It's a loyalty you. If you have to acknowledge you want to be here,
ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can
do for your country. Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the
Ricochet Podcast with Rob long and me, James Lollax. 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 apps. It's a podcast.
By Dance has had to apologize in the past for failing to follow appropriate
political control from the CCP. And we also have major American investors who have
billions on the line having invested in ByteDance, that are now using that money
to lobby against any action in the House in the Senate. America is a
nation that can be defined in a single word. How the foot, excuse
music? Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast. It's number six hundred
and eighty four. I'm James Lelyax in newly snowy Minneapolis. After a barren
winter, We're getting dumped here supposedly on Sunday eight inches. Oh. Rob
Longs in New York, where I assume the snow is long gone, and
that there are hints of spring of the air. People are as are there
there won't in Gotham have a spring to their step. Eustace Tilly is looking
at a butterfly through his monocle. Wow, good, useless Tilly reference.
It's freezing, actually got cold. And so there's a lot of people wandering
around looking baffled like this was not supposed to happen. But you know,
well you want baffled, you want baffled. Okay, let's stay, 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 want through and it doesn't happen. It doesn't help when the
New York Times, for example, we'll have headlines like this, what the
data says, oor data about pandemic school closures? Four years later? Now,
gosh, I wonder, I really wonder here, I'm stroking my chin,
stroking my chin. I's 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, 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 this is
stunning a development to you as it is to me. No, it's not
a study development. I mean, obviously I'm tormenting two things. One is,
I feel like we need to keep reminding ourselves what happened so that we
remember that often the the initial response of our you know, of the bureaucrats
who sort of could it turns out how a enormous amount of control we we
question. But the second thing is, we just need to educate ourselves about
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 Baticharia,
and we need to be prepared, I think, in the future to
push back on this stuff. I mean, the way the way the world
works will push back on it, and it will be something really terrible.
Like you, we really should stay indoors, you know, right right the
way we will win the last war. But as a sort of general I
don't know, morality tale. What we learned is that people will. People
will will when when when it caught, When it caught, when when your
liberties are truncated, when you are when the when the economy shut down,
when children are sent away from school and hospitals are essentially closed to any anything
other than COVID. When all that stuff comes, it comes from people trying
to help you. It won't come from, you know, villains twirling their
mustache. It will come from people in a lab coat with a stethoscope.
It will come from the people who really think they're doing the right thing.
Right. We tend to be, we tend to be. I think we
tend to be scared of villains. I think properly right, and Stalins and
Hitler's they're terrible, right. But it seems like the twenty first 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 shoe box somewhere,
because who knows you do otherwise I give everybody up. 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, go home for a couple of weeks,
let's let's let's all just see. But two things. One them them they
knowing from the start that these masks were strapping around our face were in efficacious,
and then making them a a prerequisite for entering civilization unless you had one
of those things. 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 whoever so, I
mean, in the first we were expecting having seen these things in China,
you know, with the 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. Well it didn't happen. I mean, what happened
was we put old people into nursing with sick people into nursing homes and killed
a lot of them. We intubated in an awful lot of people, put
rest, 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 yeah, kind of like flu that we'd had
before in two thousand and eight, because I remember we had a flu panic
in two thousand and eight. So it they will, yes, want to
do something for our own good. And the problem isn't that they seem they
seem to have squandered the good will that we gave to the last thing that
the last institution that we really seem to trust with the lab code guys,
the science guys, right right right, Well, I mean, you know,
we can still trust them in a way, right, I mean,
irrespective of your feelings of vaccine mandates or how the vaccine was sold, it
is incredibly amazing that we got a very effective diminishure of COVID symptoms medicine,
I'll just call it. That in a very short amount of time. Suggests
that when you, when you really put your mind to it, you can
do some amazing things. Now you may say, was it's officially tested,
all those things could be true. I'm not even litigating that, but I
mean I'm talking because I'm One of the things I'm saying is that it happened
so fast, and that's pretty good. Uh. And I think all those
things are true about the external you know, what happens in DC or what
happens at the CDC, or what happens where bureaucrats gather to make ru Okay,
that's true. Well, I think we need to do some as citizens,
need to do some self reflection. You know, there's a very good
Lenten time we have a week before a holy week to do some reflections.
