The Ricochet Podcast - When Bureaucrats Gather

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Richard Epstein brings his encyclopedic knowledge to help break down some of the pivotal matters being debated in Congress and before the Supreme Court. Plus, James and Rob look back on the Covid lockdowns four years later, along with Minneapolis' move against Uber and Lyft. 

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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and me, James Lylex. Peter Robinson is out, and today we talked to Richard Epstein about, oh, TikTok, Supreme Court, EVs, you name it, we got it. So let's have ourselves a podcast. ByteDance has had to apologize in the past lobby against any action in the House and the Senate. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him in a foot... Excuse me. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast. It's number 684.

I'm James Lilacs in newly snowy Minneapolis. After a barren winter, we're getting dumped here, supposedly, on Sunday. Eight inches. Oy! Rob Long's in New York, where I assume the snow is long gone, and that there are hints of spring in the air, as are there won't in Gotham have a spring to their step. Eustace Tilly is looking at a butterfly through his monocle.

Wow, good Eustace Tilly reference. It's freezing, actually. It got cold, and so there's a lot of people wandering around looking baffled. This was not supposed to happen, but, you know. Well, you want baffled. You want baffled. Okay, let's talk baffled. I guess we're about at the four-year anniversary of that thing that happened, the whole shutdown.

And it's remarkable for me to look around the office and say that, you know, there's about four or five more people in today than there were four years ago when everybody went home for good. I get unaccountably angry when I start to think about this stuff again, about what we went through. And it doesn't happen. It doesn't help when the New York Times, for example, will have headlines like this. What the data says, or data, about pandemic school closures four years later. Now, gosh, I wonder.

I really wonder here. I'm stroking my chin. I've got an eyebrow-cocked Spock-like. Let's go to the cut line. The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And experts say extended closures did little to stop the spread of COVID. Imagine that. You take the entire school population population put them home behind a screen

and they're not learning as much as they do when they have to go someplace and sit in the class rob is is this is stunning a development to you as it is to me um no it's not a study development i mean obviously i'm torn between two things one is i feel like we need to keep reminding ourselves about um risk and what risk really is and we need to listen to experts and certainly this one expert that you and i know very well jay batacharya um and we need to be prepared i think in the future um to push back on this stuff i mean the way the way the world works we'll push back on it and it'll be something really terrible like ebola where we really should stay indoors you know right right we'll win the last

war but um as a sort of general um i don't know morality tale what we learned is that um uh people will people will will when when it can't when it can't when when your liberties are um truncated when you are um when the when the economy shut down when children are sent away from school and hospitals are essentially closed for to any anything other than covid when all that stuff comes, it comes from people trying to help you. It won't come from villains twirling their mustache. It'll come from people in a

lab coat with a stethoscope. It'll come from the people who really think they're doing the right thing. We tend to be scared of villains i think properly right and stalin's and hitler's they're terrible right but it seems like the 21st century is going to be about people trying to help me and save me and protect me and basically raise me like

a veal you know you know shoebox somewhere because who knows what you do otherwise i give everybody i give everybody a pass on the first month of this stuff when we didn't know i mean we didn't know i mean we did but we didn't know everything and it was an unfolding situation and it seemed it was not unreasonable to say hey right go home for a couple of weeks let's let's uh let's all just see but but two things. One, them, them, knowing from the start that these masks we were strapping around our face were inefficacious. And then making them a prerequisite for entering civilization, unless you had one of those things. Right, right. And two, the notion that it's two weeks to stop the spread was never what it was going to be.

They knew it was going to be longer than that. And so they defended those two things, and they did not tell us the truth because we couldn't handle the truth. We were just little children who would not behave properly. We'd rip off our masks and go face-free into the world, and then who knows what would happen. Right, right. then who knows what would happen right right so i mean in the first we were expecting having seen these horrible things in china you know with a tanks going down trucks going down the streets spraying bleach everywhere welding people into their apartments early videos of people dropping on the street dead we expected here in america that we would that they'd be stacked how like

cornwood and there would be death death death, death, death, death. Well, it didn't happen. I mean, what happened was we put old people into nursing, we put sick people into nursing homes and killed a lot of them. We intubated an awful lot of people. We put them in respirators, which turned out not to have been the right idea. But I got the feeling pretty early on

that this was not Ebola-level stuff. This was kind of like flu that we had before in 2008 because i remember we had a flu panic in 2008 um so it they will yes want to do something for our own good and the problem is that they seem they seems to have squandered the uh the goodwill that we gave to the last thing, the last institution that we really seem to trust with lab coat guys, the science guys. Right. Right. Well, I mean, you know, we can still trust them in a way. of your feelings of vaccine mandates or how the vaccine was sold it is incredibly amazing that we got a very effective um diminisher of covid symptoms medicine i'll just call it that uh in in a very short amount of time it suggests that when you

when you really put your mind to it you can can do some amazing things. Now, you may say it was artificially tested. All those things could be true. I'm not even litigating that. But I mean, I'm talking because one of the things I'm saying is that it happened so fast. And that's pretty good. And I think all those things are true about the external, you know, what happens in D.C. or what happens at the CDC or what happens where, you know, bureaucrats gather to make rules. Okay, that's true. But I think we need to do some, as citizens, need to do some sort of self-reflection. You know, it's a very good Lenten time. We have a week before Holy Week to do some reflection. What were we asking of our government? What were we asking of our bureaucratic overseers? And I think we were asking too much from them. I don't think that they were irrational in thinking that we wanted them to fix everything and we wanted them to do it quietly. And if that meant we had to curtail some of our freedoms, we were happy to do it. were freelancing here i think we have over time as a very rich society is a very rich country

have kind of let ourselves get a little flabby and we've decided that government's going to teach our kids and teach them everything and that the world's going to be safe and we're gonna you know if i if i buy a product and i use it wrong and it gives me an electric shock i get to sue we we have kind of decided that we wanted to live in a no risk situation and not pay any price for it um and so yes i think that there's a huge government overstep and i think the bureaucrats always take more than they need and take more than they are that they should be allowed to but um we've asked them to do a lot of stuff that our forebears would be shocked by, I think. I would disagree with the way you phrased that.

