The Ricochet Podcast - The Long Game

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Back this week with the full cast and another full show. We start with a deep dive on the Bari Weiss resignation and free speech in general. Then our favorite Denmark dude, Bjørn Lomborg joins to discuss his new book, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. and we give him a chance to rebut a very snarky New York Times review of said book. Source

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. There really is no reason why we're having 40, 50, 60,000 other than the fact that we're not doing something correctly. I'm the president and you're fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex.

Today we talked to Bjorn Lornberg, who tells us, don't panic. And we talked to Ovik Roy, who tells us, don't panic. So let's have ourselves a podcast. And don't panic. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, and it is number 504. And we are joined by Peter Robinson again.

What do I mean again? He wasn't here last week. He was not like Rob, swallowing around somewhere. I think Peter would be more, I don't know, I just see you sort of pensively striding somewhere to engage some great issue of the day in a sylvan setting of California. So where were you? We were, we, my wife and I and our oldest daughter, our oldest daughter was between jobs for one week. She started a new job now, but we just looked wife and I and our oldest daughter, our oldest daughter was between jobs for one week. She started a new job now, but we just looked at each other and said, let's go someplace. The lockdown was driving us all crazy.

We had very little time. So we made a 27 hour trip down from where we live down the coast to Carmel, California, which is, oh, it's, it was spectacularly beautiful. That beach, that long white beach that that the quaintness now of course it's not as quaint as it used to be every quaint little house is now sells for six million i suppose but and they were a little bit it was how to put this i'm in some ways grateful for the lockdown because at this time of year, ordinarily, even on a Thursday and Friday, Carmel would be jammed. But because of the lockdown, you could get a parking place anywhere. We got a great rate on a little bungalow-style hotel just downtown five blocks from the beach.

And at the same time, Carmel is in a county that's much more open than our own. So there were shops you had to wear a mask, but you could go in and out, or you could stroll, do the things you'd want to do in Carmel. So it was lovely, and thank you. Nobody could care less about my little vacation to Carmel, but we enjoyed it. Well, I'm interested in the fact that the parking was available. This is a good metric. Rob Long, back in New York, what's parking like there?

I'll tell you. Can we actually go back to the days of a 1970s cop show where kojak could screech up to the building and there'd be a spot right waiting we call it in show we call doris day parking because in every doris day movie she's driving her little convertible roadster she always parks right in front of where she wants to park and of course all the 70s movies and tv shows people are always in every neil simon place someone's sorry i'm late i'm i took me forever to find a place to park because people in the old days would drive their car.

Into New York. I know. Within New York. They live on the Upper East Side. I've got to go to the Upper West Side. I'll just get in the car. I'm here to tell you the one thing that may mitigate the universal loathing for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is the worst elected official in the United States currently,

and universally loathed as he should be. And the level of my rage and detestation is so huge, except for this. He has suspended alternate side of the street parking in New York for the time being, which means that as I stand here talking to you, James, looking out my window onto 11th Street, I can see my car parked in front of the building across the street. And it has been there since Sunday night. I didn't have to move it. I won't have to move it for another week. That's great. So you're saying another term for de Blasio.

Well, close. I mean, the rest of the rest of the country regards New York right now as getting fully what it deserves because they want this guy. They got this guy. They want some half-baked, half-wit Marxist. There you go. And here's the result. And enjoy the perpetuity of that. But as long as we're talking about New York, here's – everybody on Twitter last week was abuzz about – and right there, you just lost 80 percent of the audience when you say everyone on Twitter was abuzz because we mistake Twitter

for the real world. It ain't. But it is indicative of the culture that you find in institutions like the colleges and the New York Times. And when I say the Times, everybody was talking about Barry Weiss leaving, to a lesser extent talking about Andrew Sullivan leaving in the way that these, what we regard as centrist and moderate voices were driven out by the culture there. As we were texting about this earlier this week, Rob, you remember I was saying the New York Times is increasingly irrelevant to the national conversation, except that it sets the tone for what newsrooms report. And so that got me to thinking, exactly,

how, when you look at the New York Times becoming irrelevant, and you look at the fact that NPR's ratings have fallen off hugely. Oh, they have. I wasn't aware of it anymore. How does the diminution of these voices... Yeah, seriously, you speak bitterness about the national press. You're in trouble, mister. Siri, just so you know, Siri, that's not me. It's him.

I'm eminently persuaded. L-I-L-E- so you know, Siri, that's not me. It's him. I'm eminently persuaded. L-I-L-E-K-S, Siri. All right. All right. Never mind. I have no idea. Now I've completely forgot where I was going about that. I'll just ask you guys, who is going to be driving the – where is the news going to be coming from in a few years from now for people who actually want to pay attention? Is there going to be any main sources that they can go to that they trust, or is it going to be this increasingly fritterous, chitterous melange of social media and unverifiable stuff out there? I mean, aside from Ricochet. I'll go first because I'll set up Rob. Rob will have thought this through. Here's my problem. I can't figure it out. The New York Times, yes, I would like to say Douglas Murray and the London Spectators that wrote a piece called What's the Point of the New York Times, noting that he simply doesn't trust even its supposedly straight factual reporting anymore.

None of it is trustworthy. And yet we know that the subscription digital subscription to the new york times is bigger i believe than that of any other newspaper in the country including the wall street journal which is up over two million digital subscription now and as far as i'm aware it continues to rise the new york times is not taking a hit among its own readers on twitter true twitter is not the real world but in my Twitter feed, the moment Barry walked away from the New York Times, two or three of the tech people out here in Silicon Valley said, no problem for her. Just let her start her own blog. She doesn't need to be bundled

with a brand anymore. Let people, let Andrew Sullivan and Barry Weiss start their own blogs. And I thought, you know, I don't, something makes me queasy. I don't like it, but I'm also not sure it will work. There's still something. Don't you, or is this just a generational thing? Is it just because I grew up when I grew up that I still feel the urge to get, to get a compendium each morning, to read the Wall Street Journal, to compare it to the New York Times, and not to go picking this voice, that voice, the other voice.

So I just don't know. Yes, it's generational. Is it really? Okay, over to Rob. Well, I'd say two things. One, Barry's great. I mean, we had Barry on the podcast many times. She's a really smart person.

She's a great thinker. She writes beautifully. Her real contribution the new york times was she was on the editorial board so she was a voice in the room saying hey guys there's enough simmer down you know um and she's not there anymore i don't know whether we'll see a difference i'm not sure i don't know what effect she had i wasn't in those rooms um and in terms of the blog i mean well andrew sullivan had a blog he famously had a blog he's one of the most famous bloggers there was i mean he maybe he was an ur blogger an early blogger andrew sullivan mickey kouse people like that were bloggers before blogging was blogging um so i'm not sure about that i would say i'd say'd say that I got an email from a friend of mine who is a financier in London, American.