What were we asking of our government? What were we asking of our 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 like curtail some of our freedoms, we were happy to do
it. I don't think they were. I don't think they 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, by buy a product and I use it wrong and it gives me
an electric shock. I get to sue. We have kind of decided that
we wanted to live in a no risk situation and not pay any price for
it. And so, yes, I think that there's a huge government overstep,
and I think the bureaucrats always take more than they need to take,
more than they are that they should be allowed to. But we've asked them
to do a lot of stuff that our four bears would be shocked by.
I think I would disagree that where you phrase 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
them. 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 stick her
on the floor six feet distance things, which is based on nothing. They
knew it. We didn't ask them if could you please kindly shut down the
heart. I used to have to go to the when I went to the
hardware store. You couldn't go in. You can 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 apart because we didn't
ask for any of that we asked them to be sensible, and sensible stuff
we would have followed. But the totally sudden we're going to control all the
things for your own benefit, we can't apecially COVID. Yeah, 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 didn't put
If you buy a bucket at hump Depot, most of the bucket, the
exterior of the bucket are warnings, uh huh, that you could that children
could drown in the bucket. I want what you got to You got a
home depot, You buy a bucket. It is 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 sets the table for a lot of bad stuff. So we
have to be willing to we have to be willing to live in a slightly
more uh unsupervised world that I think we have as an Americans, which is
natural, the natural outcome of being rich and successful and wealthy and everything's great.
You get a little you just get a little little soft Two things about
that. One, I was taking out of the garbage yesterday and I got
out a new bag, new plastic bag, and I was fitting it in.
I saw, as usual that it's sat on the side about this garbage
bag. This is not a toy. And I thought, and I thought
Marcel Duchamp would really be happy to know that his idea caught on. No,
is not a toy. But the second thing is is you're right,
and that we have come to accept everything that we have now, which is
basic civil order. And we have civil order. I walk outside and there's
not warlords out there extorting me to cross the street for a couple of doubloons.
That 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 don't. Everything solidly works and is prosperous
and is great. I'm in a marvelous office building, a miracle of technology
there, tinkering away with 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 that 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
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 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 do, 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, it was fray
related. Fray related, I think all about I mean, I think that's
all true. I would I would say, you know, it happens over
time, happens slowly, doesn't. I mean, it just happen. It's
kind of we 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. The Roman bureaucrat who was
taking time away from the you know, from his inscribes 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 in the calidarium and cold and the frigid
areum, 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 main 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, right, right, that's when you're in trouble. Here's a chilling
thing. I know. We got to go to our guest, Ridgeda Seine,
because I'm very excited to talk to him. I got a bunch of
things talk about with him. Here's here's the chilling thing I heard. And
this goes back to the seventies. So you can't really blame it on anybody
or any particular you know policy. But when you hear the phray three Mile
Island, you think nuclear power plant accident. You think you know radiation,
and you know it's not Chernobyl, but you think that's something bad happened.
There of a friend of mine who's he's been in this business for a long
time and they make geig your counters, a bunch of other things, and
they've got this company in Long Island for one time and his father started it.
They're sort of brain act family. And he remembers as a kid being
the state police coming to his house in the middle of the night and dragging
his dad out of bed and saying, we need you, we need you
because there's been a disaster three Mile Island. He was there at the very
beginning, And 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 thing, this, this nothing that happened was enough to drive
the country into hysteria. And to how many dominoes you want to like tip
over here? 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 anymore
nuclear power plants, not making them better, not building smaller, smarter,
safer ones. We ended up not building them at all. Rely 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 use this money wisely. And they did,
they bought stuff, and then they also supported Alcata And it was all
because of a weird crackpot reaction to something that didn't happen. So there's a
certain story. There's a certain COVID story too. So that's that's my that's
my Friday. Morrow for the day. I read yesterday on Twitter somebody was
describing a program that Richard Nixon had proposed, which was to build one thousand
nuclear reactors in America, a thousand, one thousand everywhere, which today would
supply two of the energy that America needs. 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 got to Richard before we do it, to say I did talk
to a guy once a long time ago who was you know, you know,
on the right, on our side stuff. And he said, and
he's an engineer, and he's aid, sort of another brainiac, and he
said, you know, the thing bad 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 fifty sixty seventy hundred years the way, but
it is a simply a technological problem that we could solve, which then goes
back to the idea of 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 power that comes to
us for free of one billion, trillion jillion nuclear explosions every second. That's
what the sun is apparently, or something like that. Anyway, 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 out of the
podcast Becauchet writer. As a matter of fact, one of our faves,
Richard Epstein. Lawrence a Tish professor of law at New York University, senior
lecture at the University of Chicago, and a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution.