I don't think we asked them to do this. I think we acquiesced to an incremental series of diminutions of liberty and choice. We went along with it. We didn't ask anybody to put up do-not-trespass tapes around toys and seeds at a Walmart. Yeah. We didn't ask them to sticker on the floor six feet distance things, which is based on nothing. They knew it. We didn't ask them, could you please kindly shut down the hardware?

I used to have to go to that when I went to the hardware store. You couldn't go in. You couldn't go in like a man and just, you know, look at the bolts and the nuts and the rest of it and talk about this and get some popcorn out and pet the dog and all the other things we do at the hardware store. You couldn't go in. You couldn't go in like a man and just, you know, look at the bolts and the nuts and the rest of it and talk about this and get some popcorn out and pet the dog and all the other things we do at the hardware store. You had to go up to the front door, tell them what you wanted. Somebody would go in the back and see if they could get it and then bring it back. So you had this line on a weekend of these, you know, of tired men with their masks outside six feet apart. We didn't ask for any of that we asked them to be sensible and sensible stuff we would have followed but but the the total sudden we're

going to control all the things for your own benefit we didn't ask you especially covid yeah i i agree with that i agree with all that i just think that it was part i mean and i'm not excusing it i'm just trying to put a little bit of the onus on us i mean they're they didn't put um if you buy a bucket at home depot most of the bucket the exterior of the bucket are warnings that you could the children could drown in the bucket buy an army i i want one you got to call you got a home depot you buy a bucket it's an orange thing because it's dangerous a bucket and it says on the side and has a little picture of a kid bending over with his head in the bucket. Because I guess kids have drowned in buckets before. We somehow let ourselves get to a position where we were concerned that people didn't know how to use a bucket.

And that leads to, in an emergency, which I guess COVID was, a lot of like, it sets the table for a lot of bad stuff so i think yeah i get that we have to be willing to we have to be willing to live in a slightly more um uh unsupervised world uh then i think we have as americans which is natural the natural outcome of being you know rich and wealthy, and everything's great. You just get a little soft. Two things about that. One, I was taking out the garbage yesterday, and I got out a new bag, a new plastic bag, and as I was fitting it in, I saw, as usual, that it said on the side about this garbage bag, this is not a toy. And I thought Marcel Duchamp would really be happy to know that his idea caught on. No, of course not.

It's a shoe. Of course it's not a toy. But the second thing is, is you're right in that we have come to accept everything that we have now, which is basic civil order. And we do have civil order. I walk outside and there's not warlords out there extorting me to cross the street for a couple of doubloons. The buildings stand. I'm looking out the window. I see plumes of steam coming from the power plant, which means that it's generating power.

The elevator is going to work in the building here. The food will be available down at the pizza restaurant if I get it. Everything solidly works and is prosperous and is great. I'm in a marvelous office building a miracle of technology. There are guys tinkering away at the margins at it. I will drive home tomorrow in my car, which works on a street, which is fairly good, and everything works. When you grow up in that generation after generation, it becomes built into the people, I think, this idea that we have to focus on the one thing that bothers us the most, which is capitalism and once we get rid of that

everything will continue to work but it will be more pure and wonderful and without realizing of course that the very thing that they want to destroy is the very thing that makes all of this stuff possible and so yes we we are coasting on we you know we are shoving all of the seed corn into microwave bags as i like to say and raising a generation of people who have seemingly no idea what it took to get to this point and how much actually it takes to maintain it. So if that's related to what you just said, I hope it is, because that was my intention. Yeah, I suppose it's very related. I think that's all true. I would say, you know, it happens over time.

It happens slowly. I mean, I think that's all true. I would say, you know, it happens over time. It happens slowly. I mean, it just happens, you know. We just expect to walk out the door and everything be safe and clean. And if it's not, we want to sue somebody or hire a bureaucrat to make sure it is. The Roman bureaucrat who was taking time away from his scribes and his engraving of whatever the latest pointless law was, went down to the baths of Diocletian and was accustomed to being warm in the collidarium and cold in the frigidarium and the water would come out of the spouts and all the rest of it. And all those guys expected that to happen because there were guys who were galloping along the aqueduct,

however many miles away, to make sure that there wasn't something that got in there and impeded the flow of water. And when you get to the point where the Roman guy is trying to wash his hands and there's no water, and he doesn't know why. Yeah, right, right. That's when you're in trouble. Here's a chilling thing, and I know we've got to go to our guest, Richard Epstein, because I'm very excited to talk to him. We've got a bunch of things to talk about with him.

