Clay welcomes back Avik Roy

them has been phenomenal. If this is the first one that you're listening to, i'd encourage you to go check them out from the world of sports, media, politics, business and also some focus on COVID, which is what we're gonna do again Part two with oh Vic Roy. And before I bring him in, I gotta say it's rare I get praise for anything that I do for my

wife in any part of my life at all. But after our first conversation, which we had back in August, she said, I wish everybody in the country could hear him and could hear that conversation because it cut through so much of the north Ways and got to the essence of COVID our response how to balance out going back to school. From the perspective of August, it now has been whatever. It is nearly six months since we last talked. We still are in the throes of much

of the COVID related hysteria I would call it. And certainly we're now changing administrations because we're recording, uh the day after the Biden inauguration, and so Ovic again, you're coming at my wife's request for part two of this discussion. So there's high there's high potential here, but also high danger because I know for sure that she'll be listening, and she even sent me a couple of questions that she wanted me to ask. So first of all, thanks

for coming with us again. Thanks for being so great in August. If you haven't heard that August conversation, I would encourage you, maybe if you're starting this one, to pause, go back into the podcast listen to that August conversation first, because a lot of the background. I'm not necessarily going to go back over again in because many of you have already heard it and I want to kind of get an update on your thoughts. So thanks for coming

on again. People loved our conversation last time, and I hope we can help out a lot of people here and they will enjoy this one. And get informed just as well as they did back in August. Bakeley, what's your wife's name, Laura l A R A And just like you. Uh, she is from Oakland County, so she went to lass Or High School. She grew up in Bloomfield. So I went to the University of Michigan from there and then we met in law school. So so Laura, my wife is definitely listening right now. And uh, and

you guys are both fellow Michiganders at least in your youth. Yeah, it's a drive by laws Er High to Detroit Country Day every morning on my way because we talked about we talked about that last time where Chris Webber had gone to Detroit Country Day in Birmingham, Michigan, which is where my wife and I got married back back in the day back in two thousand four. Right, Yeah, well, uh, thank for me, Thank you Laura for for those kind words, and I hope I can live up to it this time.

All right, quick background again, I would encourage you if you want a longer form background of how Ovic ended up doing what he does, go listen to our August twenty one conversation. But I just want to reset the table because some people won't do that. You grew up, like you just said, playing basketball with Chris Wheb at h AT in Birmingham, Michigan. Uh. You then went to m I T. And then you went to Yale for

medical school. Do you want to give people like a two minute synopsis of what you do in your professional life and have done in your professional life since leaving and finishing your schooling. Yeah? So my my undergraduate major was effectively molecular biology. So the genetics DNA and genetics worked, and how how all that plays into how cells aren't work, how our organs work, our bodies work, how diseases work. And I went to med school, and then after med school,

I didn't practice medicine. I ended up joining an investment firm called Being Capital to help them figure out the biotech industry. So I spent a dozen years on Wall Street in Boston and New York, so not not not always in the physical Wall Street, but working as an investor investing in biotech companies, including vaccine companies and companies that developed treatments for various diseases, cancer, things like that, And along the way I got really interested in healthcare policy.

Mitt Romney, as many people will know as the founder of bank Capital, and I ended up working for his presidential campaign in twelve. He and his team asked me to help them design their health reform plan for the twelve presidential race, and that led me down the rabbit hole of Obamacare and health reform and public policy in general.

And now I run a think tank based in Austin, Texas called the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity or free opt dot org online f r e O p P dot org, and we work on ways to expand economic opportunity to those at least have it using free enterprise, individual liberty, technological innovation, and plurals and in in other words, Uh, people like me believe that free enterprise the thing that's lifted people out of poverty all over the world, all

over the country, and we need to rededicate ourselves of doing that for the people who are struggling to make it in this incredibly challenging time that we live in now. Amen, you're capitalist exactly, which is like it's like some people are afraid to say they're actually capitalists nowadays. Uh. And so, uh, the data and what I love about it. So I talked about this back in August. But I became aware of you because there was so much noise, uh in

this COVID coverage in the media. And I always say, you know, I don't need people to tell me what I should think. I would like to be able to

see the numbers myself and make rational decisions. And so I first became aware of you because you were looking at the stratification from an age range perspective of how COVID was impacting different populations, right, because one of the first flaws, I think, uh, the original ends as it were, potentially of our response to COVID has been to treat this as if it is an equal opportunity disease that impacts everybody equally, much like because you hear this analogy

all the time the nineteen eighteen flew right, which had a much more consistent impact across all age ranges, and so the decision to shut down schools, for example, was predicated on the idea, Oh, the places that did that in nineteen eighteen had better success. But the problem is that schools and school aged children, unlike in nineteen eighteen, are not primary vectors for the spread of this disease. So the positive impact in terms of lessening the spread

is not in any way. We're basically fighting the war with the technology of the last war, when this new war is entirely different, right, And that's what often happens in wars. You try to take the lessons that you learned from the last war. The problem is the situation has changed and this isn't the same thing anymore. Yeah, you know that that war with a hundred and three years ago, and it's a completely different virus. I mean,

every virus is different. Influenza virus is the way they behave are different than the way coronaviruses behave in your body, the way they attack you, the kinds of people they attack. We actually have known from from previous coronaviruses that coronaviruses tend to attack older people, tend to be problematic at nursing homes. So people who really looked at the science quote unquote should have known that we really needed to focus on protecting the elderly. But but that's not what

we did, and that was tragic. Okay, So I asked you last time, what letter grade would you give our I'm not trying to be partisan our political here I'm just saying, as a policy perspective, what letter grade would you give our response to COVID as a country. Oh boy,