Richard, thanks for joining us. 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 that he wants, you know, sixty
seventy percent of it to be electric by twenty thirty four. This is a
diminut. 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 reche 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 twenty thirty five and beyond. This is
a classic illustration of governmental overreach, trying to take away from the next generation
it's 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 twenty
first is the most important day in any admission 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 the 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 project. Secondly,
on the leadlegal 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 in the West Virginia case and the local case, these are all cases
which are doing one way within 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? It's the entire corpus of literature with respect to global
warming. I mean, they are truly ignorant. This is and they could
never quite ask themselves the question, if you decide to shut down on one
technology, what's going to happen with the ills that are associated with other kinds
of technologies. Solar energy is not the end all. I mean, if
you were to look at the normal situation, this same government says, when
you cover a plot of land one acre rather not one acre one square met
or 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 planels, which are much more damaging, they
say we ignore all the collateral damages that they start to take. So it's
going to happen if 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 step 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. In an electronic vehicle which stalled out on the
road forty miles with two small children in the back seat, you're 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 joined in the fossil
fuel car is a three hour wait at one of these turning stations, and
people will not tolerate that. Hybrids, you don't have to Mandata 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 it's an electric
vehicle, because the electronic vehicles require that you get rare earths and this requires
a huge amount mining, which creates all sorts of runoff, slag and old
fashioned pollution. If you could cut that down by a factor of twenty twentyfold
and get five percent of it and have gasoline and shift back before between the
two of them, it's a dominant solutions. And you've seen all the rental
car companies right they're dumping their electronics vehicle because nobody wants to drive those miserable
things. And so this is the third situation that you have, is there
will be a huge consumer backlash with respect to this stuff. It's already taking
place in Pennsylvania because the Biden administration, mean another one of its food situations,
has 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, and
that means that the people in the business have to be out of business,
and it means that all the people will get royalties for the work that's done
on their land will go without royalties, These things will not go unnoticing and
elections, and already Biden has shown some signs of backing off this stuff,
and my guess the political pressures will lead them to do more. But it's
so problem about these guys that are 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 look at the
securities regulation, it's striking. There isn't a single number in that entire litany
of lungs that 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 it going to result in climate change?
The answer is probably over the next fifty years, it's zero point one 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 not doing anything. We men will 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 two thousand and nine or two and eleven,
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 a normous, so that basically speaking, in a ten year
period, every major kind of environmental hazard that's associated with fracking is reduced by
in order of magnittone. So it used to be one hundred, it's now
going to be ten. And you don't want to ignore all of these huge
changes in advance. 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 Men who has run 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 to experiment myself and take your your cell phone, it's got a
little battery in it, disconnected, 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
period, I mean you have to spend more energy to keep the thing from
disapining than you're worth. I can know how to store a 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, that inexcusable,
inexcusable set of tragedies now that are being forsted 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, which I'm sorry, but that
was so warm up it? Yeah? Can we can we shift from energy
just just a bit? There are two sort of issues now that I think
are maybe related, maybe not related, the vaguely First Amendment. One is
Murphy versus Missouri. Yes, and the other is TikTok you make me smile,
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 it needs to be
stood up to and curtailed and punished for its overreach. But I'm also sympathetic
to the idea that people have to do what they do, and like the
idea of banning an app seems like a mistake and a violation of First Amendment
et cetera, et cetera. It depends on what there's things going on,
and I think you're looking at it from the wrong end of the barrel as
it work. 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. It's also the case that the Chinese
government it 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. And the
concern that one has with TikTok and I cannot verify, is that these people
collect the enormous amounts of information about everybody who works on this system, and
that the company that operator but says, 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
completely disreputable trading partners. And so if they can continue tormoscis information, the
real risk to securities 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 in various kinds of walls to make sure that information
which is collected from one progress cannot be used for another. They won't do
anything of that particular sort. And 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. But you're focusing on only one issue, why I understand,
which is the data the data harvesting problem. But more often than not,
when I'm looking at these sort of certainly the congressional and them sort of media
debates, it's about propaganda. It's about the chi comms are gonna di store.