Here's the chilling thing I heard. And this goes back to the 70s, so you can't really blame it on anybody or any particular policy, but when you hear the phrase Three Mile Island, you think nuclear

power plant accident. You think, you know accident. You think radiation. It's not Chernobyl, but you think that something bad happened there. I have a friend of mine who's been in this business for a long time. They make Geiger counters and a bunch of other things, and they've got this company in Long Island for a long time. And his father started it. They're sort of of brainiac family

and he remembers as a kid being you know the state police coming to his house uh in the middle of the night and dragging his dad out of bed and saying we need you we need you um because there's been a disaster three mile island he was there at the very beginning and his what he says is the most amazing thing about Three Mile Island is that nothing happened. The plant was fine. Nothing leaked. Nothing broke. And this nothing that happened was enough to drive the country into hysteria. Depending on how many dominoes you want to like

tip over here i i like to tip them all over because i like i like stories so because of a nothing thing that happened that didn't happen and the outrageous hysterical reaction to a non-event we ended up not building any more nuclear power plants not making them better not building smaller smarter safer ones we ended up not building them at all relying more on the bad coal that we are that it's going to kill us all apparently but also more on foreign oil we handed over trillions of dollars to bad people who hate us and we said use this money wisely and they did they bought stuff and then they also supported al-qaeda and it was all because of a weird crackpot reaction to something that didn't happen um so there's a certain story there's a certain story. There's a certain COVID story, too. So that's my Friday moral for the day.

I read yesterday on Twitter, somebody was describing a program that Richard Nixon had proposed, which was to build a thousand nuclear reactors in America. A thousand. One thousand everywhere. Which today would supply 200% of the energy that America needs. But, of course, we can't have that because of Three Mile Island, because Jane Fonda made a movie, and all the rest of it. And we all got scared and wanted to go back to the sun because the sun is good. The sun is wonderful. The wind is good.

The wind is sweet. They're all morally – I know we've got to – Richard,ard before we do can i just say i i i did talk to a guy once a long time ago who was a you know you know on the right on our side stuff and he said and he's an engineer and he's a sort of another brainiac and he said you know the thing about it is that the sun probably will supply most of our energy when we figure out how to collect it and he had he said this this is a technological problem we haven't solved but if we do it could be amazing he said but of course that's you know maybe 50 60 70 100 years away but it is a simply a technological problem that we could

solve which then goes back to the idea like okay well then what are we teaching kids in school i hope we're teaching them about this stuff instead we are not teaching about this stuff we are teaching them about how gender is a construct rather than how to like collect the the power that comes to us for free of one billion trillion

gajillion nuclear explosions every second that's what the sun is apparently or something like that anyway there I'm done the important issues so maybe it was good that they were out of school for four years well moving right along we welcome now to the podcast a ricochet writer as a matter of fact one of our faves richard epstein lawrence a tish professor of law at new york university senior lecturer at the university of chicago and a senior fellow at the hoover institution richard thanks for joining us oh hello everybody um i wanted to the the University of Chicago and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Richard, thanks for joining us. Oh, hello, everybody. I wanted to, the EPA has got a

new rule that they've come out that's going to require the automakers to make lots of electric vehicles and hybrids and then slash carbon emissions from gasoline-powered models. Biden says he wants, you know, 60, 70 percent of it to be electric by 2034. This is a revocation of people's choice when it comes to the kind of automobile they want, and it has incredible ripple effects when you go through the infrastructure that we use to distribute gas throughout our cities and our country. Is there any legal thing that the opposition party can do to get around this, or are we powerless to just have this regulation reshape our lives? Well, I don't think anybody is going to be powerless. I mean, this is so sufficient. But

let's sort of take the simplest point. He's president until the end of this year, maybe another term. He's trying to dictate the policy that's going to exist up to 2035 and beyond. This is a classic illustration of governmental overreach trying to take away from the next generation its ability to do what this generation wants to do. So the first thing to remember is this is all being done by executive order. It's not being done by legislation. You get a Trump presidency and everything that's in place at this particular point is in fact going to disappear. It turns out January 21st is the most important day in any administration because what happens is the previous guys find that all their favorite stuff

is now going to be removed. Biden did that with respect to Trump when he took into office. And most of the Trump stuff is pretty good. Most of the Biden stuff is awful. So that's the first line is that you can't project. Secondly, on the legal side, there is right now this incredible debate going on about the scope of administrative law and what an agency can do and what a president can do. And the position that the Biden administration is taking is that any broad command to make

things better allows them to do anything that they want to do under any circumstances. It's pretty clear that that kind of rule will be gone as a matter of law by the end of this term. We don't know exactly how much it's going to be cut back, but the major questions doctrine and the West Virginia case and the Loper case, these are all cases which are dealing one way or another for the ability for unilateral actions to be taking place without the express authority of Congress. And so I think that that's going to be a serious charge. There's also, I think, going to be a serious kind of constitutional charge as to whether or not these regulations are actually confiscatory in the fact that they take huge amounts of invested capital that people have in certain technologies,

and they're saying you have to get rid of it. Why do you have to get rid of it? Well, what the administration doesn't know about global warming is the entire corpus of literature with respect to global warming. I mean, they are truly ignoramuses, and they can never quite ask themselves the question, if you decide to shut down on one technology technology what's going to happen with the ills that are associated with other kinds of technologies right solar energy is not the end all i mean if you were to look at the normal situation the same government says when you cover a plot of land one acre rather not one acre one square meter wide it turns out it's a form of pollution with respect to the circle and you have to get our approval to do it. Then when they cover the landscape with solar panels, which are much more damaging,

they say we ignore all the collateral damages that they start to take. So what's going to happen is somebody's going to file a suit and go through the entire litany of the new perils that you're introducing in the areas to stop the old one. And then you mentioned the stuff with respect to EVs and hybrids. Well, I think at this point, it's a pretty clear state to say that the electronic vehicle is doomed if it's going to be a sole situation. I know so many family incidents of people in my own family, right, who rented because they couldn't get anything else, an electronic vehicle, which stalled out on the road 40 miles with two small children in the back seat. You hobble into a station to get it charged.