that's a tough one. I mean, you know, I would probably say, in fact, you know what here's all do is we actually actually looked at all the advanced economic countries in the world at free ap and be compared like, how's everyone doing, both in terms of just desper capita, in terms of like the actual policy responses, economic restrictions,

school closures. And you know, as time has gone on, the grade that we would give the US as declined because as time has gone on, we've been the country that has actually the most lockdowns or some of the

most severe lockdowns. Not the most severe in the world right now that goes to Australia New Zealand, but but over the over the eleven month period, if you add it all up, particularly because of California, New York, the Blue or states where they've been much more aggressive on lockdowns, we've had some of the most severe economic restrictions, and yet California is seeing massive spike in cases the lockdowns

aren't doing anything right. So you put all that together, the school closures, the lockdowns, and yet the spike in cases and you have to say that that the US is somewhere between a D and F, you know, overall at this point. And it didn't have to be that way, because we were going to have death due to COVID. We were going to have people who are vulnerable who were hit just like in every other country, every other

large country that's developed has had that problem. But where we really have UM, what the beds, so to speak, is that we did things that we're provably not working, like keeping schools closed, like keeping the economy shut down in certain states, instead of focusing on the real problem, which was nursing homes and the elderly living in these kind of dorm room like facilities where we need to do more to protective. Finally we started to get the message around that, but by the time we did, UH,

the virus had already spreads throughout those communities. All Right, if the country gets somewhere between A D and F, what does the American media get in the way that they have covered uh COVID. In your mind, as a guy who looks at the data, what grade would you give the overall American media? Oh? I mean, f is a generous grade, right, like you, you'd have to give them worse than enough, because I mean the way that media behaved was was almost a sabotage, uh, the way

we we responded to COVID. In fact, there's there's probably no institution, if you can call the media an institution, there's no institution that is more responsible for how bad the US COVID response has been than the media. Just to give some examples, So as you talked about Clay, we know from the data that the overwhelming risk in terms of severe illness, hospitalization death from from COVID nineteen

is in the elderly. And yet if you actually pull average Americans and ask them, like, what's your what's my perception of my risk from COVID, it's actually young people who are the most scared of dieing of COVID because the media has been telling them day in day out for a year, for for months now that that they're the ones who should be scared witless because they're the ones not going to school, they're the ones on zoom

all the time with their teachers or whatever. So that's just wanting example of the incredible malpractice that has gone and you marry that with this part as an environment where there's there's a there was has been such a desire to blame Trump for everything that has gone wrong that people haven't been willing to see or examine where

where things really have gone wrong. So the all the things that the Governor Cuomo continues to do to mess up the COVID response in New York for example, or the restrictions in California that aren't working for example, or the fact that you know schools if you you know, have you seen Clay any articles about COVID breakouts and schools for the last four months, and you know that if there was one school in Kansas that had had like people in the hospital because of COVID and because

they reopened the school, it would be on the front page of the New York Times. So there's basically been no incident of serious COVID problems from reopening schools. But as anyone written any think pieces about wow, we've we've kind of got the school thing wrong. No, it's been this kind of people who moved on to the next

drive by thing to complain about. So yeah, I mean, look, the media, the media has been terrible and you can sort of shake your fist at the television or Twitter or the New York Times or whatever you want to do. But I try to think about it more in terms of, Okay, the media has been terrible, what is the solution, right, So if we ever have this kind of problem again, how do we think about having a a better flow of information to everyday people? And that's a harder thing

to think about. I mean, I I can't say that, Clay, that I have the answer today because if you think about the public health establishment, which which comes in alongside the media for a lot of a lot of my criticism, you know, you have the so called leading experts at the leading universities saying the same things at the media, saying that everyone needs to be terrified, hide in their basements and uh and not go out. And that's the only way to solve this problem. And that's ah, that's

not a sustainable policy. As we're seeing, like why is it the COVID is COVID case rising today. It's because people cannot sit in their basements for a year. They just can't. And and the public health profession understood that before COVID, the consensus, the conventional wisdom. The excess expert opinion then pre COVID was well, you can't lock down the economy. That never works because people eventually stop listening to you and just go about their business. So you

have to have a better strategy than that. That was the conventional wisdom among experts a year ago, and it isn't today. And that's a curious thing so much that I want to unpack from that, and it is. It is incredibly frustrating, I know to a lot of people who are listening out there to see the data right like you do, and to have your background and not be able to convey it to everyone what the data says.

And I always say, my wife says, I don't need therapy because I get to say exactly what I think every day, right for better or worse, uh, through my

radio show, through my television show. Like I'm fortunate in many ways to be a member of the media, but there are people out there who will come after me on a regular basis because what I am sharing is not the quote unquote conventional wisdom, right, or they'll say, well, you're not a doctor, how in the world are you able to have an opinion on the whether school should

be open or not. And my answer is, if you are a reasonably intelligent person, being able to analyze data is one of the most integral assets of any human anywhere. Right risk analysis is arguably the most fundamental trait that has allowed humans to exist and propagate as a species. Right Like, that's innately what we all have to do.

But it seems to me that in this social media age, uh, you know, if you said what I've been saying and what you've been saying four months, Hey, elderly people, people with suppressed immune systems, people with major health related concerns are who COVID is attacking. We need to protect those people, but we need to maintain the rest of our economy and let our society function. The immediate response was, Oh, you don't care about Grandma's You want everybody to die.