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, everyone ab our media companies has an
enormous problem. You mentioned the stuff that's going on in the Biden place with
respect to the supervision. That's a classicalization 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 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 carryers. And I regard that as utterly unacceptable in
a democratic state. But going back to Tikta, 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, but makes this so hard is all
the relevant information is to some extent classify, and if it's classified, it
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 brim pride. The Chinese have never
are respected in any form of obviously 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 all
trustworthy active 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 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 setting them up, and you have to
go through a massive disinfecting program to make sure that there are some moves 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 that we're going to ask you is not, 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 were that any Chinese
official states I don't have said this fifteen years ago, but I sort of
agree with you. But 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 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 phone on the scale. Couldn't you, maybe waggishly or in a
troll like fashion, say to the chi cooms, look, TikTok's fine,
but you can keep it. You just have to open it up in China.
Just have to let Chinese people use it freely. No, of course,
all that one may 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 Hooper about ten years ago, I
chanced to meet some my friend who is going to talk about free trade in
the military national security issue, and there's 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 expressions
They say, you take a military stuff that's made by a grumm and 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's 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 used, restrictions on how these things are modeled, instrictions 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 appreciate it, 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 money consideration called the price,
and buying a newspaper is a sale as this buy 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 double
ganga 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 will put in
these positions to see just how much the stuff you're going to sell and how
much not. So take the United States sport 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 this particular line. And you'll
make that agreement with some companies you'd never make them with other countries under these
circumstances. And it's very common for some to say is, look, you're
doing this. You want our mitilitary 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 mister Biden putting a national security kabash on to deal with nippont the takeover
us Steele, which is designed to playcate certain resentments in his party, his
coalation. But this stuff, I'm afraid. I mean, I wrote a
book called Simple Rules for a Complex World. I really believe in that book.
But another book to be written about exceptions to simple rules. And it
turns out, whenever there's uncertain 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 it's being traded? And whenever you
do these kinds of analyses. They have to be done at the margin.
Now, 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 we packaged as disguised usage of back end day, 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, but I think
they're 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've got in the
House could be easily attributed to partisan politics. For a second before Rob gets
him, because I know Rob wants to ask more about the Supreme Court decisions.
The problem with TikTok might be, though, even if we buy it
and you talk about purging the algorithm, is 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. And 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 in the family being the bear. Debilding and rest of bating is my
thought. Anyway, 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 standalistic great universities and the DEEI 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 universities. But this is a problem that goes far
beyond ticktak. What it is is we've created a system in which the diversity
culture is so powerful that anybody who wants to teach science and science is no
longer regarded as progressive or in light. And I mean his 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 try to
make sure that pathology she 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 deserving everybody in this particular world if you're spend your
time talking about things, because what medicine is often about is making incremental advances
in technologies that a huge import 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 die And if you have to give the same pill five times a
day, it's going to take a nurse's aid and they're going to be a
huge numbers of errors. Then there's going to be somebody saying, well I
missed the 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 to day
pill and it turns out that the service obligations are cut by ninety percent and
the reliability goes up by ninety cent. But that's what 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
feeding is going to be facilitated, which will reduce the need that you have
to have for tend in 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 Flier, Libertarian used to be the
dean of Harvard, and the moment he left the New Dean came in and
I think it was a sheet. What they did is they looked at all
the great pictures of the scientists on the wall. They're 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 vira. See those guys up there. If you work really hard,
maybe you could be on that Sulm show. 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 and E it whin's all of the words. But every kind of product
that they try to make is subject to all sorts of difficulties. And then
you have to look 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 attributed 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 coke lands from Georgia Pacific,
and these are immaculate and they're always taken care of. And then you look
at the government land which specialized in leaving dead wooden places kindling for future fire.
