The Ricochet Podcast - The Future Is Unwritten

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

We’ve got a packed, super-sized show for you this week, so let’s get right to it: first up (right at the top of the show), tech columnist Benedict Evans who takes us through the Facebook v. Apple privacy controversy and explains why Apple may not have the moral high ground they think they do. Then, Grace Church High School math teacher Paul Rossi (you must read the article he wrote for our friend... Source

Yeah, we're going to do it really quick. Coming down. Rolling. Three, two. Are you sure this is 542? 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. Tim Scott. He does not seem to understand the difference between a racist country and systemic racism. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalex. Today we talk to Benedict Evans about privacy and the internet, and Paul Rossi about wokeness and academia. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 540-something. Who's keeping track?

We are 542, the flagship podcast of Ricochet podcast number 540 something. Who's keeping track? We are 542, the flagship podcast of Ricochet.com. Join us and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. I'm James Laddus from Minneapolis, which is peaceable and beautiful. The boards are coming down from the buildings downtown, which is great. Peter's in California, Rob's in New York, and you know what? We got a guest queued up, so let's get right to it. Our next guest is somebody I've been reading for, well, I mean, as long as I can remember reading about tech, Benedict Evans. He's an independent analyst who writes about the complicated world of tech. His essays and newsletter will keep you up to date on subjects

ranging from the inner workings of the companies we all know, e-commerce, software, and the policies and innovations that are shaping the online world. You can find his work on his website at ben-evans.com. That'll all be in the show notes, by the way. And you can follow him on Twitter at at Benedict Evans. Benedict, thank you for joining us. I know it's late in London, so we really appreciate that you're staying up late, although it seems very bright behind you. So I guess spring is here.

It's 4.30, so I'm not sure if that counts. Maybe indeed it counts deep sleep at night. Can we quickly run down, if you don't mind, Apple has just announced, and I think has shipped, a new adjustment to its privacy policy. You have to opt in, if you're an apple user to allow apps to use to allow uh uh some apps to follow your behavior across other uh applications um yeah so there's two they've actually done two slightly different things so first of all they had a system called idfa which meant that

if you tapped on an ad and that took you to the app store and you installed the app and then you opened the app then the advertiser would know that their ad had resulted in an install and paying to get an app installed is a big business and apple has now made that opt-in which means turned it off so and they replaced it with something called skadnet which which gives much less limit much more limited information the second thing that they did is called att which is that if you run an app that uses an ad network so you are um tracking your interest or your activity across more than one app, across more than one website, showing ads based on what you did on another website. Now you have to get opt-in permission to do that as well.

Interestingly, this is actually almost a direct parallel to the cookie law that the EU has had for three or four years. You kind of have to do that and indeed CCPA. So, you know, if you're going to track people across multiple websites, you need to click OK. And Apple is sort of doing the same thing across apps but you think i mean when i see that that cookie um that cookie alert i always say fine i mean i just says it's like the terms of service that i just agree you know scroll down to the bottom of this contract and agree is it going to be quite the same experience no because it's more binary so it's quite easy to

say yes instead of no to those cookie things in fact the default is generally okay exactly whereas the apple dialogue is do you consent to them to track you yes or no so so apple and this is sort of this is sort of a broader point here, is the steering or the framing that Apple does steers people towards saying no. And that is probably one of the issues that has been such a sticking point with one of its most popular apps, Facebook, which does track you across

as much as they possibly can, don't they? So this tracking word is interesting. So Apple, as you may know, has an ad business. Not a big one, but it has an ad business. And so they analyze what you look at in Apple News, what searches you do, what you look at in the Stocks app, where you are, what your home address is in your billing account, and so on.

And they use that to build a profile of the kind of stuff you're interested in. So that if you look at lots of car stuff, they show you car ads. And if you look at lots of sports, they show you sports stuff. And their privacy statement says, we don't track you, but we just do this. I kind of look at that and I think, that's cracking, isn't it? That's what that is, yeah. And so I actually, so I did did a twitter poll which of course is fantastically unscientific um but i said if the new york times records everything that you look at on the new york times in the course of a month and uses that to decide whether to share you car

ads or sports ads um is that tracking yes or no um and 80 percent of like if i got 5 000 responses and 80 percent of people said yes that's tracking now two points one is apple facebook that is what the new york times does um secondly i don't think there's anything wrong with doing that at all um i don't think there's anything wrong with what apple is doing what i sort of i'm slightly uncomfortable with is claiming that this is that is drawing these definitions of that sort of what we do is is fine and what they do is tracking. I mean, you know, it's like the old Bertrand Russell joke about, you know, irregular verbs.

You know, I give confidential press briefings. You leak. He's being charged under Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act. Exactly right. I do personalization. You track your users. They violate fundamental human right to privacy. Right.

And it's a little bit fuzzy how the clear those definitions are so in uh in in the godzilla versus king kong you know tim cook uh president of apple versus uh mark zuckerberg head of facebook uh my natural inclination has been to side with tim Cook. He seems like he's consistently an advocate for privacy. And to be sort of against, for some reason, Mark Zuckerberg, who's always seemed to me to be a little callow and kind of shifty. Or am I just being naive? So I think there's a lot of different moving parts here. One of them is, of course, Facebook's whole business is advertising, so they collect data.

Apple's whole business is not advertising, so they don't. On the other hand, 20%, 25% of Apple's business is in China. So if Mark Zuckerberg was to give a speech about how nobody should collaborate with oppressive governments, that narrative might flip the other way around. Like it's always easy to be generous about with somebody else's money. I think the, so that's one sort of like interesting kind of wrinkle in here. The second observation would be from a PR perspective, Apple has played this very well because they've allowed Apple, they've allowed Facebook to get into a position where it appears to just be a hate privacy and kind of slid over all the more interesting questions.

I think maybe the third step in here is very few people, even in tech, let alone outside tech, really understand all the ins and outs of how online advertising works because it's hugely complicated it's kind of like trying to understand what happened when um robin hood stopped letting you trade in um gamestop like you actually need to know a lot about how the stock market works to really know what was happening there um and it's kind of the same here like there's a lot of different moving parts in advertising and the other half of that is like this word privacy sounds very simple until you ask well what exactly right draw me the flow chart that would explain why it's wrong for me as a small publisher to hire someone else to do ad targeting but okay for a big publisher to do exactly the same target at targeting with traffic that's on my site like why is it wrong for facebook to look at what i do on the internet and show me car ads but perfectly

okay for apple to look at what i do on the internet and show me car ads if it's doing it on the phone and not in a computer in manly park and there's a lot of sort of quite weird like almost sort of talmudic distinctions being drawn here as to why is that okay and why is that not okay it's like can you eat shellfish on a thursday if you're on the moon um okay like get back to me i have to get back to you right um all right so my other question so if apple now has an advertising business which they do um and facebook is claiming that actually what we're doing is tailoring content to you and we know you better we can give you better content um is google getting a pass here i mean google knows more about i mean i would have to say google knows more about my current interests than facebook does uh is why is google not part of these uh

these controversies well so this is again this is where it's the complexities of ad tech because um facebook has had quite a big business doing app install ads whereas google doesn't so facebook is annoyed by idfa and google isn't really affected by the idfa side which is tracking the install from the ad to the app store to the app being opened um secondly um facebook has a rather bigger i mean you sort of go to the kind of core of this the core of what facebook does is who is scott scott who is rob what have you been interested in on the internet in the last months or, I'll show you a hotel. Now, it's not nearly as simple as that because Facebook has a lot of information around what you do on Facebook and Google has a lot of information around what you do elsewhere.

But the core, that's kind of the core of it. It's who is analyzing what kinds of data here. So I know everybody else wants to jump in. I just have one last one. Just about the business. It seems to me, and I'm just looking at myself as an example, which is always a mistake. But, I mean, I don't really use Facebook at all. But I use Instagram. But the people I know who use Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all sort of apps like that, they don't seem at all concerned with privacy. Privacy seems to be number 27 or 30 on the list of actual priorities.