And he asked a simple question. He said he's more of an optimist than I am. He said, is anybody on the right preparing for or building any institutions to compete with the institutions, not businesses. I mean, not Fox News. Fox News is a business, not an institution. The Murdoch family is in it for business. That's perfectly legitimate and reasonable thing to be doing. But, you know, we on the right tend to think of it as an institution and it's not. But we also know that in this world, this is what I wrote to him. I said in America, you know, what is the most trusted brand since the, the most trusted brand since the, you know, pandemic? It's been Amazon. Really, it's not the federal government. It's not the state government. It's not your local government. It's Amazon. Amazon, they come and they deliver the packages. And that's a brand that's, you know,

barely a decade old. So we know how to build brands. So my real question is to all of the hedge fund billionaires and conservative rich people I know, and we all know a lot, and there are tons, they're making more every day. Why are you not thinking big? Why are you not building the Harvard and Yale and the Princeton and the whatever of the next century? Because it's a century ago. These schools had been, you know, had been around for a long time, but they were still in the process of becoming what they were. They were just basically finishing clubs a century ago. Harvard and Yale, the Ivy League were just like where rich white guys went to learn a few phrases in Latin before they took what took to the law or something. So there's plenty of time left and there's plenty of money left for conservatives to do something big. And so I know I'm on a rant. Let me just finish this rant. When I was growing up, we had childhood friends and family friends, and they were Herb and Marion Sandler, who were very, very smart, very savvy investors and operators. They ran World Savings, which was the one SNL that managed to make it through the SNL nuclear winter. They were never part of any kind of SNL scandal.

They ran an incredibly lean, tight ship. They were, and as a consequence, they were immensely rich. And when they passed on, they're both, I think they, I'm pretty sure they both died. I think they both died. They left a huge portion of their money. They founded something called ProPublica, which is a news reporting organization to uh to do investigative long form pieces of investigation and then get them in places like the new york times and the wall street journal and other newspapers um it is of course lefty right because you know sullivan's law anything that's

not explicitly conservative ends up being liberal but But it started liberal. They are not they were not uniquely rich. Where are the billionaires to do something this big? Where is the pro publica for the center right? I don't know where it is, but I know a lot of billionaires who are too busy starting blogs and want to give more money to some present company excluded, some think tank. We don't think big. We don't play the long game. And the left plays the long, long, long game, which is one of the reasons why they tend, the country tends to creep leftward no matter who is in the White House and Rand. James, I don't know whether you are as deeply in awe as I am, but do you realize what Rob just did? He just took his usual $5 a month membership pitch and raised it to $50 million. $5 billion.

Try $5 billion. $5 billion. You are absolutely right, Rob. Totally, totally, utterly, completely. There are plenty of billionaires on our side. Let's just say it. Ricochet could use one or two. What we couldn't do.

What couldn't we do? What couldn't we do? But look, five right-wing kook billionaires putting $2 billion apiece could create a national free public high school or a national, maybe on four coasts, including the Mississippi, free Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Ivy League quality university with an endowment of $25, $30 billion. They could do that. They could do that tomorrow. And any one of these institutions would immediately be demonized as a right-wing place that does not give you the fullness of education as you get in these others in Harvard and Yale and Princeton. Any news source that we do will be derided. I know, Rob, I'm not saying we should. If we're defeated, then we should surrender. No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

The mental experiment. Excuse me. Yes, go! What I'm saying is, first of all, first and foremost, before we talk about any practicalities, what the billionaires should do, is that I hate the idea that we have to cede Harvard and Yale and Princeton and news and newspapers and all of these institutions to the left. It's like, well, all right, well, you guys got them. Okay, well, you know, we'll go here and start our own. I get that. But I hate the fact that the long march has succeeded with them winning all of these institutions. And it'd be great if we could figure out a way to claw them back somehow and make a

long march back through Harvard and Yale and Princeton and the rest of it and the schools and the education system and the newspapers everywhere. That's what I'd like to do. Just because these parasites have gone in and destroyed the brain and are now walking around with a husk as if it's the real original thing doesn't mean we can't go back and get a two. Yes, I agree. It would be great to have our own parallel institutions.

But you know that they're going to be Hillsdale. They're going to be, you know, Breitbart. They're going to be regarded as illegitimate and unfair and unbalanced simply because they are explicit and honest about their point where the other side isn't. That's because in this culture and the thing that we have to change is the idea that leftism is the default of rational, normal people. That's that's true. And in opposition to that is the right. All right, I'm done running now. You know, I hear you. I would always say this. I mean, I'm sorry. I'll say this. You are correct about that probably, but you are also probably incorrect. There's a chance that you could build

an institution at last that isn't instantly vilified, but over time it will become an institution. And over time it will become something that is valued by the culture at large. I agree. That argument is cheesy. I've heard too many rich guys say, well, I can't do that. You don't need to try to take back Harvard and Yale. Those places are moving very quickly

to irrelevance themselves. Build something new. Michelangelo said, criticize by creating. That's what we got. Yes, yes. Didangelo said, criticize by creating. That's what we got. Yes, yes. Did he really say that? Either Michelangelo or me, I often get us mixed up. Okay, so here's, look, I don't want to come in here and say I hate it. Well, a little of this, a little of that, but I do agree with both of you in the following sense. Tom Sowell,

I recorded Tom Sowell, an interview with Tom Sowell, what, two weeks ago now, on his new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. And he made the following point, which we all sort of know, but strikes me as just basic. What happens in a neighborhood in Harlem when a charter school opens up? The other schools get better, too. Rob drew a distinction between a business and an institution. And of course, what I'd like to suggest is that the distinctions get a little bit blurry. Here's the mental experiment. Lord, do I wish I'd lived my life a different way and made tons and tons of money because I do this myself. Give Larry Arnn at Hillsdale College $15 billion. Let that campus get built in a beautiful, let it turn into a huge, beautiful

campus and let him hire Glenn Lowry from Brown and Harvey Mansfield from Harvard and build a first-rate faculty. And within a decade, I believe, this is the mental experiment, none of us can prove it, but doesn't it feel right that within a decade, that will have become an institution, A, an institution as formidable as these great old institutions that have been accumulating endowments for decades and decades, and B, that Harvard and Yale and the other old great institutions will have begun to respond. In one way or another, they'll say, oh, oh, oh, wait a minute. There does, even as if the New York Times starts to take a hit, if competition begins to surpass it, the New York Times will start to respond.

Isn't that right? I think the epistemic closure in those places is welded so tightly that they make the bathyspheres that go down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench look like a sip. The second point that I would make is that instead of calling it Hillsdale, call it Harvard with an ERD and call it Yale, Y-A-Y-L-E, so that the names have the cachet, but the people will use them. Sometimes it's the spelling of these things. Like, for example, if somebody's named Bradley, do you know if it's L-E-Y or just L-Y? And when it comes to that matter, what sort of parallel institutions are we talking about? We've already got one, and we already can bring it to you. Why would we do that?