And where do the fire start. They start on the place where nobody
actually tends to the forest, saying that nature must take its course. 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 the lawyer who's suing
Joe Biden. Shall we say, well, because what he's done is replaced
all the experts on the various military service boards on the grounds that they didn't
agree with his politics. So it's through somebody like hr 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, while the president's entitled to have the people he wants
to advise, and 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, right, Well, it turns out the alumni which used
to be the source of the next generation fierce family inheritance and they basically are
disgusted with this. The enlisted men are reduced, and so we have an
army which is getting weakened in terms of the average calibri it's performance. And
then we get a president who sufficiently wise and said, in the 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, it's 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 performed, And they basically said, if you
fail and 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 a horse rate to
put the walls out and you sit right. And he always said to me,
you're only good is what you did yesterday. I mean, that's the
way I was raised. And you know what it made. It really made
a difference to put the fear of God in me from the time I was
ten years old, and it has basically worked. But if you say to
everybody, oh, 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 of discord. What you're doing is you're setting up
people for faith. And that's what we are doing in the United States,
and this administration is doing it. The entire educational establishment, at the most
parts, is more interested and comfort than it isn't excellent. And I have
to tell you, if you don't feel pain when you're doing your work,
you're not working hard enough. I mean, that's terrible newds, that's humble
news. I mean time in my life I've always had to face that row.
Do you notice any pushback on that? I guess what I would say
is that the one I mean, maybe it's a tiny, little green shoot.
I'm not sure how to take it. But during one of the things,
one of the many things that happened during the lockdowns or during the school
closures, I should say, his parents started to notice just how bad teachings.
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
remain closed in a lot of places, pression 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 did did you feel that way? Do you
see that happening? I mean, because it seems to me like the answer
to all the questions we're talking about, right, the answer the question about
technology, the answer the question about health, The answer the question about excellence
starts somewhere in school with a rigorous, thoughtful, but the kind of education
that you had in New York City in one in nineteen forty eight. Okay,
well I was going to I was going to name the year, but
okay, that's yeah, right, right, right, Yes, sir,
miss Lipmann told me how to carry numbers. You know, I still remember
my teachers with the greatest respect because what they did is they taught me to
do. 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 the very effect of all the tax reductions are taking
place there. All the educational innovations are taking there. And it's not just
charter schools, which are fine in many ways, although the conditions could be
fatal. What happens as people or device shadows schools of themselves. So I
want to homeschool my kid, and you want to homeschool you're a kid.
Well that's not going to work very well. So ten parents get together,
they get a set of materials that are supplied by a homeschool authority, and
they take the instruction amongst themselves. Dis 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 they had to go to they fight a
couple of years ago. So there are but it is that there are huge
classing forces. The political dynamic, however, is very unstable for two reasons.
One, this is highly dichotomists. There is no overlap. The most
liberal Republican is more conservative than the most conservative Democrat and vice versa, so
you get much more thing. 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 any time you have reform, it's
going to be contentious if it's done at the national level, and it's going
to be a 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 the 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, from Florida California, and the reason is that in the one state,
what happens is the public has found 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 that probably 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 what you do, we'd
spend enough, Yeah, 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 rens that go to teachers. And so you look at a charter
school and the course for 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 evil kids remain in the public school system as poorn. But of
course that's not the way it works. Even if you have random selection for
charter schools, they always outperformed 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 twelve. And it was
a nine year old who was trying to teach n ask to his older brothers.
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 ruins or deaths or
any of the sort. It's just that we had a shared commitment to excellence.
