The Ricochet Podcast - The Most Interesting Virus in the World

Episode Date: February 29, 2020

The main topic? What else? The Coronavirus, which is roiling everything from the markets to the political arena and beyond. The Vice President is the new point man. Then we get down to the nitty gritty of the race for the Democratic nomination with Luke Thompson and talk to a sensible Democrat about the environment as we’re joined by the President of Environmental Progress, Michael Shellenberger... Source

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long in New York, Peter Robinson in California. I'm James Lylex in the middle of the country, and today we talk to Luke Thompson about, well, of course, the election coming up, and Mike Schellenberger about apocalypse never. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I'm going to say I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. Billionaires today, if you can believe it, have an effective tax rate lower than the

middle class. Why are you complaining? Who wrote the code? My call was perfect. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Welcome, everybody. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Welcome everybody, this is the Ricochet Podcast, Corona Edition number 485. Gentlemen, Rob, Peter. Yeah, nice. How long had you been planning that one?

Never, it just spontaneously occurred to me. Like many things, just spontaneously occurred to me like uh like many things just spontaneously occurred in nature um or that particular bit was engineered in a lab and somehow got into the world i can't say don't know we're all a little bit in the dark here the question is now whether or not you believe that mike pence is the right guy to save us from coronavirus because as we know he failed to stop the spread of aids in illinois and i believe also is in favor of smoking that's how i'm getting the news at least uh well it's interesting summary that's yeah but that's what they say he was governor of indiana

by the way yeah right so you didn't have any so whatever happened in illinois was not his problem although i know from minnesota they're indistinguishable. Well, I'm saying to the media, Illinois, Indiana, the same thing. I live in the city of Indianapolis, so what do I know? That's what they're saying, that in a good administration where Hillary were president, the vice president would be a person

of exquisite scientific knowledge and would actually be in there sequencing the DNA and making the virus. So how do you think the administration's response has been thus far, Peter and Rob? And also, welcome to the podcast. And how are you? I'm fine. Thank you very much for the welcome to the podcast.

I spoke at some length to the vice president on Monday. I don't know if I mentioned that to the two of you. I was in Washington and I interviewed him for the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers. It's taped. It'll go up as an episode of Uncommon Knowledge, but we spent about 20 minutes. He was kind enough to invite me over to his office. So we spent about 20 minutes together beforehand. I had not met him. Here's what you need. He is a highly intelligent, very shrewd, very tough individual. In public, he is doing what a vice president does, which is to make sure that the credit goes to the president, not the vice president, and he's avoiding making any news. I asked him beforehand, shall we discuss the coronavirus?

And he said, no, that's developing. He didn't want to make news on that when the president was an Indian. It was right for the president to speak first. In other words, my impression of him personally is he's tough and smart and shrewd. And that is what you want when it comes to coordinating the activities of various pieces of the federal government, CDC, health and human services. You want somebody who's got time to spend on it, which vice president has, let's face it, and who has direct access to the president and the trust of the president. Mike Pence has both of those characteristics, and he's really smart.

He'll, yes, yeah, he's the right choice. Of course he is. Rob, I believe you're in New York, where are preparations being made? Do you see people lining up at the Duane Reade to get their... Yeah, you see people lining up at the Duane Reade to get there? Yeah, I see masks. I flew back from L.A. on – I was in L.A. for a few days. I flew back on – I think Pence – probably it's a really good idea to have somebody chair the task force. They don't need scientific knowledge.

You just need to be able to chair a meeting with people who are smart scientists. The pure vapidity of American culture is such that when Obama appointed somebody, not a scientist, to run his Obama task force, president, then real estate developer Trump tweeted, that was outrageous. What a dumb idea. You've got to have somebody with science background and expertise in that job. Obama's failing, exclam, exclam, exclam, which just shows you that if you like the guy, you like what he does. If you don't like the guy, everything he does is stupid. Look, the great thing about a coronavirus, about science stuff in general, and the great- Hold on, hold on. Can we just encapsulate that? The great thing about the coronavirus, comma, whatever follows that dependent clause can't live up to the clause. The great thing about the virus is that it's

not uh explosively fatal like ebola correct but it has an incredibly rapid spread like rapid exponential spread the little number above the number or a little number above the x is a high number um and that's that's a new thing uh and so we are going to – this is a really, really good dangerous fire drill we're having because the truth is the death toll isn't going to be that – it's going to be bigger than the flu anyway. But it's going to show us where the weaknesses are when something like this happens. Nobody expected it to suddenly appear in Italy or in Iran. Nobody expected it or nobody expected a few days ago to appear in Sacramento, right? The first community transmission

of the virus in the United States was in Sacramento, meaning the first person to get it from somebody or some place where that person had not had direct connection to Wuhan, China. So all this stuff is really good.

We're going to see the failure. I mean, it's going to be failure. We're going to see the system is not going to work. All right. So we're talking about different systems, though, aren't we? I mean, the system in Iran is not the system in Italy. The system in Italy is not the system in Wuhan. It's not the system in America. So when you say that we're getting tests here, we're getting a lot of different tests to see who's doing a better job of this, right? Well, we're getting a test to see who's being honest about it and who's not. And obviously the Chinese have been, I think their honesty level has increased geometrically, but as the disease spread exponentially, you know, there's a lag, there's definitely a latency

in the reporting, the honest reporting from China. But look, public health crises like this are – I wouldn't be surprised if Iran isn't all that good about this stuff. Iran is a fairly closed society. Italy is slightly different. In the United States, we are wide open. So we have to and figure out where the weaknesses are because this is a unique opportunity. The next one that happens won't be the common cold. Right.