Now, maybe when they're asked questions, they'll say, oh, I'm really concerned about privacy, the way people are concerned about eating right. But when you actually look at what they do, they don't eat right and they don't care about their privacy. They're giving it away for free all the time and they seem to be okay with it. So two questions. Am I right? Should they be worried? This does seem like a business move that is a distinction that maybe nobody cares about.

So, again, three or four different observations. a pair of glasses that you wear all the time or a watch or a home speaker, then having a very strong signal that you're pro-privacy or, one, a credit card, having a strong signal that you're pro-privacy is an important strategic advantage as a kind of, you know, not necessarily for the privacy itself but for sort of other products that you might be selling. A second thing is that I've always thought that the privacy argument is sort of a false consciousness argument it's like you are oppressed and you don't realize it but one day you will wake up and realize it and

everyone will wake up one realize and realize that advertising is maybe all advertising is evil but certainly targeted advertising or you know tracking of what you do on the internet is evil um and historically there's been a relatively small number of people sort of 10 or 15 percent of people who do seem to care about this quite a lot and most people don't seem to care and there's all they all care very much and there's a lot of argument about well is it that people don't really know how it works? And, of course, most people generally don't really know the details of how it works. Will there be some event that will make people wake up? Which, of course, as Popper said, is sort of an unfalsifiable prediction. Because, you know, it's like the history of the Marxists can always say, well, the revolution will happen next.

Exactly right. Stay tuned. Yeah. Is it that, as I said earlier, this concept of privacy is very sort of fuzzy and it comes down to a lot to how you describe it and how you think about what's actually happening here. I mean, the phrase that was going around a couple of years ago was Facebook sells your data. And that was an attempt at making something more tangible

and specific than privacy. The problem was Facebook doesn't sell your data. So it just wasn't true. It wasn't true in any sense. The whole point is your data isn't supposed to leave Facebook. Sometimes it does, but it's not supposed to. So that wasn't actually like a good and accurate framing. But trying to get if there was some framing or

some event and of course the came a genetic thing a lot of people thought that would be the event but it turned out not really to be if there was something that shifted either shifted people's perception or made people think differently about what this is that would be significant so far that hasn't really happened and as you said this has tended to be driven on the one hand by very abstract notions of privacy. And on the other hand, from companies and government, some of which companies, of course, have their own motivation, as opposed to like an absolutely fundamental consumer pull. Benedict, James Lylek's here in Minneapolis. Pardon my barking dog. There apparently is somebody knocking at the door. But every time I open up my Safari web browser, it informs me that Safari has prevented 227 sites from tracking me, which is extraordinary. You just get the sense that you're living in this panopticon where everything that you do

is being watched. So I'm glad that Safari is keeping track of me. But to get away from the whole cookies, the whole privacy thing, there's another sort of Talmudic issue, to use your term, that Apple is facing right now, which is fascinating. This lawsuit, which seems to go to the heart of the entire digital world, that says Apple's being sued because the button on their site says you can buy this movie. You can buy this television show. But actually, you can't. And it can be revoked almost at any time if there's some change in the terms of services how do you feel about that lawsuit as to the whole idea that you buy something but you don't actually own it it's like a it's like an nft in a sense it's it's

a thing out there in the cloud that can be revoked to the moment that your tech overlords decide you ought not to have it anymore i i'd say I haven't seen that lawsuit at all. I mean, there's an issue that comes up very occasionally that, you know, a book gets pulled from the Kindle store and so Amazon remotely deletes it from everybody's Kindle. It hasn't tended to happen very much, to be honest. I mean, the interesting thing in content, movies and music in the last maybe really decade is that we've been shifted.

We shifted almost completely away from an ownership model. We've moved to a rental model. So you pay Spotify or Apple Music or Netflix or10 a month, and then you have everything. And interestingly, that actually shifted the balance of power away from tech towards Hollywood because now buying a movie or buying music isn't a point of leverage that means I have to keep my iPhone because I can move to an Android. And even if I cancel my Spotify account, I can sign up to Google Music or Apple Music or something. So that sort of content ownership question has actually receded quite a lot in the tech industry. But still, even though, yes, there's this vast library to which you can subscribe.

And you say that it doesn't happen very often that Apple doesn't pull something off the Kindle, but they do from time. We have an example here in the States now of a biography of Philip Roth that was written by somebody who's faced all sorts of charges of unseemly behavior. So they're pulping the book. And if they're going to pulp the book because of the morals of the author, which have nothing to do with the book, then they're probably at some point going to start pulping the digital copies as well. That's what worries me. I mean, I still like to have copies of everything that i own for that very reason it's an interesting one yes i mean what in a past world what would happen in the

library would the library take it off the shelves um and you know it kind of is sort of a challenge to be you know i mean if this man is convicted that now you're selling this book by a rapist um he's in prison um this is this is a challenge um it's a moral challenge for a publisher and not not really a tech specific question um yeah if you bought the book you know it's not like the dumb norton would send the book police to your house to come and get it if you bought the ebook can it be revoked well yes um probably it can um it's a pretty it's an interesting case. It's kind of an, it's one of those little edge cases that comes up every now and then.

Like, how exactly does this work? Should Amazon continue to provide it? You know, if you bought mine camp, then they decide, actually, we probably shouldn't have sold you that. What happens? Do they delete it and refund your money? It works like it happened in 1984. Down the memory hole, which is the precedent that we have in an age of cancel culture. It makes you worry. Hey, let me interrupt for a second here

and ask you, are you watching what's happening in the world today? Of course you are, because you're concerned, you're interested. Global pandemic, US debt piling up, spiking inflation in the looming Biden tax plan. In the 2008 financial crisis, many Americans lost a large portion of their retirement savings. It was not fun. So what are you doing now to protect your money? Well, many turn to GoldCo, the leading gold IRA company in the U.S. and a four-time INC 500 winning company. With an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and thousands of five-star customer reviews, you can trust the team at Goldco to help you protect and grow your wealth. Go to goldco.com slash ricochet to request your free IRA guide that uncovers the secret most financial advisors won't tell you. So what are

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Tech has destroyed the old journalism model, which relied heavily on advertising of a kind that now takes place entirely at Google and Facebook. So we have in this country, a couple of national newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal seem to be able to make a go of it on online subscriptions. And then we have a few newspapers that are the playthings of billionaires, including the Washington Post. And that's an entirely new problem and then we have local journalism which is just collapsed nearly everywhere all right is a new model emerging are you do you do you champ your

teeth and say wait a moment this is this is just bad for democracy. We've got journalism is under permanent pressure from tech. Or do you say, no, no, no, various forms of tech, sub stack, and so forth, are permitting the emergence of a new model. It'll take care of itself. Investigative journalism, commentary from all points of view, all of this will reemerge. So I think we've been having this conversation, I published something this morning about Apple's App Store. And So I think we've been having this conversation, as I published something this morning about Apple's App Store, and I said we've been having this argument for a decade and nothing's changed except the numbers got worse. And I think for newspapers, you could say that for 15 years,

it may be 20 years. The core of this is, as I think we all know, that newspapers were an oligopoly of local distribution, local printing, and advertising. And the internet removed a huge portion of their attention. People do not read newspapers as much as they used to. And you read five stories, you don't read 50 pages. And in parallel, the internet made it easy to create much better advertising roles for most of those advertisers. In fact, a lot of those advertisers don't advertise at all. If you want to buy a car now, it's not that they're advertising on Google.

It's that that dealership isn't advertising. And that money is going to their website with their database of everything that they sell, for example. And so an awful lot of that money just left advertising entirely or went to something else that was a hundredth of the price and vastly more efficient and in fact that all happened like five years before google and facebook even even existed um now you can go back one level further i did sort of a i say it myself a really fascinating set of number pulled together really fascinating set of numbers here on the u.S. newspaper business, which is that U.S. newspaper circulation has been falling since the 90s. Per capita circulation has been falling since the 50s.

