The Ricochet Podcast - Universal Questions

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

This week we’ve got old friends as guests: The Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen Meyer joins to remind us that the God hypothesis gets us a lot further than alien astronauts. (Check out his excellent New York Post piece.) And then our own Dr. George Savage follows to speak about the new ominous Delta variant, and to point out that industrial policy is better left to innovators rather than... Source

The universe is expanding. The universe is expanding? Well, the universe is everything. And if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything. What is that your business? He stopped doing his homework. What's the point? What has the universe got to do with it?

You're here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. I have a dream. This nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated and that's and they're killing people. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and me, James Lilacs. We're going to be talking to Stephen Meyer about intelligent design and Dr. George Savage about industrial policy and COVID. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode 553. How do we get this far? Well, by support from people like you, as they say on that other network. You can join us at Ricochet.com and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis. Rob Long is not with us this week. Peter Robinson is in California. Peter, welcome.

Welcome, James. Good to see you again. Well, I was gone in Colorado last week at 9,000 feet, gasping like a fish on a dock. No, actually, I wasn't. It was absolutely stunningly beautiful part of the world. I've absolutely no problem with it. I'm driving through Colorado thinking, I have no objection to absolutely any of this. The beauty, the geological formations, if only I skied, but I don't. Speaking of skiing and getting out ahead of them, we're going to have a commission on the insurrection that convulsed the nation on 1-6. And I hate to go straight to whataboutism, but you would think that if the 2020 burn sessions that convulsed city after city after city in America had been done by Boogaloo Boys and

other boogeymen of the sort, that there would be an investigation as to how this happened. But I guess Antifa is just an idea, whereas the people who invaded the Capitol were part of a concerted movement that would stop at nothing, including drawing up their plans with detailed Lego models. So are we going to get anything away from this, or is it just going to be another kabuki dance as we expect these things to be the latter the latter that seems obvious that the speaker the democratic talking point is that january 6th was singular it was unlike anything that had ever happened before in american history in some relatively modest ways it was they intend to pay no attention to the destruction that took place in city after city after city, all of which should be investigated. How did the law break down there? How did the local police

find themselves so quickly and immediately overwhelmed in city after city? No, none of that. And furthermore, even though the Speaker gets to stack the commission with eight Democrats, leaving the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California five seats, he nominated five Republicans to go on the committee, and she said, no, those two aren't good enough. They supported President Trump. Off they go. So, who knows? That's a president that will never come back to bite them, right? That's right. That's right. There are all kinds of pieces of information that remain puzzlingly obscure at this point, as in, if this event was as foreseeable as many in the

media, and particularly Nancy Pelosi says it was, it was clear the president intended was up to no good on January 6th, then why was the Capitol so undefended? Who killed Ashley Babbitt? Apparently that now places me in the swamp fevers of the right even to ask that question. But that is an interesting question. In any other circumstance I can recall, we would now know the name of the officer, we would now understand the circumstances. If this officer, he or she has been cleared, as apparently they have, no charges seem to be being brought against this person, then we would have an explanation as to why the use of force was justified. All these things would be in the public domain by now.

They're not. Jim Jordan, not my cup of tea exactly, but he would have made sure that there were answers to those questions, that there were answers to questions, that the Commission would have satisfied legitimate requests for knowledge on both sides. So no, nothing doing, we're not going to get anything like that. It is purely a political exercise to try to place Republicans, I beg your pardon, to try to place Democrats in a better position in the coming midterm election. Full stop. That's all it is. Well, and I said before that we all hate whataboutism, but I'm starting to kind of like it when it sheds some light. The other day, they asked Joe Biden if any members of the Democratic Party favored defunding the police, and his response was to say there are members of the Republican Party

who believe that we drink the blood of children and imprison them in basements. Now, that's Q, and while he's correct that there are nut wads who believe in that whole thing, going back to Pizzagate et al., the idea that QAnon is as mainstream in the modern Republican Party as the defund the police is in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is nonsense. They are not analogous by any means. There's nobody on my city council, well, there's no Republican on my city council in Minneapolis, but if there were, they wouldn't be talking q nonsense they would be trying to find a way to defund the police a little less i mean so what became a dominant idea and a standard that they proudly waved back and forth in 2020 is now apparently a fringe idea that no serious person was ever involved in

and i still you know i when you have the violence that you have in the American cities and you have in Chicago, the mayor responding by saying, well, we're going to ban flavored tobacco. When you have the violence in D.C. and the mayor responds by, we're going to permanently etch Black Lives Matter on the street. I don't think the party itself may be looking at polls and thinking, this is not going to read down to our benefit, but I don't know if they're going to be able to do anything about it because they're so invested in this rethink, reimagine policing model. That's all they have. the Democrats really believed that by the midterms, they would be able to go to their supporters with a list of what their supporters would have considered tremendous accomplishments. Huge new infrastructure bill, for example, possibly even a commission that was seriously considering

packing the Supreme Court and end to the filibuster. Well, it turns out that even when you control the House of Representatives, if your margin is as narrow as theirs is, it's hard to get those things through. Even if you have 51 votes in the Senate, because the Senate is 50-50, but the Vice President will vote for you, it turns out to be very difficult to get those kinds of measures through, especially if you have even one or two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are centrist Democrats, not Democrats who feel any compulsion. Certainly, Joe Manchin in West Virginia doesn't feel any need to appease the AOC wing of the party because in West Virginia, it doesn't exist. All right. They won't have anything like the list of accomplishments. I think they would all have been terrible, but they would think of them as accomplishments to take to their supporters and run on in the midterms. So,

what do they have to run on? Same old, same old. They have to scare everybody to death about Donald Trump and the big bad republicans as far as i can tell that's all it is it is just crude simple blatant politics no infrastructure no green new deal um no elimination of the electoral college all of these wonderful things at least in the trump administration he was able to go to the Republicans and say, we got some things. We got less regulation. We got, the taxes are better. You didn't get the wall, which is kind of a binary thing. You either have the wall or you don't. But at the midterms, that still wasn't known. So yeah, what are they going to be able to bring? We've governed like you expected,

a completely centrist, go-along, get-along, institutional DC swamp party to govern. No, it doesn't exactly galvanize the base. And you're right. I mean, the Trump specter boogeyman, even though he's talking about running again, seems to be just fading. It just loses its coherence day by day. But that just may be me. Maybe I'm not paying attention to the right things. Maybe I'm just not seeing things correctly. Could be that I need to get my eyes checked. It's been a while since I've looked at the bottom of the line and said, M-Z-O-P-Q-R what? But I know that when I do get my eyes checked and I do get new frames, I know where they're going to come from, and that would be Warby Parker. Warby Parker,