You've got, well, you could, I mean, we could go down the checklist of the systems, right? You've got border and air traffic control. Do we really know who's coming into the country? Do you've got border and air traffic control. Do we really know who's coming into the country? You've got testing. How quickly can you deploy testing kits, testing personnel? How can you cover the people who need to be tested adequately? You've got information systems. Are we, when somebody tests positive in Sacramento, how quickly is that information disseminated? Then, of course, what the great thing about this country is, you'll have people coming down with this thing in different places. There will be different hospitals, different institutions will experiment with different protocols for quarantine treatment. Do you super hydrate these people? What do you do

with them to make them comfortable? How do you combat the virus? And how quickly do best practices emerge? And how quickly does that information get disseminated across the entire medical system. And then, of course, you've got the technical, the biotech, how quickly can they figure out what this thing is, and how quickly can you develop a vaccine to combat it. And then, of course, you've got the regulatory, the government overhang of, are the regulators actually going to permit them to do the test in super quick time? What's safe? What isn't safe? How quickly do you test? How quickly do you go from testing in test tubes to testing on human beings? All. So what is it? You could break it down into, say, six components.

And you're exactly right. Every single one of those will be. There also be a test of journalism here. How good will the reporting be? How honest will it be? To what extent will they resist the temptation simply to scream as they seem to be this morning, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, and actually give us some deep background, talk to scientists who know about this? I follow this very good medical writer named James Hamblin, big lefty, but he's a good writer. And he had a very funny tweet the other day. And it says, America 2019. I'm not going to go for the Western medicine.

I'm going to use an essential oil and use that to kind of detoxify my inner space. America 2020. Give me the goddamn vaccine right now. And that is exactly the problem we have. On the one hand, we love the idea that man, Western medicine, it's so ridiculous. And it's like all about pills and medication,

you know, you should really just kind of, and then when something like this happens, suddenly it's everybody loves science. Everybody loves medicine. Everybody loves the pill. For some reason, there weren't enough acupuncturists in Wuhan to shut this thing down.

Exactly right. All that. Oh, you know asian medicine's ancient chinese medicine's been wrapped all right try that with the coronavirus my friend the lefties might also want to answer for their preferred system of government and society if they want open borders in other words if everyone should be able to come here uh and there should be no question, you walk across the border, you're here, here's your citizenship, start to vote. Combine that with universal health care, then you're talking about a system that anybody can come to and crash. And you're also talking, I mean, if there was an even worse pandemic, does anybody think that people wouldn't be streaming across the border for their guaranteed free health care in the southern tier of the United States? Of course they would. It may perhaps people in government think that it wouldn't happen to them because they're in the Northeast Corridor and it'll take them a while to get there.

And maybe we'll have some illegal Canadians, but they're nice people. You can have open borders and complete Medicare for all. You can't. And if you want to make that argument, then you have to make the argument that somebody who walked across the border five minutes ago has a greater claim on the resources of this nation than somebody who's been paying into the system for 50 years. Good luck. I mean, that's what I'd like to see somebody say in the debate.

How do you square this with the Democratic Party's idea of open borders and Medicare for all? Well, you know, it's interesting you say that because, of course, they did ask that a few debates ago. And the result was that Elizabeth Warren's standing in the polls plummeted. And so there are a lot of people in the result was that elizabeth warren's uh standing the polls plummeted and so there are a lot of people in the in the media who love elizabeth warren and i feel like they they feel responsible for her utter um and total total implosion and her utter failure at that in all of these contests and so they don't ask that question anymore um uh there there's a feeling i think in a lot of people in the media that they have done they did elizabeth warren's uh campaign a disservice by um asking her how on

earth she was planning to pay for that um and you know to bernie sanders the you know presumptive nominee to his credit he could easily return to a previous previous full-throated advocacy for building a wall and closing the borders he has a history of of making that very very uh um uh claim so the the reality for this is like to me the most interesting thing about the coronavirus and what's good about it is that we we should all investigate it without thinking about it in partisan terms because coronavirus ebola or whatever comes next doesn't care. Well, with all this talk, of course, we're told to prepare, to be ready, to have food, to have essentials on hand. And you know what? You know who's not probably sweating that right

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That's ButcherBox.com slash Ricochet and enter the promo code Ricochet at the checkout. And our thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Luke Thompson. Some folks call him the smartest political consultant they know. We just call him Luke. He writes for the National Review. He often appears in the Editor's Podcast and, in fact, a actual bona fide Republican political consultant. Luke, South Carolina, firewall. Is this Joe's last stand?

What do you think is going to happen? Well, boy, lots of questions there. The funny thing about last stands in politics, unlike last stands in matters military, is that you can sometimes keep going long after what was in fact your last stand. And so since Super Tuesday comes so hot on the heels of South Carolina, I think it's highly unlikely that it will look like a last stand in the sense that you'll see surrender or, you know, the end of the Biden campaign. As a practical matter, however, it is almost certainly the last stand. Right now, Biden is in such a poor position in some of the Super Tuesday states, including California, that he will need to more than double his election day vote versus

the early vote that's already been cast, assuming the polling is correct, in order to clear the 15% threshold he's going to need to get delegates. So anything short of an overwhelming and resounding victory by Biden tonight, and we're talking into the teens and 20-point margins here, is probably not going to be enough to keep him viable as a candidate, although it will allow him to continue to absorb scarce delegates and continue to divide the anti-Bernie field. So then I guess the second knock-on question before I get to handicapping what happens on Saturday is, is Bernie going to have 50% of the delegates going into Milwaukee? Right now, it's a close-run thing. If he continues to place in the 40s after South Carolina in a number of Super Tuesday states, then yes, he'll probably have enough momentum to get himself into over

the 50% by the time we get to the convention. However, if he remains trapped in the range he's been in outside of Nevada between the sort of high 20s and mid 30s, it's going to be very difficult for him to convince people, hey, I'm inevitable, get on board. And there are enough hostile Bernie, sort of anti-Bernie forces who will continue to run races with the explicit goal of generating a brokered convention, that it might actually freeze the field in place moving forward, even as people essentially run out of money to stage active campaigns. Hey, Luke, it's Rob Long here. I have two questions. The first one is just I need to express my irritation, and I need to know if I'm right. There's no living, active politician in America today, and that includes the president, who I find irritating.