Really? Yes. Revenue went up until the late 1990s. It went up maybe, I forget the number now, maybe three, three and a half times. Newsprint consumption also went up, though not quite as much, until the late 90s. And employment went up until the late 90s. So what happens is your circulation goes down, your page count goes up, your ad rates go up, and you hire roughly double the number of journalists in order to fill the pages this is basically how instagram works you know more inventory more

content higher ad rates and this of course works great until someone comes along and at this so at this point if you look at you basically if you do a very crude analysis and you say well what's the revenue multiplied by the tons of newsprint being produced? Then you go, aha, guess what's happened to the pricing? Or indeed, journalists multiplied by the tons of newsprint being produced. And what you see basically is, and you see exactly the same thing in the UK, is following on from basically TV, radio and cars, newspaper consumption has been in secular decline since the the second world war and the reaction to that was it moved up market and they had the style section and the culture section and the theater reviews and the second set in the color magazine and all of this stuff and the things get fatter and fatter and the ad rates go up and up and up

and they make more and more money and then the internet comes along like a guillotine because now all those advertisers can go somewhere else and all of that reading can go somewhere else and google and facebook are just sort of the manifestation of that in the same way i mean and sort of blaming them is a little bit like blaming pratt and whitney for the collapse of ocean liners it's like well yes but what do you want us to do not make airliners right right right what print could have done is getting has gotten ahead of it i'm in newspapers and i used to enter my building through a vast floor that was this that was the classified department endless rows of veal pens in which people would clatter away at these all gone completely wiped out and it was because when

this thing be called the internet came along they shrugged at it. They just absolutely, it's not going to happen. If they'd gotten around it and ahead of it, they could have possibly done something to keep Craigslist from destroying the business. I think you could say, and clearly newspapers were the wrong company to do, kinds of company to do that. But I think the other side of it is like a local newspaper, like all of the economics of the newspaper industry in the US particularly said a metro area. But the economics of an internet site don't say a metro area at all. There isn't one Craigslist for a different company for every metro area in the USA. That's not the right level of aggregation. So is this what you're saying to me is don't be a romantic about journalism.

It's don't be a romantic about sweetheart. Get me rewrite. It's all gone. And it was doomed anyway. They overbuilt. They hired too many journalists and they were ripe for disruption. Got it. But what about the argument that democracy requires maybe you prefer a different term but it

requires some sort of journalism scrutiny scrutiny scrutiny at least scrutiny all right fine scrutiny so has tech given us the scrutiny newspapers essentially dead has tech given us the kind has tech replaced that kind of scrutiny with scrutiny of its own so certainly i mean this is particularly an issue in the u.s which is such a localized country but this is sort of the same in the uk the things that have really collapsed have been local newspapers and you know local newspaper in britain means 10 000 circulation local newspaper in america is like the miami herald um and you know the new it's tough for the New York Times to do the scrutiny of Miami or Milwaukee or Indianapolis the way that it can do to national government. And so there's

certainly that scrutiny and that scrutiny is gone or a large portion of it is gone. There's certainly new platforms and new ways of making money and new ways of producing content and distributing. Does it have the resource and the investment and the reach and the expertise and the feet on the ground to do the same kind of thing? Probably not at this stage. What does that mean? I'm not sure we know yet. I think there's a sort of a much higher level point here one could make,

which I generally make at the beginning of any kind of presentation I give talking about regulation, which is that this has all happened really quickly um i mean the you know when netscape launched in 1994 there were maybe 25 million consumer pcs on the entire planet and there's now probably four and a half billion people with a smartphone and there's only four and there's only five and a half billion adults on earth like 90 over 90 percent of the adults in the developed world have a smartphone now and use it all the time and this has happened in like this has happened very quickly and i think we're still sort of scrambling to catch up with that and the other announcing point that i often

make is to compare regulation of tech with regulation of cars so imagine we're having this conversation in 1975 and we said oh my god look what cars have done and we've just realized let's just think about all the damage that cars have done to our society and all the consequences that have we've got to regulate cars and they're like the sensible answer would be well yes but let's break that apart because teenage boys getting drunk and driving too fast is not the same problem as general motors union contract and that's not the same problem as parking or robert moses wanting to build a freeway across lower manhattan like these are all different problems and each of those problems are complicated but they're all basically different problems many of which are

local or national or international and some of them are competition law some of them are financial services some of them are labor law you can argue about all of them but they're all like different things and we're kind of scrambling to catch up with that and it took us 75 years to say that seatbelts should be mandatory whereas in tech like we're having to do all of that work all of that out work out what these things are when we didn't grow up with them the way we grew up with cars in like 50 different areas, which gets you to, you know,

all the conversations we're having in antitrust and regulation around tech. We're kind of trying to do all of it like right now. I know we have to let you go, but before we do, I can't let you go. I have to ask you this question. Basecamp today, which is kind of a, you know know, not a really not a consumer facing site, but it's a it's a bellwether for tech anyway, has announced that they were going to they were going to pull back all of their sort of the all of the frills and the corporate culture kind of expenditures that are sort of famous for silicon valley

you know the uh we'll give you an allowance for your go to the farmer's market we'll give an allowance for all this other stuff at the same time you know maybe a year ago or maybe a little less than a year ago during the sort of the height of the black lives matter summer i think it was the the head of coinbase the sort of the cryptocurrency wallet app, announced that they were not going to take any sort of political – that you don't bring your politics to work. All right, so that's two. So the New York Times rule is three is a trend, but I don't follow that rule. Is this a trend? Are we looking at these sort of – this industry that has sort of led the way and like this nurturing nanny corporate culture

changing its mind so specific and general things here so there's a sort of specific backstory apparently from base camp that they'd like they'd had an internal list of people who have funny names and most of those funny names tended to be like people from vietnam say who have funny names. And most of those funny names tended to be like people from Vietnam, say, who have names that sound funny if you've never met anyone from Vietnam. And this is kind of what it started out as a joke, and it kind of became not a joke. And people were unhappy about this and said, what are we going to do about it?

And that was the trigger for this event. I don't know what that was. You know, as an English person, when I'm reading about an American called Randy Bull, I start laughing, but maybe he doesn't think it's funny i'm triggered yeah randy means randy means yeah so um i did actually see a name for a guy called randy bull and like oh great um so there's a second point which is as a backstory of the base camp founders um sort of promoting their company by causing controversy um so that's another little bit of backstory there.

I think the general, so I was like kind of one, two general points. One of them is my impression, and I should be clear that I used to work for Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Coinbase. And I know some people who work there, although I haven't talked about it. Congratulations, by the way. Yeah, unfortunately, I joined before they invested. So I didn't make any money from that um okay i made it and i got one coinbase share it's like well okay um yes right um so i think there's a specific and a general point here

the specific point here is you had 20 somethings on slack spending all day shouting at each other about politics and i think that's actually what base what coinbase were getting at and i think that's also kind of what maybe the base camp guys may be getting at which is we understand there's different ways of saying this and communicating it but there is a sort of look we get you care about this we get this is important but we can't have people spending three hours screaming at each other on slack like we've kind of actually got to like get our work done um and there's a lot of different ways of expressing that and talking about that and obviously as a middle-class white person it's easier to be relaxed about saying let's not talk

about politics than if you are people somebody who looks just like you has just been shot by a policeman like you're probably going to like want to talk about it but i think that was the kind of the core of what those both of those companies were sort of trying to get at maybe the wrong way maybe they did it clumsily maybe they shouldn't have done it but that was that's kind of the issue it's not don't talk about politics it's don't scream at your colleagues all day on slack basically well okay that's a that's a good question um and i know jay's wants to get in here before we go um i i one of my uh oldest and dearest friends was a ceo of a huge um tech company big media company um and he told me recently i sort of asked him you know over a drink i said so what percentage of your day was spent as the ceo of a company um on hr issues and he didn't even think it's 70 i said 70 it that seems like a business problem you a leader, so you're leading people. So all of your issues are people issues, in a sense.