One of the three stations is inoperable, and the other two have lines with three and four people in front of them. So it turns out that an hour and a half joint in a fossil fuel car is a three-hour wait at one of these tuning stations. And people will not tolerate that. Hybrids, you don't have to mandate a hybrid. If it makes some good sense, people are going to start to buy them. And in fact, in many cases, they do make good sense.

A hybrid in terms of its environmental degradation is much less dangerous than is an electric vehicle because the electronic vehicles require that you get rare earths, and this requires a huge amount of mining, which creates all sorts of runoff slag and old-fashioned pollution. If you could cut that down by a factor of 20, you know, 20-fold and get 5% of it and have gasoline and shift back between the two of them, it's a dominant solution. And you've seen all the rental car companies, right?

They're dumping their electronic vehicles because nobody wants to drive those miserable things. And so this is the third situation that you have said that we don't want to import natural gas to foreign countries. Well, that means you have to shut down many of the wells. That means that the people in the business have to be out of business. And it means that all the people who get royalties for the work that's done on their land will go without royalties. These things will not go unnoticed in an election. And already Biden has shown some signs of backing off on this stuff. And my guess, the political pressures will lead him to do more. What is so problem about these guys, they're all ideologues of the worst nature. They never see any trade-off. They only see

everything in terms of black and white. And when they even talk about global warming, you looked at the securities regulation. It's striking there isn't a single number in that entire litany of wrongs that are taking place. What they simply do under these circumstances, they get up there and say, we have to save the planet from carbon dioxide. And they never ask the following question. Given the total emissions and the responses in places like China, if you cut down with disclosures by X percent of American pollution, if, how much is going to result in climate change? The answer is probably over the next 50 years, it's 0.01 percent the degree that's going to happen for billions of dollars. There's no sense of the trade-offs and no awareness of the fact that every time the United States decides to pull back, the Chinese

are going to say, there's less of a problem because they're not doing anything. We might as well fill up the void. This is an administration which is tone deaf and completely uninformed about the way things go. And I do think that they're going to face a fierce political reaction. It's already happening in Pennsylvania.

It will happen in other kinds of states where this is sensitive. And I hope that they will return to their senses. But let me mention one other thing, which I think is always the case. What happens is when people start talking about fracking, they say, do you remember what happened in 2009 or 2011? And the answer is, yes, we do. If you then look forward, the question you have to understand is that these are manageable technologies in which the advances are simply enormous. So that basically speaking, in a 10 year period, every major kind of environmental hazard that's associated with fracking is reduced by an order of magnitude.

So it used to be 100. It's now going to be 10. And you don't want to ignore all these huge changes and advances. It's much more difficult to have an advance with respect to solar energy or with respect to wind, because the basic problem of storage is one that they cannot solve in any feasible way. I have a friend named Buddy Francis who runs this site called the Manhattan Contrarian. And what he does all the time is he says, this is what you have to do in order to make these conversions work. And it's just simply crazy. So I tried the experiment myself. Take your cell phone that's got a little battery in it, disconnect it, and see what happens to the amount of leakage that takes place. And it turns out in this ideal environment,

if you don't charge it, within a day or two, you've lost half your power. Well, you're trying to store solar energy or wind energy for six months, period. I mean, you have to spend more energy to keep the thing from disappearing than you're worth. I don't know how to store fossil fuel energy. I put it in a bucket, shut the door, and make sure that it doesn't blow up so this is in fact an inexcusable inexcusable set of tragedies that are being forced upon us on this issue trump is better on other issues i dare not say well i wish you had some opinions on that matter rich i'm sorry oh i've never had a warm-up yeah can we um can we shift from energy just a little just a bit a bit there are two sort of issues now that i think are maybe related maybe not related they're vaguely first amendment one

is um uh murthy versus missouri yes um and the other is tiktok um you make me smile i uh i'm i'm i'll just start with the second one first i am sympathetic to the argument that the communist government in china is terrible and needs to be stood up to and curtailed and um punished for its overreach but i'm also sympathetic to the idea that um uh people have to do what they do and like the idea of banning of an app seems like a mistake and a violation of first amendment etc etc um it depends on what just thinks going on and um I think you're looking at it from the wrong end of the barrel, as it were. I have no doubt that much of the speech that takes place on a site like TikTok or anywhere else is fully protected in terms of what it hopes to do and so forth. that wants to engage in disinformation campaigns can find lots of other vehicles through which to do it so that shutting down tiktok is not going to stop that particular element unless the rest of the media world decides to take up to it that's not the concern that one has with tiktok

the concern that one has with tiktok and i cannot verify is that these people collect enormous amounts of information about everybody who works on this system. And that the company that operated was said, oh, we'll keep our operations out of China. And I don't believe the Chinese when they make any promise about anything. And I think this has to be done against that background that they're completely disreputable trading partners.

And so if they can continue to amass this information, the real risk to security is at the back end where they collect information and data. Think about what the American views is on that. We are absolutely freaked out about privacy, and rightly so. And so what we do is we have all sorts of rules that put various kinds of walls to make sure that information which is collected from one program cannot be used for another. They won't do anything of that particular sort. So the position that we took in this country, which is sell this off to an independent operator and let them do it and you get paid for it, they won't even talk about that because if they do create that kind of separation, the primary benefit for them

is going to be lost because they won't be able to do data harvesting on a massive scale so you're but you're focusing on only one issue which i which i understand which is the data the data harvesting problem yeah um but more often than not when i'm looking at the sort of certainly the congressional and the sort of media debates it's about propaganda it's about the CHICOMs are going to distort. This is not an argument that I care about. Really? The propaganda argument is a serious argument, but it's not unique to Tic Tac. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, every one of our media companies has an enormous problem.