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five days, and there's no obligation to buy. Ships free. Includes a prepaid return shipping label to make it even easier. That's five pairs of glasses at home for free at warbyparker.com slash ricochet. warbyparker.com slash ricochet. And we thank Warby Parker for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the Ricochet Podcast, Stephen Meyer. Dr. Meyer directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. His publications include Signature in the Cell, DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, and Darwin's Doubt, the Explosive Origins of Animal Life and a Case for Intelligent Design. His newest book, Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.

Welcome back, Stephen. I'm sorry, Dr. Meyer. Good to be with you, James. Work hard for that. Steve's just fine. She had a piece in the New York Post and it opened with a line, aliens are in the news again, which they are because the Pentagon is sort of saying, we don't know what they are, but yeah, they exist. And you then give our readers a little overview of what the scientist whose

hypothesis is that life on earth may have been intelligently designed by aliens from elsewhere. I mean, there's the idea that they seeded the planet. There's panspermia, which is a notion that it's everywhere or that they tinkered with us. Okay, take our listeners through this before you get to your alternative hypothesis. Yeah, right. It's not just the Air Force pilots or UFO enthusiasts who have been talking about aliens, but actually scientists have been talking about alien intelligence for decades, at least some, and they've been doing so because of the difficulty of the problem of explaining the origin of life on Earth. When you look inside even simple living cells, you find complex digital nanotechnology and the information

that's stored in the DNA, the complex information storage, transmission, and processing system that makes use of that information inside even the simplest living cells, and even little tiny miniature machines. And so, rather than invoking a transcendent intelligence. Steve, can I just, in the middle of this explanation, the layman's understanding of evolution is that life evolved from simpler to more complicated forms. And you, Steve, are saying that the more we learn about what we thought were the simplest forms, the more we find ourselves reeling back in awe at the discovery that even a single-celled, even an amoeba turns out to be an immensely complicated structure and then you go into the amoeba and take one structure within the amoeba and it turns out to be immensely complicated.

It's like the old joke, turtles all the way down. It turns out to be complexity all the way down. Where's the – that's roughly the idea, correct? Okay. That's brilliant, Peter. Yeah, perfect way to put the whole discussion in context. The Darwinian idea was that we could explain the very complex forms of life that we see today, the giraffes, the sea mammals, the human beings, as a result of a slow, gradual process that started from something very simple. So, it was a simple to complex sort of schema. And when we look, but he never attempted to explain the origin of the first life,

the origin of the first presumably very simple living cell. And the great discovery of the second half of the 20th century in biology is that the simplest living cell is on its own scale as complicated as the most complex organisms, with complex multicellular organisms, and inside even the simplest living cell. The first big discovery was the Watson and Crick discovery that the DNA contains information in essentially in a digital or alphabetic form. It contains information for building the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive. But beyond that, then it's been discovered that in order to process and use that information, there's a complex storage, transmission, and processing system that involves not only DNA,

but a whole host of protein and protein machines to process the information. And the information in the DNA also builds the proteins that in turn process the information on the DNA. So, it's a complex interdependent system. And so, explaining the origin of all that, all that complexity, and what we call specified complexity. It's not just by complexity, we don't mean a random mishmash of stuff. We mean integrated complexity of the sort you'd find in a complex factory, and indeed one run by information. So, that has created an impasse in original life research, and as a result of that, some scientists have

actually proposed that, yes, this is clearly evidence of design. Richard Dawkins, in an interview with Ben Stein, which I think he now regrets, acknowledged that, yeah, it looks like a signature of intelligence, but he said, if so, that intelligence must have itself evolved someplace else in the cosmos, on some other planet and some other star system. And so, rather than invoking a divine creation or a transcendent form of intelligence, the intricacy of the cell, the information in the cell is attributed to another mind somewhere else in the cosmos that then presumably seeded life here on earth after it evolved by an undirected unguided process okay stupid question here if i can interject for a second um so let's say indeed

you're right but the people who are saying that we're planted here by aliens and who knows where they came from, at least we have now evidence of them in a sort. We have their ships. We see them flying around. We have these unexplained phenomenon, whereas we don't have grainy Pentagon images of anything that would suggest the existence of a divine being. Well, the Pentagon report was entirely inconclusive because there are so many possible explanations for the visual phenomena. So, I don't think, A, that we do have evidence of aliens. But B, in this case, the postulation of what's called panspermia directed alien intelligence, alien intelligence directing life to earth only pushes the ultimate question back out into space because those aliens even by

the the thinking of the the proponents of panspermia themselves evolved by an undirected material process starting from some simple cell on that planet and that so the hypothesis doesn't explain the origin of the first cell there or the information necessary to produce it. And yet we know that information is, in our experience, the product of intelligence. Bill Gates' DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever devised or created. We know that software comes from programmers. If you keep having to push the origin of that information back to some intelligence someplace, eventually you've got to get to an ultimate starting point. And since basic chemistry doesn't move towards the production of information, this is the big

problem in origin of life research, and we haven't been able to explain how it could have come about from chemical reactions on this planet, it doesn't really solve the problem to just push it out into space. Yeah, turtles all the way down and aliens all the way up. Peter? Steve, I took the privilege yesterday of putting up a note on Ricochet. You and I have talked before. We recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge, and I took the liberty of putting up a note explaining that you'd be on the program and inviting people to submit questions. And it turns out, Ricochet members are pretty bright people, and there are some really intriguing questions. I'm sure we won't have time to get to all of them, but here's one from Barfly. Whether life evolves on its own or is nudged or is continuously guided, there has to be a mechanism