It seems too in many ways have been a fundamentally broken marketplace of ideas because the right ideas haven't won and carried the day, either in media or public policy. It seems to me, you know, Clay, there's a there's an analogy or a comparison. We can make the sports

here because you think about the whole moneyball sports analytics thing. Right, all these people who came in who are sort of nerdy ivy leaguers or whatever, just people who are math nerds, never had played the sport, and they were always clashing with the scouts, who are veterans of the game, you know, using their intuition, their feel for the athletes to have that view of UH. And then they always looked down

on the nerds. They said, oh, you know, you don't you don't get it because you've never played the game. You you know, you know, you've never seen anything. But the nerds ultimately have have one that that that debate there, right, and and and and the differences in sports. The right answer wins right, the right answer wins championships, and the right answer puts the best team on the field or

on the court. And so you can be vindicated if you if you apply those unconventional UH methods to sports. The difference in public policy is the tenure professors at Harvard and Stanford, who more at Harvard than Stanford, we should say, but but the tenure professors who say we should we should keep schools closed and UH and and terrify all the teenagers and the children. They're still Harvard professors, they're still in position, so there's already some of them

are joining the Biden administrations. So in that sense, that's the one thing about public policy is it's not a meritocracy. Wrong ideas, wrong policies can continue to be conveyed and continue to be in force even if they've been proven wrong.

That's fascinating and that's well said, and it's true, and that's why I've always argued that sports represents the ultimate foundation of the meritocratic ideal, because everybody's goal is to win, and whoever makes it more likely that you are going to win gets employed, right whether I mean, you can have Antonio Brown, who's got all sorts of different issues off the field, but if the Tampa Bay Buccaneers decide that he makes it more likely they're gonna win a

football game, and if they think Tom Brady can work with him, they're gonna find a way to bring him in. Right.

A talent ultimately trumps everything. Almost there is a limit where your problems can exceed your talents, but that's relatively rare, and there's a way too immediately vindicated and frankly in the world that you're coming from which is the capitalistic environment, a market based economy over time rewards in theory, the best business so long as they're certain, you know, as long as there's not a monopoly involved, as long as there's not some sort of untoward practice taking place. But

that's why capitalism ultimately works so well. Right as you do, much like in sports, get a verdict on whether or not your business made sense totally, I mean, and that's you know, that's uh. You know, there are economists who say it's like, look, you know, if you if you're a business, you don't have your incentive is to be as inclusive as possible, cause you want every customer, you

want the employees working for you. And now, obviously it hasn't always worked that way historically, but that's not because the previous system was a free market system. It wasn't because there was the prejudice, there was the segregation, there was a gym crow, there was the stuff going on that really prevented people from taking advantage of the talent that was all around them. And uh, and companies obviously

work hard to try to change that. How frustrating is it to you as someone who has been sharing the data from the from the moment this all started. Why school should be open, the stratification of age, range of death and how that can govern our decisions for that not to have been inculcated fully into public policy, and to see us here as we are now into a new administration, not able to for instance, get kids back in school. Because what drives me crazy Ovic and we're

talking to O vic Roy. I encourage you to go follow him at ovic a v I K at a v I K on Twitter. Be sure to catch live editions of Outkicked. The coverage with Clay Travis weekdays at

six am Eastern three am Pacific is. People who claim that they care about equity the most are propounding now the most inequitable outcome of our lives for the most part, in requiring kids in public schools, very often in cities who don't have WiFi at home, who may not have parents at home, and who don't have access to outside of school education, to be outside of school for a year.

I mean, it makes me want to pull my hair out as a kid who went to public school K through twelve and now is fortunate enough to live in a district where my kids are in school, and I got a kid in private school as well. But if you have advantages, which I do, you can take advantage of those opportunities and give your kids those advantages. But most kids don't have that in this country. It's infuriating

to me, you know, totally. I mean the most. I tend not to get frustrated play and just because, like, if you do what I do for a living, which is trying to persuade people of your ideas and things like that, if you're gonna get frustrated when people don't listen to you, this isn't a job for you, right Like you have to be you have to be willing to accept that not everyone's gonna agree with you, and

that it's hard work. If you've got a contrarian or dissenting opinion about the way the world should be, or the way policy should be, or the way the law should be, it's your It's up to you to persuade everyone else that you're right, and that's gonna mean talking a lot of people who disagree with you. So that's if you don't have that sort of temperament, then you

know you can't really do this kind of thing. So in that sense, I'm I'm a most really fine, but I will say that the one, the one moment or or period of time where I was most my blood pressure was really arising, admittedly was a selfish one where there was a point in time in the in the spring or summer, I can't remember exactly what it was now when the Austin the Travis County, which is the county that contains Austin, Texas, where I live, there was

this unelected Travis County Interim Health Authority that basically said all the private schools that have to stay closed along with the public schools. And that was like, you know, for me, because I, like you, I can afford to send my kids to private school, which again is you know, I feel terrible for the people who don't have that luxury. But for me, that was like, wow, this is like the government is going out of a tway to make

my life miserable on top of everybody else. That was just sort of at a purely selfish level, something that made me made me, uh, you know, made my blood pressure raise, because go up. But but you're right at that that the incredible unfairness of it that that you and I can still send our kids to school, but

so many people cannot. It's just incredible. You know, I testified before Congress, I want to say, seven or eight times last last summer, last you know that sort of spring, summer, fall time last year, and almost every single one of the hearings was about racial inequities that have been exacerbated

worse than by COVID um. And the thing that was so surreal or crazy about those hearings is, you know, there was a lot of talking about, oh, you know, it's really terrible that, um, you know, African Americans are getting COVID and and dying of COVID at disproportion of rates,

