'clock. Three more hours to go. Talk to our her in my arms And tell her that I want her For my own Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock Listen to the clock Tick tock, listen to the clock Tick tock, listen to the clock Listen to the clock

One time is good Tell me once again One time is good Two more hours and then I'll be his world While the magic of moonlight makes you mine Better help and put my time Better help, it's almost time

Tick tock, listen to the clock Tick tock, listen to the clock Tick tock, it's seven o'clock Tick tock, listen to the clock Tick tock, it's eight o'clock Now I'm not hurt, no And my heart is beating fast Every moment until it lasts

Oh, what time is it? It's time for love. Tick tock, it's a little club. Tick tock, it's a little club. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Tick tock, it's a little club. Tick tock, it's a little club. Tick tock, it's a little club. James, you can pronounce it however you like.

Don't worry. No. As somebody who's been Jim Lillix all his life, I want to make sure I get it right.