behind it. Well, that comes close to one of the attacks your critics make, which is, well, wait a moment, if God is responsible for this, how did he do it? Isn't that, it's a form of the same question, and how do you answer that? Well, the theory of intelligent design moves from the evidence back to a certain type of cause. It's, it retrodicts. It's positing not a mechanism, but the activity of a mind. And you can say, well, we need to know how minds produce information. The problem is we don't know how our own minds produce information, but we can recognize the activity of mind when we see information. The question of how

the mind produces information when we're speaking is essentially the question of the mind-body problem. We know from direct introspective experience that we have minds. We know of our own minds' capabilities. And we can see the distinctive effects of the activity of mind. So we're able to infer back to the activity of mind without necessarily knowing how mind actually manipulates or affects matter. As you and I are causing air molecules to be modulated at certain frequencies as we speak to each other, we're creating information, but we don't really know that the interface between mind and matter is a mystery. To require, though, a theory of intelligent design to propose a mechanism is to misunderstand the nature of the theory. We're proposing that mind

played a role, and mind is a fundamentally different type of cause than a mechanistic cause, which is a materialistic cause. So, the big question is, is it mind over matter, or which came first, mind or matter? And in the case of the ultimate origin of life and the ultimate origin of the universe, we think the distinctive attributes of the universe and of life indicate that mind is primary. Okay. So, actually, let's, every time I talk to you, I feel the urge to do this, and I feel the urge to do it again. So, forgive me, because I will have asked you to cover some of this ground before. No worries. Why forgive me? I'm sure lots of people ask similar questions.

But I'm interested in establishing, by the way, I don't know that we've even named your latest book. The name of the book is The Return of the God Hypothesis. The Return of the God Hypothesis. And it is absolutely fascinating. All right. So, the boundaries of your claim. I had thought before you wrote The Return of the God Hypothesis that believers and science had settled into a reasonably peaceful and compelling sort of truce. Science has its field of inquiry and knowledge which is proper to it, and religion has its field of inquiry and knowledge which is proper to it, and the big event of the last decade or two of the 20th century was the discovery that on certain readings of the science, they're consonant

with each other. The Big Bang that physicists now believe occurred at the beginning of the universe isn't lifted straight from Genesis, but it's consonant with Genesis. So I thought before this book came out that Steve Myers' huge accomplishment, and I thought as an intellectual accomplishment it was gigantic, was to create terms of real peace and even a certain degree of amity between religion and science. Now, if I'm not mistaken, and there's always a chance when you're talking to me that I am, in this book, you say, no, no, no, no. It's not just a truce. Intelligent design is scientific.

Right? You're adjusting the boundaries here, aren't you, Steve? I'm saying, let's set the issue of the specific theory of intelligent design aside for the minute. I'm saying that the evidence that we've discovered scientifically that is relevant to understanding three big questions of origin, the origin of the universe, the origin of the fine-tuning of the structure of the universe, and the origin of the universe itself, are actually supportive of theistic belief. The Noma idea that there are these non-overlapping magisteria is partly right. There are types of science which are concerned with describing how the natural world works. And those descriptions, you know, how does one part of the cell's membrane interact with some protein molecules? Well, we can describe that. We can describe how

gravitational force works. And that's a theologically or metaphysically neutral topic. But these questions of origins are different. They're asking, what produced the universe in the first place? What produced life in the first place? One possible answer to those types of questions is a purely undirected material process. Another type of answer is that mind played a role. And the evidence that we have of the fine-tuning of the information in DNA and the abrupt appearance at some finite time in the past of the entire universe of matter, space, time, and energy, the evidences we have concerning those three big events

do not lend themselves to materialistic explanation. So, in this book, I'm proposing theism as an alternative metaphysical hypothesis to the big system of thought known as scientific materialism or other systems such as pantheism. So, I'm quite happy to acknowledge that what I call the God hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis, but I argue that it provides a better explanation of those key facts concerning origins. And therefore, what we've discovered scientifically has metaphysical implications that are more friendly to theism than to materialism or other competing worldviews. Now, I do think that intelligent design is a scientific theory.

The theory of intelligent design provides a means by which we can detect the activity of intelligence. But in this book, I go further than just saying, yes, we see evidence of intelligence, for example, in the DNA, the information in DNA, but rather, I attempt to identify the type of intelligence we're talking about. And this gets back to the piece in the New York Post, because rather than, there are two basic options, either the intelligence responsible for life in the universe is imminent within the cosmos, or it's transcendent beyond the cosmos. And one thing that the space alien designer hypothesis certainly can't explain is the origin of the universe itself, or the fine-tuning of the universe that physicists are telling us about that was present from the very beginning or soon after no alien being within the cosmos could be responsible for the fine-tuning that would make its later evolution possible don g says the conformal cycle cosmological model ccc

speculates that the universe goes through repeated cycles of big bang subsequent expansions what do you think of the idea that our universe just happens to be the instance that is conducive to development of humans, of life? Could it just be one lucky roll of many, many rolls instead of hitting an inside straight flush the first time? And I like that because I'm a big heat death hater. I hate that. We don't want to have a heat death in the universe. Yeah. No one's looking forward to that.

No. Nope. Atoms scattered billions of miles apart. I want the universe to come back together and then expand and blow up and and reset every time it's not inconsistent also with a whole multiverse idea and as a matter of fact it's not even consistent with a theistic explanation because anybody who plays a sim game like sim city or roller coaster tycoon or the rest of them knows that sometimes you just start a new game change your parameters and see what see what happens so is how do you

think about that, that this isn't just a one-time shot, but this is the billionth iteration of this and the conditions this time worked out for the rise of life? Yeah, right. Well, in general… Yeah, right. No, I just meant I'm familiar with the model and the question. In general, multiverse models, whether they're based on inflationary cosmology or string theory or some of these cyclical models, require prior unexplained fine-tuning in the universe-generating mechanism. So, they attempt to explain the fine-tuning of the universe by positing an infinite number of other universes. But in order for those models to work, there has to be some sort of generating mechanism so that our universe can be portrayed as the lucky winner of a great cosmic lottery. And so, the underlying mechanism that's generating the lottery effect itself turns out always to require prior unexplained fine-tuning.