Okay. All of your issues are people issues, you know, and not just about anything we just talked about. I mean, I think there was a sort of a general point I was going to make, and I'll sort of say this as sort of delicately as possible, particularly as an English person. America has a culture war in a way that britain kind of doesn't and um the culture war in the last five years the culture war spread to silicon valley and you have you know as i think we all sort of agree there's a small number of people who are very very zealous on both sides

and there's a lot of people in the middle who are sort of more sort of agree with those people and sort of agree with that for you those people but you know willing to kind of give or take um and the people who who feel very strongly take up a lot of oxygen and so you've had these issues these kind of conversations particularly inside google um where um people have got a lot more passionate about politics. People have spent a lot more time talking about it. You know, American politics has become something that you would be more passionate about as well. And these are companies full of young people with a lot of communication tools and a culture

that's all about everybody talking to each other all the time. And so that has become a question in a way that it wasn't sort of 10 years ago. Industry hazard. I get it. Well, I saw a tweet the other day that was replying to the new rise of workplaces that don't talk politics. It says, banning politics from the workplace is exactly how the Nazis gained their cultural power because it was verboten in the office. And so it simmered up, which is a nonsensical thing to say. But apparently, if you don't talk politics at the office, then the next thing you do is you have Nazis everywhere. Benedict,

thank you so much. I toast you with my London Underground Central Line mug, which I bought at the London Transportation Museum. And I can't wait to go back to England again as soon as this current unpleasant nonsense leaves us. Thank you for joining us on the show today. We could talk London Transportation Museum, and I can't wait to go back to England again as soon as this current unpleasant nonsense leaves us. Thank you for joining us on the show today. We could talk to you for another hour and a half, I'm sure. Thank you. Thanks, Benedict. Thank you. Thanks a lot. You know, the point that I was making before about having your books taken away from you, which does not seem to be, it seems a little bit absurd now, whether or not they can reach into your Kindle and reach into your library, but it absolutely is not. So one of the things you might want to do is keep an eye on exactly

who is collecting your data. You've just heard this great big discussion about data privacy, and you're asking yourself, is it data or is it data? I don't know. I really don't know. And I don't care. What matters is keeping it close to home. So it doesn't matter what your politics are, who you voted for. Everybody should have the right to express themselves freely, right? Your data goes out there and you should just be able to spread it as you wish, seed to the wind. Unfortunately, the big tech monopoly has opted for silencing tactics and censorship, as we've seen, to fight back against big tech's control of the internet. We use ExpressVPN. You ever wondered how these free-to-access tech giants we've been talking about make their money? Well, you heard it. big tech's control of the internet. We use ExpressVPN. You ever wondered how these free

to access tech giants we've been talking about make their money? Well, you heard it. By tracking your searches, your video history, everything you click on, building a profile on you is what they do, and then sell off your sensitive data or data, or datum, if you have very little datum to sell. When you use the ExpressVPN app on your computer or your phone, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address. That makes your activity much more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers. But what's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your network data to protect you from eavesdroppers and cybercriminals. What we like most about it is how easy it is to use. It just takes one click to

protect all your devices. One click. That's why ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET and Wired, who tend to know what they're talking about. Revoke big techs right to your data. Secure your internet with the VPN we trust for online protection. How? Simple. Visit expressvpn.com slash ricochet. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash ricochet to get three free extra months with this exclusive link. Go to ExpressVPN.com slash Ricochet right now to learn more. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Paul Rossi. Paul became a teacher a decade ago, and he spent much of his career teaching math.

I repeat that, mathematics, as non-political a subject as is available, teaching math at Grace Church High School on the island of Manhattan. Grace Church High School began requiring, recently, all this is weeks old at the most, anti-racist training and wokeness overall. Paul will fill us in on the details and paul said no and grace church said you're fired paul thank you for joining us add a little to what i said was accurate as far as it went correct and can can you i don't um everything up until um the you're fired part i am i am all but fired i would say i i did not resign and they have not fired me but they've taken away all my classes oh i see okay duty so they have placed you on ice

yeah so to speak okay all right so does that mean they're still hoping to work something out that you're hoping to work something out that um it's been radio silence uh on all sides as this as this unfolds in the public square okay and can you tell us exactly what it was that they said had to happen to which you responded no i'm out can't do that well it it um we have a year we have yearly contracts in the independent school world so i have a contract currently until the end of August, but in order to sign up for next year, I had to agree to sign a contract by April 15th. And as part of that contract,

I had to agree to participate in a restorative justice practice in order to address the harm I had caused students of color and other students at the school for sharing some questions at a Zoom meeting earlier in the year. They didn't give any specifics or details on what this practice would entail until after I signed the contracts, and when I asked them for any of those specifics, they refused to give them to me. So I couldn't sign the contract for next year. And they introduced that clause in the contract in response to a specific event? Right. My participation in a Zoom meeting on February 24th for all white identifying faculty and students. So it was a segregated, racially segregated meeting at which, which was mandatory for everyone who is white to attend. And the title of the meeting

was self-care through an anti-bias lens. And what was your violation during that meeting your putative violation against uh well there were several um several reasons that the school gave uh that were pretextual but the main the main thing which which came out later was the nature of my the doubts i voiced about the slide that that the facilitator showed to everyone saying that characteristics of white supremacy included things like objectivity, individualism, and fear of open conflict. And most interestingly, punctuality. I can't remember if it was on there. I can check. I have it on there. I can check. I have it right here. Let's see. We have perfectionism, sense of urgency,

quantity over quality, worship of the written word is apparently a white thing. And right to comfort was the one that I felt was the most disturbing, given that the sensible reason for the meeting was for self-care. For students who had experienced difficulties during the pandemic, social isolation, difficulty completing their work, having to go to school on Zoom, this was the thing that if they actually felt they had a right to it, they were participating in something called white supremacy culture. And Paul, Rob Long and James Lilacs are both on, they're going to want to come in with questions. I have, just establishing the context, I read about this, of course, as half of America did,

but hearing you describe it and describe in particular the items on that slide, it is worse than I, I mean, crazy, I mean, mad, really, really insane, mentally, intellectually unhealthy. All right. I can understand during this pandemic year, the school wanting to take special care in some way of students who ceased being able to go to school, had to take classes, do their coursework. All this is very difficult, particularly for younger students. I get all that. But where did the ideological component come from? How did the two go together?

Was this something that would have happened this year, even if the school were operating normally and the pandemic had never happened? Or is there some connection between the pandemic, everyone feeling upset, disoriented, because things were strange this year? Is there some connection between that and this ideological lunacy? I don't think so. I think this kind of thing has been happening at our school for years. The pandemic only made it more visible to parents, as I think it did in schools across the country. This is not as specific to, I think, my independent schools in New York, although I think independent schools in New York may have adopted so-called anti-racism as a, you know, anti-racist programming as a, you know, platform or mission,

part of their mission statement earlier than other schools. But now based on what I've seen contacting schools around the country, people have written in to me. It's, it's ubiquitous. Rob. Paul, thank you for joining us. Um, well, Grace, uh, Grace Church is about, I don't know, two blocks from here from where I'm standing right now. So I have two standard questions and I have a third sort of narrative I want to hear. First is, why should I care what happens at a fancy Manhattan day school? I mean, people who listen to this podcast know exactly why I do, but if i'm listening i don't what do i care should i care well you should um because it's not limited to the rarefied atmosphere of of

these independent schools these wealthy tuition high tuition independent schools um they um they're actually artfully more artfully presented in some ways and less clumsily presented at these high-end schools. But you're seeing this all over the country. You're seeing this in Fairfax County, Virginia. You're seeing this in Rye, New York. You're seeing this in, you know, Rumson, New Jersey. I can give you several places where these things are being pushed. And, you know,

that's why I think that the response to my article has been so overwhelming across the country. And, you know, sort of like as goes California, so goes the nation. I think in many ways, as goes these independent schools, so goes the country. So my next pushback is, well, you know what? You just sound like a malcontent, complaining right winger. And this is all part of your right wing Trump mega hat attitude that needs to change. Scale of one to 10.