Why would you want it? What am I talking about? Listen, making sense of current events during these, as they say, extraordinary and unprecedented times, it can be trying. Well, Conceived in Liberty, the Bradley Speaker Series, Conceived in Liberty is a new video series that offers meaningful perspectives through 15 engaging 15-minute interviews. The guests focus on the big picture. They distill what the latest developments mean to our deeply held commitment to restore, to strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism. So you want to know more and watch the lectures and learn something? Sure. You can visit bradleyfdn.org slash Liberty. And there you'll be

able to see the most recent episode, which features Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel. That's Bradley with an L-E-Y at the end, and then FDN.org Foundation, BradleyFoundation.org slash Liberty to watch the video. New episodes will debut weekly, so come back often, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and be notified whenever a new one's posted. So thanks to Bradley Foundation for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast Bjorn Lomberg. I think the last time he was here, the earth was on fire, boiling, and now I think it's even.0000001 degrees even hotter than then. We're all doomed, right? Well, maybe not. Bjorn's latest book is False

Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. Thanks for coming back, Bjorn. So let's talk about that false alarm. What is the false alarm that the cover is telling us about? Well, so fundamentally, everyone are incredibly scared about climate change, and wrongly so. Just to give you two examples, we know that a lot of young people really, really worry. So Washington Post did a survey. Fifty-seven percent of all teenagers in the U.S. are now afraid of climate change. But perhaps more importantly, in a recent survey across the world, 48% of all adults literally believe that climate change will likely lead to the extinction of the human race. Four out of 10 Americans believe this. So we're up against this. It's the end of the world sense, as you just mentioned. But the reality,

of course, when you look at what the UN Climate Panel tells us is global warming is real. It is a problem. In about 50 years, so in the 2070s, they estimate the net impact of climate change will be equivalent to reduction in your average income of somewhere between 0.2 and 2%. Remember, by then we'll be 2.63 times richer. That's their own central estimate. So instead of being 2.63 times richer, we'll only be 2.56 times richer. That's a problem, but it's certainly not the end of the world. Hey, Bjorn, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. So a year ago, probably exactly one year ago, lefty climate activist politicians proposed something in this country called the Green New Deal. And people said, listen, the Green New Deal, that's going to be an economic disaster for this country. It seems like if you look at the current emission stand, the current emission numbers for the past four or five months, that that's what this lockdown, at least in this country, has been.

Is it fair to say that if you liked the shutdown, boy, are you going to love the Green New Deal? I think that's probably a little partisan, but you're absolutely right. Okay, only a little? That's good. What the lockdown showed us was that environmentalists have for a very long time been telling us, could you use the car a little less, take a little less planes, walk a little, or bike to your job, that kind of stuff. We all did that with the lockdown, and it had almost no impact. It was incredibly annoying. It cut perhaps 2.6 billion tons of CO2 from the world. So it's a very, very large reduction. It's the largest we've ever seen

for one year. But by the end of the century, you won't be able to see the difference. It'll reduce temperatures by one five hundredth of a degree Fahrenheit. So the idea here is to recognize when people talk about really making enormous impact on climate change, they're talking about lots and lots of lockdowns. Just to give you a sense, the U.S. will probably experience, if you also get a second wave, about a 10 percent reduction in your emissions. If you have to go to zero, which is what Biden and many others proposed, that's essentially trying to do 10 lockdowns every year. Not surprisingly, even if you do it much, much smarter, that is going to be costly and unpleasant. So one of the things I hear people say who are sort of climate change skeptics is that there's an analogy between wearing of the masks, that the idea is that we sort of lied to and these numbers are fungible and whatever particular political hobby horse the person wants to get on, they will use climate change or they'll use COVID precautions to sort of drive that forward. Do you feel like, I mean, just from your going around and talking about this book and this issue, that climate change has remained the number one fear among young people, or is it now number three after COVID and systemic racism?

I have a hard time answering that, both because I'm not in the U.S. I had to get home while I still could. But also, look, this is a long-term issue. I think everybody recognizes that corona is more important and certainly the first year. But given that we're going to be talking about climate change for the next many decades, this is where the real conversation is. And I suspect

that once we've sort of fixed or ameliorated corona, we'll go back to worry about climate change. Climate change is this wonderful thing where you constantly can get these stories, the end is nigh. One example I give in the book is last year, almost every news outlet, Washington Post led very prominently with it, told us that 187 million people would need to move by the end of the century because of sea level rise. And many other news outlets actually said they would just drown. But of course, if you have 80 years advance, you probably will move out of the way. But what they failed to remember was that research assumed that you were going to see sea level rise, which is absolutely true. That's a consequence of global warming. But then they assumed that nobody would do anything about it for the next 80 years. You'd

just sit around, watch the waves lap up over your knees and eventually your hips and then, you know, either move or drown. But the reality, of course, is that we adapt. And the very same paper that estimated the 187 million also said with realistic adaptation, which the paper thought was the more likely outcome, you would have 300,000 people having to move by the end of the century. Just to give you a sense of proportion, that's half of the number of people that move out of California every year. So I think we can probably handle that on a global level over the next 80 years. And that was 600 times exaggerated. But it's the kind of thing that keeps driving the fear that makes us take this real problem

with global warming and dramatically exaggerate it and then say, let's throw everything in the kitchen sink and lots of trillions of dollars at this. So I guess here's what my real question is. My real question is this, because I feel like it's part of a large— No, no, the others were fake. Yeah, the others were just, you know. Do you think the problem in the conversation about climate change is that we have— we are operating on differing sets of data, that I don't trust your data, you don't trust my data, or is it that we're interpreting the same numbers incorrectly? Well, I actually think it's

a fact of a lot of people just not reading the UN Climate Panel. So everybody says that the UN Climate Panel is the gold standard of what we know about global warming. And they have constantly, and for the last 20 years, been telling us global warming is real, it's a problem, it will have a moderate impact. You know, they tell us in the last report that pretty much any other area of social behavior, so, you know, demography and everything else will have bigger impacts. But, you know, it will be a significant issue and it's something that we should talk about. Yet most people just decide to say this is the end of the world and we're all going to die. We need to do lots of stuff against this.

And I think that's the real conversation. That coupled with the fact that most of us have no idea the scale to which we really would have to change if we want to reach these very unlikely targets that people put up. I'm constantly surprised. I think most people in the business are surprised that people literally still believe that we're going to make the 1.5 degree target, which is just, it's not possible. There's no way you can make that, but people talk about it because it feels nice. So I think there's a disconnect between what the science and the economics tell us and what most people believe because they've heard the 187 million people are going to drown. We've got to do something. So in order for me to like take a rational, thoughtful, measured approach to climate change, I don't need to attack the UN data.

I don't need to say this or that was faked. I don't need to say that they looked at the wrong core samples. I don't need to do any extra research at all. Is that what you're saying? I just simply have to read the current... I don't think... I mean, first of all, these guys are much smarter,

certainly than me, and probably they've spent a lot more time on this than most of the rest of us. So, you know, that's what a specialization in society means. We listen to them.

But then we also ask, what should we do? And I think this is where we are failing the fundamental economic point, namely that you always have to make trade-offs. The comparison I make in the book is right now about 40,000 people are going to die in traffic every year in the U.S., maybe not this year because of corona, but mostly about 40,000 people. We know how to avoid all of those deaths. It's just about setting the speed

limit at three miles an hour. Then nobody dies, perhaps except for boredom, right? But the fundamental point is we don't do that because we also recognize that that would mean we wouldn't have a continentally integrated economy. We wouldn't be able to go and visit our friends or family. We wouldn't be able to go work where we like, all these other things. So we make a trade-off and we have a sensible public conversation saying, look, should we have 85 miles as our speed limit or should it be 55? And the cautious are going to argue more for 55 and the more focused on economics are going to say 85. But we don't run around and say, should it be unlimited or should it be three miles an hour?

