The Ricochet Podcast - Too Late To Turn Back Now

Episode Date: May 29, 2021

If your for seeking out the good amid the darkness these days, this episode’s for you. The doctors are in! And while the prognosis ain’t great, we’re gonna do what we can! First up is our friend Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who keeps us up to date on all things CoViD. Then we’re joined by Glenn Loury, the legendary Professor of Economics at Brown University and also the creator of one of America’s most... Source

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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex, and today we talked to Dr. J about COVID and Glenn Lowry. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks, and today we talk to Dr. J about COVID and Glenn Lowry. So let's get to it. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 546. This would be the flagship podcast of Ricochet.com, where you should go, join up, sign in, and enjoy an internet that's different from the one that you've been hating all these years. It's a great place. You can be part of the most stimulating conversation on the internet if

you just go to Ricochet. And I say that as somebody who goes there about five or six or seven or eight times a day, thanks to the founders, Peter Robinson, Rob Long. Gentlemen, hello, and I have to ask the pressing question of the day. What kind of ice cream are you eating? It's too early for ice cream. I mean, as if that could be possible. Me too. But I'd like to think that our press corps is setting an example for everybody. So let's ask all of our guests today what kind of ice cream they plan on eating, because that's a real big issue. Or we can ask them, or you guys, guys for example uh current affairs casting your eyes around the world it seems the united states is going to help rebuild gaza and i'm wondering exactly how this is going to work are we going to reconstruct skyscrapers that can then be knocked

down in another 10-15 years because doesn't seem as if anything was solved by this last round of this exchange of ballistic devices. Just pushed off another X number of years until it happens again. Are we morally obligated because we support Israel to help Gaza rebuild? No, I don't think I would construct anything like that kind of argument. Gaza has a million people, roughly. Isn't that right? I think about a million people. And I think at this stage of the game, it's been 75 years since the disruptions of the war of 1948. I don't know, you just think of all that happened at the end of the Second World War

in Europe proper, the displacement of tens of all that happened at the end of the second world war in Europe proper the displacement of tens of millions of Germans the displacement of tens of millions of Poles people have made their accommodations and gotten on with life and growth is now evident everywhere in the Middle East Israel of course has turned into a tech power but so has the UAE, where energy is now down to 30% of the economy. Saudi Arabia, of all things, is trying to rebuild, remake its economy. I just don't see why Gaza should be the permanent sick man of the Middle East when those people are as talented and as energetic as anyone else. And the only problem there is ideology and a corrupt and violent government that's my thought or the only problem is is is a colonialist uh genocidal blockade as they would tell you um so rob yeah i

take it that you are not also in favor of a great U.S. effort to rebuild Gaza because you don't expect that the long-term profit from that will be noticeable? Well, no, I just think it's the wrong psychology. the buildings in Gaza and Gaza itself and the infrastructure of Gaza. And then the, the people of Gaza are seen as by the leaders of that region as expendable by the, by Hamas. The there's no point in putting up a building that Hamas will then just use as a target for Israeli missiles. I mean, you know,

the, you know, there, there, the, the reason that buildings come down in uh in gaza is because the people because the leadership in gaza continually uses them as launching pads and so they are taken out they are offensive weapons at a certain point or they're where they surround you know they put they surround offensive weapons and missile launching sites with children essentially so why give them more targets to use in their war i mean this seems

kind of crazy i mean that gaza would be better off and the people of gaza would be better off if they lived in tents because then their leaders couldn't use them as um as cannon fodder which is what the leaders are doing now you get you get the feeling that the bite administration is not going to be particularly hard on iran which was helping to gaza to perform their latest acts of resistance that uh this may be part of it that uh that iran gets a pass from all this because we're so keen once again to strike that nuclear deal that will save the world i don't think the bite administration is going to be hard on anybody they're not they don't seem to be very hard on the chinese they don't seem to be very hard on the on lukashenko belarus who's sort of an international

pirate they don't seem to be they seem to be looking around the world and they're doing their own kind of weird apology to right some reason that's the piece of this that i can't figure out joe but let's stipulate let's just say for the sake of argument that Joe Biden is even in his own administration at best a caretaker, a kind of empty cipher floating. So let's just say the president himself may not be making decisions here. May not. I don't mean to condemn the guy, but we know for sure that there are all kinds of very intelligent, hardworking, remarkably accomplished foreign policy professionals, beginning with the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken himself. These people have impressive resumes. They think, they develop strategies. I can't figure out what they believe they are doing

unless, and you have to say, I think you have to argue at this stage, the madness of Trump or the extent to which Trump may have driven them mad and made it impossible for them to make calculations. You have to suppose that that has receded now. So during the last four years, attribute it to Trump or forget about Trump, but during the last four years, American policy really did put Iran in a tight spot. Their economy was squeezed. The regime had less money to spend on Hamas and so forth. And Arab nations really did make peace with Israel. There was progress there. And now the Biden administration, at at best seems intent on ignoring that progress

and at a minimum seems to be wants to wants Iran to recover somehow I don't get it neither do I what are they thinking bank the gains we've made take credit for them yourself but bank the gains I don't understand it no I don't either because what exactly is it in for the United States to do this thing, which was a disaster from the start and never really worked and kept Iran from doing what they're doing? Do they honestly believe that they're going that they are the that the people in place right now in Washington are the smart, canny minds and intellects that are going to be able to bring Iranan back into the family of nations i i i it it seems sometimes that the only justification for this is well obama tried to do it and trump didn't want to and that's really all they need to know because that tells them we're virtualized not wisdom but virtue yeah i mean i know and even even even honest members of the obama administration in foreign policy and there were a few there weren't many but especially with regards to iran even they would acknowledge that iran was a bad actor in the region

and that this was a way to bring that bad actor into some kind of framework right um i didn't buy that argument but it's an argument argument. It was a strategy. It was like, okay, well, we recognize, it started from realities that we all agreed upon, which are that Iran is a bad actor, maybe the only, the single most important bad actor, powerful bad actor in the region. This seems to be kind of like the idea that what we need to do is we need to make it up to Iran somehow.