So the fine-tuning problem doesn't really go away with multiverse models. But as to the specific model, it's the cyclical model of Sir Roger Penrose. It's very interesting because that was proposed that there have been these oscillating universe models where the universe is yes expanding now but according to oscillating or cyclical models then there was a subsequent contraction and expansion and contraction penrose's model is interesting because he thinks there's one big expansion out of which at certain points then you get another expansion spinning off and oh it does go ahead and the to do that, the problem with oscillating universe models generally is that each new spinoff or new contraction and expansion requires new energy available to do work. And Alan Guth showed back, an MIT physicist in the 80s, showed that the problem with the first oscillating universe model was that with each expansion, you get a dissipation of energy. So, after the contraction, there's less energy available to

work, and then the next expansion will be a little smaller and a little smaller and a little smaller, and eventually you damp down to a point of equilibrium, a kind of you're in a black hole. And the newer models, the newer cyclical models have the same problem, though they manifest themselves a little differently. In Penrose's model, as the universe expands, he says that in isolated places, at just the right time, you get a new expansion coming out of that, a new universe coming out of that. And he proposes something he calls a phantom field that is responsible for the reduction in entropy or reducing the increase in order and then the new expansion. The problem is, as some other physicists pointed out, the field that he proposes has properties that are associated

with no known physical fields. All physical fields are ubiquitous throughout space and time. Penrose proposes one that acts at a specific place at a specific time and spontaneously increases order and reduces entropy. Now, those are properties that are only associated with the activity of agency or mind. So, if someone wants to invoke Penrose's model as an alternative to the God hypothesis, they have the curious effect of positing a physical field that has God-like properties, the ability to act at a specific place at a specific time, in a sense, on schedule, and to reduce order or reduce entropy and increase order in a specific way in order to produce a new universe. So, I don't think models like that really solve the need for transcendent intelligence because they're effectively invoking intelligence

by another name. Steve, Peter here. I've got one more question and then I'd like to just have you tell our listeners about the Discovery Institute. But the one more question isn't a small one, it's another big juicy one, I think. You and I talked at the very beginning of the summer about your brilliant book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, and one of the questions I had afterwards, to the extent that I've been mulling it over ever since, is the return of the God Hypothesis. All right. The book tells us what Steve makes of developments in science in the 20th century, but not so much what Steve makes of God.

And in my experience, yours would be much deeper, obviously, but in my experience, just watching people put up responses to you on Twitter, comments here and there, one aspect of the resistance, as I read it, to the God hypothesis is, oh, God, here come the Ten Commandments and all kinds of demands on our moral behavior and, oh no, all that again. The whole project of the Enlightenment in the 20th century was to escape from that. That's why sexual liberation is liberation. People feel that, and here comes God. All right. Now, I've got to ask Steve, and now I am asking Steve, exactly what kind of God do you mean by God in the return of the God hypothesis? And it came to me, I think, this is just a few days ago in my church, the Catholic church, we've been working our way through Genesis readings,

and we had Moses discovering God speaking from a burning bush. And Moses said, who are you? And God replied, I am. And I thought, oh, I bet Steve would go for that, but not much more. God as the ground of all being. God as the unmoved cause. Okay, that's how my feeble little mind has been crawling toward the light of Steve Meyer. What kind of God is the God in the return of the God hypothesis? Well, I come at this partly as a philosopher as well as a scientist. And so, I'm looking at what it takes to explain the evidence that we have. And if we have the universe beginning, and by the beginning, if we have evidence of a beginning of the physical universe, and that includes the beginning of space and time, then to explain the

origin of the universe, we need to posit an entity that transcends matter, space, time, and energy, is in some way separate from those domains. God as conceived by theism, classical theism and deism, conceives of an entity which exists outside of or independent of matter, space, time, and energy. So, that would be one attribute. The fine-tuning suggests the need for a fine-tuner for intelligence, as does the evidence that we have in life with that intricate DNA and DNA information processing system. But that evidence arises much later. So, we have evidence of transcendence, evidence of intelligence acting from the beginning of the universe, but then evidence acting long after the universe. When I look at the different philosophical systems, theism, deism, pantheism,

materialism, the big systems of thought, classical theism posits an entity which has the attributes which are necessary to explain those three key facts, a transcendent intelligence that acts not only at the beginning but long after the beginning of the universe. So, not a deistic creator, not an imminent creator, not a space alien, but rather a transcendent creator who is also active in the creation. So, that's what I call basic theism. It does not settle the question, well, which form of theism? Is it Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, Jewish? But rather, it, I think, takes the argument for God as far as it can be taken based on the evidence that we have in the natural world, that there is evidence of a transcendent intelligence who's active in the creation. That's what theologians have long made the distinction between general revelation, what we can tell about God from the creation, and special revelation, which is what we can only know about God from God's communication

to human beings, perhaps at the burning bush with Moses. I do think the name of God that God gives to Moses is intriguing because it implies a timeless entity, I am that I am. And a ground of all being, yes, but a personal intelligence that has existed eternally, independent of the physical world, which has had instead a finite beginning, which is, I think, one of the great discoveries of modern physics and cosmology, that the universe itself had a beginning. The Greeks debated this, are we finite or infinite? Well, it looks like the universe is finite. Something else, therefore, must have brought infinite? Well, it looks like the universe is finite. Something else, therefore, must have brought it into existence, I argue, in the book.

I am what I am is also the founding tenet of Popeyeism. One last question here from the readers. It's Brian Scarborough. I would like Dr. Meyer to give some examples about the fine-tuning of the universe that makes human life possible on Earth. The delicate balance of so many factors that allows us to exist is, me proof that we are not a cosmic accident but we're created by an intelligent creator and that's interesting because the way our i mean you can say in the deist sense the conditions were made and then god walked away and let it all happen or you can say that there's actual evidence of very particular fine-tuning in our own solar system because you've got jupiter out there making sure that nothing comes and hits us you got the moon at the right place to slosh up the world with the tides and

get things going down there. There's a lot of stuff that makes us seem like a very fragile and unique blue marble in space. Does that suggest that we're the only ones that few other planets actually have those conditions with somebody keeping them from getting hit by a meteor every 10 years or something yeah well brilliant question um there are two and it alludes to and your amplification alludes to the fact that there are two types of fine-tuning that physicists and cosmologists and astronomers talk about there's cosmological fine-tuning the stuff that was set the parameters that were set from the very beginning of the universe or soon after, and then the fine-tuning of our planetary system, which as you rightly point out is its own set of marvels. But just as far as examples,