I think we fail to have the same sensible, middle-of-the-road, rational conversation on climate, where we realize it's a problem, let's find out how much of it we can fix reasonably at low cost, and how much it would be dumb to go too far. And we don't have that conversation. Hey, Bjorn, Peter Robinson here. I should note that the day after you got on a plane to return to Europe, we were intending to record an episode of Uncommon Knowledge on your marvelous new book, False Alarm. But you had to skedaddle because there were only, I think, two seats left on one airplane. You got on, you virtually had to hold on to the wing as the plane took off.

But we're going to be recording an episode of Uncommon Knowledge one week from today. Okay, that said, again, the book is False Alarm. Here's what Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner, said in, I'll say it, you wouldn't because you're much too much of a gentleman, but it was a very snarky review. That's the overall tone. Still, he makes his arguments. And this is Joe Stiglitz. Have you seen this yet, Bjorn?

It's in the New York Times. It was in the New York Times yesterday. Okay. People have made me notice that. Yes. All right. Okay, good. I mean, I was rather hoping that the New York Times goes unnoticed, but still. All right.

So Joe Stiglitz says that Bjorn Lomborg makes several mistakes, and one of them is that he just doesn't take due account of the risk. Those are his words, due account of the risk. Quote, not since the dawn of humanity has there been anything like this. The models use the best estimate of impacts, but as we learn more about climate change, these best estimates keep getting revised and typically in only one direction. More damage and sooner than had been expected. Close quote. Bjorn Lomborg is inadequately hysterical. He fails to note that the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

Bjorn? Well, I mean, it's perhaps important to recognize that Sticklitz got his Nobel Prize in signaling as the kind of stuff you do in markets like for used cars. Whereas the criticism that he levels, of course, is in climate economics. And actually, the climate economics that we know, so for instance, one way of estimating are the damage estimates getting worse or better. Well, that's on how much are the estimates of the social cost of carbon. And actually, period studies show that it's been going down. That is, it's been getting less bad, not more bad. So in some sense, you could just say Sticklitz is just ill-informed, or perhaps more accurately, Sticklitz get most of his knowledge from newspapers,

maybe perhaps especially from New York Times. So he also says that there's more and more damage from extreme weather catastrophes. And he mentions that the U.S. in 2017 alone, as he says, lost some 1.5 percent of GDP to such weather-related events. He fails to say that he cherry-picked that out of a 30-year trend that is downward sloping. And he picked the highest number from the last couple of years, 2018, 2019, were more like 0.5. So again, what he shows here is actually that he's an avid and very, very loyal New York Times reader. But I'm not sure that's a good argument for saying,

we want to entrust you with how we should be spending our trillions of dollars. But perhaps most importantly, notice that his main criticism is really not of me. It's of his fellow Nobel laureate, Nordhaus, who actually got the Nobel Prize. Give us a sentence on who Nordhaus is. Fill the listeners in. Unlike Stiglitz, Nordhaus actually got his Nobel Prize in climate economics. He's the only climate economist to get the Nobel Prize. And Sticklets very literally say that both Lomborg and Nordhaus and the people like them

are the bad guys. And of course, I'm very happy to be bunched in under Nordhaus because he actually knows what he's talking about. And that's why he got the Nobel Prize in climate economics. And I think it's terrifying to the extent that we're simply sitting in a situation where people now want to decide what are the right things you're allowed to say and what are the right things that we should be paying attention to. the right things that we should be paying attention to? But of course, we should be paying attention to what the only Nobel laureate have been telling us about climate.

And that is we should do something about climate, but we shouldn't do too much. Just like the three miles an hour point we made just a second ago. And Nordhaus says that we should do way too little to sticklets taste. But look, again, we probably shouldn't spend hundreds of trillions of dollars on sticklets taste. We should spend it on evidence. What about two trillion dollars? Here's what here's something else that happened this week. Today's Friday. On Monday, Joe Biden announced a plan to spend $2 trillion, trillion with a T, $2 trillion on climate over his first four years as president. So that's $500 billion on climate per year for each of the four years of Joe Biden as president. And Biden seems to be arguing both that this will, in one way or

another, reduce carbon emissions and that it will stimulate economic growth. Here's Joe Biden. When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is hoax. When I think about climate change, the word I think of is jobs. Bjorn? Well, I mean, I looked at what he was saying and I tried to find the plan. And unfortunately, there isn't, or at least not yet, a public plan. So the only thing you can say is he makes some different estimates. And you're absolutely right if you go through what he says. It's actually mostly jobs. And that's probably a smart thing, especially if you want to be elected president.

But it has very little to do with climate change. I also find it odd, to say the least, that a very large part of what he's talking about is really increasing infrastructure. So it's about having more highways and more cars. Some of them are going to be electric, but still, that's probably not very much climate related either. What he does do is he makes three identifiable points that I think we can actually evaluate. One of them is he wants to weatherize several million homes, so basically retrofit them to get them to be less energy consumptive. And we have good studies of that. The biggest study that was done in Minnesota a couple of years ago, published a couple of years ago, shows that despite everybody telling you beforehand it is an incredibly good idea, it turns out that it's an incredibly bad idea. You end up wasting about half of your money.

And this is a pretty robust result. Don't try to do this generally. There are some houses that are great to retrofit, but most you actually end up losing money doing. He also suggests we should go carbon neutral by 2050. That's not in his $2 trillion plan because obviously that's much later. But estimates, there's only one country who's actually asked for an independent estimate. That's New Zealand. They found that the average cost of going net zero is 16% of GDP. So here's another number for you. 16% of U.S. GDP in 2050 is $5 trillion every year. That's a lot of cost to achieve fairly little. And not surprisingly, the economic estimates show that this is vastly not a good

investment. But and he also said something really good. He also said he wants to spend much more money on investment into green energy R&D. And that's one of the points that I make in my book. And indeed, that's what we've done both with our Nobel laureates to actually look at what are smart climate policies. So we had three Nobel, so we outrank Stiglitz three to one on that. But the idea is to say, what can you actually do that will really do a good job at dealing with climate change? And at the same time, it's cost effective. We found the best long-term investment has dramatically increased investment in R&D. Because if you can innovate the price of future green energy down below fossil fuels,

everyone will switch. You won't have to rely on cumbersome treaties like the Paris Agreement. You won't have to twist everyone's arm. You won't have to rely on rich, well-meaning people doing a little virtue signaling. Everyone, both Americans, but also Europeans and Asians, but also Chinese and Indians and Africans will switch because it's cheaper. So innovation is the way that we fix this. And so, yeah, Biden is going to waste some money, probably too much for my taste. But he's also at least

talking about the smartest way to fix climate change. And I'm a little happy about that. Bjorn, James Lylex here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where my house was weatherized and improved at great expense. The Metropolitan Airport Commission paid huge amounts of money to everybody in our neighborhood to strip them down and make them quiet so we don't hear the airplanes going over. It's nice. It's great. It's a jobs program. It's tremendously expensive, as you're right. But it would seem to me that part of the problem in coming up with rational, sensible solutions like you're talking about is that a lot of people use climate change as a stocking horse for other ideas. It's convenient because it's anti-consumptive, it's anti-growth, it's anti-progress. And frankly, they don't want everyone to have a big house.