Let Iran build the buildings in Gaza. It's theirs. They bought it, basically, so let them do it. In general, there seems to be this kind of rudderless idea about the world from the Biden administration, this kind of inability or maybe unwillingness or no appetite for for for for as peter said take the wins but also to sort of acknowledge the fact that there are very few times when you can put like you you can you can identify a truly bad thing like well it's really terrible that maybe the virus leaked from a lab

and you know maybe it's terrible when a foreign leader scrambles a fighter jet to to to bring down a commercial airliner to yank somebody off and arrest them all those things are um so unambiguous that you think that if you were the president of the United States, any president of the United States, you'd be like, thank God. Thank God I don't have to hear on the front page of New York Times about the nuance. I'm missing the nuance. But in this case, they seem to have internalized that themselves. They seem to be paralyzed by their own inability to make a robust argument when the world is giving giving them all they need which seems very strange to me very have a press corps that uh is compliant enough so that nobody ever has to wonder whatever

happened to the biden's dogs that was kind of an issue right i mean that that says it all to me um but actually we're probably next going to hear about the biden's cats because cats are less likely to bite people when they come into the office. And this seems more like a cat administration than it does a dog administration. So we'll have wonderful stories about people asking Joe Biden exactly what kind of kitty litter he uses or what kind of scoop or Joe, do you have to take it out? Well, if Joe's smart, this is not one of those political things. This is actually a nonpartisan thing when it comes to kitty litter, right? Joe's working from home. You're working from home.

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and for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Now, the uncaped crusader, our friend Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Dr. Bhattacharya, I note just because it dazzles me every time I say it, that Jay holds a doctorate in economics and an MD. So he can tell you why you're sick and why you're poor. Ladies and gentlemen, Jay Bhattacharya. If I could only tell you why I'm poor, that would be it. Rob, you often groove with Jay. You go.

Yes, because as you know, I'm a COVID survivor. I'm a COVID hero, I like to put it. Hey, so Jay, I am now traveling in the South. Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Rob. You had COVID? Oh, yeah. Maybe you missed that one brief moment where I mentioned it.

Yeah, I've heard of something called long COVID, which I now believe is a strain that makes you unable to stop talking about it. Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me? This is act one of my COVID journey. Long COVID. Yeah. So I'm not in New Orleans right now. I'm in Memphis, but it's in New Orleans. And restaurants are kind of coming back. they're opening and stuff and bars and stuff and it's new orleans right but there are still enclaves and i don't mean like geographical enclaves i mean in businesses where there's this kind of, you just sense the vibe. You go in and it's masks and six feet and little stickers on the floor that people are paying attention to. And this kind of attitude on the part of the people working there that, you know, we're not ready to give this up.

How crazy are they? I mean, from a scientific point of view, I don't understand it. I mean, I think at this point, we're in COVID low season, we've vaccinated basically almost all the vulnerable. There's really not a scientific reason for it. But I think once you have put the fear of God into the population for a full year and a half, or almost a full year and a half, it is very difficult to unring the bell. And for people that have lived this reality for a full year, I mean, you can feel, I mean, I feel a lot of compassion for it, frankly. I mean, I just don't, I don't know how to convince people that live in that kind of panic that it's not no longer necessary to do so. But I mean, I think that's something

we ought to be doing as a public health community. But we've sort of fallen down on the job on it. You still see the CDC director talking about how we should be scared for our children, our little children, two years old, put the masks on them. I mean, I think that kind of signaling of panic and fear unwarranted based on the data is is a huge error always unwarranted always unwarranted especially now well that that's the question there's a new study that says that masks were utterly inefficacious not mandates but masks themselves because of the aerosol could get through easily people were putting them on poorly it just they really they didn't work which is counterintuitive to the people you know to even to even to me, I don't like masks, but I still, if I was getting into an elevator and I knew the three people had COVID and were symptomatic at the time, yeah, I'd want to put something over my face.

That's different from going out in the rest of the world, though. And the idea that telling people after this year that actually the masks didn't do that much, I don't think people are going to accept it. If that study is replicated and peer reviewed and the rest of it, I don't think that people presented with that science, people will not give up the idea that they did the right thing for society and themselves by masking up. I think you're right, James. I mean, the issue is one of, we've sacrificed so much. I mean, my kids didn't go to school for a full year. We wore masks. We distanced from our parents. We watched our grandparents die without being able to be there. We didn't attend their funerals. And to find out that some aspects of that were just not all that useful to slow the spread of the disease is a tough pill to swallow. I mean, the truth is whatever the truth is,

and we'll find out as the studies start to come out. I suspect you're right, James, that it's unlikely that the mask played an enormously important role in stopping this disease. But I don't know how to, I mean, I think we have to re-examine what happened last year with a clear eye

so that we can't let it happen again. I mean, the problem isn't just the virus, it's the response to the virus on the basis of fear and overreaction that led us down absolutely destructive paths and how we repair that is going to be the task for the next decade longer so on a scale of one to ten ten being very confident one being sort of where i am um do you think we're ever going to get any light out of this will there be any light will there be a consensus it seems to that so i echo that feeling it seems to me when i walk into those

places that and i see the kind of fear there's this kind of desire for the fear too it's kind of a freudian thing where they really they like living in that panic place it it comports to the worldview we've been developing over the past 20 years that the earth is going to die and this climate change is going to kill us all. And this is an apocalyptic kind of culture, right? But do you think there'll be a moment where people say, well, turns out maybe lockdowns and masks aren't the way to go? I mean, the Soviet Union collapsed, Rob. I don't know what it would. I mean, I think it'll happen much faster than that, because I think I'm always optimistic. But I think if you look and see two realities, and you see people living

more or less normally, doing normal things going on with their lives, not in fear, and then alongside a set of people that are just still scared to death at some point, I don't think being scared to death is the normal way of human life. People eventually look and say, okay, it's okay. And we, I, and the question is how to, how can we who are not scared be compassionate for the people that are, we're not, they're not crazy people. They're just, they've, I mean, I mean, we all felt it to some extent at some point,

I think last year, like, you know, what is this virus? What can I do to stop it? How can I, I mean, that, so we should have some compassion for that, but it's, I don't, I also think we should be very forthright. It's no longer reasonable to act that way. It's not, it's not, it's not necessary.

It's not helping anybody. It's just harming the people that are doing it and creating social strife. So just to, just to, you know, uh, ask for Dr. J's kind of, you know, the next, the next time this happens, the next time there's a respiratory virus that's sort of mysterious and has a two-week sort of asymptomatic quiet zone. What do we do? I guess we do a lockdown, right? Because we don't want to overwhelm the hospitals? Or was even that a mistake?