But there's no living politician today more irritating than Elizabeth Warren to me because all her supporters claim is that it's the sexism and they wouldn't do this with a woman. She's only still allowed to campaign because she's a woman. Eric Warren, with that performance in the caucuses and primaries, he'd be out on his butt at this point. He'd be like – they would have called him up and told him, you know, nice try, dude, you're done. She's only allowed in because no one wants to, like, drop a dime on her because she's a girl. And it just bugs me. Am I irrational? Should I go to be reeducated? Just to be clear, ladies and gentlemen, that's Rob Long speaking. It's not James Lyle, it's not Peter Robinson, it's not Mitch Johnson. Tell me I'm wrong. I think if I can rephrase your question as, to what extent is Warren still going because she's got to hold a part of the electorate as the leading woman candidate?

I think there's a lot to that. Warren led early with that messaging. Now, Klobuchar has complicated that narrative quite a bit. But if you want to look at the people who are trying to appeal to similar candidates, appealing to similar constituencies early in the election, call Cory Booker and ask how his presidential campaign is doing. He was also aiming to, in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, monopolize the kind of wine track leftist. So upmarket liberal, but not full on socialist electorate. But she doesn't – we now have results.

She lost – was she number four in New Hampshire, the neighboring state? I mean, has any Massachusetts politician running for president ever lost New Hampshire? The answer is no. So what on earth is like, what on earth is powering this zombie campaign that is utterly, utterly hopeless? Or am I just so mad at her? I'm not giving her enough credit. And this all things with Donald Trump. I mean, I think what's powering it is, is she hasn't, she has enough money to get South Carolina. Um, she knows she's good in a debate setting where very few of the other candidates perform particularly well. Um, that's been able to

infuse her campaign with cash. And as far as her team is concerned, you play to the whistle. Um, you know why she keeps going. I don't know. Hardly the first quixotic presidential campaign we've ever seen. I don't know if you're aware, but John Kasich's father is a mailman. That's true. He ran for president of Ohio. He won and then continued to run for president of Ohio, even though Ohio had already voted. So it happens. Some people, they get the bug and they can't stop. Okay, my second – all right. That's a very generous way to put it uh my second question really is this see rob there is a way to be gracious when you talk about politics i guess i don't i just haven't learned it um in in in biden world right now um you know they're not these guys are pros they looked at the numbers

i mean and he is a pro he's run enough losing presidential campaign you know when he's in a losing presidential campaign yeah we're getting into in a losing presidential campaign. Yeah, we're getting into Harold Stassen territory. Yeah, we really are. Okay. He's like, he's competing with Dr. Lenora Filani at this point. Yeah. As a, as a, as a Minnesotan, I object to that reference. Amy Klobuchar is waiting with a binder to throw at me for saying that. We'll talk to you in about a second. My question about Biden world is this. This seems to me to be he is running a convention strategy to get to the convention with some clout to be either a kingmaker or to be the compromise and broker convention. I don't think it's going to happen, but is that the strategy that's going forward or are they – in Biden world, are they delusional and think, no, he's going to surprise us all in California on Super Tuesday? I think that's mostly right. I happen to be in Las Vegas the night of the caucuses, and I coincidentally bumped into a big chunk of Biden's team at a bar.

What do you mean you happen to be in Las Vegas? These things, they happen. So they were – there was an interesting age split the younger folks seemed genuinely convinced that they were going to be the comeback kids coming out of nevada in south carolina and they were going to take it all the way home um i think the older folks clearly had a slightly more haunted look in their eyes um the best face to put on Biden's candidacy right now is that the momentum that kept him on alive and sort of propped up before people started casting votes is actually going to be the same force that keeps him alive and propped up after people have

started casting votes, namely that there simply has not emerged a better alternative to Bernie. And if he comes out of the first state with a large black electorate with a win, he can continue to say, many have entered, I'm the only one who's won with a large black electorate. We are not going to win in November without the black electorate fully bought in. Now, the problem that Biden's going to run into, I think, with that argument, and that's an argument he can make and say, keep me alive, get me to the convention. But the problem he's going to run into is this. The southern black electorate looks a lot different from the northern black electorate. Bernie's going to do better in the northern states, and those states vote second,

which means there's a reasonable chance that what will happen is that Biden will do well initially in southern, heavily black Democratic primary states, and then begin to see that support share erode as they move into the north. People will attribute it to him losing steam with the black community. It actually won't be that. It'll be a byproduct of different preferences resulting from different underlying demographic and and economic factors but that's what it will look like in the media narrative okay so let me i know uh peter and james want to get in let me ask you a quick question uh prognostication um it's biden v bernie all the way to the convention. I think, gun to my head right now, I'd say Bernie gets, I think Bernie's going to get there with a commanding lead, but and a real one, not just one where Bernie's one or two delegates shy. Uh, you need four, three to four people consistently clearing the 15% threshold, right? Now you have Buddha judge doing that. You have Biden doing that.

Um, that's it. And so that's kind of the minimal minimum credible, uh, didn't mention, you didn't mention Elizabeth Warren cause you're a sexist. That's it. Yes. That's it. It has nothing to do with the fact that she can't break. Yeah, I noticed you didn't mention Elizabeth Warren because you're a sexist. That's it. Yes, that's it. It has nothing to do with the fact that she can't break double-discons. She's number four! I think instead of the term commanding lead, you want to use the term comandante lead. Yes, that's right. Let's talk Bernie Veep. I mentioned Amy Klobuchar before. Some people around here are saying, well, you know, Amy's got that moderate, sensible stuff going for her.