If it's energy efficient and served by green energy, they don't like that because they don't like the suburbs. They don't like the cars. They don't like all of these manifestations of Western materialism, right? That's probably true. And again, I think in any big global conversation, there's a confluence of all kinds of other ideas. I try to just simply keep my conversation on climate. So if you look at the Green New Deal, probably somewhere between three quarters and nine tenths of it is actually not

mostly about green stuff, but it's just all kinds of other things that get lumped into it. And I think that's how politics work. But I think we have to be very honest and say for most people around this world, and that's where the subtitle on how climate change policies often hurt the poor, for most people around the world, they obviously want to be able to have a better life. They want their kids to not die from easily curable infectious diseases or get nutrition or education. And clearly, they see a lot of what we're trying to do, say, we got rich using fossil fuels, but I'm sorry, you can't. Not as an honest broker. We did a study for Bangladesh. So we work with a lot of developing countries to look at

where can you spend dollars and do the most good. We worked with Bangladesh and looked at they wanted to build a series of coal-fired power plants. The West simply says we're not going to fund that because that contributes to the climate crisis. That makes a little sense, but you've got to look at it in the grander perspective. So we found that it would also make each and every Bangladeshi about 13% richer. It would simply help lift lots of people out of poverty in just 15 years. So we found that for every $100 that Bangladesh would get benefits from having more accessible and cheap and reliable energy, they would create climate problems for the rest of the world, mostly for the rest of the world, worth about 23 cents. We don't seem to have a sense of proportion when we say, no, no, I'm sorry, you can't get those hundred dollars because we care too much about the 23 cents. That's where we need to pull people back. But I like that much more doing that directly and just telling people, look, you're not actually

caring about these poor people if that's what you're telling them. And of course, they won't be listening to you either. The book is False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. Those verbs are in future tense. I don't want the second edition to come out and say how it cost us, hurt the poor, and failed. And one of the ways we can get around that is to read the book and tell everybody else to read it. And it's wonderful contrary thinking. It's great stuff, and we're always happy to have you on because we learn something every time. Bjorn Lomborg, thanks a lot. We'll see you later.

Thank you. Bjorn, thank you. Take care. You and I will talk in a week. I look forward to that. Take good care, guys. Take care. You know, when I was talking before, and I'm sorry I got interrupted by my stupid Siri thing again,

is that, you know, people have agendas and they say you can't do this. You know, they want less of Western civilization because Western civilization irritates them on some elemental level. We should all be egalitarian and we should all be conforming to certain ideas and eating a nutritious slurry instead of eating meat because meat, the methane of the cows, I mean, Burger King is coming out with ads now talking about how they're trying to change the diet of their cows so they emit less methane. That's great. Maybe it makes for healthier cows. Maybe it smells better around the pasture. I don't know. But the truth is, is that the people who are running these things don't want us to eat meat anyway. But you love meat. I love meat. Everybody looks sensible and American and has red blood pumping through their veins and our arteries loves meat. That's why

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counters, take that off your list, and receive quality meats delivered to your door now. How? Simple. Go to butcherbox.com slash ricochet. That's butcherbox.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now we welcome back to the podcast, Ovik Roy. After training as a scientist at MIT and a physician at Yale Medical School, he moved to Boston to join this company called, I don't know, Bain Capital. I don't know what ever happened to them. technology companies who were developing therapies for diseases that had here before gone untreated. He is a passionate believer in the conservative case for universal coverage, the idea that markets and competition can bring quality health care to every American. In 2015, he moved to Austin, where he ran the foreign and domestic policy shops for Texas Governor Rick Perry's presidential campaign. And he's now the president of FreeOp, a Texas-based think tank that focuses exclusively on research that moves the needle for

people with below median incomes or net worth. Also happens to be host of the new COVID in 19 podcast right here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Hey, thanks for joining us, Ovik. Hey, James. I'm trying to figure out the news. I get a lot of my information not from the sources that come and pay perform to my door or even their websites. I follow a lot of people on Twitter who are very dispassionate about numbers and do not seem to be rooting one way or the other. They're just looking at it. And what I get from them is different from what I hear from the news. From the news, I hear abandonment and panic and widespread

and we're doomed and it's horrible. And from these numbers, I get a clearer picture that is not as terrifying or frightening. So is it in the middle? Where are we in this thing? And what does the next month look like? I know that's kind of a silly question when you have a big country and it's all state by state and county by county, but are we doing okay? Well, we're doing reasonably okay, but I want to start with your preface, James, because if there's one thing that the journalism profession selects for, it's people who are bad at math. So we shouldn't be surprised that the ability to- Oh, no, no, no. I'm in the media. Fifteen out of nine colleagues of mine are bad at math. There you go.

That's almost 30 percent. I mean, think about the old cliche before the pandemic we used to talk about is plane crashes, right? Actually, it is far safer to fly an airplane, far safer by orders of magnitude. It's safer to fly an airplane than to drive your car to the office. And yet, because every plane crash is nonstop, 24-7 news for days on end, people have become convinced that flying, or at least some people have become convinced that flying is more dangerous than driving your car or crossing the street, when that's not in fact true. And something similar is going on with COVID, where the risk of dying from COVID,

if you are, say, under the age of 35, is far lower than it is of being in a car accident during that exact same period. And yet people are not as terrified of getting in their cars as they are of getting infected with COVID. Now, again, that's not to say that COVID is not serious. It is very serious. But that's an example of where media panic leads people to not have accurate statistical views of the danger and the risk. And you see this in polls. There are polls that show that the people who are most afraid of COVID are people under the age of 45, even though they're the ones at the lowest risk. That's all true. But I just read a story the other day about a guy who did not believe that COVID existed, who on his 35th birthday got into his car and drove to the airport to take a flight and was struck by lightning. So you tell me that COVID isn't serious. And he was wearing a mask,

and it was N95 too. So I mean... You know, in a country of 330 million people, there are always going to be interesting and compelling anecdotes, especially if you're a talented writer, as many journalists are. But the statistics really matter here. They really matter. And what's been interesting, too, is, by the way, people, it's not just the journalists. It's people who actually should know better people who are in public health or who have math backgrounds whose uh whose risk aversion you could say or your fear or maybe it's your politics uh prevent you from seeing the statistics as clearly as you should hey oh oh i'm sorry go ahead rob yeah it's rob in new york How are you? Listen, I don't know about telling stories. Exactly. I don't know about numbers, but I know how to look at pictures. And I keep seeing pictures of a graph showing, you know, a new record for new cases of COVID. So that the record of cases is going up and to the right. And it's been going up and to

the right for four weeks, almost five weeks. I've been hearing this for four or five weeks. And I keep expecting to see the new deaths for COVID going up and to the right. They should match at least the curve. If there's even, you know, four weeks later, whatever that, whatever that latency is. Um, and they're not, is this because the denominator is much larger than we thought that COVID is more widespread, but less deadly? Is this a reason for celebration? Is this a reason to, uh, to hunker down some more? Explain to me the picture that I saw in, in, in small words,

because I don't do the numbers. Well, you know, it's interesting because I tweeted about this offhandedly a couple of weeks ago when the, when you, we first started to see the spike in Florida and Texas and this tweet, this tweet thread or whatever it was,

tweet storm went viral. And I, which I didn't expect, but because people were really hungry for, for, for this really hungry to answer this question that you just asked, Rob. And basically what it comes down to is not all cases are the same, because not all people are at the same risk of serious illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID. If you're young and you test positive for COVID, the probability that you're going to get sent to the hospital because you're seriously ill is a lot lower than if you're old. The probability that you're going to die from COVID is a lot lower if you're young than if you're old, even if you do get hospitalized.