in the cosmological sense, one of the great fine-tuning parameters is what's called the cosmological constant. It's the force that's responsible for the expansion of the universe. And an accepted value for that is one part in 10 to the 90th power. There are only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the entire universe. So, getting that one cosmological fine-tuning parameter right would be equivalent to setting a blindfolded person out in space floating around searching at random for one marked elementary particle, but not just in our universe, but in 10 billion universes our size. It's a minuscule probability and an exquisite degree

of fine-tuning. But other parameters include things like the strength of gravitational force, the strength of electromagnetic force, the strength of electromagnetic force, the other fundamental forces of physics, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the ratios between them, the masses of the elementary particles, the quarks, the electrons that must fall within very narrow ranges in order for life to be possible. And then another class of cosmological fine-tuning is the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe, what's called the initial entropy. The configuration of mass and energy at the very beginning of the universe had to be very precisely fine-tuned to allow for the development of stable galaxies. Sir Roger Penrose has calculated that fine-tuning with, it's a hyper-exponential number, one part in 10 to the 10 raised to the

123rd power. There are not enough zeros, enough elementary particles in the universe to represent all the zeros in that number. So, there are multiple fine-tuning parameters. Most of them are independent of each other, which creates an almost incalculable degree of improbability associated with our universe. And that's at the cosmological level then your question is right as well at the at the planetary level we have all these different fine-tuning parameters that are necessary to make our planet a life-friendly planet and one which our colleagues jay richards and guillermo gonzalez have pointed out is also finely tuned oddly for scientific discovery we're in just the right place within the galaxy and just the right place within the solar system that we can actually make discoveries about the wider universe in which we live. Their book, Privileged Planet, is a classic. So, yeah,

there's, I agree with... Great, great. Now I've got planetary privilege to go along with everything else that I'm supposed to be guilty about. The book is The Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe by Stephen Meyer. And you've got to admire the fellow because as far as I understood, the whole idea of intelligent design was solved in a Usenet flame war in 1992 by a bunch of neckbeard atheists. But he perseveres and makes incredible points that are fascinating to listen to. It's been a joy, and we hope to have you on again. And Peter, raising a finger. But I don't want to let him go before he tells us a little bit. The Ricochet Network is going to begin, I believe, this summer or this autumn at the very latest, distributing a couple of podcasts

by the Discovery Institute. So, Steve, before you leave, by the way, to add to Steve's attributes of the long list of his accomplishments, he's also one of the nicest guys you'd ever hope to meet, which is just a problem for everybody who wants to think he's a nut or a troglo. He's just a lovely man. What's the Discovery Institute? What are these, I think it's two podcasts that you're planning? What are the podcasts that you're planning? What are the podcasts that you're planning? And will you yourself be participating in one of them? We are rolling out a podcast. In fact, we've already had a few episodes of our ID, short for Intelligent Design, ID the Future podcast. And we're looking at also doing one

around my content in the new book next fall. And we're already getting great response from your Ricochet subscribers network. It's fantastic. And I'll be participating this summer. There'll be a couple of interviews on ID the Future this summer about the return of the God hypothesis, and we'll go into more depth. So, to enable people to go to Apple and find these podcasts podcasts the podcast that's already available is called id the future id the future id the future right right and uh named because the theory of intelligent design not only provides a good explanation of facts that we already have from science like the irreducible complexity of molecular machines and circuits

and the digital code in dna but also, once scientists get comfortable with the notion of intelligent design, they're using it, and many scientists are using it, as what's called a heuristic, a guide to future discovery. They're using it to generate predictions about what we should find in life or the solar system or in the universe. And so, it's actually turning out to be a very fruitful scientific idea. Wow. And then, the second podcast that will be built on your book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, has a name yet? We don't yet have a name. We're trying to figure out exactly how to frame that, but your producer, Scott, has encouraged us in this. There might be interest in this topic,

so we're going to work on developing that by the fall. My suggested title would be just when you think he'd gone away forever. Dot, dot, dot. That's pretty good. No, my suggested title. No, I would suggest you find another scientific development. So you can call it ID4 instead of ID3. Because people naturally think it's an Emmerich disaster movie with Bill Pullman as president. We all love Bill Pullman as president.

I can't think that fast to be that funny. That's really good, James. Hey, and thank you both for these fantastic questions. These are really perceptive and well-considered questions by your audience. We were just feeding you questions from Ricochet members who are one smart group. I wasn't expecting to get something about the cyclical conformal model of cosmology on a podcast. Well, I would have brought it up at the end. It's a good way to start your weekend, Steve. It gets the adrenaline going for sure.

Thanks so much. Thank you guys. Really appreciate seeing you both. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. When you talk about who's making the universe, you wonder, well, who's the maker? Who's the chef, shall you say?

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involved to clean and which weighs just, it's an anvil. It's essentially a flattened anvil. And you put the oil in this thing and it smokes up the... Alright, guess what? The made-in pan, it will sear the meat. It'll do as beautiful a job as a cast iron skillet, but it's as easy to deal with, much lighter, and as easy to clean up as a Teflon pan. So that's what I've been using. That's the summer use of the Made In frying pan here in the Robinson household, searing meat.

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Joining us now, Ricochet board member and, to be honest, full disclosure, one of my best and oldest friends, George Savage. George is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. He holds a B.S. in biomedical engineering from Boston University, an M.D. from Tufts University, and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. George and I met at Stanford Business School, where he engaged in the astonishing feat of working his way through Stanford. Stanford Business School for me was, oh, an 18-hour-a-day job just keeping up. George got his MBA while working in the emergency room of a hospital just down the street. And George has gone on to found one

company after another since then. George, thanks for joining us today. And thanks for your help with Ricochet as our board member, the grownup on the board. So, Rob and I had on Rob's friend, the journalist David Adler last week, And we had a pretty interesting conversation, I think, on David's argument, David Adler's argument, that the United States needs some sort of intelligent industrial policy. We've permitted our manufacturing to get hollowed out and shipped over to China. We have the example here at home of DARPA, the venture capital firm to put it crudely inside the Pentagon, which Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but DARPA seems to have some claim to have done so. We have the example of the Chinese who have a very forthright industrial policy.