Maybe Bernie would want somebody like that on the ticket to balance him out. And I'm thinking, so Bernie wants somebody to get to reassure America that he actually won't implement the policies he's talking about. And for proof, let me point to the moderate person who disagrees with everything I'm saying about socialism. Who looks like a likely VIP pick for Bernie, should he get it? You know, it's a really interesting question. I think Bernie will make one of two plays. One would be to make a run at some of the Rust Belt states and try to shore up his position there. If he were to do that, you know, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, any of those folks would seem to be prudent picks. Obviously, I think Klobuchar fits that mold, but having run for president, especially

having had all of the terrible stories about her abusing her employees come out, it's going to be pretty hard for Bernie to say, workers of the world, unite, and if you don't, your boss is going to throw a binder at your head. So I would say probably not Klobuchar, but there are other choices in that neck of the woods. The other play would be to go with a Sunbelt candidate. You know, there are options that present themselves. One of the various and sundry Castro brothers would be a likely pick where their last name, not Castro, because Sanders Castro, I think is just a little too on the nose for a sign. But even somebody like Kyrsten Sinema, who of course in her past

life was a member of the Green Party and a rabid anti-war protester, is not as far off base, I think, as some people might think, even though she has the most conservative voting record in the Senate right now for a Democrat. Hey, Luke, Peter here. You have not even mentioned Mike Bloomberg. Now, I'm not saying that accusingly. I'm just asking, is that an indication of how very little spending half a billion dollars, which seems to be the amount he's already spent, is that an indication of how little half a billion dollars will buy seems to be the amount he's already spent. Is that an indication of how little half a billion dollars will buy you? Is he just gone? He's an asterisk already? No, I don't think he's gone. I don't think he's an asterisk yet. You know, if Bloomberg improves

as much as he did between the Nevada and South Carolina debates, from the South Carolina debate to the next one, he could breathe life back in his candidacy. And the truth is, it appears that Buttigieg's campaign is losing steam. You know, he is starting to slide in the polls. That could redound to Bloomberg's benefit, simply because what's indisputable is that Bloomberg has the means to go the distance and to go to the convention with Sanders. But ultimately, you know, if you look at Bloomberg and you look at Biden, which one of these two can actually win a brokered convention? You know, if my money's on Bloomberg because his money is on people, people just outside the convention hall, how much will it cost? Sure. But, you know, every single one of these delegates has to put their

name on a piece of paper. And if they support a, you know, every single one of these delegates has to put their name on a piece of paper. And if they support a, you know, billionaire former Republican over, you know, hostile of Victoria Siempre Sanders, then that's going to fragment the Democratic Party in a way that I think you could tell yourself as a Democrat, as a Democratic delegate to DNC that going with Biden would not. Oh, I see. I see. Biden is still everybody's default. Biden is still the way to avoid a civil war in the party in their thinking. He is he is the safe choice to lose the presidency with a respectable majority preserved in the House. OK, now I have one last question for you, Luke.

Mm hmm. And in a here's this is going to sound like a strange question to ask of a guy who knows all the numbers and knows the sequencing of the states and who's spending what. All right. Forget the polling data. Forget the money. Just get a good vivid image in your mind of that debate in South Carolina earlier this week. Did you see anybody up there with the presence and sheer vitality to knock out Donald Trump? Anybody? Well, you know, it's a horse flesh question. Yeah. No, I don't think anyone there has the kind of stature to do it today. But being blessed as your party's nominee increases your stature. And that will happen to Sanders as it would happen to Klobuchar or Biden. Your party rallies behind you. It unites. It gives you a stage. The nation's eyes fix on you. So they will grow as the campaign continues, assuming all of those that don't wither on the vine and die, one of them will grow. And second, let's be very clear, the economy is

doing very poorly right now. I don't think that this is going to last, but the president is not doing- Wait, wait, the economy's fine. The markets are down. Yes, the markets are down. That's what you mean. The markets are down. Yes, the markets are down. I mean, that may spill over into the economy, but what we know right now is, and the markets could recover by Tuesday, right? Indeed. And indeed, that's what I'm sort of counting on, personally. But if the markets stay down, you know, the president has not handled this coronavirus situation very deftly. It has been one of the few places where we've seen him really seem to go into panic mode in his own messaging.

And, you know, that could hurt him. So today, did I did I see anybody in that South Carolina stage that looked like a Trump beater? No. But, you know, there are as you say, it's not just about numbers. There are some animal spirits at work. And so I wouldn't count. I wouldn't count 2020 as in the bag. Got it. Got it. Rob wants – Oh, yeah. I was waiting for James to jump in.

I got a question. Now, this is another off-the-wall question. I expect you to do your best to prognosticate. So it's a – taking as a premise that this particular Democratic primary is more of a mess than usual, which I'm not sure I agree with that premise. I think that primaries always seem like a mess and everyone always says, oh, my God, I can't believe it. And right around now, people are always screaming about a brokered convention on theruly and particularly more terrifying to big Democratic donors and big Democrats, the idea of Bernie at the top of the ticket. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being she's the next president of the United States, 1 being get over her already. Where is Hillary Clinton right now?

Well, she's launching a podcast I saw this morning. Well, yeah, but everybody's doing that. That doesn't count. Yeah, yeah. You know, who doesn't at this point? I think that if you look at the timing of the moves that Clinton has made, from the documentary that was released to doing the podcast. She has, I think she clearly asked her people early on in 2019, what are the steps that I need to take to keep my options maximally open so that if they need somebody to ride in on a one horse, I can do it. Now, I think that's never going to happen. I think that exists, that scenario exists in her own mind. Yeah. But I do think that there, there is probably a small part of her that would love to be asked back.