It's not clear to me that did anything in most of the country. There weren't that many cases to lockdown for. Well, let me put it this way. On the one hand, in the United states in in march let me not march last year there are too many cases already floating around to for a lockdown to make get to zero covet it was already too late um i mean that's clear right because we did lock down and we didn't get to zero and is it clear just uh just just to make i've been operating on this assumption, that everything we needed to know about epidemics and their spread and the effectiveness of lockdowns, etc., we already, we knew this in 2018. We've known this forever. If it hits a 1% number, it's kind of over.

The story's written, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the places the lockdown worked, if you will, are places like New Zealand and Australia, which were in the southern hemisphere during the low COVID season, their summer, when it hit. There were very few cases in one or a very limited number of international airports, so they could close down traffic and actually got to what they thought was zero. But then they keep on having to close down their society over and over again when they find five cases. And they'll have to continue to do so because there's no demand for the vaccine because there's no cases there. They're isolated from humanity for the rest of, I mean, until, you know, I mean, it's just, it's not a sustainable policy if you believe in a

global world. So I think there's, on the other hand, in the United States, in Europe, America, and much of the Americas, it was already too late by mid-March when we first thought about why. Frankly, it was probably too late by mid-February to do anything like that. You would have had to shut down in early January.

Too late for what? Too late for what? To replicate the New Zealand-Australia model of zero COVID? Well, you say too late. I'm sorry, I just want to press that. Could it ever have worked in this country? Yeah, I mean, if we had known in the middle of December or something, when the first cases actually arrived in the U.S., I don't know, late December,

I'm not sure, who knows what the date exactly is, but it certainly isn't the official date. It certainly belonged before that. If we had known, maybe. But then how could you know? It just was not possible to know. By the time you smelled the smoke, the fire's already started. Yeah. So I think the issue then is like, what do we do the next time? That's what you're asking, Rob. I think the next time, first, we have to be clear headed about what we know and don't know. And we shouldn't assume that we have control over situations we don't. Which is actually what happened, right?

We assumed that we had control. If we just locked down, we could figure out what's going on and stop it. It was the wrong model. I think the key thing next time is you have to involve a much broader set of experts. It's very clear that the epidemiologists and the virologists that were in charge of this uh policy that affects these dogs they're in charge of the policy uh have a too narrow set of expertise to have any possibility of designing society-wide policies that that last you know a year and a half with any degree of nuance or thought about what damage they can cause with their with their panic that they're dealing with. I think that the other thing is, I think we need to fundamentally revise. I mean, I thought public

health understood you don't panic the population. I thought that was a tenet to public health. That clearly was not. I mean, I think some level of deep introspection by the public health community, that set of experts. The other thing, I was thinking about this, the politicians, many of them looked to the experts because they didn't want to take the blame for what was done. Right. They could say, look, the experts told me to do this. That was an error. That was an enormous error. We needed a group of politicians, new set of politicians who will say, look, I don't think these experts are seeing the full view. Like they may know this area, but they're not seeing the full scope of things. And they're willing to speak up when even when Dr. Fauci is telling you two million people are going to die. You say, no, why are you sure that's right? How confident are you?

Let's bring in more experts to check. What are the consequences of shutting down the society? What are the consequences? I mean, those kinds of questions have to get asked as we get asked by our leaders. Right. I mean, we have a technocratic managerial class that worships expertise. So the idea of putting all of this into the hands of the experts was their dream. But to go back a couple of points, you know, when you talk about when I was here first, I remember being in very early January in San Francisco in an Uber. And the driver was hacking like somebody from the first couple of chapters of Stephen King's The Stand. And I'm thinking now when I look back, he had it.

And I'm thinking, I got it too. But it turns out that now more people are looking to what they were working on and thinking that perhaps maybe it's on the table that the lab leak hypothesis, which we were told was racist conspiracy theory nonsense, could actually be true. And we're looking into it. And in 90 days, we're going to get a report. What do you think?

I mean, I think both are possible hypotheses. I hesitate to jump to one or the other. What it does mean, though, from a pandemic planning point of view, you have to plan for both and work on dealing with both possibilities. It comes out of zoonotic work and somehow some virus makes the leap that's possible for the future. It's still also possible lab leak. I do think that it's important to get to the bottom of this because if you have a lab leak like this and it's the outcome of of research that was funded worldwide including by possibly by the NIH I mean that's that's the allegation right

um then um I mean we have to significantly rethink how what sorts of research we actually should should fund and how what the safety protocols are and frankly regulation of scientific activity that can affect the world in this way well i'll ask you do you think we should do gain of function function in order to be able in the future to more effectively develop countermeasures should these things get out i don't i i think it's just if okay so this is this the answer will be dependent on what we end up finding about the link between the gain of function research and this virus i don't, I think it's just too, if, okay, so this is, the answer will be dependent on what we end up finding about the link between the gain-of-function research and this virus. I don't know the answer to that, but at this point, I think it's foolhardy, right? I mean, I just don't,

I don't see what gain-of-function research has bought us in terms of protecting us against something like this, because this is what's supposed, the kind of thing was supposed to protect us against. Right. But it hasn't. But if somebody's going to do it and they are shouldn't it be us in other words do you would you rather the united states was doing the frankenstein research rather than somebody who's tied directly to the communist chinese communist party in the red army those only those are linked together james i mean we get to fund we get to fund the the chinese and we get to do it ourselves i i think um i remember in during cold war that i learned someone's a teenager or something i did about about the smallpox research

that there were two labs there was like one in the soviet union one in atlanta or something that had this had smallpox i thought gosh it's really dangerous that the soviets have the smallpox um uh i i don't i'm not sure that it's the thing is what if it's they had an outbreak didn't they the soviets had a so they had a small box accident didn't they i don't actually i didn't know that if that's that's interesting i that would be i mean that would be interesting i think it's like you know i don't think it's even um i don't even think it's it's a question of of malign will you don't let's say there are perfectly reasonable scientists in china wuhan or whatever they're not connected to the chinese military or whatnot let's say they're just doing their research

and they and an accident happens like one person there's this incredibly infectious virus in their little pizza dish or wherever and it they catch it right you go home looks like a cold and all of a sudden it's spread all throughout the world or during the two-week asymptomatic period i mean it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't alert you that's the diabolical construction of this virus it doesn't tell you you got it right and so you spread it and so it could happen by accident completely entirely by accident just because of some some lab tech forgot to wash his hands or something i mean who knows um that's the problem i mean that that's why i think this at this point

this kind of research is too dangerous to to to support i have the feeling this is politics media thinking here rather than scientific i hardly need to tell you that because you know what a scientific knucklehead I am. Yeah, nice disclaimer. As if necessary. Nice disclaimer, Peter. Because we were all worried for a minute you were going to bring to bear your powerful scientific brain. Exactly. Okay, so this is, Rob will weigh in on this as well.