They choose where China needs to get strong, and they make sure that companies in that area get funding. Now, this is government spending money on more or less private companies. Private companies in this country, more or less private companies in China. So, David Adler isn't ruling out the markets and competition and George Savage listened to this podcast and he sent Rob long and me a scorcher of an email on the questions we didn't ask go ahead George okay well I I certainly enjoyed uh David Adler's perspective but but what occurred to me, frankly, at the outset was Ronald Reagan's old adage that when it comes to business, government's approach is if it moves, tax it. If it still moves, regulate it. And when it stops moving, subsidize it. And it strikes me

that given we're well along the stop moving phase, everyone is calling for the subsidy phase. And before getting to some sort of centralized financial authority, which picks winners and losers and does more Solyndra style, potentially waste of taxpayer money, I simply advocated that we take a look at all the barriers that have been constructed through our own political processes to manufacturing being here in the United States, barriers that have the effect of exporting jobs to China. One such was our corporate tax rate, which was, at least temporarily, it appears addressed by the Trump administration, creating an enormous incentive to offshore jobs. But another whole area are feel-good environmental regulations,

whereby everyone's for clean air and water. They're generally appealing to Republican and Democrat alike. Democratic activists are enormously in support of these kind of rules that really put a bullseye, particularly on factories, things that make things, things that are immobile, things that are low margin, capital intensive, and raise the bar in terms of making it very difficult to succeed in that kind of business. But never mind, we have a relief valve built into our economy where consumers can still get their cheap goods, but they get them from China. Globalists can still make a very fat profit and continue to donate primarily to Democrats, but they get them from China. Globalists can still make a very fat profit and continue

to donate primarily to Democrats, but to Republicans as well, because they can offshore their manufacturing in China. And with more of the value add of their products occurring overseas, they get around all the various tax rates that we just talked about. George, when you and I were in business school, I'm about to ask you a question that'll make me sound really smart. But as you will instantly recognize, I'm only asking a question about something that you explained to me in the first place. So you're so smart, you get the question and the answer. And it's this, that when you and I were in business school three decades ago, up and down Northern California, up and down the peninsula where both of us live, people were still manufacturing silicon chips. There were fab plants, fabrication

plants all over Northern California. And today, there are none. How did that happen? Well, a large part of it was driven by environmental rules and also the differential corporate tax rate in the United States, particularly California. When I ran my last company, we have a fab that made little tiny silicon chips that would go into medicines in the East Bay of California here, the Bay Area. The only reason we could operate this was because a prior company that had a license had gone bankrupt and we got to acquire a facility that would have taken years and many millions of dollars to even get permitted in the state of California. We then witnessed a string of delegations coming through from Singapore, from Switzerland, and from the UK of all places, guaranteeing special tax rates as low as 5% or so if we would relocate our intellectual property. Special corporate tax rates.

If we would relocate our intellectual property to their jurisdiction and our manufacturing, and that way they'd get the manufacturing jobs. And when you calculate transfer pricing between subsidiaries of companies, you would say that much of the value of our product is from some overseas subsidiary that we, the U.S. parent, would pay for the use of, quote, their IP and the products that they manufacture for us that they ship over, and therefore the profit would be taxed at the local tax rate. And of course, you could open up your factory in weeks, not years, because they would streamline all the paperwork and everything would just be sunny and wonderful. Meanwhile,

in the U.S., another relief valve we have is the software industry, which is very successful and which has infinite margins no cost of goods for for you know you can make one more unit of software for literally zero cost and so this industry does well and we all get to applaud that well silicon valley's still here you know it's designed in california and we have lots of bright people doing bright things. The problem is this cuts off the bottom half, if you will, from a margin structure of our industrial base. We don't make things here, and there are plenty of people who are skilled with their hands and operating with the real world, but they're not interested in being coders, and they're effectively guaranteed a universal basic income rather than building the products that we all need. So, George, could I ask, this is an almost cultural slash political question. Hard to prove this, but I think you'll get what I'm saying. There is in the air now,

in our children's generation, and for listeners, George has sons and I have sons and they went to school, they're good buddies, so George knows the crowd I'm talking about. The feeling that just maybe the reason there's no manufacturing left in this country is that we're not any good at it. That this really is in one way or another shaping up as China's century. That our best years really were behind us. And you're saying, well, maybe, but you know what? Let's get rid of this layer after layer after layer of encrusted regulation that makes manufacturing in this country slower and more expensive than it needs to be. The first industrial, before we talk about market failure, let's talk about government failure. And the first industrial policy in this country ought to be to set American industry free. And then we'll talk

about whose century this can turn out to be. In other words, this creeping sense that we're in decline and that China's on the rise is to some large extent just another artifact of the federal and state governments screwing it up. Is that right? I certainly think so. And I agree with you in order of how we tackle things. But there is a zeitgeist thing. And this is of a pace with all of the commanding heights of the economy seemingly controlled by intellectuals who support at least rhetorically Marxism and Marxist principles. And the rhetoric is very much against us. And that causes people to hesitate to invest in manufacturing plant. Because as we see, the changes Trump made are looking pretty ephemeral right now.

If you run a software business and the world becomes less congenial to you, well, fine, you'll hire more workers in your remote overseas outpost in India, Singapore, wherever you operate, because all you're doing is investing in mines, mines are mobile, they can go anywhere. If I've just spent $100 million on a factory, and I built it over years, it's a fixed asset, it's immobile. And right now, the sense is that wherever we are, from a capital investment standpoint, things are only going to get worse for, you know, quote unquote, the 1% or whoever it is, the industrialist who's building a factory. So why wouldn't I build that somewhere else that appears to be more welcoming and where whatever political risks I'm taking appear to be much less? So I think it's the reality of tax and

regulation, but also this rhetoric. Americans used to all agree of both parties that we wanted more manufacturing in America by American, good manufacturing jobs for people on the line, as well as for the executives and everyone in between. And that seems to have broken down. We need back. George, I want to back up a little bit because you said something and there are people who have heard nothing but an air raid siren in their head ever since you said it. The phrase, we had a factory that was building chips to go into medicine. There it is, Bill Gates, nanotech. We'll get to that in a second.