which is true. But you know, it's also true that the economic inequality uh that that has come from government policy has disproportionately harmed minorities who are lower income, who can't afford to go to private schools right or some of their kids to private schools. And that has been, I have to say, like an astoundingly hypocritical thing. You know, you have all these people saying, oh, it's really terrible that that the virus uh, you know has disportuately harmed

lower income Americans who are dispportunately non white. Well, yes, the government policies that have taken their jobs away from them, taking their livelihoods away from them, taking their schools away from them, has been incredibly harmful and it's going to widen economic inequality of this country. And and you're you're absolutely right that, you know, certainly at our organization, at Free optote or we've we've worked hard to try to make those points. And I think, you know, we've had

some success with that. I think there are lots of um people of both parties, of both you know, ideologies or whatever you want to say, progressive, conservative, independent, who who realized that schools need to be reopened. The differences on the Democratic side, the teachers unions are just such a dominant force politically. No one wants to cross the

teachers unions and that has been the decisive factor. Can you say, follow the science and in any way justify schools being closed at this point in the United States of America. No. And I think one of the things, you know, we're gonna we're gonna do a kind of an action after action report of the pandemic hope in the hope that the pandemic is actually is over in

the next several months, as people get vaccinated. But I think one of the things that's really gonna we're going to really focus on in our writing is the absolute disgrace of of the or or the gap or or discrepancy between the people who use the word science most often in their in their speeches or their tweets and

the actual science, which shows something completely different. And and again what's been so troubling is that the people who should have the most steak in scientific authority, the Anthony Fauci's you know, these people at the universities that I've been mentioning, they're the ones who have done the most to undermine trust in quote unquote scientific authority. You know, Fauci's running around saying, oh, it's so surprising that there have have been COVID breakouts in schools. Um no one

ever expected that. We all expected that that there would be massive outbreaks in schools after we were open. So that's really quite strange. And I mean, what I'm thinking,

what bubble is this guy in? But clearly he is in one right, and and that is a huge, huge problem, And there needs to be a real self assessment in the scientific community about about the politicization of basic information around who's being impacted by the virus, what kinds of UH interventions are working, what kinds of interventions are not working. And my hope is that now that Biden is president, we can start to have more of an honest conversation

about that. I feel like, you know, because so many people in the academic world are anti Trump. No one wanted to say that Trump was doing anything right while Trump was in office. But maybe now that he's gone, maybe it becomes safer, you know, for that Harvard professor to say, like, actually, the Trump administration, they did this thing. You know, I don't agree with that thing they did, but they did this thing right, or they did that thing right. Um, maybe the CDC was wrong in this

particular case or whatever. Maybe that conversation gets a little more deep, deep politicized. Now that that binds an office, we can only hope, but but we're going to certainly do our part to to contribute to that conversation. I can't wait to read that, and I want to make sure that I help you distribute it to the best way that we can. And in my limited world, certainly we have a big audience in the world of sports,

and I will say. You said, you know, the the overall public policy response has been very bad in the world of all Republicans, Democrats, independence, whatever you want to say. The media, I think in general does deserve a grade worse than F, which is what you said. I'm actually somewhat encouraged that sports got much of this right, um, and it was a battle to get it right. But when we talked back on August twenty one, we didn't know whether college football was going to happen. We now

have crowned champion. We did not know whether the NBA was gonna be able to finish their season. They did in the bubble. Now they're out of the bubble in the next season. Major League Baseball finished their season with fans present in Texas. The NFL has played their entire schedule so far. We're talking in the week of the a f C in the NFC Championship games. All of those sports, not to mention countless high schools, as well as other sports that are not anywhere near as popular

on a collegiate level or a professional level. Ovic there isn't a single death or even serious illness that has been connected to coaching or athletics and the coaches are obviously older than the players, but that's what the data told us was likely to happen. And people are like, oh, wow, this actually ended up being possible. Thankfully they took the chance and tried to figure out a way to make

it happen. What letter grade would you give sports leagues for their willingness and ability to play once they came back certain nascars involved tennis, all these other different sports. Uh. And are you at least as appreciative as I am that we found a way to get that done and that the data showed lo and behold that it was

safe and it was possible to do. Uh. Definitely appreciative, and not just that they did it for for the sake of the athletes who obviously worked so hard for those opportunities, but for the rest of us, who, you know, just as human beings. We needed something that was not political, if at least mostly not political. Uh. And and that that we could that we could point to and cheer about in our lives and in this very challenging year we've just had so grateful. I'm grateful to the sports

leagues that that worked hard to make it happen. We and you know, and you've covered it on your show. You know, it's not like the sports league said business as usual. There's a lot of stuff and a lot of work, a lot of testing, a lot of restrictions on attendance by the fans that went into keeping sports

going in a cautious, uh and prudent way. And and hopefully they've learned from that to realize, okay, maybe we can we can h loosen it up a little bit now that we've learned that we can do this safely and operate safely. But you know what really comes back to in my mind, uh play is what you said the beginning, capitalism, right, it's the financial incentive for sports leagues to stay open was a big driver of why

they did stay open. And now at the time, you know, last summer, last early fall, August, September, that was you know, the sports pundit said, this is so terrible. You know, these these leagues, particularly the you know in terms of college sports, where you know, there's the conflict between amateurism and the money. These leagues are putting money ahead of humanity. They're they're they're they're so greedy and so terrible. And

I look at it in exactly the opposite way. It was the the financial or economic incentive which motivated them to get it right, to figure out, hey, there's got to be a way to do this safely. We're gonna lose a lot of money if we don't figure out how to do it safely, so let's figure it out. And exactly the same dynamic play is true with schools. So why is it that private schools around the country are open and public schools are not. First of all,

you don't have teachers unions in private schools. But a big part of it is if you're that private school. If you're running a private school and you say no, we're gonna go to zoom, no one, everyone's gonna disenroll, no one's going to show up at that school, and your school is going to go broke because you're not gonna get any tuition dollars in the door, Whereas in the public schools, the money is flowing regardless of what you do, So why keep the school open when you're

gonna get paid either way. So the economic or financial incentives were absolutely a critical driver of why public schools have been closed, but why sports leagues and private schools were open. It's so well said, I mean, is now not surprisingly the sports media mostly there are exceptions, you're listening to one of them, but the sports media mostly followed the lead of the now national media in making the arguments there's no way that it's safe to play right.