I have the feeling that the kinds of political questions that you, Jay Bhattacharya, want answered, namely, how do we keep this from happening again? Not how do we keep a virus like this from breaking out again? That's a scientific question. The political question is, how do we keep some small group of experts who don't actually know what they're doing from shutting down the United States of America for more than a year again. And I have the feeling that nobody will be serious about that until it becomes widely understood, just an assumed axiom, that the lockdown we've been through did more damage than good. Is that true? Can we say that now? And if it is true, I don't know how to put this. Can the public health... See, the thing about you, Jay, is I don't doubt your brilliance, but you're much too good a person. You assume, oh, well, we need a period

of introspection among the public health authorities. I remember a conversation with Tom Sowell when he said, for decades now, African-American leaders have done the wrong thing for African-Americans themselves. And here's the evidence. And my question was, well, if the evidence is so clear, why haven't they changed their message? And Tom Sowell said, the hardest thing you can ask a human being to do is to admit he was wrong. The public health authorities are bought into this. Okay, you get the question. How do you reply to all that? I mean, there's a famous dictum in science, and science advances one obituary at a time.

All the old guard won't give up. They're all wrong ideas. It just takes time. I mean, we don't really have that kind of luxury. I think we have to convince the public, because the public health authorities have their power, because the public thinks that they're acting on their behalf and protecting them. Actually, I'm working on this project where I'm the editor of this site called collateralglobal.org. We're putting together essentially the research and the stories about the collateral harms from lockdown, which are absolutely devastating. At this point, the only question is whether the damage from the lockdowns are two or three orders of magnitude worse in terms of health than the marginal lives saved by the lockdown. Hold on, hold on. That in itself is

tremendously important. As far as you're concerned, it is now obvious, not a question, it's obvious that the lockdowns did more harm in terms of health. Set aside the psychological problem. Set aside the educational setback. In terms of sheer health, the lockdowns did more harm than good. That's clear to you? Yeah, I mean, from a global perspective, right? So, for instance, the UN issued a report that said that in South Asia, 228,000 children have died as a consequence of the lockdowns this past year and some 220,000 400,000 uh people additional people dead in just India alone for tuberculosis uh forget about South America where just the lockdowns

were utterly devastating um so in in the develop developing world the lockdowns have killed just enormous numbers of people uh through a whole series of mechanisms i can get into but like me but you can understand when you already have a poor country and you lock down you make it poor you're going to kill people um the the other uh in the in the in the developing developed world it's it's i don't know if it's two orders of magnitude probably it's on the same order of magnitude so like people skipping cancer treatments or cancer screening that happened and it's still happening like in the uk there's an enormous backlog of of elective surgeries that have been people skipping cancer treatments or cancer screening. That happened. It's still happening. Like in the UK, there's an enormous backlog of elective surgeries that have been elective for a year and a half.

There's in Canada the same thing. Children are going to be – in California, we've kept our kids out of school. You keep out of – the literature before the 2020 on the harm from keeping kids out of school for just a short period of time was devastating. They lead shorter, less healthy, poorer lives. That's going to have ramifications for a generation. And on the health of our children going forward. There really isn't a question in my mind about that. The harms of the lockdown, the health harms of the lockdown are just

devastating. We have to tell that story. It has to become as clear in the public mind as, you know, as the stories about the, you know, sort of the harms from COVID itself. And I'm going to work to that end. If you go to CollateralGlobal.org, you can see some of the stuff that we're doing on this. They're going to be pandemic retrospectives, official ones, put together by entities like the Rockefeller Foundation, maybe even Congress. That has to be a front and center part of the story. If it's not, then it's a whitewash.

So Jay, just one sort of process question. So one of the ways you get to the number is you take excess deaths and you subtract from excess deaths, COVID deaths, and you can actually get to a number that's larger than it should be. Right. That, that, that, you know, deaths, American, American deaths larger than they would be ordinarily without COVID, without taking away the COVID death, taking away everything.

Just you actually have, we have a number. There's a number that we can find, right? Is that, I mean, is that, is that a reasonable assumption that there's a number. There's a number that we can find, right? Is that a reasonable assumption? You can get a number like that, but, Rob, that still will be an underestimate, right? The health consequences of lockdown will last a good long time. Cancers will be diagnosed two years from now at later stages than they should have been picked up this year. And women will die from breast cancer that should have lived um that those would count even though they wouldn't come into the excess death numbers from last year but you could you but that is certainly a productive thing to do so for instance if you look at excess deaths

in in california and um and and florida and you look at 15 to 44 year olds there are a few like there are small excess deaths in Florida relative to previous years in that age group that isn't particularly affected by COVID. But in California, it's like way up. That has to be lockdown, because COVID didn't kill that many people in that age group.

I mean, it's going to be hard to find one. I mean, the thing is, think about the lockdowns. The effects on society and health are so multifaceted that it going to be hard to find one. I mean, the thing is, think about the lockdowns there, the effects on society are so, and health are so multifaceted that it just defies pointing to one number, but you have is like stories. You have like devastating story after devastating story. There needs to be like a cultural,

like all our cultural icons should start focusing on this as a, as some, as a deep mine of, of human stories to tell. That's how you change minds, right? It's not- You'd like to think so. I mean, you're absolutely right. Two things happened as far as I can see. One, all of a sudden we had this shift where everybody assumed that their fellow human beings were objects of contagion and had to be avoided. We atomized in a way that the society has never done before. Simultaneous to that, the laptop class was divorced from the physical environment of work, stayed at home, which itself had this incredible ripple effect through the economy of downtown,

of real estate, of the rest of it, and just changes the way all of a sudden people work. Two big, big things that didn't have to happen. Jay, we'd love to talk to you forever and a day, but we have to go because we have somebody else to talk to. It's Glenn and I, right? I saw him on the chat. Right. Well, now I'm jealous of you you understand we understand why we're getting out the big the big crook and pulling you off stage because we've got mr lowry coming along dr j thanks a lot talking a bit thank you we'll get to go to glenn in just a second but i have to tell you i mean we're talking about crises here what happens when crises arise well i got Well, I got something you want to pay a little bit of attention to. It's about

donors' trust. When a crisis comes up, and we've seen a few, it's good to have a couple of dollars socked away. Well, the same is true for your charitable dollars. That's why it's good to have a charitable savings account so you have resources to dip into when other people need them. That's exactly what a donor-advised fund can do for you. And if you believe in limited government and free people, a Donors Trust donor-advised fund, that's the account for you. Donors Trust acts as your own charitable ATM, helping you manage your giving in a way that's smart, tax-advantaged, and private. Let's say John and Samantha, they use Donors Trust. When their children went to college, they realized university educators sometimes leave out important lessons.