How truthful is that? It's about it. I'd say it's, let's say ten being the most true zero being not true at all yeah i give it a two two okay well do you hear that i mean isn't that what people say when they want to dismiss your yeah and and what do you say to that i say these this is not about trump or biden or anything this is not a right or left issue this is a sanity insanity issue um and and the types of the types of emails i've received across the country i would say most of them um are actually um liberal in in in orientation the classical liberal in orientation

many people are are approaching this from a religious perspective, which I think is no accident, but people are disturbed, disgusted, outraged, desperate to do something about this in their communities, in their local school boards. Paul, what do you mean people are approaching it from a religious perspective? as a challenge to long-standing religious traditions, whether it's Jewish, Christian, Muslim. I see. Got it. It's a new religion in effect. People are, got it, got it. Rob, back to you. Sorry, I was just puzzled by that point.

Well, I just want to guess a little bit, because I think this brings up my next question. I was sitting, I had dinner last night with a bunch of people. I think some of them, you know. And one, she's a professor, is currently embroiled in trouble, which seems, of course, I agree with you. Oh yeah, you're so right. Quietly, not publicly. And the tacit understanding between the friends is don't, you know, don't spread around my support. And I think probably the most spectacular example of that happened to you this week. I mean, you had a conversation with your head of school. Yeah, this conversation took place on March 2nd. It was a conversation that I have with the head of school has with every faculty member yearly.

He meets with every faculty member for 30 minutes yearly to have a discussion about how things are going. It's actually a very admirable thing that he does. He wants to take the temperature of how every one of the faculty members is feeling about how the school year is going. This is a challenging year. He continued to do that this year. It so happened that my meeting with him fell a week after my importune questioning of this anti-bias, self-care through an anti-bias lens meeting. So that was the nature, that was the context in which our discussion took place. I was concerned about, you know, how this would affect my employment at the school. And I was also concerned about public statements the school might make about me, and so I did record it. In that conversation, he surprised me by actually agreeing with me on many of my concerns that I shared about how this, you know, so-called anti-racist policy was being, this programming

was being delivered at the school and its effect on the students by saying, and the word demonization didn't come from me, came from him. He said, you know, one of the things we need to get our arms around is the demonization of whites at our school. And I was simultaneously shocked, gratified, but also repelled because if this is something that he felt and knew about, shouldn't he do something about it right and he and then uh did he know you i think as i understood it you correct me if i'm wrong you and now you've said this is what he said yeah i mean that i didn't i didn't plan on releasing it but he did impugn my character and my and said that i mischaracterized some statements in in my article first and when i said no actually um if you if you're saying that i missed had mischaracterizations and omissions please tell me what they are because you you're

saying that i did that you know won't tell me what they are and then when he didn't do that i you know i pushed back about that and then i said said, well, you know, actually, in our conversation, you had agreed with me previously. And I mentioned the things as quotations. And then he said that I was lying about that. Right. So he left, you know, in a sense, I have to make, you know, I'm going to be looking for jobs, you know, I need to protect my reputation angry. You seem like a math teacher, honestly. Like, actually, honestly, just to be super blunt, you seem like my nightmare of a math teacher because you're composed and you're smart. And I feel like I already don't know the answer to the question, and I don't understand sine, cosine, tangent. All right? So I'm already terrified that you're going to give me a quiz. No quiz. Is that – have you experienced that? Has anyone reached – are you isolated now from your former colleagues or your current colleagues technically?

Or are you – you know, everybody's like, hey, just take a breath. It's going to be fine. We're going to get over this. This is just that moment in the crucible where everybody's going insane but it's going to be fine in a month is is there a sense of that or are you are you done no i think i think it's a scorched earth at this point um i have a i have you know some colleagues that i was close to prior to this and as as you said you know one-on-one people will come to me and say you know i i won't go as far as you about some of these things. Because I never really hid my objections. Of course, I tried to behave myself, but people knew where I stood.

People would come up to me and be like, as they were saying that stuff in the meeting, I was thinking about what you were thinking. And I actually, I kind of agree with you. I won't go as far as you, but I kind of agree with you. And I would get that all the time. So I know there's a lot of preference falsification among the faculty on these issues. And in some of the subsequent meetings to the meeting that I got in trouble for speaking out at, I did have defenders. I did have people that stood up for me in the faculty and said, listen, I may not agree with what Mr. Rossi is saying, but I think we should admit that we have a problem if we censor him. We don't admit him or we believe that

his ideas are beyond the pale because he reflects a lot of what the majority of the country thinks. So if we're going to be in an ideological bubble, let's at least admit we're going to be in an ideological bubble. And I appreciated that. I really did support from a handful of faculty members. What about students? I mean, I get an idea that the students are kind of running around, you know, like they were under Pol Pot, you know, denouncing every adult and everybody who wears glasses. But I also get a sense that there are a bunch of students maybe the majority of them okay who uh who are just kind of rolling their eyes at the stupid stuff the grown-ups are doing and like hey what you want me to sing it round i'll sing it round sing it flat i'll sing it flat just give me an a i gotta go to stanford i think that's it that's

i would say that's what a lot of students feel. There are true believers. There are believers in whiteness and white supremacy and that this is the supreme issue of our time. And there are students, I'd say them, you know, I've really tried through students that have approached me, tried to really get a sense of what percentage of the student body is preference falsifying at this point i think there's a mat there's a big gender gap between the boys and the girls as far as who who is you know the boys are i think are more resistant and and preference falsifying than the girls who. I mean, well, yes. Or at least knuckling under. Yeah, I mean, the social pressures are enormous on these kids if they step out of line. Paul, one more. Rob, you've given us a feel for the faculty.

Rob just asked you about the students. Here's my question. Parents. Parents. Parents, what's, Grace Church is what, 60 grand a year? Okay. So these are really with it parents. They have to, well, I suppose some of them may be, have inherited their wealth. So some may just sit on the sofa and watch sofa operas all day.

But a lot of these people are investment bankers and hedge fund people and consultants. And these are people who are operating on the island of Manhattan at the highest levels. They are in competitive businesses in which reality matters. You fail to respond to reality and you don't get a bonus that year. And they're sending their kids to get indoctrinated by this madness? What? So what the heck is going on? What are the parents doing? They say, are they knuckling under as well? This is shut up, get grades, because I want you to go to Stanford.

As a family, youngster, junior, we're playing the game. It's a game, but we need to play it. Is that what's going on? I don't think it's, you know, I don't have an insight into the family dynamics of these parents. But I do actually have some sympathy for the predicament in that you have a kind of moral cartel with these independent schools because they're all accredited by the same agency, the New York Association of Independent Schools. So the NYSEIS, this is a group that also runs a lot of training programs. So they have, every independent school has to be sort of, is sort of lockstep to various degrees with this, with this extreme ideology, the culture they're trying to create.

And a lot of it is vertically integrated with the colleges. So, you know, they, if a school produces a product and a student, which is acceptable to Yale or Harvard or any of these top schools because they're already woke weaned, they already believe ideologically. They're not going to be a problem going to all of these woke seminars in the Ivy League schools because they're preformed. So there's a whole vertical integration here. And then, yes, the parents know that this is the path to success. This is the path that they took. And so there's leg whole vertical integration here. And then, yes, there, the parents know that this is the path to success. This is the path that they took. This is, you know, and so there's legacies involved and, you know, all the attendant inequities that those cause, frankly, but you know,

that there's a lot of that just a habit and the, and the, and, you know, huffing the vapor trail of the brand in essence, right. We want you to go to this, we want to go to go to this prestigious institution that we went to and so on. There's also high switching costs, right? You would think, okay, why am I spending all this money when they're just indoctrinating my kid? I want to pull them out and move them somewhere else. For the same level of prestige, there's really nowhere to go i mean there's there's the high

switching costs which right which you know but there's also the idea that where are you going to send them where are you going to where are you going to put them where this ideology doesn't exist since there's this moral cartel there's really not a lot of options some parents will be like no i'm going to put them i'm going to like the founder affair by and bartning i'm going to put my kid in my kids in a catholic school school. You're going to sacrifice status and prestige and all these things. The other reason why parents don't speak out is that precisely because they work for of promoted by so-called woke capital, well, then their reputation will suffer. And so there are significant pressures. Paul, last question for me.