CBS Sports, for example, I talked about this a lot on my radio program. They had an expert, and you know how this works, the experts that say the things that don't make headlines. Oh yeah, there's definitely a way to play sports that doesn't make the headline. The expert who comes out and literally at CBS Sports guaranteed a football player would die and predicted there would be at least three to seven as if he were Nick, you

know Joe Namath back in the day. He guaranteed a death and said he predicted that there would be three to seven. That's a headline at CBS Sports. They finished the season in college football, and that's what he was specifically making his prediction about. Everybody is fine, there are no issues, and the story just disappears right, there's no consequence for an expert, and I'm putting that in quotation marks being a hundred percent wrong, particularly when those people

have tenure at university. It's like it's it's impossible for them to ever have a consequence. And that probably goes back to your point. In a market based economy, if you're wrong, you lose your job. In a university setting, if you're wrong, you just write a new article explaining why you were wrong, and uh, and and and or completely ignoring it, there's no and there's no consequence. Yeah,

you know. In fact, you're reminded me of I can't remember which a media organization was, may have been ESPN, and may have been Yahoo or CBS. Uh. Lots of people there was. There was a Big twelve expert that the Big twelve A d. S recruited who said, actually, you can operate the league safely and here's how you

do it. And there was a round of articles criticizing and that expert saying, oh, the Big twelve just you know, wet doctor shopping and found some idiot off the street who who was going to validate what they wanted to do and not listen to the science. Right, And that guy turned out to be right, and everyone else turned out to be wrong, at least the ones that say the Big ten was listening to it is I mean and and and all of this, you know, and and

again to kind of relitigate some of this. You remember the myocarditis story that flared up. Oh my god, if you get a if you get COVID, you're gonna get myocarditis. Your heart's gonna be ruined forever. There's no way we can play sports. Nobody had myocarditis issues either, but if they did, that often happens with viral infections in general.

It wasn't specific to COVID. And the media what I called fear porn governed the day, and and candidly behind the scenes, I was having conversations with commissioners as early as April, and I said, look, you're used to people being in favor of your sport. Everybody in the sports media is going to be opposed to you guys playing college football this year. They're not going to carry the water for the NFL. They're not gonna say, hey, this

is a brilliant idea. They're all gonna buy into the fear and curl up in the fetal position and argue

that there's no way that should be happening. Well, as you know, Clay, I mean it's in a long standing dynamic in sports meet is that you know, sports writers, sports commentators, they they particularly the ones who work at say, major newspapers are major news organizations, right, they feel that sort of inferiority complex of we're not the real journalists like the people who work on you know, who go

to Capitol Hill or cover the White House. So they feel that that sense of, well, I have to do what the the other journalists tell me to do, because if I don't, then I'm going to be seen as that fluffy sports reporter and not the hard journalists that I really am. And so that sort of that sociological element of the sports writing or sports media community plays a big role in in their deference to to what, to what other people are saying that they feel they

have to defer to. And so it's some of its fears. Some of it's that deference. Some of it is just

genuinely like, you know, being terrified or whatever. It is all that to say that, you know, what people like you and me and and the people who listen to your podcast and other people out there who who who have had the same point of view need to do is to make sure that uh, as we go through this, we're able to assess and and have that after action report where we can say, okay, guys, let's learn from this.

Let's learn about what the so called experts told you that was right, and what they told you that was wrong, and certain things that were unknown. So to take the example of myo karditis, I mean you and I were more skeptical that was a serious issue. But you can understand risk averse for college president's risk averse a D saying you know what, we've we've got to be concerned

about this because I don't want it. I don't want to deal with the litigation if you want to be cynical, or I don't want to do with that on my conscience.

If somebody really gets sick, the kind of the you know, the Reggie Lewis type thing, so you know, do the m R I s do the testing every you know, UH, Power five University certainly has the ability to arrange for those tests if you if as someone's COVID positive, you can you can look to see if there's information and there aren't muscle and and and monitor in which they did right. Most of the most of the big conferences did that, and that's what allowed them to get that

that relief that this wasn't a big deal. So I don't have a problem with if they're going to be really risk averse, invest the extra money, since they make so much money off college sports, at least the revenue sports, you know, to invest in those tasks to see what's going on, make sure that nothing's going wrong. But to shut down the season altogether, that's stupid. You know, keep an eye on it and if it looks like things

are going to go wrong, that's one thing. And remember there were a lot of sports writers who said about the college football season, say, oh, this is so pointless. The whole season is gonna get shut down after two weeks anyway, you know, why is anybody even bothering? And as you said, you know the season basically, yes, there were games that were canceled and things like that, but but the season was played and and I think most

people are pretty pretty happy about that. And to go to your point on the market based capitalistic economy being the most efficient, which by the way, all of world history proved, that's a whole another story. But for anybody who wants to study the history of of economies UH