So you put all those factors upon factors on top of each other. And what it means is that the number of cases is really not actually that useful of a metric. It's kind of a superficial metric. What really matters is who is being infected. And what we're seeing is that, generally speaking, in this wave, it's younger people, people in their 20s and 30s, who are testing positive. Not the nursing home, the elderly types, which was the first wave, you could say. And they really, you know, had a tough time. As you know, the work we've done, we've shown at pre-ep.org that about half the deaths in the U.S. from COVID have come in the nursing home population, in which

0.6% of the U.S. population lives in nursing homes. Then 45% of the deaths have occurred in nursing homes. That's a big problem. That's crazy, right. Is it fair to say, was it fair to characterize COVID-19 as a nursing home disease? Well, first of all, I have to apologize because you did ask me for no numbers, and I slipped in some numbers there. Yeah, you did. I noticed that. I had to interrupt you quickly. Sorry about that. Because already I was starting, my eyes are rolling in the back of my head.

Numbers? No numbers. I tell you what, the COVID pandemic has been not only a boom for video conference software companies, but also for data visualization software, because there's so much data out there, and you can put together all these beautiful maps of what's going on, even though obviously it's a tragedy. COVID is a tragedy in so many ways. That has been an interesting thing to observe. So, sorry, I lost my train of thought. What was your question?

I would say, is it a nursing home disease? I mean, are we looking at a disease where we're like, okay, if you're old, masks, Purell, wash your hands, stay in. If you're young, wash your hands, masks. Maybe when you go into the store, don't go into large groups, but you're fine. You should go to school. Well, you know, I'd say that is an elevator pitch way of describing it. But the only caveat to that, and so we just put out a big paper at

freeop.org on reopening schools. It's really long. So if you're very passionate about the subject, read the whole thing. But if you are only somewhat passionate about the subject, you can read the executive summary, which I promise is shorter and has bullet points. And this is basically the point of the paper is the 100-word version of the paper would be young people are at infinitesimally low risk of dying of COVID. Send them back to school. We have experience in Europe. It's worked. Send them back to school. That's the short version. The long version is that, well, you have to account for every situation in which there are young people who live with their grandparents or college students who live in a community which has a really high coronavirus infection rate, Or you have, you know, elderly faculty who you need to protect. Or

you have people with, you know, I mean, who are immunocompromised or have other. So there's all these, you know, caveats in terms of vulnerable populations that you have to think about in order to make sure that we're protecting everybody and not having a situation where those younger people contribute to the spread into the older elderly population. So for example, you know, right now the smart states have been locking down nursing homes and preventing infected patients and family members even from visiting those nursing homes. But that's hard on the people who live in nursing homes, right? You don't get to see your family for months and months on end. That's tough too. That's not an easy choice. So people have been doing it, but

we have to recognize that it's a hardship as well. Oh, you mentioned. Hold on a second. I just want to say he mentioned elevator pitch. We can't have elevator pitches anymore because it's only four people to a car, sometimes two. So the person you want, the person, the person you want to talk to got on and you're back in the queue, which means that when everybody goes back to the office, there's going to be long lines because they won't be able to go out eight at a time. That's another one of those phrases that people will look back and like, like, you know, dial like, you know, when it comes to phones and televisions, all the things that make no sense anymore. Elevator pitch. I don't, I don't get it. Anyway, Peter, you were going to say. Oh, I want to get back to the question of schools opening in a moment, in a moment. But first, I just want to make sure

I understand the argument here. We have rising numbers of cases, but a low, if not falling, falling over the past couple of months, for sure. I don't know over the last two or three days. We have rising cases, but falling death rates. That means that younger people who are at much lower risk are the ones who are getting sick. Is it not the case, correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not the case that absent a vaccine, the way to beat this darn thing and get back to our lives, normal lives, is something that Rob and I don't understand because it involves numbers, but it's called herd immunity, and you achieve herd immunity precisely by what's going on now. People who are not at risk of serious illness and certainly not of death get the virus and build up antibodies

toward it. In other words, the alarmism in the press about the rising number of cases is not only mistaken, but 180 degrees mistaken. In some basic way, this is good news, not bad news. Or have I just got this wrong? Well, this is a matter of significant controversy. And I think what I'd say, I lean towards the view that lockdowns haven't worked in general. That doesn't mean they can't work, but in general, they have not worked in the United States. And if you look at Europe, you see this too. So for example, Sweden, they basically had a deliberate strategy of not locking down. And their mortality was pretty significant for a while. They took a

lot of lumps, especially when you compare them to their Scandinavian neighbors. But their death rates now are falling considerably and are now very low compared to a lot of other countries. New York City, not through a deliberate strategy, but through a combination of incompetence and malice, New York City is basically doing the Swedish strategy, where they did a lot of lockdowns, but the refusal to clear the subway and a lot of other incompetent New York City bureaucracies, the mandate from New York State

to force infected patients into nursing homes, a lot of different things went on in New York. But basically, they're dealing with the same thing, where right now, it's quite possible that 60% of the Manhattan or New York City population has COVID. And so you're seeing the deaths decline, not because New York City did anything brilliant from a policy perspective, but because it's like a forest fire. All the dry wood has been burned through. And so it may be that what's going on in the rest of the country is because the rest of the country did lock down and didn't get that as much of the first wave.

As we've relaxed a little bit, you know, more people are getting infected in those other places. But I still don't think those other places are going to be as bad as New York, because New York has a unique combination of high density and incompetent government. OK, so so I can see a few bars of that, my friend. I mean, compare it to Hong Kong. Compare it to the other high-density cities around the world that haven't been as bad. New York is singularly bad. And basically, we're all dealing, all the national statistics about how terrible the American performance has been on COVID are driven by the fact that half the cases happen in the New York City metropolitan area. So if you take New York City out, actually, the U.S. is not that bad in international comparisons. True in many ways.

So, Ovik, way back when, when the lockdown was first announced, even I could understand the argument. Flatten the curve. The point was to make sure that the virus spread slowly enough so that hospitals and particularly emergency room facilities were not overwhelmed. I got that. I'm sure even Rob got that. Forgive me, Rob. And now, however, I live in Santa Clara County in Northern California, which is one of the, I guess it's six or seven counties now that's being especially cautious about opening up. I don't understand what they think they're doing. What is the argument?

I mean, I truly mean that. I don't see them stating a rationale for continuing the lockdown because we all know across the country, even in New York City, whereas I guess in the Bronx and Queens, there were some hospitals that did show some risk of getting overwhelmed. That was weeks ago. There's no place in the country where hospitals are at risk of becoming overwhelmed. So forget about Santa Clara County. Texas, a rock-ribbed conservative governor, Greg Abbott, your own Greg Abbott, said, well, wait a minute. We better slow down here.

