When Bureaucrats Gather

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

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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