and UH and market based decision making in general. It's probably not a surprise if you adopt that line of thinking, that the NFL, which had the absolute most money at stake and is the biggest business in all of pro sports, had the most successful season because not only did they play every single game as scheduled, all thirty two NFL teams played all sixteen games, but they did it on

their schedule. They didn't even have so far UH that the a f C and NFC championship games are Sunday, We're talking in the middle of the week leading into that, and then the Super Bowl. They've got two weeks to be able to schedule that, but right now it's scheduled as it typically is for two weeks after the Sunday a f C n NFC championship games, and a lot of them had fans present, but every television part of their game, which is where the biggest part of their

revenue comes from. Guess what they did the best job big business does, the best job in pro sports with putting their product out there for people to watch, and it's arguably the most difficult because of all the physical contact that goes into football compared to let's say baseball or tennis or something like that. Yeah, that's that's a great point. You know, as you were talking, I was, I was recalling the the European soccer summer soccer season

from last year. Right, not some of the league's didn't play, but the ones that did had no problems. Right, everything worked out just fine. Yeah, there were some positive tests here, there are things like that, but but but the games that were played were played and worked out just fine. Yes, there weren't fans in the audience, and they would pump in the crowd noise on the broadcast, but but otherwise it worked and that was our first indication that actually

this could be done. Or two that to give us the confidence, right, the real world example, so this could be done. So so kudos to the NFL. I mean, definitely very impressive that that they've managed to have everything

run on time. And um uh you know, and you know part part of it too is you know, one thing we we probably should you know take an account here is pro athletes, particularly football players, there's so much discipline involved, you know in being a pro athlete, you know, in the NFL, it's just you know, you can get cut so ruthlessly and have your career cut short if you make one mistake. Um, and if you make it to the pros, you're likely to have that discipline and

that maturity. And not everyone does. And we've seen some, you know, notorious cases that not being the case. But but most of the athletes have really stuck to it, right, Whereas at the college level it's a little harder. Right, these are kids, Um, you know, there's a there's a campus, there's parties, there's people who admire them and want to, you know, want a party with them. There's a lot more temptation when when you're a college student to do

the wrong thing. And so you know, it's it's impressive on both counts, right. It's impressive of the college season managed to do as well as it did, even with a lot of interruptions. And I'll be see you look to the pros and say, hey, uh, you know, hats off. We're talking to Ovic Roy. Free op dot org is his website. Follow him on Twitter at ovic a v I K at a v I k is his Twitter handle. Uh. And this is the Winds and the Losses podcast. I am Clay Travis, Fox Sports Radio has the best sports

talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot Com and within the I Heart Radio apps. Search f s R to listen live. One of the challenges that I see that is the largest in the world of sports and other places. And I'm curious what you think about this. So much of our media is anecdote driven, and the anecdote is used to justify the overall story. So, and I'll give you

an example. If, as you mentioned, I remember, and this is unfortunate, and I feel for his family, there was a kid who died at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina of COVID or with COVID. It's not like I've reviewed his medical files to know exactly, but his death then becomes a front page New York Times article talking about the challenges of going back to college. The two million or four million, or whatever the heck number it is of college kids that go back and don't

have any issues at all. It's all about framing. In other words, if I wanted to write a story about how dangerous it is for kids to drive back to college at the end of summer, inevitably every year there are kids who die driving back to college campuses. That doesn't mean as a general rule that it is incredibly dangerous for those kids to be driving back to college campuses. Inevitably, every year there are college kids that get the flu

and die the seasonal flu. That doesn't mean that all kids on college campus are in danger of the seasonal flu. Outlier occur and as a data guy, outliers can be fascinating for you, I'm sure to review, but they are just that outliers. How much of our challenge in media today is using anecdotal outlier stories to justify a preferred narrative, such as sports can't happen because this college kid died, even if it's in no way representative of the larger

data set. That is such a challenge, it seems to me, because the story of one death is more overpowering than sometimes the story of a million people being fine. You know what I'm what I'm thinking about as you go through that, and all all Well said is you know my my My takeaway from from on that score is every high school in America should require that its students

take a statistics class. Yes, because statistics are the thing they drive so much of life nowadays, especially because we have all this data being thrown at us because of the world we live in, and we just don't know how to process it, and we process it wrong. And that that affects the way sports, you know, sports get to analyze. That, that affects the way lawsuits happened, particularly the class action type lawsuits. It affects government policy, obviously,

affects medicine, affects so many different things in our world. Uh. And if people had that set, that understanding of statistics and how to separate anecdotes from the overall uh context of those of those anecdotes, you know, that would be an important service that would do a lot to just

calm everyone down. I hope you know. Maybe that's ah, that's uh pollyannas or naive of made to feel that way, But I really do believe that if we could have a country where people were more journalists, in particular, more numerous, more affluent in statistics, it would be so much better. I mean that the story that really crystallizes to me everything that went wrong with the media coverage last year

was was the huge story. And I talked about it the last time when I was on with You in the in the New York Times, where it was claimed that there was a South Korean study that was purported to show that kids were infectious and it was dangerous to reopen schools. And this was plastered all over the New York Time. It was circulated to every school district in the country, and there was reporting afterwards that said that that basically there were a lot of you know,

school principles superintendents who wanted to open schools. They read that article in The New York Times and said no, we're not going to do it, obviously egged on by the teachers unions. And it turned out that the that the article totally misrepresented the data, and that once the full data set came out, it was pretty clear that in fact, kids were not infectious in South Korea, just like kids were not infectious anywhere else, that schools had