Let's everybody wear face masks and we may have to lock down. What is the rationale? How would Greg Abbott, in medical terms, defend his latest pronouncements? Well, he wouldn't defend it in medical terms. He would say, I talked to my privy counsel and my privy counsel says this is what we should do. And his privy council is filled with academic public health people who give him the same advice that the people in California and the people in New York would give him. Okay, so somebody somewhere, some high priest of public health, presumably has thought this through and has a rationale for continuing aspects of the lockdown even at this late date, right?

What's the rationale now? What could it possibly be? You know, and Peter, we talked about this, you know, when I think the last time I was on this podcast, early on when we had put out the big reopening the economy plan at WAP.org, that there was this view, there's this kind of one-dimensional view out there in which the only thing that matters is preventing people from getting COVID infections, and nothing else matters. The economy doesn't matter. Treating people with heart attacks doesn't matter.

Mental health issues don't matter. Social isolation doesn't matter. None of that matters. Educating kids doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is COVID statistics, and that single-mindedness. And Anthony Fauci is really the high priest of that, and he sometimes admits it under questioning that basically the only thing I'm trained to do is worry about COVID or pandemics, and that's it. I don't care about anything else. So, Ovik, what you're telling us here is that whereas all the rest of us, even our political figures, even political figures whom the press particularly likes to malign, including Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, and your own Greg Abbott, governor of Texas.

All the rest of us have learned a lot since the lockdown began in March, but the public health officials haven't learned a darn thing. They're still fixated on the COVID numbers and the COVID numbers alone. Is that true? Is that what you're saying? I mean, yeah, that's part of what I'm saying. I mean, I think there's a couple of things going on, right? There's that one-dimensional thinking piece of it. There are people, you know, just in the spectrum of personalities in the world, there are people who are going to be more risk-averse, more cautious about things like pandemics, disease. That's understandable on a certain level of humanity. And there's a partisan element, right? Because of course,

you know, people, if Joe Biden is president, you know, in 2021, the headlines starting on November 7th are going to be about how we're turning the corner on COVID, how everything's going great, and any statistics and charts that look bad, the kinds that James was bringing up before, all that will be dismissed. I guarantee you, you know, there's going to be a certain amount of that. I remember it in 92, when we went from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton, there was a similar complete reversal in the way the same economic statistics were being described in The New York Times and The Washington Post. So there's a lot of factors. But by the way, I will say on the school reopening piece, the New York Times did actually put out an editorial saying, let's reopen the schools. The Washington Post put out an editorial saying, reopen the

schools. So this should not be a partisan issue, but I know in some quarters it has become one. And that's tragic for the 80 million people who go to school in this country. Oh, that's my last question. It is correct, is it not? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you think of a school classroom, public school, let's just take an ordinary standard school classroom, 25 to 35 kids and a teacher, maybe a teacher's assistant, the 25 to 35 kids are just essentially not at risk. They're just plain not. The problem is not large populations of kids. It's a very small and one would think manageable population of teachers. And the public health officials ought to be honest about this. Those who are reticent about

opening the schools are not doing it for the children. They're doing it for the teachers, and it ought to lie within the realm of human wit to be able to protect teachers who are at risk, which, after all, is only a small proportion of teachers. Is that not all correct? It is, and that is the bulk of the white paper we just put out at freeop.org is about how to protect teachers, how to protect faculty, how to protect staff, how to protect faculty, how to protect staff, how to protect the community. And by the way, we should mention, we haven't yet mentioned on this segment, the importance of labor unions, right? So public sector unions, the teachers unions are fighting this tooth and nail because they're getting paid regardless. So they have every incentive to basically block reopenings because, as I said, they're getting paid regardless.

Private schools aren't like that, right? If you go to a private school, the school's not going to get tuition payments and the teachers are not going to get paid if a school doesn't reopen. So now you could say, well, who cares about economics? That shouldn't be a factor in their thinking. But it absolutely should because there are public health costs to not educating children, children who fall behind, particularly young children whose brains are still growing and developing. You leave them out of school for a year or two. It is incredibly damaging to their mental development, their social development, their emotional development. And none of that is important to say the L.A. Teachers

Union, which said we're not going to reopen schools until you defund the police. I mean, come on. All right. Well, I think you want teachers to die. Previously until you defund the police. I mean, come on. All right. Well, I think you want teachers to die. Previously, you wanted grandma to die. Now you want teachers to die. My mom is a retired Montessori school teacher, and I want her to live as long as possible and all of her colleagues. So yesterday I went to the Apple store to pick up a laptop that was being repaired. Previously, in the before times when I went to the Apple store, I would walk in.

I'd lick the countertops. I'd have people sneeze on me. I'd just devil make care. But now, things are different. Now, you stand outside in a queue, somebody temp guns your forehead, walks you through the little list of symptoms. And when you get inside, of course, it's very spare. It's an Apple store. It's even less cluttered than before. And when the guy handed me my computer, of course, he was masked. I was masked. We all laved our hands with juice. It was in this protective sheath. And I asked him if I could have that sheath to put it in my backpack so the computer didn't get scratched. And he sort of recoiled and said, well, this is for your benefit. think you are an asymptomatic carrier shedding massive amounts of virus and that you just breathed all over this piece of cloth before you handed it to me. I think we're being a little bit too paranoid about this. I don't think this is how I don't think it's transmitted by people handing you back your computer.

Now, am I wrong or have we not had any really good discussion about how people get it? And if we knew that, perhaps we would alter our behavior a little bit. I love that soliloquy, James, because I didn't know where you're going with it. I didn't know if this was one of those surreptitious ricochet commercials or whether you actually had a question. Well, you know it was a commercial because I didn't interrupt it. So the fact is there's actually an enormous amount of evidence at this point that surface-to-surface transmission is not a serious problem with COVID. It's really more about the droplets in the air from breathing on people, prolonged encounters indoors with someone who

is very close to you physically. That's where the infection transmission happens. The other piece of it, by the way, that's really important that's come from a lot of emerging evidence is that actually 80% of people who get infected with COVID do not really spread the virus to others. There's about 20% and really more like 10% of people who are infected who are the so-called super spreaders who, for whatever reason, end up being the ones who really transmit the disease to a lot of people. So that's an important area of study that's going on right now, and I think we're going to learn more about super spreaders.

And hopefully, if we come up with some ways of determining who might be at risk of being a super spreader, that could do a lot to help us control the transmission of this disease before effective treatments and vaccines are around. Overcroy, thanks for joining us today. We'll talk to you again down the road. And if Trump wins, of course, we'll be talking about how it's the worst pandemic ever. If Biden wins, you're right. We'll be talking about how we turn the corner and the better days are yet to come. Thanks. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, guys. i did want to mention however that when i talked about taking my apple computer in i do i'm sure there were people in the audience saying oh what's the

matter couldn't fix it tech boy well apple technology couldn't pull it up technology james i mean i i i I'm baffled by it. For instance, I have technology in the car, and whenever it breaks, they just get a new car. There's no other way. There's interrupting a segue, and then there's sort of lazily micturating in the punch bowl while talking to somebody else. You think those are different? I wouldn't rate that as one of your best. Micturating in the punch bowl.

How thoroughly disgusting. Well, there's a worse phrase, by the way. Anyway, what we were talking about was computer systems. And Rob's quite right. What are you going to do with a computer system in your car when it goes south? Because it's expensive and you can't fix it. It's not like those of us who know a little bit about computers and can troubleshoot stuff. It's a whole different category when it comes to the stuff in your computer.