But I can't help thinking of this. By the way, let me just tell you, as I ask the question, I'm hoping your answer is no. But here's the question. This stayed with me because it was so striking, but years ago I heard Natan Sharansky, who of course was a refusenik in the old Soviet Union. Now he's a prominent political figure in Israel, but he did years in prison in the Soviet Union. And he said the distinguishing feature of growing up in the Soviet Union was learning to live with the lies and being very clear in your own mind. And it was hard work. It was a strain, but you had to work in your own mind to think through what was true

and also to understand the small number of people in his case he said the fact this is why family was so important and why the system did so much to try to atomize the family but your family you could talk to about the truth but only your family usually maybe one or two colleagues. And he had a career. His mind worked in quantitative ways. He was, as I recall, a physicist in any event. That was the distinguishing characteristic, struggling to retain some sense of the truth for yourself while maneuvering in a system of lies. Is that where we are? Is something like that taking shape on, of all places, the island of Manhattan, this citadel of capitalism? Yep. Oh, that's the wrong answer, Paul.

Okay, now, when you say something like that, okay, I have to say. Yeah, okay. Exactly like that? No. I mean, the stakes are not that that, okay, I have to say. Yeah, okay. Exactly like that? No. I mean, the stakes are not that high, obviously. But they could be. I mean, the future is unwritten. And these are the patterns that you rightly observe are in effect. And it will come down to whether enough people publicly voice their dissents about this.

And hopefully we can start a preference cascade in the other direction, and people can actually say, listen... By preference cascade, you mean telling the truth. Yeah, and this is something that private lies, public truths. Public lies, private truths. And this is something that, Private Lies, Public Truths, or Public Lies, Private Truths, I think that's a book by a Turk, I forget his name, but a Turkish sociologist or someone who, it's an interesting book that talks about preference cascades. I forget the name, apologize. Maybe someone could look it up. But after a period of preference falsification, if enough people start to stand up and announce the truth of their opinions and beliefs, it can make it easier for the next person to come out. And then the next person and the next person. Then you actually can change the arc of history this very seldom

happens that a guest is so profound that we all just fall silent for a moment to take it in trying to think about that hey so um i i know i'm gonna get around to say one last question what what happens now i mean what happens to you now what what's what is the next year going to look like for you i don't know yet i mean i i uh i'm i i am encouraged and i'm heartened because i i put an email at the bottom of my art my essay um and i've received over you know over a thousand responses and i would say i was i was i had a you know i had a little whiteboard on my i was going to mark you know people who hate me people who support me i was hoping for 50 50 you know and i put this email on other places that aren't just tied to barry weiss's substack so i'm trying

to get a and i got like 98 99 support i'm getting offers from from schools around the country florida texas pennsylvania no one from new york yet but um you know vermont maine saying you know come teach at our school we boarding schools day schools i i i'm not gonna starve and i i would say other teachers if this is if this is something that will help you stand up, there's opportunities out there. I mean, you may have to move, but you won't starve. Good. In the old days, it was a Scottish monastery where civilization went to be the guttering flame to be attended by the monks. You will do the same, except when they rewrite the history,

it'll be Florida instead of Scotland. And we hope indeed that you find gainful employment down there where you can curate the illustrated manuscripts and wait for this to blow over. But it's not going to blow over unless, as you say, the preference cascade begins and enough people stand up. I have to say, the term woke weananed which you used a little while ago is so perfect for describing what is going on in these in in the schools that uh it's going to be all i could do not to steal it and take credit for it but no everybody remember it's paul rossi who came up with that term and with many other things that deserve to be passed around in red we wish you well sir thank you for coming on the show and we hope to talk to you at some point in the future

to find out your new bold adventures in education and how it looks from where you end up. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, James. It's a pleasure to be here. Paul, thank you. Bye, Peter. Bye. I agree. That math teacher scares me. You always scare me. Math teachers always – because I'm not prepared. That's the thing.

I don't understand it, and I didn't even do the work. So I went through most of high school saying, well, I just don't get it. I just don't get it. And honestly, the amount of time I spent trying to get it was pretty low. Now, I have legitimate concerns and complaints against the way we teach math, but the truth truth is i just uh i blew it off i went through new math i went through base eight sure the the justification for teaching people base eight to this day is is is stunning i mean which it'd be useful if we lived in a world in which digits were chopped off from time to time and you couldn't look at your hands and count but then you

still have to rely on your toes great tom layer Lehrer joke, right? Yes. Base eight is just like base 10 if you're missing two fingers. Yes, that's where I was going. Anyway, so I don't consider myself innumerate, but I got my basic how to run ideas and numbers. My father, who left school at seventh grade, learned enough by seventh grade to be able to run an entire business practically in the back of an envelope. We would go out to breakfast at Perkins after church, and he would do endless columns of figures there on the placemat, because just numbers that he had going on in his head about the business and who owed what and the rest of it. He had math worked out for him. And then I look at kids today, I remember when your calculators came along, they said, well, you're not going to have

a calculator in your pocket every time in the future. As it turns out, absolutely, yes, we did. And I still am so lucky that I have these few little ideas that got planted in my head about how to do things that I don't have to rely on my calculator to do the rest of it. I learned two things, I think. First of all, the thing about math teachers and I think science teachers, teachers too, in general is they tend to be much more moderate or center, right? The president of Yale once said, and not this one,

but one before that, whenever there was a big issue at a faculty meeting, a budgetary issue at the faculty meeting or, or a issue in which the crazy left-wing members of the faculty were going to take over, he always scheduled a budget decision to be made that affected the math and hard science department because if if he didn't have that they wouldn't show up and they wouldn't vote and then the sort of the the lit crit department the psych

department would have the run of the place so he would make sure that he got as many math science teachers and hard science professors there at the faculty meeting because then they would hear some crazy crackpot proposal and they'd vote no. So, you know, math teachers in general kind of sound. But the two things I learned about math that I remember really, really well, one was a simple, simple mathematical trick, not a trick, but a function. To find the percentage of something, you divide the little number by the big number. I i mean there's other ways to put that and you get a percentage and in every board meeting i'm ever in uh i find there's always there are always two numbers that yield a really interesting percentage and and i do

that really quickly on my phone and i just sound really smart even though i really you know so well that so we're getting a i mean you're getting we're we're getting about 33 of this thing but whatever it is right oh wow you're really smart the second thing i learned is that the the benefit of math is that it tells you how to work around something that you don't know like i don't know what x is so i'm just going to put x and make that x and i'm going to do all this other stuff all the things i do know all the words i do know and the numbers and that has actually helped me because it's helped me like in actual human lifetime problem solving of isolating the thing I don't know and not worrying about it. And just worrying only and manipulating only the things, the known quantities, and eventually get closer and closer and closer to knowing what X is. Or at least knowing what X probably is.

It's like it's somewhere between something and something. And I'm sure there's a million math people here who could probably explain why what I just said is nonsense. But that's my takeaway from math from 18 years. It's not a bad takeaway. So by the way, when we interviewed Andrew Gutman last week, you know, he wrote a book called How to Be an Investment Banker. And I couldn't help thinking, if that book had been published a generation earlier,

everything might have been different for you and me, Rob. Oh my God, are you kidding me? Nobody knows. Rob and I had a conversation 10 years ago in which we both discovered that we, graduating from college, we both hoped that Manhattan would smile upon us. And it turned out Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, nobody wanted English. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted me. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I have very few skills. Unfortunately, this is one of them. Well, one of the skills you guys did was to found Ricochet, which is a great thing. You know, I mean, think of the Internet, if you will, as a physical product. If the internet was a physical product, the state would slap a label on it describing its many potential hazards. And at the top would be a warning in bold, red ink in all caps, do not read the comments ever. It's one of the first lessons that writers learn. And it's a depressing lesson, he said. I'm not spontaneously riffing this off the top of my head.