I think when that doesn't happen, if there is in fact chaos set loose upon the land, there will be plenty, there will be a big part as a very young man, he saw Fatal Attraction. And what he's asking is, is Hillary going to come out of the tub like Glenn Close? She will not be ignored. Oh, my. We're going to need an explicit content warning on this episode. If we're going to have somebody coming out of the tub that terrifies, let's go with a shining instead of Fatal Attraction. Yeah. Well, I don't think there's a living

politician that wouldn't terrify any of us coming out of the tub i don't i don't necessarily want to see donald trump struggling out of the tub to come you know but on the other hand i would say this is that i mean could it be i just i mean i don't just i know she's a joke. We like to laugh, right? But she won a lot of votes. Isn't there a rational argument for Hillary Clinton? If you're a Democrat, certainly a Democrat donor, and looking at the numbers and looking – I mean, isn't it – I mean, it doesn't seem outlandish. If nobody gets in there with more than a third of the delegates, then there becomes a much more reasonable answer. If somebody's in there with more than a third, after a grueling long duration primary, there simply don't exist the mechanisms to do the kind of brokering necessary to get that deal done today. The old smoke-filled room and convention system depended upon a model of state parties and state party control where you could in fact broker and trade your delegates around that just does not exist so stopped you're basically message to me rob stop hoping no no no enjoy it look spin up the

fantasy worlds in your mind i just don't think that there's no encourage i can do it i'll do that well it should be she may be the first podcaster to give a major address at a convention, so it'll be fun when she stops in the middle of her discussion to pitch Casper mattresses to everybody. Luke, thanks a lot. We'll talk to you down the road. Keep your eyes open, as of course you will. We'll see you on NR and on Twitter and around the world and back here in the podcast as soon as possible. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks, guys. Take care.

Thank you. Well, you know, I was going to say, you know, we're talking about the markets. The markets are down, of course. Markets do that. That's what happens. Maybe we'll buy in the dip a little bit later. Maybe the rude animal spirits have been stifled somewhat. You know, it's one of those times where you just white knuckle through it or you sell everything or whatever. Maybe you're one of those people who isn't in the market at all because you've got a problem with debt. Well, there's no solution to that problem. Well, there's no solution to that problem. I can't even think of one. I can't think of a

solution. I can't come up with one. I'm here to tell you that there is actually something of a solution. That incidentally was Rob trying to get me as quickly as possible through the segue to the spot because I'm guessing he's got someplace to go you got a lunch date is that coming up rob is nothing nothing important nothing another meeting that's going to come from that you know new york times piece where you were sitting on sitting on the stairs staring thoughtfully into the middle distance that's right that's they they told me to do that that's not my fault oh no believe me i've been the victim of many a photo shoot like that too and what are we thinking well we're we're thinking about our art, of course. And as we all know, art is the road to riches,

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Go to earnest.com. Today, terms and conditions apply. And our thanks to Earnest for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Mike and conditions apply. And our thanks to Ernest for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Mike Schellenberger, Time Magazine Hero of the Environment, Green Book Award winner, frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other publications. His TED Talks have been viewed over 5 million times and he's the author of Apocalypse, Never, which will be released in June. Mike, thanks for joining us here in the podcast today. I'm a big believer in nuclear energy, as much of it as possible.

And it would seem that anybody who's concerned about carbon emissions would be embracing nukes, especially the generation that we have today. Yet Bernie Sanders and the rest of them have this regressive idea where we've got to go to all of these unrecyclable things like solar panels and wind turbines and ignore the one solution to their problem that's staring us right in the face. What am I missing, or what are they missing? You mean, why are they against nuclear? Yeah.

Well, the history, to understand why, you have to go back to the 1960s in the mid-1960s the sierra club and most other liberal and environmental groups were pro-nuclear they actually got california's last nuclear plant diablo canyon uh built and then there was sierra club got diablo cannon built wow't know that. That's a fact that's been he was the key person. And he understood that nuclear was the best energy for California. It produces no pollution, takes up a very small amount of land, and it provided electricity for very cheap. And so the initial opposition to nuclear came from two places or more. But the first was just people that were against nuclear weapons and thought that if you got rid of nuclear power plants, that would somehow get rid of the weapons. Another group

and the same people that thought that cheap energy was bad because it would bring too many people to California. And then there were socialists who thought that the private utility shouldn't be able to do really anything and that it should either be made public or there should be some decentralization of energy, which is basically what they've been pushing for the last 50 years. So here's Peter Robinson talking here. I'll name three names and you tell me how you address the implicit argument. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Right? Isn't that what it comes down to these days? Just a vague sense that these things are just too nuclear, nuclear whatever, nuclear energy is just too dangerous to play around with. Right. So the question is really, why do we think those accidents were so, why do we think those accidents are a knock against nuclear rather than

a case for it? And so when you look at the accidents, nobody dies at Three Mile Island, even though the entire reactor melted. So it's hard to imagine any other industrial accident where you would have the major piece of machinery involved melt and nobody dies. You know, Deepwater Horizon, nine people die when the oil rig goes down. Natural gas pipelines explode. A dozen people get killed. So the whole nuclear reactor melts. Nobody's hurt, nobody's injured, nobody gets any dangerous dose of radiation. With Chernobyl in 1986, you have the worst nuclear accident in history. And according to the best available science, about 50 or fewer than 50 people died from the accident. The firefighters, the people cleaning it out, and another 150 will die, may have a premature death.

In other words, they might live for decades, but die from thyroid cancer. And that's it. So maybe 200 deaths from Chernobyl, which if you're familiar with, like, you know, how many people die from ordinary air pollution, it's 4 million. And so you look at nuclear and you realize it's the safest way to make electricity. Every major scientific study finds that. The accidents themselves prove that low levels of radiation are either harmless or if they cause some harm, it's just greatly outweigh? And a big reason is that we associate it with nuclear war, with nuclear apocalypse, which is a truly scary idea. Nobody denies that. But I think the other is that there was a concerted effort to make people confused about the two things. I mean, a nuclear bomb going off is quite different than a nuclear reactor melting. And yet, I think for a lot of people, including me when I was a boy,

it really was only when I was an adult that I understood that an accident at a nuclear power plant was totally different, really has nothing in common with a nuclear bomb going off. So, Mike, we could go on and on about this obviously and and and i'm asking a question that could lead to very technical answers bear in mind that you're dealing with three dodos here well i speak for myself at least one dot well no i know those two other guys they're dodos too so the question here is the new technology, cheaper, smaller, much, much safer, right? Stuff that's under development doesn't – I live in Silicon Valley. I'm told that very quietly because people – these operations still don't have any idea how to handle the press.