Because it's the new norm, right? It's the new normal in your car. Everything's got a computer attached to it. There's electronically controlled transmissions. There's the touchscreen displays. Dozens of sensors. My car, for example, beeps if I get too close to somebody and I'm still accelerating. Nice, but, you know, I'd like to make sure that it keeps working. I can't fix any of that stuff myself. So when something breaks, it can cost a fortune and now is not the time for

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The James Lydon Member Post of the Week! That's pretty good. Right there. We're getting there. We're getting there, We're getting there. Indeed. The membership post of the week is from Tocqueville, who, well, he didn't use the word. I can't say it. We'll bleep it. Bull bleep words and expressions that have got to go 2020 edition. These are bull bleep non-English expressions that make people irredeemable to him as soon as they use it.

Their original English language meanings have been distorted beyond recognition, and in many cases they now exude that unctuous quality that our overloads use to conceal their insidious totalitarianism. A little tongue-in-cheek, a bit. Some of the words are validate, platform, especially as in give a platform to, share, problematic, move forward, reach out, stories. Conversation. Inclusive. Diverse. Diversity. Community. Communities. Privilege. Listen. Support. Ally. Voices. Any words or phrases that come to mind

that you guys would like to extirpate? Curate. Mixturate. Mixturate. Curate is a good one because that just generally means what? like edit aside or put together right choose um choose um spaces is space he didn't have space in the list but space has become one of those words too this is a safe space this is our space we've created these spaces

um i'm not exactly sure what other word they'd use room box yeah spaces that's a they are spaces there's um there's another business phone which i can't remember oh it'll come to me yeah they're horrible but also like they are the thing you say when you're thinking about what you want to say rather than just simply falling silent. Right. Could we include, I'm not sure there's insidious totalitarianism behind this as much as just plain lack of thought, but could we add icon? Yeah. Yes. Yes, we can.

Yes, we certainly can, because iconic has now come to mean anything that just sort of stands out a little bit. And the word has been, I mean, all of these things get eventually introduced and watered down by endless use. Originally, they have a point, but now they don't. And he's right, they're signifiers that when you hear these words, you immediately sort of make a set of assumptions about the person making them, right? Yes, yes, yes. It's a particular language. Yes, that's right. And it's got to be intentional on their part. signify to people of their tribe that they get the whole overwhelming set of intellectual concepts. But when people outside of that hear it, they just bristle.

It's also a way to do it so that you don't get into trouble. Like, what's the language you want me to use? I'll use it. That's true. Right, which is not good. Which is not good at all. No, not good. Especially when we have, you know, we have, and I hate to say Orwellian, that's probably going to be one of those words next on the list, but the destruction and manipulation of language these

days, the way that certain words are now off the table, the way others are being redefined, just does bring to mind the whole idea of coming out with the next edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, which has fewer words than the one before. By the the way i have one more to add and i know i just can't resist because it drives me mad issues around issues around meaning we have issues around parking in lower manhattan yeah oh i hate that that's just because you don't want to you don't want to take a stand. That's right. That's issues around it. There's not issues about it.

I'm not mad at you. I'm not shaming you. I just have the issues around it. Well, A.G. Barr has some issues around the matter of China this week. Yeah, you're right. The emanations of the penumbra. But Barr was not talking emanation of the number language. He actually gave Hollywood and big tech quite the talking to, the dressing down for their accommodation of the Communist Chinese Party. On top of video that circulated this week about Uyghurs, horrifying stuff.

Their heads shaved, their hair being sold to foreign exports. They're shackled on their knees out of a train bound for the camps. A rather familiar image. And everybody pointed out, and nobody's going to do a damned thing about it because everybody's to behold in the Chinese money and tech and the interest in the rest of it. What did you think of Barr's speech? Do you think it moved the needle? Do you think, I mean, I'm more interested in tech decoupling than I am Hollywood.

Sorry, Rob, I don't regard them as our moral avatars these days. So if they're going to bow to the Chinese market, fine. But tech is a different matter. I liked everything about Bill Barr's speech. And I have only a dim before he rejoined the Department of Justice. He was as a very young man. He was attorney general. And I had only a vague sense of him.

This guy is tough and he's smart and he is going to tell the truth as he sees it. He doesn't need the job. He's just there to do the best he can for the country. It's as simple as that. And I love everything about this guy. Rob, we know you have to jump off in a few seconds here. So you're in the industry. Give us 30 seconds as to how you think the industry is going to deal with China going forward. Appeasement or subtle appeasement?

Well, yeah, or outright appeasement. China has traditionally and remains a place where people buy things, not where people sell things. And each American industry discovers that. It takes them a long time to discover it. But that's the asymmetry between a Chinese country and the United States, in which you know, 300, 400 million people living in poverty. The asymmetry there is going to make that the case for a long time. It's going to be a place where you go and you buy stuff to go and sell it somewhere else, buy stuff cheap, sell it expensive and somewhere else. So, you know, Hollywood isn't, is the,

our job in Hollywood is to sell you something. It's all we do is sell. We don't really buy. And so Hollywood is going to discover that it doesn't need China so much because the Chinese aren't really buying what Hollywood is selling. They're making their own. They've got their own search engine. They've got their own Disneyland. They've got their own everything. Well, before you go, we're going to need your suggestion for the Redskins' new team name.

Peter also as well. Before we get that from Rob and Peter, though, I've got to remind you the podcast was brought to you by ButcherBox, the Bradley Speaker Series, and CarShield. Support them for supporting us. And if it wouldn't kill you, go to Apple Podcasts, any place you can possibly find us, and give us five-star reviews. The more people

find the podcast, the more people join Ricochet. So, gentlemen, Redskins' new team name. Peter? Red Clouds. I saw this tweet. Was new team name, Peter? Red Clouds. I saw this tweet. Was it Phil Terzian? Red Clouds was a great American Indian chieftain, and they should keep, but they should rename it in something that makes it clear they're honoring and not mocking American Indians. Oh.

Hmm. Rob? I'm stealing what I saw on Twitter. I don't know who did it. The Washington Cocktail Parties. I like that one, too, because then at the scrimmage, they were just all with it. You know, when the ball is snapped, the guys in the line would look at the opposing players and say, so what do you do? Yeah, right.

Which committee did you work for? The Washington Red Tails, which I believe was it wasn't that a Tuskegee Airmen unit, which keeps the red, moves it in a different direction. I like red clouds. I do, as well. So, what you would like to add to that, you can do in the comments. Anything that you'd like about this podcast, you can add in the comments, if you're a member. That's the thing. And that's what keeps the commentary at Ricochet civil

and serene and more civilized than any other place on the internet. You want to see it? Well, go. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. I'm a one-way motorway I'm a road that drives away

And follows you back home. I'm a streetlight shining. I'm a wildlife blinding bright burning all alone it's times like these you learn to love again it's times like these you give and give again it's times like these you learn to love again. day rising I'm a brand new sky

to hang the stars upon tonight I I'm a little divided Do I stay or run away and leave it all behind Do I stay or run away and leave it all behind?

Whoa, whoa. It's times like these you learn to live again. It's times like these you give and give again. It's times like these you learn to love. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Like these, time and time again. Bye.