You mentioned the stuff that's going on in the Biden case with respect to the supervision. That's a classic illustration of disinformation being put forward by our government. Only in this particular case, it turns out to be our own. And I thought the Supreme Court was much too kind when they said, well, it's all a matter of government speech. Well, it's not all a matter of government speech, because these were not public statements of policy. They were private threats and private promises to carriers. And I regard that as utterly unacceptable in a democratic state. But going back to Tic Tac, it's the back end that really matters. And in terms of the free speech, what happens if they decide to pull the apparatus from the United States, another platform which has the same operating characteristics will come into place and all of

a sudden you can have the same kinds of videos that made the place so popular to begin with and so i think the free speech can migrate and therefore we ought to comment most seriously on the question of how much is this a threat and here rob i mean the thing i wanted to say which i think is always true under these cases what makes this so hard is all the relevant information is to some extent classified. And if it's classified, it's not really perfect for public debate. And I don't like having to trust public officials on anything. And so if you ask me, what my basic argument is, I am relying on the following grim prior. The Chinese have never respected any form of privacy, never respected any form of privacy,

never respected any form of intellectual property, have always engaged in hostile activities against every company that tries to do business in there. They steal secrets right and left. I just don't think they're a trustworthy actor. And so therefore, I think, look, either you sell it off,

which the speech can survive, or if you want to keep it, we'll find some other platform. They will not sell it off, because if they had you sell it off, which the speech can survive, or if you want to keep it, we'll find some other platform. They will not sell it off, because if they had to sell it off, they probably could not even purge the algorithms that they have in there of their insidious qualities. In fact, I'd even go so far to say is that they sold the whole thing off. They're going to be bugging the stuff that they're sending to us, and you have to go through a massive disinfectant program to make sure that there aren't some moles that are built into the software which could then

relay some information back to the chinese through some back channel i mean my level of distrust is total and so the question i'm going to ask you is now given what you've seen in the taiwan straits and what you've seen everywhere else with the you guys and so forth is there any reason to believe a single word that any chinese official states i don't have said this 15 years ago but i i sort of agree with you but can i can i can i just pitch this idea to you that i haven't even thought through so you can shoot it down instantly is that if we believe uh in the idea of free trade, that free trade is generally a good thing. Yes. If it's fair and free, right? Meaning no one's putting their thumb on the scale. Couldn't you maybe waggishly or in a troll-like fashion say to the Chai Coms,

look, TikTok's fine. You can keep it. You just have to open it up in china just have to let chinese people use it freely no this is all that would mean they have another group that could spy on in another way look one of the things about free trade and this was quite by accident when i was at hoover about 10 years ago i i chanced to meet somebody, my friend, who was going to talk about free trade in the military national security issue. And it was a non-classified conference, and they allowed me to attend.

And the moment you sit there, you realize that nobody in the military is a free trader. If what you mean by that expression is they say you take a military stuff that's made by a grumman airport company, and you sell it to whoever wants to buy it so you sit there and you start to listen to the kinds of stuff that they talk about there's no such thing as just selling it to somebody sold on all sorts of elaborate conditions these are conditions that are not imposed by the vendor necessarily they're often imposed by the united states government which says this country doesn't rate this kind of technology. And what you see is that there are restrictions on use, restrictions on how these things are modeled,

restrictions on how they're going to be upgraded in one form or another, so that agreements that are made with respect to military hardware are in fact subject to reams of investigation of one form or another. It is generally not appreciated, including by me in some sense, is to just how convoluted licensing agreements are and sales agreements are when you're dealing with sensitive technology. The definition of a sale is simply saying I'm going to use something in exchange for a money consideration called the price, and buying a newspaper is a sale, as is buying a piece of military hardware. But there the similarity ends. And so the problem that you have in this field is if every other kind of technology, which is adaptable for military purposes, can be subject to export

restrictions in what I would regard as a legitimate exercise of national security, then one of these platforms, which is a doppelganger and works in both ways, has to be treated more or less in the same kind of way. And what this does, unfortunately for us, is that it means you have to trust the judgment of people who put in these positions to see just how much of stuff you're going to sell and how much not. So take the United States' fraught relationship with Israel, right? We sell them a lot of stuff. They sell us a lot of stuff. But one of the things that they have is sharing agreements of information about all the stuff that's sold back and forth across these particular lines. And you'll make that agreement with some countries. You'd never make them with other countries under these

circumstances. And it's very common for some to say, look, you're doing this. You want our material stuff? We're going to give you the B package, we're not going to give you the A package and then they'll negotiate up and down on all these items, changing the price and changing the security. So I don't think the free trade model works particularly well. It works well with steel, right? I mean, you don't want to have Mr. Biden putting a national security kibosh on the deal with Nippon to take over U.S. Steel, which is designed to placate certain resentments in his party and his coalition. But this stuff, I'm afraid, I mean, I wrote a book called Simple Rules for a Complex World, and I really believe in that book.