Since then, John and Samantha have used their fund at Donor's Trust to support classroom programs that teach free market economics, the rule of law, and free expression, principles that shouldn't get lost in times of emergency. Oh yeah, they could have written a personal check to accomplish their goals. But with Donor's Trust, they knew they'd spend less time on administration and more time having an impact. Now is the time to take a closer look at Donors Trust and join its community of liberty-minded givers. How? Well, by opening a donor-advised fund. Go to DonorsTrust.org to get your free donor prospectus and learn how a donor-advised fund can help you simplify and grow your charitable giving. That's DonorsTrust.org. And we thank Donors Trust for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. We welcome now, I think for the first time, but really,

I think we've all been, we're all going to be fanboying out here for a little minute, Glenn Lowry. Glenn went to Northwestern, got a BA in math, and got a PhD in economics from MIT. He's an academic author, economist who's taught at Harvard, Boston University, and Brown, where he serves as the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Economics. He's also the host of The Glenn Show on BloggingHeadsTV, as well as a terrific sub stack. We are pleased and honored to have you. Hey, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Rob. Good to be have you. Hey, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Rob. Good to be with you. All right. So I just want to start as like a resident. I like to think it's myself as the only person on this podcast who went to an Ivy League school because Peter went to Dartmouth. And Glenn teaches at Brown, so watch yourself long. Yeah, well, I mean, I we're not gonna get into brown here um how much in trouble are the ivy league or fancy institutions in this country

both from a position of sort of their relative power and how much do they deserve what's coming to them i'm leading with my chin there well uh, I don't know if I have the expertise to assess there. You know, what are donors, big donors going to do? Are people going to not want their names on buildings at these places anymore? What's the value of the degree in the marketplace, whatever premium that the econometricians measure, is that going to go down? Are students going to stop wanting to apply in the droves that they apply to these places so that Brown, for example, can accept, I don't know, one out of 15 applicants or something like

that. We get 30,000 applications for 1,800 places. I'm not sure I'm able to answer those questions. I would have thought that this ship would have started listing a long time ago. I mean, so that's an answer to your second question. I think they, quote, deserve whatever trouble they're in. I mean, I've been fighting with my provost and president. God love them. They're very good people. But I think wrongheaded on the diversity front.

For a long time, to no avail, I get a fair amount of correspondence from alumni and other interested parties saying, you know, thank God that you're there and you're fighting the good fight. But so far, the policy looks to be impervious to the kinds of objections that people like me have been raising. So I don't know, they might be able to carry on for a long time. I, it feels like it should be unstable. And, you know, and I've been especially thinking this, I don't want to ramble, but let me just say this, during this year, when I've been teaching, you know, by remote, and I've been thinking, God, I'm teaching 60 in my lecture course, I could be teaching 60,000 just as easily with enough teaching assistants to handle the, you know, the paperwork, I could be teaching 60,000. What is going to keep these brick and mortar places with the corner of the market that they have when, you know, very serious people, let me include myself in that company, can offer their intellectual product, you know, go over their heads and offer their actual product out there. And it's an interesting problem because it's a little bit mysterious to me how the cachet comes into existence. And if I want to start de novo, start fresh with a new institution, how can I earn

the reputational weight that would be able to attract people to come to my shop and get my degree? I mean, we got to get past the credentialing, the certification, these institutions that tell the... But anyway, again, I don't want to ramble. They're not in as much trouble as they should be, in my opinion. Yeah, I can all agree. Well, let me ask you this question about those schools, because it's always seemed to me, and I went to Yale in the late 80s. It always seemed to me that, and of course, I was there way before critical race theory but there were the seeds were planted there it always seemed to me like there was a tax that rich white kids paid so they could feel good about their privilege and that the following whatever the downside of these

whatever the penalties whatever the bad version of the bad outcomes of this kind of scholarship was going to be it wasn't rich white kids weren't going to pay that anyway. Is it different now with the critical race theory? Or is it, is my cynicism still operative? I'm not sure I understand your cynicism, Rob. Rich white kids are, what, they're buying some kind of exemption some kind of uh yeah they can they can go and they can agitate for uh for um a critical race theory that they know will never ever really have an impact negatively on their lives that they can pay a certain like a certain

tax they can pay a conscience tax so they can feel good about their privilege. The schools themselves don't change the way they choose students. It's really kind of an internal sort of terrarium style, aquarium style. Your argument seems to be that that's the causal dynamic that's generating the anthropology department, which has completely lost its way. And I think the anthropologists have lost their way for reasons that don't have to do with the needs of wealthy white kids, but for reasons that have to do with the internal intellectual dynamic of, of their discipline and of allied disciplines, they become relativist. They, they, they have, you know, kind of no pretense to scientific objectivity.

They are in the sway of every fad and fashion that comes along with it. Transgenderism, let it be you know whatever it is they you know they're they're against binaries they're they're against you know the things that the sort of conservative working people ordinary you know joe and jill uh are embracing and they define themselves in contradistinction to these things. I'm not a historian of thought, an intellectual historian, so I can't parse, you know, how much Derrida and Foucault and these people are at the end of the day responsible.

But what I do is I look across the road there to my, and I just give anthropology as an example. We could be talking about many other departments and I see the kind of thing that comes out of them. They want to, they now want to decolonize the curriculum, but you know, they, they, they want to take, take down all of the white male, I patriarchal icons and whatnot. They they're examining reading lists that again, I'm not just talking about anthropologists, but I, I think I'm on good ground to say that the discipline has lost its way. And I just don't know if that's a response to the market demands of students or if that's not something else that's going on. Is critical race theory a response to the market demands of students?