But very quietly, there are some 20 or so startups that are being quietly funded to design new kinds of reactors. True? that are being quietly funded to design new kinds of reactors true? Fill us in on the current technical state of play. Without being so technical, we can't follow you. Yeah, well, no. I mean, it's actually pretty straightforward. And what we've known about the economics of nuclear are unchanged in 60 years of nuclear energy. I was just reading the old histories histories and they basically predicted everything correctly, which is, I think, contrary to the hype that you've heard, the cheapest nuclear reactors are the big ones. That's because they produce more electricity with fewer employees. And so

the costs are lower because, you know, fewer costs with more electricity. So larger reactors are cheaper as a rule. Everywhere around the world, that's the same. And then the nuclear plants that are the cheapest to build, which is about two-thirds of their cost, those are plants that construction firms, construction workers have a lot of experience building. So the evidence is overwhelming that what matters is just building the tried and true, the same kind of machine over and over again, and that the design itself is not as significant. Now, in terms of safety, it's hard to see how you can make a technology that basically never kills anybody any safer. You couldn't even

make the, you can't, you couldn't, certainly couldn't make that claim scientifically until, say, 60 or 100 years have passed with the new technology operating. But even then, it's just, you'd be comparing a technology that had maybe zero to 100 deaths to a technology that's had about 200. So for me, I think there's been too much hype on alternative designs. I think that the hype, what concerns me is the hype is just misleading and wrong, but also it tends to reinforce the sense that there's something really, really dangerous about today's nuclear power plants when all of the evidence shows quite the opposite. Hey, it's Rob Long in New York.

Thanks for joining us. So I have a question about just how it plays out, because if climate change is, you know, imminent disaster, you know, an extinction level event, it does seem like all of the news that we see is shaped with that as a conclusion. So fires in Australia are due to climate change. So climate change is going to, you know, set the continent of Australia on fire fires in California. Um, while, especially the wildfires last year were a direct result of climate change.

Um, pretty soon the earth is going to be on fire. Well, first of all, you know, know i think i think i know how you how accurate you think that is but if you could just to tell us exactly why it's not accurate but also maybe explain if you could how how do we then shape um a response to this sort of uh i don't know what what is it the the the sort of almost extinction chic that is in the culture extinction chic that's a new one i I like it. I invented it right now. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so the funny thing is that there's never been any science really supporting the apocalyptic portrayal of climate change. I've read every

IPCC assessment report for the book that I finished, including the report that launched all the reports, which was the 1983 report by the National Academy of Sciences called Changing Climate, there was never any apocalyptic scenarios. They tried to sort of string together things like Amazon drying out and burning, the West Anaric ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet falling off into the ocean. But even when they kind of construct a combined set of scary sounding events, they're occurring over like a thousand years. You know, for example, a thousand years is how long it would, 700 to a thousand years

was what it would take to get the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to fall off. In terms of the fires, you know, as I've, I interviewed all the top forest scientists in California, which is where I live, and they were all very clear that basically all of the increase in fires can be explained and is explained by rising population, more housing near, near forests, and then the accumulation of wood fuel, because we had a very bad idea for 100 years, which is that we should put out all the fires in the forests rather than letting them burn in a controlled way. So yeah, I mean, I think it's this question of, you know, my view is that climate change does present new risks. It's sort of a background multiplier of risks in terms of adding more heat and energy to the planet. But that, you know, it's basically everywhere in the world with all

of these impacts, the climate impacts are outweighed by other aspects of human economic activity or human development on the surface of the earth. So the question is sort of why did we come to see it as such an apocalyptic? Why do we put it in those terms? And it actually gets back to how we started, which is that really it's the same people who presented an apocalyptic view of nuclear presented an apocalyptic view of climate change. And in fact, I was one of the people where at the end of the Cold War, when I was just heading off from high school to college in the late 80s, early 90s, as the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war went away, people that wanted an apocalypse to fear and to scare others with turned from nuclear war to climate change. And the problem is that climate change really was never, was just, it never, there was never the, I mean, with nuclear war, at least you can paint a scenario where all of

the major cities and highways and power plants and industries are bombed out. But there's, there's not really anything equivalent like that for climate change. And I think that what has, what the result has in many cases just been for some apocalyptic climate activists, certainly not all, certainly not me, to just exaggerate even further and to sort of, you know, people are very ignorant about how the planet works. And so I think it's worked to to I think people I think people have been very badly misled and manipulated in the understanding of climate. All right. So if I could just summarize. Climate change, it's real. It's a problem. But it's not that big a problem.

Is that fair? Well, in some ways it's a big problem in that it's the whole planet and that it's – the effects are multiple. Like they're kind of everywhere. So in my book, I talk about how the yellow-eyed penguin, which is this rare, beautiful penguin in New Zealand that my wife and I saw, is potentially threatened by climate change in the sense that the fish may need to be deeper into the ocean where it's cooler because of climate change and warmer sea temperatures. But there's these other factors that are affecting the yellow-eyed penguin, which is that it doesn't have enough land because they use it all for pasture, for cattle pasture, and

that humans are just eating a lot of the fish that the yellow-eyed penguins eat. And so when you kind of look at the threats to the yellow-eyed penguin, climate change is in there. It's just outweighed by these other things. So it's not that it's not big. It's that there's other big things that, you know, so it's a tricky problem. I think there's a way in which it's just been a hard problem for people to think about because on the one hand, it affects everything, and so you can see its effect everywhere on the other

hand when you look closely at the actual problem you're trying to address you discover that there's just a whole lot of other stuff going on you know this apocalyptic strain has been with the left for an awful long time uh before we had uh the fate of the earth jonathan shells peace in the new yorker before we had all the fears of nuclear war. There was overpopulation. There was resource depletion. There's this strain of negativity in the left, this desire almost to see everything fall apart that seems to speak to some sort of deeper sickness in an affluent society that yearns for this in a way and is almost disappointed when it doesn't come true. If they don't get their Green New Deal, what are they going to do?