But there's also another book to be written about exceptions to simple rules. And it turns out whenever there's uncertainty about the future use of force, it's always an analysis of two different kinds of errors that you have to deal with, right? And so when you're dealing with all of these trade situations, is the gain from trade worth the security risk that's being traded? And whenever you do these kinds of analyses, they have to be done at the margin. And whenever they're done at the margin, you're going to have honest disputes by competent peoples to what should be done. In my case, in this case, I don't think TikTok is close to the line because this is not somebody whom we'd sell any military equipment to voluntarily. And so if we get military stuff repackaged as disguised usage of back-end data, I think we have to be

much more careful about it. I can't be conclusive about this, and I know that there's some opposition in the Senate. I think there's going to have to be a lot of public and private deliberations on it, but I do not think that the bipartisan result that you got in the House could be easily attributed to partisan politics. If I may interject for a second before Rob gets in, because I know Rob wants to ask more about the Supreme Court decisions. The problem with TikTok might be, even if we buy it and you talk about purging the algorithms, that's true. It's not the fact that it collects data and sends it back to China that worries a lot of people. It's the fact that it is sort of a brain worm transmission device

that the Chinese have exquisitely tweaked in order to platform the worst sort of aspects of American society and the worst sort of silly, frivolous nonsense that we fritter away our time staring at our glowing rectangles while the Chinese kids themselves are looking at TikTok versions that tell them to go to school and be good at math and be patriotic uh and if we were talking before you got on here about how we as a society have sort of willingly put ourselves in a position of softness if we got tiktok back and put it into american hands and somebody came up with a competitor that said

we are the wholesome alternative to tiktok it would fail because people want to go to the carnival and see the geeks and the fat lady in the bearded lady and the rest of it is my thought anyway that that's that's so yes i mean you're right i mean the single most important thing about education in the united states and has become standalicious at great universities. And the DEI movement is about to basically destroy huge amounts of what goes on. I am just utterly shocked at the kinds of stuff that I read, which I regard as just intellectual dribble, having huge influences in a major American university. But this is a problem that goes far beyond Tic Tac.

What it is, is we've created a system in which the diversity culture is so powerful that anybody who wants to teach science is science is no longer regarded as progressive or enlightened i mean this man named stanley goldfarb who has an operation called do not harm who described the experiences he had before he was fired at the university of pennsylvania when they tried to make sure that pathology was in the curriculum. And all these characters wanted the tools to talk about underserved minorities and so forth. And the odd thing about it is you're disturbing everybody in this particular world if you

spend your time talking about that. Because what medicine is often about is making incremental advances in technologies that are hugely important in the way in which things run. So let me just give you a simple example of what you want to do in medicine. You have to take care of old people, and they need to take a pill diet. And if you have to give the same pill five times a day, it's going to take a nurse's aid, and there are going to be huge numbers of errors. Then there's going to be somebody saying, well, I missed a dose, I'll double the dose, and that's probably a mistake. And you get all sorts of things. Somebody comes along with a one-a-day pill, and it turns out that the service obligations are cut by 90%, and the reliability goes up by 90%. But that's when

you want to help poor people, and you want to help folks. What you need to do is to get yourself technologies in which the ability to transmit the technologies to individuals for use is going to be facilitated, which will reduce the need that you have to have for attendant care with respect to elderly people and increase the reliability of the transmission. So what's going on here is you just basically kill our heroes. I mean, my friend Jeff Flyer, libertarian, used to be the dean of Harvard. And the moment he left, the new dean came in and I think it was a she. What they did is they looked at all the great pictures of the scientists

on the wall. They noticed all white males. And so they take them all off. And they say, well, how can an Asian woman work in that environment? Well, this is how you work in that environment. See those guys up there? If you work really hard, maybe you could be on that same ship. And you want to join them. You don't want to pretend that they don't exist.

So we have a culture of mediocrity. I've been told, and I suspect it's true, that one of the problems that Boeing has with respect to its engineering is that it has a DEI program. And there is no place for that kind of stuff when you're dealing with human lives and safety. And if you want to look at PG&E, it wins all the diversity awards, but every kind of product that they try to make is subject to all sorts of difficulties. And then you have the government. And they put the state on fire, yeah. And then you put the state on fire. The same thing in Hawaii. These are all sorts of situations where sound husbandry is not practiced, and that anytime something happens, you never attribute it to human management. You always attribute it to global warming, even in times when the temperatures are going down. It's not going to be one-tenth of a degree that's going to explain a tenfold increase in the destruction of wildlife and so forth. It's human management. And, you know, one of the nice

things is that one of the congressmen said, look, I'm going to show you two air photographs. One of the Koch lands from Georgia Pacific. And these are immaculate and they're always taken care of. And then you look at the government land, which specializes in leaving dead wooden places kindling for future fire. And where do the fires start? They start in the place where nobody actually tends to the forest, saying that nature must take its course. What we have to do is to completely rethink the way in which we take our stuff and to remember that excellence and merit are the only things that produce long-term improvements with the overall operation of a system. And we don't do that. And so, I mean, you look at the president,

it's terrible. One of the other areas that I work in, unfortunately, has to do with military stuff. I'm proud to say that I am. Now, a lawyer who's suing Joe Biden, again, shall we say, well, because what he's done is he replaced all the experts on the various military service boards on the grounds that they didn't agree with his politics. So he threw somebody like H.R. McMaster off one of these committees so he could put one of his trolls in their place. And it's completely illegal by any standard.

And we got a Trump judge who wrote an absurd opinion saying, well, the president's entitled to have the people he wants to advise him when the statute says they have to be bipartisan and independent in the way in which they start to operate. Well, what's happened to the service academy? Well, it turns out the alumni, which used to be the source of the next generation, fierce family inheritance, they basically are disgusted with this. The enlisted men are reduced.