And I could still remember, you know, I wasn't sure what I
was going to write for mister A. Kent Hire on my first esset in
when I was seventeen year olds to fine what a professional is, and you
know what happened. It's now sixty years later, and I still think about
that same question that was put to me when I was a freshman, and
I understand, right, the problem is, Richard, you don't understand.
It's not about a commitment to excellence. It's about a commitment to equity,
which people believe is necessarily leads to excellence. But it's a whole different definitional
and we lead the accidents at all what it does. And we have at
least to coddling or at least at basically telling gifted kids you can't advance because
poor kids. You know we did when we actually have to go. But
why are you right about that at this Ricochet site, because we do want
to hear he had to do it first grade? Yes, tell us what
you had to do it. And it was a class of thirty six kids
with one teacher, Missus Lippmann. And no teacher can teach thirty six kids,
right, but the classness of them was so strong. What she told
me, I'm pretty good at man, will you help Stevie will learn his
fractions? And so I march over to the table and teach one of my
classmates that kind of stuff. Well, it was not uncommon. Now,
of course we do that, and you know it was appreciated on both sides.
He liked the help and I like the sense of being able to help
somebody else. And so you never had a discipline problem. Richard, thanks
today for the wide arranging conversation it's been and we'll see you back in Ricochet.
Take it easy, great, take it thanks Richard, Bye bye.
Signor did you do that at first? I think we did that in first
grade? Well what was that? Helping people? Yeah, you had to
go like I think at some point we're on like they would put us in
little tables you had to could have worked together, and 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 now I was sitting back there,
you know, the smart kid with the glasses who had to read this
other stuff. Well, because my heart goes out just a little Stevie though,
I mean, I mean 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 uh yeah, I think
some things we could talk about here. I suppose Minneapolis decided to get away
with Go, 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 legally in New York, right, you still can get an
Uber in New York. Yeah. 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 taxicabs better. Taxicabs in New York City are much much better than
they would have been without competition. Competitions stood, it's not quite as easy
to do the workaround with the 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 stills really popular. But I'll tell you here's a
very twee example. 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 rank that was somewhere around, or you had to
call a number and the number nobody ever answered, and you wouldever show the
taxi was coming. This was just horrible. I know, I understand these
are first world problems. But then along came Uber and the taxi companies,
at least in Paris, responded by making it much better Uber. Like I
was just I was in Paris for a few days before I went to Morocco,
and you know, you're getting a taxi is the easiest thing in the
world, so much easier than anything else. It is an app. You
just tell 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. The problem with
it, with all the problem with Uber and Lyft and in some of very
liberal things, it's the problem in general with the idea of the of the
gig economy. Right that you are, you're kind of working on your own
and there aren't that many safeguards, et cetera, et cetera, 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, but if your door dash or maybe whatever kind of like freelancing things
they do is they're discovering just how high their taxes are because they've got to
pay them themselves. And there is something about that magic pay stubbs 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, yeah, you start to notice just like
how bad it is, I think. And there's the war against the ten
ninety nine economy, the war against the people who are independent contractors because they
believe that they're all being exploited. That nobody, nobody in this nobody has
volition, nobody has an agency, and all of these things that we're all
just at the ponds. 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 schmoke can walk
through the door and see even the Chinese Communists, even the chikops. But
if you want to go to the member feed, where a lot of the
really interesting, where the conversations start that eventually make it to the member feed,
you've got to be a member, and it's cheap, and you should
do it because a you will find a community that you've been waiting for looking
for all your life of the Internet, and be you'll be helping it 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 thirty five minutes until I'm so sick of the
sound of my voice that i have to leave. I can I just jump
in, I know I'm going 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 a it's an audio theater. It's fun. It's
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 eighties, so this is a place with which I'm
well familiar. Anyway, you folks, this is your first podcast. Go
back and read or listening to about six hundred and eighty three more of them,
and we'll talk to you next week. Five star reviewed out 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 Guild finally throws
a dart at your heart and you go do it. Can't hurt anyway,
Rob, It's been great. Enjoy your weekend in New York. I will
do the snow when I get home here, all seventeen feet of it,
and we'll see everybody in the comment, said Ricochet four point zero. Next
week, next week, Ricochet join the Conversation