I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, I remember some of these writers. I knew Derek Bell pretty well because I taught at Harvard in the 1980s when he was at the law school there. Faces at the Bottom of the Well is a book that I actually reviewed for one of the magazines eons ago. That was his last big book. He's just one of these figures, a godfather of this intellectual tradition in legal studies that has broken out. Kimberly Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, you know, these are names that I think of. And I don't know that they were responding to students at all. You know, I would if I if I were forced to, I would look elsewhere for the genesis of it. But those are just, you know, my random thoughts. You mentioned decolonizing,

which is a very popular word these days. Yesterday, I had an employer-sponsored and employer-mandated struggle session where 138 white faces nodded along on Zoom as we were being told a whole bunch of things about biases and the rest of it. It was remarkably free of jargon, but the words did come in that you expect to come in. Intersectionality, equity instead of equality, anti-racism instead of not being racist. These terms have meanings, very specific meanings that a lot of people just sort of nod along to without exactly getting what it is. Is it possible, or does it seem to you nowadays, as if we're entering a period in which it is impossible to discuss critical race theory, the ideas behind it, without accepting the vocabulary

used? How do we get that language back? I do not think it's possible to critique them without interrogating those terms, making problematic those terms. I take equity versus equality. Now, what they're saying is, if we establish a regime in which people are treated fairly on the basis of their individual characteristics and without regard to their race. And if having done so, the outcome does not produce some kind of proportional or numerically balanced demographic profile of the people who are successful, then there is a social problem. Well, I think that's demonstrably false. In fact, I think Thomas Sowell has demonstrated empirically that that's a false claim about the world. Parity between groups is to be observed essentially nowhere. And in fact, the argument has an internal contradiction in my mind, which is that you think identity is really so important that these groups matter, that they are thick with content and substance. So I'm black, I'm Latino, I'm gay, et cetera.

I'm a Native American and Pacific Islander. And that's a type and that's a category and that's a group. And that's to be distinguished from other groups and respected, not to be tread upon, not to not to have a cultural appropriation taken of it. The group has groupness. It has thickness. It has content. And then you imagine that all the groups are going to be represented in neurology and biophysics and the English literature and in the law and in engineering in the same proportions.

But I thought that the groups were groups. I thought that they had values and internal content, which would shape the way that people aspire in their lives. If that's the case, how could I possibly expect that the groups would then produce the same proportion of people attending law school and medical school and going into business for themselves and working in finance and writing novels and whatever. Wow. So, you know, I think there's both the empirical observation. Look around the world where you see ethnic diversity. You don't see parity anywhere. But there's also, in my mind, this internal contradiction on their own terms.

Groups matter. And yet groups are supposed to come out in a fair system with proportional outcomes across the board. You say empiricism as if that's some sort of universally understood value, and we know it's just an attribute of Western society and therefore has poisoned the entire world. Or so I was told. Peter? He said sarcastically. Yeah, he said so. I'm reminded, Glenn, your last comment, that Milton Friedman used to say that it's the quality of a genuine insight that the moment someone states it, it seems obvious. course you're right. They can't say at the same time that groups are distinctive and they matter and that the results should show everybody's actually just like everybody else. Just as many so-and-so in medicine. Maybe I'm the only person who hadn't thought of that, but that is really striking. Okay. A Tom Sowell point. This is something that there's a piece of this that I learned from Tom,

and there's a piece of this that Tom doesn't actually care to, he hasn't, he won't answer this. So here's the piece that I learned from Tom. There is a century of American history, of African American history, that has been shoved down the memory hole. And this century is from the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery. Do you know where I'm going with this? To the Civil Rights Act. acts. And during this period, you see African-American advances of all kinds, climbing out of poverty, educational attainment. Now, to be sure, African-Americans start from a low base. Of course they do. They're released literally from chains. But still, there's

progress of every kind. And furthermore, the African American family throughout this period remains intact. And by all kinds of measures, the African American family is more stable than the white family. Okay. That's not what we hear. What we hear is that the Civil Rights Act, after a decade of, and of course, Jim Crow did exist. This is not a fiction. But after a century of stagnation for African Americans, the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-60s are enacted, and the welfare state comes along. And that is when we begin to see African American advance. And Tom says empirically, this is just not so. There's a century of progress, and the progress stagnates in the mid 60s. That's the piece I learned from Tom. The piece that Tom, I don't think he actually finds interesting in some way, but I am fascinated by it, is why?

Why isn't that century of history celebrated? Why aren't we seeing book after book after book examining aspects of the African-American experience during that century? Why haven't we seen a dozen new biographies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois? Why isn't that just a fascinating and celebrated aspect of the American experience? I do not get it. Well, Tom is certainly right that what happened after the emancipation for 75 years, if you will, 85 years, truly remarkable. The slaves were largely illiterate. The acquisition of the capacity to read in that population, I think, this is not my field, but I think this could be readily documented, rivals what's been observed anywhere in terms of how quickly literacy diffused itself in a population of largely illiterate peasants. People acquired land. They started businesses. They built schools and they they etc of necessity there you know it was jim crow in the south i mean you had to

uh pull yourself up by your bootstraps because nobody was coming to save you um and uh the i want to avoid the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy it is certainly true that you get to the 1960s and things go south uh and it's also true that you get to the 1960s and things go south uh and it's also true that you get to the 1960s you get the civil rights act of 64 the voting rights act of 65 you get the great society you get the expansion of afdc dependency in these families and you see the family beginning to collapse uh it is a very contentious territory uh i actually think in retrospect that charles murray dare i speak his name uh pretty much got it right, pretty much got it right in Losing Ground in 1984. I remember that book when it first came out. And I remember the fierce debate.

I was at the Kennedy School at that time. And the people who ended up writing Bill Clinton's welfare reform, not David Elwood. Again, God love him. Good man. Good economist working on his book. Poor support was very influential on William Jefferson Clinton. Mary Jo Bain is another one of these scholars whom I can remember. And they were appalled by Mary's speculations that we tried to kill poverty with transfer programs. We got the incentives messed up and we ended up destroying a lot of lives in the process. But I think in retrospect, he's got the better of that argument, but people will disagree. You say why?