Well, yeah, I mean, I think the first things you said there are really spot on. In my book, I talk about how, you know, there was a difference between the Marxist left and the left that came around after World War II. So, you know, the big thinker here is this British economist named Thomas Malthus, who said that humans were doomed to have huge famines. There's nothing we could do about it. We were just doomed to it because we would be producing too many kids and we wouldn't produce enough food. Well, at the time, this is in the late, this is in the early 1800s, late 1700s. At the time, other thinkers said, well, wait, that's ridiculous.

People will just use birth control. You know, they had birth control back then. They were using, it was becoming better. And they were also just using the rhythm method. But people said, that's not true because because people will choose to have smaller families, at which point Malthus said, no, no, that would be immoral to use birth control. He cited the Christian church doctrine on this. But nonetheless, the same thing basically happens then in the 60s, where a bunch of Malthusian people influenced by Malthus said,

we're going to have famines, all this food is going to run out. And people would say, well, why don't we just, you know, use fertilizer, irrigation and big machines to grow more food? And why don't we just have birth control? Oh, no, there are all sorts of reasons why we shouldn't let poor countries have fertilizer because it would use fossil fuels. And supposedly that was bad for poor countries because of all they'd give all sorts of reasons why poor countries really shouldn't have fossil fuels. Well, you know, obviously most of them were like said, no, thanks. We'll take the fossil fuels and going to reject your advice to stay poor. And then what was pretty disturbing is that in the 80s and

90s, the people who basically had just been discredited on the issue of overpopulation and famines picked up climate change as new justification to cut off cheap energy to poor countries. It's some pretty sinister stuff, frankly. And you see it today where it's not just that these guys oppose, you know, coal plants. They actually oppose hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants, which are both zero carbon. And they insist that poor countries use renewables, even though everybody knows that the industrial revolution couldn't have happened with renewables. It required coal. This keeps getting reproven. There is no rich, low-energy country, just as there is no poor, high-energy country. Energy and prosperity are still absolutely one-to-one requirement of each other.

Energy consumption goes down a bit as you put all your factories to China, but even here in Europe and the United States, we still use a huge quantity of energy. So anybody promoting radical reductions in energy consumption is promoting poverty. There's no kind of this idea of some other way to get rich, like sustainable development is just nonsense, nor has there ever been leapfrogging. The so-called leapfrogging became an obsession with the UN and green NGOs in the early 2000s, late 90s and early 2000s. So it's a, you know, where does it come from? You know, I think some of it's just a pretty dark part of the human being, which wants to keep other people down.

But I think you're right. There's another part of it I think that is a kind of – there's a kind of religious quality to it. I think this is – go ahead. Sorry. Well, you're right. I know I said a lot. No, but you're right. There's a religious quality because it's

supplanted religion before we used to have the joke of the guys walking around with a hair shirt and the signboard that said the end is near uh or and throughout western society these periodic apocalyptic cults would spring up because we were sinful we had failed and we deserved what was coming to us and then when religion falls away from the society, there has to be something else that people fixate on and find a new sin. And the sin is consumption. The sin is prosperity. The sin is acting like the West where we have all this stuff we don't need. And it's this Puritan idea that we're somehow saving the souls of people

in third world countries by not letting them be as bad and sinful as we are. Right. And the Puritanism is coming from the richest, highest consumptive people in the world. So, I mean, you have to, so like periodically, in my book I describe this, periodically there is a scandal where somebody preaching low energy poverty living to everybody around the world is caught jet setting or living in a huge house. It's happened with both Al Gore. It happened with Greta Thunberg. It happened with the British royalty. We're like literally like within like days or weeks of them telling everybody that economic growth has to end and that we don't have enough room on planet Earth for poor countries to consume energy, they're found

to be using huge quantities of energy themselves, flying off to resorts and hosting conferences. I mean, the big one was Google hosted a conference this summer in Sicily for celebrities to talk about how they could moralize, help to moralize about climate change. Well, they all flew in on private jets and many of them like didn't even stay in the five star resort. They just remained anchored off the coast of Sicily in their luxury, you know, yachts. You know, British media got a hold of this and and and walloped them over this. And so but I think there's something there's I don't think that's like a coincidence. I think it's, on the one hand,

it appears to be a kind of guilt. But on the other hand, it's kind of a way of just bragging about not only am I rich and famous, but I'm more moral too. And so that's a really twisted psychology, very unhealthy. Everybody hates it. But it's almost like the people that are doing it, it's not like they're trying to be hypocritical jerks,

right? It's not like they got up that morning. We're like, I'm going to, I'm going to like go and I'm going to go and be this just gross consumer of energy while telling poor people they shouldn't consume energy. They don't even think of it. So they're clearly in the grip of a kind of religious fervor. And I think you're right that it does tend to be more common among people who have actually abandoned traditional religions. It tends to be among secular elites, atheists, people who have rejected traditional religion, because, you know, for all of its problems, one of the things that, you know, the Judeo-Christian Abrahamic traditions kind of suggest is that we are all humans, we're all children of God, we all have, you know,

the right to prosper. There wasn't a sense in which some people are, like, born to be inferior, as was the case with like the Romans and the Greeks. With, you know, with under a kind of Christian humanism, the idea was that every human is special, every human has a right to prosperity, and I think that that got lost as we fell away from the Christian faith, and the sad thing is to see so many people that suggest that, you know, and in some part of them, I think do want to make the world a better place, resorting to such a kind of sinister, dark, repressive, and even futile ideology.

Well, everybody has to believe in something. And I believe that I have to go talk to my furnace repairman right now, because it's 20 degrees above in minnesota he's like oh that's right he's laboring hard to make sure that i don't freeze and frankly i am an unapologetic consumer of natural gas and and and happy about it uh mike schellenberger thank you for joining us in the podcast today remember everybody the book is apocalypse never coming out in june we'll talk to you somewhere down the road we hope bye-bye thank you mike thanks guys thanks mike well before we wrap up here today uh we were going to chat about rob's uh no well maybe we won't maybe yeah it was a near time space it's i'm i'm sorry we won't go on i'm just we're just proud we're just proud of you that's all but i have a question about the photograph okay fine go ahead so so the photograph rob yes ladies

gentlemen our own beloved rob long appeared in an article in the New York Times on the new state of writing in Hollywood. Yeah. And he was, as usual, witty, brilliant, insightful, not quoted as much as he should have been. They should have devoted it to him. Okay. But there was a picture of Rob staring off into the middle distance. Yeah. Looking somber.