And so we have an army which is getting weakened in terms of average caliber of its performance. And then we got a president who's sufficiently wise to say, in world of the most dangerous situation we'll project power by reducing our force this is not a sustainable situation that we have and i'm afraid that what you're seeing here with tiktok is the tip of a tiny a tiny tip of a very large iceberg in which it turns out the virtues that I grew up with and which drove my life when I was young, people said to me, we don't love you. You want to do something, perform. And they basically said, if you fail, you're not going to make it. And if you succeed, you are. And my father always used to tell me, he says, never sit on your laurels. And that's an expression where after you win a horse race, put the laurels out and you sit on them. And he always said to tell me he says never sit on your laurels and that's an expression where after

you win a horse race put the right out you sit on right and he always said to me you're only good as what you did yesterday and that's the way i was raised and you know what it made it really made a difference it put the fear of god in me from the time i was 10 years old and it has basically worked but if you say to everybody, don't you worry about your failures because we have failed you. And therefore, what we must do when we work in this situation is to make you feel happy and secure

in your environment so that you don't have to face any antagonism or discord. What you're doing is you're setting up people for failure. And that's what we are doing in the United States. And this administration is doing it. The entire educational establishment, at most part, is more interested in comfort than it is in excellence. And I have to tell you, if you don't feel pain when you're doing your work, you're not working hard enough. That's terrible news.

It's terrible news. I mean, at the time in my life, I've always had to face that rock. Do you notice any pushback on that? I guess what I would say is that one, I mean, maybe it's a tiny little green shoot. I'm not sure how to take it. But during one of the many things that happened during the lockdowns, or during the school closures, I should say, is parents started to notice just how bad the teaching was. And then when COVID was essentially licked and over and subdued properly, and we kind of knew that school children were not in any danger, the schools remained closed in a lot of places.

Union pressure. And it felt to me like, okay, this is the moment for school choice. This is the moment for a more independent, more entrepreneurial, more parent-driven, more market-driven movement in education. Did you feel that way? Do you see that happening? Oh, yes. Because it seems to me like the answer to all the questions we're talking about, right? The answer to the question about technology, the answer to the question

about health, the answer to the question about excellence starts somewhere in school with a rigorous, thoughtful, the kind of education that you had in New York City. In PS161 in 1948 okay well i was i was gonna i was gonna name the year but okay that's yeah right yeah that's right right yes sir miss

lipman told me how to carry numbers so you know i still remember my teachers with the greatest respect because what they did is they taught me to do it and i think what you're really seeing here is the huge blue versus red chasm all of the school choice movements that you see are taking place in red states and they're very effective all the tax reductions are taking place there all the educational innovations are taking care and it's not just charter schools which are fine in many ways, although the conditions can be fatal. What happens is people all do like shadow schools of themselves. So I want to homeschool my kid, and you want to homeschool your kid. Well, that's not going to work very well. So 10 parents get together, they get a set of materials that are supplied by a homeschool authority, and they rotate the instruction amongst themselves. The question is whether you want to test them. Fine,

test them. They're going to outperform public school kids every time. They're not going to get the sort of deceptions about social promotions that teachers are willing to give because parents really care about their welfare of their own children. And so I think all of that is good. It's what changed the election right in Virginia when we had the Gutterisch fight a couple of years ago. So there are, what it is is there are huge classing forces. The political dynamic, however, is very unstable for two reasons. One, this is highly

dichotomous. There is no overlap. The most liberal Republican is more conservative than the most conservative Democrat and vice versa. So you get much more things. And also, I mean, it's hard to find a middle position between the two narratives of the way in which the United States is going. And therefore, what happens is anytime you have reform, it's going to be contentious if it's done

at the national level, and it's going to be fairly good or very bad if it's done at the state level. I mean, everything that's happened in New York City with respect to education and so forth, it's not so good. And so parents are leaving. People vote with their feet. There are very few people moving from Texas to California or from Florida to California. And the reason is that in the one state, what happens is the public has failed them. But you have in California a governor who's very elegant, very rich, very suave, and very uninformed. And what he does is he's able to push these terrible programs through. They all backfire, and then it's always the same explanation.

The problem we had with the failure of our last housing program is very simple. What went wrong in that particular case was that we didn't do enough. If we had done more, we would have done it better. And so when you do... We didn't spend enough. We didn't spend enough. We didn't do this. The expenditures bear no relationship to the performance in the education. Much of it is monopoly rents that go to teachers. And so you look at a charter school, and the cost per pupil is basically about half of what it is in a public school, and the performance levels are higher. Well, the thing to do with

that is to say, well, they are basically siphoning off the best of our kids, and we have to shut this down so we can have the able kids remain in the public school system as poor. But of course, that's not the way it works. Even if you have random selection for charter schools, they always outperform the public schools. My son, for many years, actually worked in this space, and he would tell the kind of story that actually tears your heart in two. There would be two kids. One was in a charter school, and one was in a public school. The charter school kid was nine, and the public school kid was 12. And it was a nine-year-old who was trying to teach math to his older brother or sister. Why was that?

Because of the failure inside the public school system. I mean, if we don't basically turn our heart on failure and try to do those things that work, we will always turn out to be worse off than we could otherwise be. I mean, I find this very sad in many ways. When I went to Columbia College, I had an education that was world class.

It wasn't because we had very fancy dormitory rooms or desks or anything of the sort. It's just that we had a shared commitment to excellence. And I can still remember, you know, I wasn't sure what I was going to write for Mr. A. Kent Hyatt on my first essay when I was 17 years 17 year old define what a professional is and you know what happens is it's now 60 years later and i still think about that same question that was put to me when i was a freshman and that's right the problem is richard you don't understand it's not about a commitment to excellence is about a commitment to equity which people believe it necessarily leads to excellence but it's a whole different definitional structure.