I can only speculate here. I'm not shy about speculating. I think there are a number of factors that are at play. Larry Mead, the political scientist lawrence mead at new york university has a new book out called burdens of freedom and i'm not going to try to recapitulate the argument of the book with which i don't entirely agree it's a culturalist argument about western european ideals being at the core of what makes america a great country and etc etc and i And I don't want

to get sidetracked into arguing with Larry without him being here. I have done a podcast with him in which we argued for an hour about this very thing. But in any case, his main point is freedom is hard, not easy. Freedom is hard. Freedom is responsibility. Freedom is accountability. Freedom is you really have to get up and put one foot in front of the other and do the thing. If you have a view in which you are essentially, everything is determined for you by forces from the outside, or you're deferential to whatever it is that the higher ups lay down in front of you and whatnot, you don't have any responsibility for yourself. That's one thing. But if you have freedom, you got to do something with it. And I think it's kind of an irony, but that the truth of the matter is that the advent of the political revolution,

the civil rights revolution, 1950s and the 1960s, left African Americans free. Basically, I didn't say all discrimination was eliminated. Of course it wasn't. It never will be. But these things left us with pretty much the full sway, full set of opportunities that come with being a member of this polity and of this society. And I think there's a tremendous comfort in embracing a narrative in which you don't affirm that freedom and you don't take responsibility and you lay off the problems that beset your community on external forces. And I've actually been given the saying lately that the reason that we live in the 19th century in the head of the anti-racist social justice wars is because the 21st century is just more than we can bear. Okay. So this is, I haven't read this book by, it's Lawrence Mead. Lawrence Mead. He's a political scientist at NYU. He's written some other books over the years that I think are noteworthy. But the book is called The Burdens of Freedom. And as I say, it's a-

That is the argument in a book that I have read. That's the argument in the Brothers Karamazov, in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. It's exactly that, isn't it? I'm no Russian literature expert, but yeah, on my Cliff Notes review of Dostoevsky's, I've read Crime and Punishment from... I've read Crime and Punishment. I can tell you about Brother Raskolnikov. But I don't know about the Grand Inquisitor as much as I think I probably should know. Well, I'm not trying to be smart here because I just cribbed that from Shelby Steele. Shelby Steele, who makes the point you just made that freedom is hard and is a Russian literature expert at the same time. So Shelby, you know,

by the way, I would like our producer to note, Dr. Lowry has a doctorate in economics from MIT. And that means both our guests today are smarter than the rest of us. And I would really like to make sure that never, ever happens. It happens every week, Peter. It happens every week. I got one more question. I don't know how to how to ask it. You have 60 students you teach in a class you could teach 60 000 that suggests for some reason to me optimism are you optimistic i'm not uh i'm in despair to be honest with you. And maybe I just haven't, you know,

embrace the entrepreneurial opportunity, you know, talking to my venture capitalist until, you know, somebody helped us think about, we're going to do the over the head of the university thing. We're going to launch, we're going to all be billionaires in five years, you know, by creating, you know, uh, Khan Academy on stilts or whatever, you know, I don't know, but I'm, I'm, you know, the race beat is kind of my, uh, my, uh, wheelhouse these days. And I just, I feel like we're losing, not winning. I'm looking at what the current administration is doing. I don't want to get too partisan political, but, you know, it just feels to me like we're winning. I'm looking at the canonization of George Floyd and what happened to him in Minneapolis is a very unfortunate thing that happened to him.

There was a jury. The jury spoke. The cop was convicted. You know, I actually respect juries when they speak. I don't second guess juries. But the way that that event has been processed in our political culture, I don't know how it is that the 1619 Project is having as much effect on K-12 education as it would appear to be having, how it is that some of these books that, you know, I could name, some of these prizes that have been handed out, who are these people who are giving out these prizes, and so on. So I just feel like I'm, you know, spitting in the wind that I'm invading against this implacable force. And perhaps I need to get out more.

You know, I give one example. One example of why it is that I feel like they're winning. The critical race theory, anti-racist social justice warriors are winning. Georgetown Law Center faculty member on an open mic, which she didn't know she was being recorded, is overheard saying to a colleague that she worries that the kids clustering at the bottom of her class are disproportionately Black. Now that gets out, somebody releases it, they break the rules and release the thing, and it goes on Twitter and it goes viral. And now Georgetown Law Center is having a crisis because its institutional racism has been exposed. The law students rally, they write a letter, and it gets a gazillion co-signatures from every responsible legal academy around the country and even around the world.

The white faculty members at Georgetown Law are called to account by their Black colleagues and students and urged to issue a meaa on behalf of their whiteness because the institution is so structurally biased that this could be said and i thought two things one is my god if it's true and no one actually said that what that woman said wasn't true she was actually reporting on her own experience in the classroom, then shouldn't that occasion a crisis within the institution about how ill-served the students who it's admitting to the program of study are in virtue of the fact that they are being so unsuccessful? Because after all, they are, they're practicing affirmative action. They know what the test scores and grades of the kids are that are coming in.

They understand that they're admitting African-Americans with a lower standard of performance being required. And then they're getting evidence ipso facto after the admission that the consequence of that is the disproportionate poor performance in the bottom of their class. Shouldn't they be interrogating themselves not as systemically racist, but rather as, you know, this is a outcome which we have produced with our own policies. Maybe we should reconsider our policies. But they didn't do that. The dean fired this lecturer on the demands of the students that this person be fired as a racist because she spoke the truth about her experience in the law school. Right. Her crime was to say it out loud. Which she didn't even really do.

She didn't think anybody was listening. She didn't do it. It was a private conversation. Yeah, right. do she didn't think anybody was listening if she didn't do it was a private conversation yeah right well you know i was kind of hoping when i asked you if you were optimistic that you were going to say yes and then provide me like a little you know green shoot of something that we could all stand behind but at least you glenn glenn you're a podcaster you know you want to end on an up note can you please can you give us an upbeat here? Gee. Robert Woodson, the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, Washington, D.C. He's a great man, isn't he? He's a great man.