You can explain it away about how you are not marking everybody for the new world order. But that does bring us to COVID, where we have now the Delta variant. And I am so over the Delta variant. I've moved on to Epsilon and Lambda and the rest of it, but people are still talking about it. So I guess we have to. What is it exactly that makes it the thing that everybody's talking about and worried about? What about these breakthrough infections?

Because we had our Texas Democrats who flew to Washington, D.C., all vaccinated, they assure us, and they've come down with it. You see tweets from time to time of somebody who said, I'm double jabbed and I got it. Which, the more you hear about that, the more you think, well, A, did what I get work? And B, if it doesn't, what's the point?

How does this deal with hesitancy? How does it deal with getting more people to get vaccinated? Where are we? Did Delta just screw everything up? Or is the media, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were, mishandling the actual facts around this variant? Well, my own view, which appears from just serving the media to be a minority opinion, at least amongst experts, is that everyone is mishandling this in officialdom. Someone who is in alignment with me and knows far more than I do, Jay Bhattacharya, put this very well in a media appearance recently, which is we should celebrate decoupling infection from death, which is what vaccines have done. So the Delta variant appears

to be far more infectious than the original, but less lethal than the original. And critically, the most vulnerable, certainly in American society, have already been vaccinated. That is older adults, people with significant comorbidities, other illnesses. And so therefore, what we're seeing is a rise in cases, but without any corresponding detectable rise in fatalities. And so you will be able to find anecdotes of people who are hospitalized or do very well, do very poorly rather, with this because it is very infectious. And even with a 95% effective vaccine, you'll have 5% who wind up getting the disease if they're exposed. But fortunately, they're getting a much milder case because the Delta variant itself is less dangerous and their vaccine is conveying a lot of protection.

And so rather than saying, all right, we now have made COVID a manageable disease thanks to vaccines. For those of you out there who are vaccine hesitant, well, you know, here are the risks and benefits that we know of from the vaccine. Here's where your risk profile is based on your age and stage. Make your own decision. But the only person you're endangering is yourself, similar to, you know, riding a motorcycle or going rock climbing or other activities. And the rest of us inside of your be this urge to snap back to a state of fear and lockdowns and masks, which if you look at aggregate statistics between Sweden, the U S states that locked down countries that locked down countries that didn't countries that masked countries that didn't, um, the mass didn't make any difference anyway. So as a policy, it didn't work the first time it won't work again.

And the great news that no one's focusing on is we don't need to do it now because this is no longer a deadly illness. We don't, but it seems to be their quiver has two arrows in it, and those are lockdown and masks, and that's it. And you hear some of these people talk, and it's as if we're in April of 2020 instead of where we are now with the vaccines. Is this because you think that these people are addicted to the sense of control and power that they got out of it? Or they simply, as my suspicion would be, that they're just unimaginative and have no other thing to say? Because to say that we've turned a corner and it's a lot better and we really can move on to a degree of normalcy, is beyond them somehow. I would think that they would be glad to do that because the conversation about masks and lockdowns

and their inefficacy is one that we ought to be having, but we're not, are we? I think that my own sense is this is a case study about how power tends to corrupt and people get used to having their every word hung on to by the public. A mayor who formerly had to deal with filling potholes in budget disputes now can wave his arms and decide what businesses are open, what businesses aren't. who used to calculate, you know, infectious disease rates, sexually transmitted illnesses, you know, drug overdoses in his jurisdiction, now has plentiful potential authority to run the economy. And without even thinking about it, you can kind of get into a habit of mind where you're the guy or gal who has to make all these decisions. And I think that's dangerous. I think what's going to be required, while we still can, is for significant portions of the public simply to ignore all these latest rules, which right now they're in the recommendation stage for the vaccinated to mask up in California. And if that goes swimmingly, I would expect the mandatory stage to follow. Well, we have to make sure, I think, that we just ignore it. George, you have sons, I have sons. They're both just getting started in their careers. You've made your career as a medical doctor, you've made your career in business,

and you've just told us how frustrated so many of your plans have been. What, at this stage, in the decline of what we still flatter ourselves by calling Western civilization, what do you tell your boys? What careers make sense? How should they intend to lead their lives? Well, I think there is still a lot of opportunity um despite all of the decline relative to what we're used to it remains reversible and underneath all that america still remains a fantastic place to live every day there's plenty of opportunity out there in our own area of silicon valley obviously a focus is high tech and there is in this software world that i talked about um it is the one industry with margins that can sustain all this craziness in terms of tax rates, cost of living, regulation, etc.

So it's a very good place to work. The application of artificial intelligence, that is machine learning to biological problems, health care and what have you, I think has tremendous potential. If you think about it, AI really isn't in practicality today, the kind of general intelligence featured in science fiction movies where, you know, you talk to your computer. It's much more a means of lowering the cost of predicting things. And so from an economist viewpoint, if you look at business processes and what goes on in life or discovering drugs or trying to figure out who's at risk from the coronavirus, for example, you look at prediction challenges and how the use of these large data sets, big data machine learning can reduce the cost of predicting. And that can yield enormous benefits to society. What I'd like to see, though, is a world where the things I tell my sons to focus on you know the high tech kind

of careers could be coupled to the kind of things that victor davis hansen talks about so that our farmers and our mechanics and machinists and electricians and plumbers uh can do a good job right now we live in a zip code where seemingly you know everyone has limitless money and yet you can't have your pool equipment fixed because all the companies went out of business and anything you want you can have provided amazon delivers it via china but if there are people in your neighborhood who work with their hands who are bright hard-working people but they chose a different line of work than somebody who works with a computer and a computer screen they are terribly disadvantaged by the status quo. And this is made much worse by these mandates. We would never have countenanced the kind of lockdowns we talk about now if it

hadn't been for widespread broadband and what have you that allow the computer class to go on working as normal as we're doing right now over Zoom, while everyone else, you know, you're a plumber, you work in a lodging, you work at a mechanics garage or what have you, your life could be destroyed. Yes. Well, their life will be better, of course, because they'll get a universal basic income that'll allow them to write poetry or become jazz musicians and society will be much better for it. Doc Savage, it's always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us today for talking industrial policy, medicine, and statism. Next time, we'll probably ask you questions about pottery, woodworking, and artisanal tomato gardening, and you'll be just as brilliant

on those as you've been on these other subjects. So thanks for joining us. Thanks a lot. All right. Bye-bye. George, thank you. George mentioned that there's a new economy in which you can get lots of things delivered to your house. Some of them you don't need. Some of them are fun to get. Some, just because you're too lazy to go to the store, but some of them provide you with the best experience you can possibly get anywhere. And one of those is ButcherBox. Best thing about summer is the slower pace, which gives us all time to do what we love, especially to get together with all of our favorite people again. Oh, it's so nice to have family gatherings, friends over like we couldn't do last year. Well, whether you're hosting a backyard party or an impromptu gathering, ButcherBox will help you spend less time searching for high-quality