It doesn't lead to excellence at all. It leads to coddling. Or it leads to basically telling gifted kids you can't advance because poor kids can't. We actually have to go. Why don't you write about that at this Ricochet site?

I do want to hear what you had to do in first grade. Yes. Tell us what you had to do. It was a class of 36 kids with one teacher, Mrs. Lippman. And no teacher can teach 36 kids, right? But the class discipline was so strong, what she told me when I was pretty good at math, will you help Stevie learn his fractions?

And so I'd march over to the table and teach one of my classmates that kind of stuff. It was not uncommon. No, of course. To basically do that. And, you know, it was appreciated on both sides. I mean, he liked the help, and I liked the sense of being able to help somebody else. And so you never have a discipline problem.

Richard, thanks today for the wide-ranging conversation. It's been a delight. It was great. I love it. And we'll see you back at Ricochet. Take it easy. Okay, great. Take care, guys. Thanks, Richard.

Bye-bye. Sayonara. Did you do that in first grade? I think we did that in first grade. Well, what was that? Helping people? Yeah, you had to go. I think at some point, they would put us in little tables.

You had to work together. I think that was... I got broken out though in first grade because i could read better than some of the other kids and so i had i had a set of books that were the next level up so everybody else got to read everybody else communal stories that they were talking about and i was sitting back there you know the smart kid with the glasses who had to uh to read this other stuff well before my heart goes out to little Stevie, though. I mean, I love Richard, and I think it was great that he did it,

but I think little Stevie must have thought at some point when he saw Richard approaching his desk, like, oh, no. Let me just, can I just, can I just stay in my ignorance just a little bit? Well, before we go, we should probably, yeah, I think some things we could talk about here, I suppose. Minneapolis has decided to do away with Lyft and Uber by raising the prices, which is interesting because I myself have stopped using Uber because the prices have become ridiculous and have gone back to traditional cabs because they're better. So, you know, I'm kind of on the fence about this. But again, it's tackling the important things.

Still legal in New York, right? You still can get an Uber in New York. Are they so entrenched that there's absolutely no thought that anybody would try to get rid of them? Well, I don't, I mean, think about the great contribution of Uber and Lyft was they made the taxi cabs better. Taxi cabs in New York City are much, much better

than they would have been without competition. Competition was good. It's not quite as easy to do the workaround with a taxi that you can with an Uber, where you sort of set your destination and then you can go. They'll figure that out, I think. It still is really popular. But I'll tell you, here's a very twee example

um there was a specific kind of hell in paris trying to get a taxi in the old days you had to call the kid either find the taxi the rank that was somewhere around or you had to call a number and that number nobody ever answered you were never sure the taxi was coming this was just horrible um i know i understand these are first world problems uh but then um along came uber and the taxi companies at least in paris responded by making a much better uber like i i was just i was in paris for a few days before i went to morocco and um you know you getting a taxi is the easiest thing in the world. It's so much easier than anything else. It is an app.

You just tell it where you are and the taxi comes. It's like Uber, but it's not. It's a taxi. It's cheaper. And it's so much better. And, like, so I feel like the competition was good um the problem with it with all the problem uber and lyft in in sort of very liberal things is the problem in general with the idea of the of the gig economy right that you are um you're kind of working on your own and there aren't that many safeguards

etc etc um and that could be true i don't i really don't take i don't know enough about what it's like to work for those companies except to say that people seem to want to work for these companies and that should indicate that they're not onerous or hideous what's interesting about the gig economy i think is that a lot of people in that who are in that economy not just uber and lyft maybe doordash or maybe whatever kind of like freelancing thing they do is they're discovering just how high their taxes are because they got to pay them themselves and there is something about that magic pay stub you get that's magically has it removed and it hurts a little bit when you get it but if you just you just focus on the number on the check you don't notice what the government takes out but if you have to write a check to the government every pay period or every quarter or every year.

You should. Yeah. Yeah. You start to notice just like how bad it is, I think. And there's the war against the 1099 economy, the war against the people who are independent contractors because they believe that they're all being exploited. That nobody in this, nobody has volition. Nobody has agency in all of these things that we're all just at the pawns and the mercy of. Yes, indeed, competition making things better.

You would think, to go back to what we were saying before, that the charter schools would make the public schools better, that they would redouble their efforts on excellence and discipline. But, well, hey, we've covered a lot of ground here, and that's what we do at Ricochet, either on the main feed, which anybody can read, and a schmo can walk through the door and see it. Even the Chinese communists. Even the Chi-coms. Do it because, A, you will find a community that you've been waiting for, looking for all your life on the Internet. And, B, you'll be helping Ricochet thrive and prosper from election to election to election.

This podcast brought to you by the Ricochet Audio Network. And if you go to the site, you will see exactly how many fantastic podcasts there are. Not just the flagship, which will be back next week with Peter Robinson, but might I add the diner where i actually just talk for 35 minutes until i'm so sick of the sound of my voice that i have to leave i can i just can i just jump in i know i'm in you you don't talk it's a sound it's a sound experience it's not just you talking there's there's like you create a whole thing it's a it's it's a it's a audio theater it's fun it great it is and i have a great producer who gives us part of that but it's it's a it's a audio theater it's fun it great it is and i have a great producer who gives us part of that but it's it's lots of fun the diner i've actually

been writing about and talking from the diner for decades going back to college actually going back to the 80s so this is a place with which i'm well familiar anyway you folks this is your first podcast go back and read about or listen to about 683 more of them and we'll talk to you next week five star review at Apple Music would be really great. I know you're not going to do it. I've been begging you for years, but this might be the time when guilt finally throws a dart at your heart and you go

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