He's in his 80s, I reckon, or very close to it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Bob is in his 80s. He's been around forever, the National Center. It's now called the woodson center um when the 1619 project came out with uh nicole hannah jones's narration of the founding of america bob with the help of some uh you know uh very enthusiastic collaborators like your humble servant here stood up something called the 1776 unites project which were going to be african american not exclusively but largely voiced as shelby is affiliated with us for example who were saying no no no this is not the story about our country that our great country that we want to tell we understand the significance of the founding what happened between 1776 and 1787 was world historic, etc. I could go on with

the speech, you get the idea. Bob Woodson, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, running around talking about people who had been killed by white police officers, why I'm concerned about the race of a police officer befuddles me. If I'm concerned about police killing citizens, I'm concerned about police killing citizens. I'm only going to be concerned when it's a white police officer killing a Black citizen. How did we get to that? But Bob has stood up a group called Voices of Black Mothers United under the umbrella of the Woodson Center, who are mothers who've lost children to urban violence, drive-by shootings, etc. I interviewed one of them in my podcast a few weeks ago, Sylvia Bennett Stone. Her daughter, Crystal Joy, was shot dead in a shootout between two groups of gangbangers at a service station, at a filling

station. I'm trying to remember where it was. I forget the name of the town. But in any case, she decided in her grief that she wasn't going to sit still, that she was going to become a voice for the grieving mothers who have lost children to urban violence. They don't have to be Black, although they all too often are. And so Voices of Black Mothers United, you can look them up, are out there now. And among the things that they're doing is counseling families who have lost loved ones to urban violence against retaliation and working to try to develop cooperative relations with the police whom they know are necessary if they actually want to stifle the violence that's

taking the lives of their children in their communities but this is uh indirectly a product of bob woodson's energy uh and and uh commitment uh and organizational skill and fundraising capacity. And I could go on in this vein. There are many different initiatives that Bob, there's a book out now, Red, White, and Black. This is Bob's collection of essays from scholars. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to make a contribution to this particular collection, but there are other fine scholars who are in there. Coleman Hughes, the young Columbia University graduate is one of them. But there, John McWhorter, my conversation partner at the podcast, is another contributor to

this volume, Red, White, and Black. A different look at the issues of race and social conflict in america uh bob's still going strong so if you force me to try to give some yeah no that didn't kill you be a little bit right um well both of those young men i mean john mcwarder i know and and colin hughes i've met recently both of them are, well, Coleman especially is really young. He looks young, too, so you meet him and you think, get out of here, kid. Yeah, he's like 25 years old or something.

That's hopeful that these are sort of idiosyncratic, smart, thoughtful, witty. Oh, wait, I got another one, Rob. Do we have time for another? As long as it's good, it's got to be optimistic. Don't give me any more downers. Free Inquiry in the Modern World is a

20-student seminar that I taught last semester here at Brown. It was done by Zoom because we were teaching by Zoom. Free Inquiry in the Modern World, we start with Plato's Apology of Socrates and the Allegory of the Cave.

We go on to Milton's Areopagitica, his passionate argument against licensing of printing books in Britain a century after Gutenberg. We get to John Stuart Mill on liberty and we parse every paragraph of the argument we end up in the 20th century with the likes of george orwell voklov hovel and um uh the closing of the american mind guy alan these kids actually read that book i got these kids to read that book here's what i want you to know here's what i want you to know I had perfect attendance at every class for the entire semester. Not a single one of them missed a class. Okay. And the evaluations that I saw afterwards, these kids are all over the place politically, but they were, to a person, thankful that there was an open space where there could be honest debate about hard questions at Brown University.

Outside of my classroom, they say those experiences are very, very rare. So there are at least 20 Brown undergraduates. These are Democrats, you know, I mean, mostly. And, you know, they're college kids and, you know, they're not the college Republicans, but they they can see the poverty, the intellectual poverty of this propaganda that gets preached at them from the lectern at many of their courses. And they were grateful for the opportunity. I'm sorry if this is patting myself on the back, but I'm extremely proud of this. Creating, quote-unquote, a safe space to read some dead white guys and to think about exactly what

is the foundation of our liberty. That did it. Thank you. If Glenn Lowry can pull that off at Brown, anything is still possible. That is the class that i want to go from 20 to 20 000 on zoom because i will absolutely i will watch that and i put my i won't miss a class

and i'll put myself on mute and when you when you start when you start your own college make sure that it's housed in some buildings that look ancient because apparently the only do you know nowadays if somebody comes with a degree and it doesn't have as much ivy behind it we're less inclined to believe their criticisms of western society but apparently if you're going to hate western society and tear it down you'd better have gotten your ideas in a place that embodies physically the look of western so i'd it's been a great except for the statues except for the statues those have to go you know i live i live on a street actually that was named for a British prime minister.

And I'm waiting for this street to be renamed because in Liverpool, they want to take a statue off the plinth. It never ends. It never ends. Which means we'll have the opportunity to have you back at some point again, which would be our honor. I'd love to. I'm very happy about being a fellow now at the Hoover Institution. And I expected I just did. I did the Goodfellas podcast just yesterday or the day before. So, you know, I'm on the team.

You're on the team. Now you need to come out in person and let me buy you a drink. We'll start there. Happy to do it as soon as we can get that worked out. Great. Happy to do it. Okay, guys. Thanks for joining us today.

It's been my pleasure. Thanks, guys. Thanks for joining us today. It's been my pleasure. Thanks, Glenn. Bye-bye. I have one more thing to add to this, and it has to do with, well, when we talk about ivy, you talk about yards, you talk about things that are green that are growing in your yard. One of those, of course, might be a tree. Trees.

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Now, through June 30th, go to FastGrowingTrees.com slash Ricochet for 15% off. That's 15% off at FastGrowingTrees.com slash Ricochet. FastGrowingTrees.com slash Ricochet. 15% off. And we we thank fast growing trees for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast usually this is the space where we just blather and palaver about something or other what television show we're watching what we think is going to happen the next week post of the week and stuff like that but frankly you know what do you do after dr j and glenn lawry i think the best thing that we can do is just shut up and go away. I'm with you on that.

I'm sorry. Yeah, absolutely. So off we go. Kiddie Poo Club, Donors Trust and Fast-Growing Trees made this podcast possible. Join today to Ricochet and support them for supporting us. Listen to the best of Ricochet hosted by moi this weekend on the Radio America Network. Check your local listings as they like to say. And of course, go leave us a five-star review at Apple. I know you've done this before. Create a new account. Do it again. No, that would be unethical.

But if you haven't, go do it. Would it kill you? Apparently so. It'll help others discover the show and keep Ricochet going as well. Rob, Peter, it's been a pleasure. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, boys. Next week, girls. My mama told me, she said, son, beware.

There's this thing called love, and it's everywhere. She told me, it can break your heart and put you in misery. Since I met this little woman, I feel it's happened to me. And I'm telling you, it's too late to turn back now. I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love. It's too late to turn back now. I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love. I found myself owning her at least ten times a day.

You know, it's so unusual for me to carry on this way. I'm the day. I tried so hard to convince myself that this feeling just can't be right. I'm telling you, it's too late to turn back now. I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love. It's too late to turn back now. I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love. It's too late to turn back now. I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love. It's too late to turn back now.

Ricochet. Join the conversation. And Glenn teaches at Brown, so watch yourself long.