I'm actually reading some ad copy, which is going where? Let's find out. Never read the comments, writers. You should learn. We've all gotten that itch. Got to look. I got to look to see what the comments are. Pure, innocent curiosity that compels us to wonder what other people might say about what

we wrote. And then what does that inquisitiveness get you? It's horrors of finding out the yelps and the yells and how people are attacking you, how you are Prometheus on a rock with your liver being plucked up by the vultures. If only there was a haven somewhere out there in the great waste of the internet. Well, there is. And it's what Peter and Rob have created and built. It's Ricochet. At Ricochet.com, civility survives, community thrives, and the comments are the content. And we got a lot of good content, too. It's conservative, of course,

you know that, but it's so much more. Our members cover the globe and views of the eclectic right word coalition that we're all coming to terms with. We don't shy from honest disagreement, but we are committed to the kind of discussion that has made the internet sound appealing, you know, to begin with. That's what I keep telling people about Ricochet. Remember how you thought it was going to be? How Facebook was supposed to be? How Twitter was supposed to be? This is where Ricochet gets it right. It's politics, of course, but not exclusively. We talk about all kinds of things. Talk shop, about work, about family hobbies, history, science, high culture, low culture, even obscure culture. And my favorite part of it here, if I can just ad lib, hosts own

personal insert, is what I love is finding out how everybody knows something about something that I don't, and they're experts at it. And their job may have nothing to do with it, but it's their thing, and they can tell you about it. We discuss, we disagree vociferously, we joke, we literally lull, we despair, and then we move on because life demands it. We express ourselves, insist on our certainty and our overall correctness, of course, and then we triple down. But then we move on because life demands it. We express ourselves, insist on our certainty and our overall correctness, of course, and then we triple down. But then we often find that Susan or Charles from Michigan or overload butt kicker 3627 has some interesting thoughts on the subject as well. And we're back in the fray. Ricochet is the place if you want to know what's driving the

conservative movement, especially if you want to be a part of it. So if you haven't soured completely on the idea of American decline or America online or America upward and onward, it may be time to become a Ricochet member. It's easy to do. Thank our members for making the Ricochet podcast possible, all 542 of them. And you know, we got a special deal going and I advise you to go to ricochet.com to see exactly how you can avail yourself of the member side. And once you're there, you'll never leave. That's it. Wow.

That's so monumentally better than any of the pitches I ever made. If I was embarrassable, I'd be embarrassed. James, were you an English major? Yes, I was. Oh, you were. That makes three of us. I didn't write that. No, I did not write that. No, I'm an English major, which is a was. Oh, you were. That makes three of us. I didn't write that. No, I did not write that. No, I'm an English major, which is a miracle that I'm employed

at a newspaper. A newspaper, my dad, which has, I think, a greater circulation than the Miami Herald. And it's interesting when a Brit reaches about for a newspaper that is not the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald. Okay. Star Tribune has its hundredth, we just recently got our hundred thousandth digital subscriber. So we are making the transition. I wish I could have said more in that conversation about the necessity for local journalism because of the George Floyd trial showed any, the Derek Chauvin trial. I mean, in the early days of blogging, we used to say the mainstream media is dead because there will always be a coterie, a cohort of people who will take up the mantle, who will tell the truth. But you know what? There isn't. There wasn't. There are people who piggybacked on the coverage that we did,

but we had people there writing about this constantly because they're paid to do so. And that's one of the things I like about it. Well, one of the people who was paid to do a difficult job was Michael Collins. And then Apollo 11, he passed away this week at the age, I believe, 90, like that. Described often as being the loneliest man in the history of civilization at some point, because he was up there in that can rolling around the moon when the guys were down planting the flag. Thoughts on this, gentlemen? As we lose, I mean, losing the initial astronaut class, the moon takes us to,

I know Peter isn't going to care, but if we weren't doing what we're doing in space now, I'd be more depressed about this. I really would. But now, now it's heating up again. China put up the first of its many sections of its new space station. They're building a new space station, a big one up there.

So this is the next race. This is big. And it's a good thing that we've got Musk and Bezos on our side, and we're learning a lot about how to put things up and bring them down. And it may not be NASA that we look to in the future. So, Michael's here's what went through my mind with michael collins i've seen documentaries uh in which he was recorded an older man not old so maybe these were 10 years old and what struck me him and neil armstrong and

the third was buzz buzz aldrin buzz aldrin is still up and kicking i've seen him actually a couple oh yeah and literally kicking yeah. He almost punched me once. I managed to insult him. Oh, really? It was an interview, and he was prickly as hell, and I said something, and he got peeved, and I just thought, oh, my God, I pissed Buzz Aldrin. I felt so bad.

Congratulations. Are you kidding me? That's a high-level anecdote. That's sort of... That fits with the point that I think is worth making. Buzz Aldrin is, was, is, he has a temper. He's irascible. He can be a difficult person. All three of them had something that I don't know still exists.

Maybe it does somewhere. That is personal courage. I may as well even say the word, a certain manliness combined with training, that sense that military training will get you through. So I was so struck in some, one documentary or another, where someone gives this quotation to Collins

that's been said often of him that when he was up there, neither on the thousands of miles from Earth, but also hundreds of miles from the moon, that he was the loneliest man who ever was. And he chuckled and said, well, it didn't feel that way. I had my checklist to get through. I had a ship to run. I knew what I was supposed to be doing at each minute. And I thought, microphone. We thought, oh, my goodness, I'm on them. Nothing like that. It was just courage coupled with training and they just saw it through.

And that strikes me as remarkable. And also, at this point, a little old fashioned. Talk me out of it. Well, in a sense, yes, you're right. That's military training military bearing manliness all those things uh apparently neil armstrong's heart rate was about a hummingbird on meth when he was guiding the ship down but you couldn't tell it you couldn't hear it in his voice but yeah i mean they're human beings right but yes i mean do we do we have those people again

we do we still do elon musk the other, you know, about the future plans to colonize Mars. Yeah, people are going to die. And there was horror. What do you mean people are going to die? Is it worth human life to go to Mars? And, you know, Musk is one of those people like those who sent the ships across the ocean. You know, the guys who got into the Contiki rafts to fly the seas. Yes, it's worth it.

That's what human beings do i can say that because it's not gonna be me either that's right right exactly but it's but it's going to be somebody who knows the risk and signs up and goes along because it's the next great adventure yeah i also feel like we need to sort of um enlarge our definition of heroism and a larger definition of sort of working on the forefront of sort of human, the human mind. You know, the, the, what was amazing about the space, our exploration of space and the moonshot was that it was a moonshot. It was like, we're going to do this thing and it's kind of nuts and we're going to do it.

And for a lot of us, it's sort of amazing to think of like, how did you know that the laws of physics work there too but somehow they knew especially for us english majors yeah i don't understand how they work here um but i feel like the people who decided you know a year ago that they were going to come up with a vaccine for covid true enough yep and the people who i hope i mean you know i i watch the state of the Union thing with Biden. And what's so depressing about it is just how old it all seems, how like how ancient all these new they found this dusty blueprint for from the Walter Mondale campaign, which itself was a retread from the George McGovern campaign. And they're going to do this. Whereas if he kept me, he came and said, listen, we're going to spend, you know, 400 billion dollars and we're going to do this whereas if he kept me if he came and said listen we're going to spend you know 400 billion dollars and we're going to cure alzheimer's uh that'd be a different story for me like that's a moon shot i get that and i also get why that would be immensely valuable

to mankind um but it's it's not the same and one of the things that will drive people crazy is saying if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we do X? And the engineers will say, well, actually getting a man to the moon is a very specific set of technical objectives. How much thrust is required to get off the earth? We know that. What's the velocity? When they get there, what do they do? All that stuff is slide rules. You can figure it out. Great unknown is how do we penetrate the mysteries of the human mind and find out whether or not somebody exposed to aluminum at the age of 12 has a higher prevalence for Alzheimer's. I mean, I'm with you. Yes. The scientific breakthroughs that we got in the Warp Speed Project are incredible and are

going to pay dividends for an awful long time. As Paul Harvey used to say, today's news of most enduring significance may be that. Out of the pandemic came this tool, just like out of the space program came things that we incorporate into our daily life today. What I found so depressing about the way, in the face of that, in face of those miracles, I guess what I find depressing is that we're not, the idea of being an optimist is something now entirely, it's hard to find. It's rare. If you watch any of the cable channels, it's all about how disastrous everything is, where in fact we sort of are sitting in a world of miracles all the time. We are, absolutely. But it is necessary to decry everything in order to justify the spending and the remaking of society.