You wouldn't look that somber in real life at a funeral no what do they do to make you get this far away ask you to do that this is your time's photo style uh don't look at the camera look away and then don't smile which i i don't smile anyway but don't even look like you are don't look happy yes but you twinkle that's the first non-twinkling photo of you they photoshop the twinkle out of you they don't want any of that stuff they don't even look like you are don't look happy yes but you twinkle that's the first non-twinkling photo of you they photoshop the twinkle out of you they don't want any of that stuff they don't want they don't like they they just that's just their style you have to kind of look off moodily uh as if um you have you're burdened by something all i was what came to me with a picture and it worried me greatly is that you're sitting on a spiral staircase with those damnable triangle steps and all i can think of is reading a paper

that rob long went arse over tea kettle after a pappy van winkle down that thing and uh you know it broke something so you were you were you were not wrong there is uh there is a certain amount of terror when i have people over uh especially we're sitting up on the roof and we're having drinks. That was in your apartment? That's my apartment. There's a certain fear. I really do want to have people to sign releases. I don't think I have an umbrella policy that really covers this kind of thing.

As I'm sure you're not shocked to find out, many of my friends, many of my closest friends enjoy their drink. And so I am – as lawyers would say, I am very exposed. That – the look as though you're burdened style of the New York Times photos, it is – that's actually quite a thing, if I may wax pompous for a moment. That is the New York Times. I mean, here is Rob Locke, charming, witty, well-liked by all his friends, well-known by many thousands of people, and frankly, very successful in his career. And yet, please, look into the distance and look. That is the New York Times. No matter how good the news is, it's still all just terrible. Because everything is horrible, and that is the sign

of a wise person. Hey, Rob, if you have to go... I do have to run, fellas. Just don't run up that staircase. I won't. We'll talk to you next week. But everybody else, we've got one more thing here for you, and that, of course, would be... The James Lydon Member Post of the Week!

Well, it's been a good week in the member feed. It's always a good week in the member feed. We talk about art, literature, politics. People tell stories from their life. But there was something that sparked conversation. And again, I bring this up because I'm keenly interested in it myself. And that is from Rodan. What is your self-quarantine strategy?

Where people, Ricochet, got together and talked about, in a joshing and serious form, exactly what happens if you got to be behind doors for four days or seven or a fortnight and a little prepper talk. Now, you may think that people who are preppers are all crazy. You know, they're the sort, you haven't put away a dime for my retirement, but I got 46 cans of chili. No, this is just sort of sensible about what you should do. And it's the kind of thing that we talk about in the member feed. So why would you go to some YouTube channel where people are ranting and raving about such things?

Or why would you go to Facebook where Lord knows who's going to pop into your feed and say something? Amongst friends is what the member feed is. So join ricochet so you can learn how to talk join ricochet so you can go to the member feed and uh and find out exactly what we're swapping for secrets and advice and the rest of it i'm set you know i my problem is is that uh while i am set for home quarantine for a month, the last two weeks consist entirely of beef stroganoff meals. And I can just imagine my wife saying, you couldn't get the variety pack.

You had to go with the beef stroganoff. But, you know, a little pepper in it, it's pretty good. Peter, are you prepared to hunker in place for a while, or are you just presuming that it won't get to that point? I have to be honest. I have not given it a moment's thought. I was traveling so much this week that the entire world could have collapsed and may collapse. I just haven't given it a moment's thought.

And then, actually, it was just this morning I checked and Costco has sold out of its survival kits. It's too late for me to hunker in place. I'm doomed. Canned food, toilet paper, some aseptic containers of milk. You'll be good. What do you mean aseptic container? I may be mispronouncing the word. Go ahead. Go to a whole foods. Take a look in there. You know, if you have to get almond milk, I suppose you could, or soy or banana or whatever the rest of it. It's got it whatever the rest of it. Stuff that'll shift.

It's got it. Okay. Got it. Shelf stable. That's the word that we want to look for. But we're going to be fine. This is an interesting little shakedown. And Rob's earlier points in the podcast about how it's a good test for stresses in the various systems is something to keep in mind as we go forward.

And I'm presuming another fortnight of rocky roads before we get our handle around these things but uh if in two weeks we are having a podcast discussing how we haven't heard from new york or california you know if it's just me in two weeks because because the coasts have gone dark then maybe i'll eat my words in addition to my last batch of beef stroganoff. But we'll get to that. We'll jump off that bridge when we get to it, as we say. Hey, folks, this podcast was brought to you by Earnest and by ButcherBot. Please support them for supporting us.

We love them. And also, have I mentioned that if you went to Apple Podcasts and gave us a five-star review, it might help people discover the podcast even more and keep our industry going into the foreseeable future forever? Did I ever say that? Yes. Have you done it? No.

So why don't you do it today? And we'll be all very grateful to you for doing so. We've already said goodbye to Brother Rob. Peter, it's been a joy and a pleasure as usual. And we'll speak to you next week. And see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, James. Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning.

No one could be sweeter than my sweetie when I meet her in the morning. Where the morning glories twining round the door Whispering pretty stories, how long to hear once more Strolling with my girlie where the dew is pearly early in the morning Butterflies all flutter up and kiss each little buttercup of dawn If I had Aladdin's lamp for only a day I'd make a wish and here's what I'd say Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning Ricochet! Join the conversation.

Where the morning glories twine around the door whispering pretty stories how long to hear once more strolling with my girlie where the dew is pearly early in the morning Butterflies all flutter up and kisses blue buttercup Adrona If I had Aladdin's lamp for only a day I'd make a wish and here's what I'd say Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the A.M.