been open and everything had been fine. But did the New York Times retract their story. No, did the New York Times run another story saying, hey, we got South Korea were not really I mean, they did write another article about South Korea, but it was a very mealy mouth and no reader who didn't already know what's going on would be able to know from that article at

the New York Times it made a terrible mistake. But that's one journalist at one influential newspaper who's misunderstanding of scientific data lead to something that impacted the lives of tens of millions of kids all over the country. And uh,

that's that's something that just should not happen. And I hope we can we can have a world in which statistics are more a part of the conversation, where when you encounter a fact or a uh, you know, a journalistic assertion, we could do more to have statistics back it up. Now, that alone won't solve the problem, because you know, the old line from Benjamin Disraeli, the old nineteenth century Prime Minister of of of Great Britain, was

there's lives, damn lives and statistics. We all know from sports that that you can come up with lots of different statistics to justify, uh, you know, anything that you and anything that you want to believe or anything that that are your prior So you have to go one level below that and really understand which statistics accurately measure things in which statistics don't. But just having that basic understanding of you know, one anecdote is not, you know,

reflective of everything else. If one person dies in a car accident, it doesn't mean you should hide in your garage. If one person dies of COVID, it doesn't mean the world's gonna end um. You know. That would obviously be

a welcome development. One way that I try to combat that is in addition to talking to people like you and hopefully sharing your worldview with my audience, is throughout this entire COVID mess on my radio show, I've been very transparent with the choices that I'm making in my own life because people can say, oh, you're saying that, But I think for most people out there who are parents like you and me, our children are our most prized possessions. My children, my oldest is in private school.

My two youngest go to school every day. I have traveled with them on airplanes. I have taken them to go watch NFL games. We have allowed them to play in addition to going to school, all of their different sports leagues in our neighborhood where the sports leagues are going on, and I hope to be sharing that is anecdotal, right, but it's me trying to live up to the data under which I am telling them that the things that I believe should happen, sports should be played, for example.

I'm living my life by that data too. I'm not telling you to do one thing and then doing the opposite, which frankly has been I think probably the most destructive

thing that public policy officials have have done. Whether it's Gavin Newsom eating at the French Laundry restaurant, or so many different politicians out there who tend to be more affluent than the average person they represent, having their own kids in private school going to class, while they are allowing all of the public school kids who don't have the same ability of resources as their own kids to not be in school, right, so that hypocrisy. I'm trying to live my life in the way that I would

say the data reflects I should. And that goes to what I think is is a really big story here. And I know this is basically what you do for a living. You're talking about analyzing probability and statistics, which I think Americans as a group do poorly, but also success or failure to me in many parts of life seems to be predicated on your ability to analyze risk in this country, whether it's what you invest in, whether it's what you do on a day to day basis,

your risk barometer. I would bet if there was a way to study it, the people who are the best at risk barometer basis are probably the most successful in the country. Would you buy into that idea as well? You know, that's that's such a great point, you know, I it's not just what your ability to analyze risk,

but it's your attitude toward risk. I mean, one of the one of the things that led to the to the rise of Donald Trump in a sense is this divide between blue collar America and you know, college college, e book smart America. And we're seeing that in the electoral results. Like if you look at the electoral election returns, Uh, if you and you look at who's voting for whom, what really is the driver more than race, more than income, more than any other factor. Is Uh, do you have

a college degree or not? Uh? And if you do, you tend to vote one way, and if you don't, you tend to vote another way. That that's the most powerful thing out there. And and you know, people who are on the elite side, so Oh, that just means that we the educated, smart people, you know what's best for you all, and you're all you all, the rest

of you are dumb and ignorant. I look at it a different way, which is now, I'm looking out my window right now in downtown Austin, and there's a you know, a twenty story building under construction right right across the street here, and there are people climbing up on the scaffolds, you know, cleaning the windows and laying down the insulation.

And those people understand risk, right, because if if they don't strap themselves in and they don't act carefully, they're gonna fall off of that platform and and and die literally die. Right. They understand the risk of of of their jobs and the challenge for a lot of sports writers, a lot of academics, people who basically live lives with no risk. And frankly, I'm in that crowd, right, Like I have a white collar job, I have a good income.

You know, we've we've talked about how my life is pretty cushy compared to the people who can't send their kids to school, et cetera. Like people who have that sociological background or socioeconomic background they tend to be more risk averse, right, because they're not used to dealing with the world in which like if they're on if they're careless about something, things can go badly wrong. Whereas blue collar America, you're people are used to things going wrong.

People are used to having to be careful, they're used to physical danger. And athletes to write you you you're not You're careless about the way you train, You're careless about the way you stretch, You're careless about the way

you run the football. You're gonna get injured, right, And athletes are very aware of that um And so people who deal with physical risk every day are much more likely to look at something like COVID and say, you know what, I can handle that, whereas it's the people who sit on in front of a computer all day

who are terrified. It's also what I always say, is like going to public school and going and I went to some public schools that weren't very good, But there is a benefit to knowing that you might get your ass kicked at school, you know, like having that fear where you know that you're not a hundred percent safe and you have to carry yourself in a way that

analyzes risk. Maybe I shouldn't say that to that guy right now, right because he might beat my ass, right, And I feel like we have and and look at every generation is getting safer progressively in the United States, right, So, uh, this, this and that's been going back in time, the data would reflect from the moment people got on ships and came to our shores. Life life links are growing like we are living in the least dangerous time in the

world that anyone could ever live in. Right, Um, all the data reflects that, But it seems to me that our fear meters are so much more attuned to danger than they ever have been before. And people who are in COVID is a metaphor for this. People who are not at risk, as you said when we started this conversation, young people, they feel terrified, right. They think they're gonna get and this isn't just COVID. They think they're gonna

get kidnapped, they think they're gonna get murdered. They think something bad is going to happen to them, when statistically most people have never been safer. If you're living in America right now than any time in human civilization than

this exact moment. Yeah, you know that that's another great point, Clay, that that there's a negativity and you know we've been complaining a lot on on this interview, but you know, like there's a negativity to uh, to journalism today that something good happening typically isn't news, right, Like if something bad happens, if a train derails, that's news. If a train goes and stays on its tracks, which is almost always what happens with every train, it's not news. Right.