It is necessary to make everybody think that every single damned bridge in this country is one dropped p from collapsing under its own weight in order to spend it is necessary to believe that the planet is on the cusp of climate change but i think the right is that too james i mean i think that we we need to recommit ourselves to a certain kind of optimism capital plus creativity and solve any problem all every single environmental problem we have when people talk about the environment i'm like you sure i like roll my eyes like yeah okay fine i grant i grant all i'll even grant you all the troubles and and and the disaster but i won't grant you the fact that it won't be solved in two to three or four years

but we capital and creativity right talk to with b Bjorn Lomborg, who calls him, his great book was The Skeptical Environmentalist. And in that conversation, here's what emerged. The United States is not going to lead the world in the redistribution of wealth.

It could, but that's not its distinctive contribution. Europe already understands the welfare state. It's not going to lead the world in regulation and replacing gas-burning fuels with windmills. The distinctive contribution the United States has to make is innovation. That we know how to do. And Bjorn said a really aggressive research budget devoted to the question of energy would be $50 billion a year. Joe Biden just proposed $1 trillion plan after another.

If you add up what he's suggested in his first 100 days in office, it comes to something like $6 trillion over the next decade. The moonshot, a moonshot I'm with Rob entirely. I'm just saying that what, if he said, we're going to spend $50 billion a year, and some of that is going to go to research and nuclear. Oh my God,

because there are entirely new technologies that are being developed. Bill Gates is backing a new technology. And if we crack nuclear energy, we solve the environmental problem. We just solve it. And the United States is better positioned to do that than any other country on earth. That would be a moonshot, right? It's true. And that's absolutely great. That'd be fantastic. And if the left was truly interested in that alone, then we'd all be on the same page. So why aren't we on the same page? Could it be that there is something in the whole big green New Deal and the rest of it that they like because it shapes and transforms and reorders society according to their standard desires so they're not so i mean yeah you would think that we would all join hands and spend a ton of money and figure out the best part of nuclear get nuclear fission going so that we can carry around little suitcases that you know that 10.6 gigawatts come out of these things that would be great the reason that we're not i think is because there's so much more to the desire to to solve climate control um right then and so right right control so rob's right yes i mean we need to talk about how

innovation and capital but you know i feel like i feel like we have fallen into the trap the right has fallen into that trap i had a meeting uh i was on what's on gutfeld uh the greg gutfeld show the trap of falling into the sort of pessimism trap if you actually watch the fox news prime time it's unrelieved negativity not just about the the biden's craziness or the left's craziness but just all this sort of bleak attitude about the world and i feel like we're missing the story the story i feel like with people out there in america and i think i look at the economy's doing really well there's we should be on the center right but especially the right should be selling optimism because we we optimism works and we this past year has been a perfect

example of what happens when you apply capital and creativity to a worldwide problem, and you solve it within 10 months. And that is a great story. And so, I mean, when I was pitching to guys at Fox, I was like, why don't you do a show, at least one hour in primetime, where it's all this awesome stuff that is happening because capitalism and America and American innovation work. By the way, that was the first contest of the new Cold War. You know the Chinese wanted to develop that vaccine ahead of us.

You know they wanted to, and we did it. Now, there was also Oxford. There's apparently Britain also developed a vaccine, but it was a little slower. Some Turkish immigrants in Munich. That's fine. Oh, that's fine. That's fine, but it was led by the United States.

And the idea that you, that we want you to build. And that seems to me to be what's missing. I mean, I, on the left and the right, it's just so gloomy. My God, what's going on? And it's why Elon Musk,

Elon Musk has become not just a brilliant entrepreneur. He's become a cultural hero. He's fun. He believes we can do stuff we can build it might be because so much of online culture is driving it drives the narrative and it goes up into the mainstream media and the the online culture is is is hideously anti-capitalistic they hate it because it's part of this whole systemic systemism that have oppressed and it's awful and it's horrible. I mean, if you look at the stats about the number of Zoomers and millennials who have a positive view of socialism and communist Marxism as opposed to capitalism, it's appalling.

And they're idiots for having thinking that. Bill Maher, for heaven's sakes. I'm getting to the point now in my life where I'm listening to Bill Maher monologues and saying, you know, that makes a good point. And I never would have done that before. But it's because he's fed up, as it is, with the people on his side who are relentlessly pessimistic about this wonderful engine that has given them all this growth. So now what we have is this shift, and maybe the right gets a little peeved and down because the only people who seem to be optimistic are those who are pushing statism. That's what they're optimistic about.

AOC, we're going to do all of these wonderful things through the instrument of the state. And after having seen a year in which nearly every single institution upon which we had put our trust shows itself to be completely and utterly incapable of doing what it was designed to do, the schools, the CDC, the rest of it, it's an odd thing to say having screwed this up let's give them even more money and power over our lives so i mean but i understand i understand the pessimistic dynamic and i agree with you that it's necessary to get outside of it and start proclaiming the things that do this country that do that that make this the greatest civilization in the history of the earth the problem is is our first our second guest mr rossi is that in order to be of the elect and the elite you have to believe this this construct of the e of the room of the absolute intrinsic on you know essential evil of the west and that's what we have to extirpate at the same time that we're being confident about

that is amazing twice in this program there has been a moment when someone said something so profound that all three of us yakkers fell silent for a moment this time it was this time was james himself well i was just wondering whether we're going no i go back to the beginning yeah no i think rob got i think i from the expression i think that rob had his phone on vibrate and he had it in his back pocket and was wondering what the sensation was. We've got to get out of here, folks. Thank you so much for listening. Go to Ricochet.com.

Of course, we like to thank our sponsors, Goldco and ExpressVPN and, of course, Ricochet itself. Join all of those. Sign up. Make your life easier. And do not go to Apple to leave us five stars. Nah, we wouldn't want to go not go to Apple to leave us five stars. Now we wouldn't want to go to the podcast store and leave us five stars. Why would you do that out of the goodness of your heart? Because Rob wants you to be optimistic about the future of the show. Don't do it. Also listen to the best of ricochet because you know, this is just one of so many podcasts in

the ricochet audio network, best of ricochet hosted by moi this weekend on a Radio America network. So check your local listings. Thank you, everybody. Rob, Peter, it's been fun. We'll see everybody in the comments. Because you can read the comments at Ricochet4. Next week, boys. I had this shit till it all got smoked.

I kept the promise till the valve got broke. I had to drink from the loving cup. I stood on the banks till the river rose up. I saw the bride in her wedding gown. I was in the house when the house burned down. I may be old and I may be bent But I had the money till it all got spent I had the money till they made me pay And I had the sense to be on my way

I had to stay in the underground I was in the house when the house burned down I was in the house when the house burned down I met the man with the thorny crown I helped him carry his cross through town I was in the house when the house burned down Ricochet. Join the conversation. I was in the house when the house burned down I met the man with the thorny crown

Our herds didn't carry us across through town I was in the house when the house burned down No, it was great. Wow, I'm glad I heard it. That was pure, pure professional. All right, I got to run.