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Hey, Peter, before we go, I have to ask you, because I know you're a really big space guy. When I think rockets, when I think sending mankind to distant planets, all of that stuff, that's Peter Robinson's lane right there. We've talked about this so often. But at the same time, I think that you would have regarded the rich guys, the billionaires going into space with a little bit of admiration, if only because of the people who were criticizing them for not spending the money on what they wanted them to spend on. I totally would. Listen, two things about me in space. One, honestly, by and large, it doesn't interest me. I've seen pictures of Mars. I don't want to go there. I don't know why anybody else would want to go there. The moon was different. That's just hovering in our sky. That has a certain poetry. It just doesn't interest me. That's just me. What I get a little insistent about is using other people's money, the federal government using money to create huge, and if it, okay,

none of that is involved in Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson's flights of this last week. And this carping, they're billionaires and they're just doing it for fun. Name a better reason for doing something in this life. I mean really, name a better reason. Look at the companies these guys have built. Look at the way they're now expanding our technical capacity. I myself don't think it would be particularly thrilling to go up in space, but that's just a matter of taste. Lots of people

would. And you're exactly right. What's this quotation we have here from Bernie Sanders? Here on Earth, the richest country on the planet, half our people- Here on Earth, the richest country on the planet, half our people live page to page. Yeah. Okay, I'm sorry, go on. Well, this is the way new technologies come down. The automobile used to be a technology for rich people. Rich people bought the first ones. The companies involved were able to manufacture more, go down the learning curve, produce less expensive vehicles.

New technologies always start as toys for the top 1%. Let them have their toys, for goodness sake. I thought it was just great. You? I assume you're going to agree with me. Well, it's not just... I love it. I absolutely love it. I'm not crazy about Branson. Bezos is all over the map when you think of what he's done, but also what he's done. The people who say, we've subsidized these guys. We don't tax them enough. Why? Bezos uses the U.S. Postal Service, which we pay for in order to make his business possible. I get all that. I get all that. I get it. But the expansion of mankind's frontiers,

the advancement of American technology, and the fact that we're moving towards getting out there and doing useful things. I know, Peter, you may think who wants to go to Mars and raise potatoes and then die. I understand that. I mean, but we got to get off this planet just in case there's something heading our way. It would be nice to have a backup at some point or an ability to get elsewhere. But the other part, my heart sings when I see these rockets go off and when I see Musk's rockets land. Yes, I agree.

Like the old destination moon rockets on a pad in the sea. I agree. It's just extraordinary. It's an amazing sight. We're doing this back again. And it's the ability to get out there and do some manufacturing. Now, again, are we going to be building huge gross point factories like we had in Detroit out there that employ tons of people? No, but there's stuff that we can do out there.

There's asteroids we can mine. Even if you can't tell me today exactly what it's going to benefit, cost, in terms of dollars or jobs, in the next 10 years, I don't care. care because unless you keep pushing and keep moving outward, you stagnate. And a society that is sending rockets up and building these craft and always reaching is going to be the preferable society to the one that sits home and just simply collapses like a small little dark star into a socialist camp where people shuttle between their small offices and their small homes on bicycles. No, that's not America. This is America, by gosh, by golly, by... And so, yeah, Branson isn't an American, but there's an American spirit in him. And we applaud that. You know, everybody has their standards, right? Sometimes you'll say, oh, that'll do. Or, you know, okay, I'll accept that. But you've got that little line inside of you that said, no, I'm not going to cross this line. This is where I stand and make a decision. For me, it's coffee.

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Take you just one a minute. The more reviews we get, the more stars we get, the more people go to Ricochet, and the more people join, and the more you ensure that we're here in perpetuity for the next midterms and the presidential after that, the midterms to follow. I'd also like to thank Warby Parker, Made In, ButcherBox, and Bowl & Branch. Join them all today because you'll get the best sheets, the best food, the best pots, cooking material, and the best glasses. So you'll look sharp, well-fed, well-rested. You can't beat it. Listen, if you will, if you like, to the best of Ricochet. It's hosted by some short guy from Minnesota, and you'll find it this weekend on Radio America Network. Check your local listings,

as we like to say. We hope that Brother Rob will be back with us next week. We and you'll find it this weekend on Radio America Network. Check your local listings, as we like to say. We hope that Brother Rob will be back with us next week. We hope you'll be back with us as well. Peter, it's been fun, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week. Dear God, hope you got the letter in.

I pray you can make it better down here. I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer. But all the people that you made in your image see them starving on their feet. Cause they don't get enough to eat from God. Can't believe in you. Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel that I should be loud and clear. We all need a big reduction in amount of tears. All the people that you made in your image Sit on a fight in the street

Cause I can't make opinions meet about God I can't believe in you Did you make disease and the diamond blue? Did you make mankind after we made you And the devil too Dear God, I don't know if you know this, but Your name is on all the quotes in this book That's crazy human's road And you should take a look

And all the people that you meet in your image Are still believing that joke is true Well I know it ain't so to you You're gone I can't believe it I don't believe in I don't believe in I won't believe in heaven and hell No saints, no sinners, no devil's world

No pearly gates, no thorny crown You're always letting us humans down The words you bring, the bait you draw Those lips that see and never find An ecstasy in the whole world round The words I see have to compound I found a certain holy ghost It's just like it's a lonely host

And if you're empty, you perceive That my heart's here upon the sea If there's one thing I've got to believe in It's you Dear Ricochet Join the conversation