A plane crashing is news. A billion plane flights going off and taken in landing is not news. So news in and of itself is better easily able to spread now. But there is I think a natural negativity bias because good news happens far more frequently and therefore isn't news. The negative tends to dictate and scare. Again, it goes to your point on probability and statistics and analysis and

being able to contextualize what I was saying risk. You know, that's absolutely right, And and the one thing I'm I'm thinking about as you say that is how does technology digital media change all that are our conventional wisdom, which is obviously has some truth to it is uh, social media, Facebook, Twitter, able news Uh, exacerbate or worse than those problems because one of the things that people want to get motivated and get angry about and share with their friends and

the stuff that they're mad about about the world. Right, And that's certainly true. But it's also true that on UM on digital platforms, you see people share inspiring stories. Yeah, a lot of times. If you look at the stories that are getting the most traffic, it's like, uh, and I think you shared it. Actually, the story about Tom Brady throwing the touchdown to Drew Brees a son beautiful last weekend, right, like that got enormous traffic. So people hunger for for good news too. And I guess the

thing is, can we think about again? I'm always trying to think about what's the solution here? How do we move beyond this and try to make things better? And I feel like we've we've gotta think more, and media organizations that that have an economic incentive to do so, just think more about how do I share those inspiring stories, the good news that the kindness, the sportsmanship, the things that that we could show to our kids and say,

know what, be more like that? Guy, be more like Tom Brady and du Brees after a hard fought game, don't be like the sore loser or whatever. You know. I think there's an opportunity in there. It's interesting to me because if you think about let's take a step back and just think about it from a capitalistic perspective, there is big incentive to get financial stories right, such that people will pay huge amounts of money to you know, get a Wall Street journal or a Bloomberg article or

wherever it is to them first right. And getting that news right from a financial perspective is incredibly important. It seems to me that there, and so the quality I would say. You may disagree. I'm not an expert in finance journalism, but it seems to me the quality of finance journalism is higher than the quality of many other types of journalism because what pays in many other types of journalism is not nuance or analysis or intelligence. Necessarily,

it's emotion. And the emotion can be good, Oh look how great Tom Brady is and Drew Brees after that game they're throwing a pass. But the emotion can also be hyper negative, which is why I say, look, Trump is a symptom of the industry and universe in which we live, not the cause of it. He is an inarticulate voice in many ways for a conversation that needs to happen. What always friend Trump is a whole different story.

But always frustrated me about Donald Trump was I just wish somebody had been making some of the same arguments that he was making with a factual foundation as opposed to a gut foundation, which I think was very often the way he was responding. Yeah, I mean that that's uh,

that's what I certainly hope for the same thing. I hope that we can we can draw the lessons of the criticisms of America that that Trump that that what Trump was right about without the other aspects of Trump's approach the life, that that we wouldn't want to teach our kids or we wouldn't want to in terms of the way we treat each other. Okay, all thatsolutely go ahead. No, Well, I was gonna catch I had a big question here.

I was gonna try to hit you with. But all this conversation we just had, um is, people are gonna love it and fantastic, But you said you're working on basically a retrospective to look back at the way the society responded, to look back at the decision to shut down schools? When is that going to come out? And it's a cliche because it is true, especially if you like history. Hindsight is right. We find out the errors that we made and hopefully learn from them going forward

into the future. Who knows when the next pandemic might happen. If you had been able to look at the data set that you have right now, you're reviewing all everything that has happened with COVID. What would have gotten us in a in public policy? What would have gotten the media and a in coverage? What would have been the best response that we could have had. Let's pretend that you and I are able to implement American policy, or maybe not me at all. You back in March, when

this virus is just arriving on our shores. Probably it was here in December or whatever else, but March, when we really start responding to it. What was the right response? What should we have done to have the most effective possible American response to COVID? We Well, first of all, I love that you're like you're now my editor and you gave me a deadline, or you give us a deadline when your your articles out, So I'm gonna I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna say, Okay, we'll get this

out by the end of February, so I can't wait. Yes, I'll get it out of the end of February. And you know, I'll say a couple of things that you know obviously this is this is we can have a we have a whole hour and a half conversation about that question. But I'll say maybe we will when your whole paper comes out, because I'd love for you to come back after I have a chance to read it and digest it, for you to be able to talk about it with us, because I think my audience would

love it. But uh, okay, dive in broad picture question that I just asked. Yeah, and look, there's a lot to say about this topic. And you know, in fact, I just interviewed uh the now former HHS Secretary Alex asar on a lot of this stuff last week. You can find it on YouTube if you google my name and his um. More to say about that, But I'll say a couple of things to to to what the

appetite of you and your listeners. First is if you actually look at which countries have performed well this time around with COVID, it was mostly the countries of the Pacific Rim East Asia. And why is that. It's because the countries of the Pacific Rim have encountered the coronavirus before.

They had encountered Stars Kobe one in two thousand three, and it was because of their experience with that first Stars code coronavirus, or at least the one that we call the first Stars coronavirus that led them to when this one came around, they took it seriously from from day one. They did the social distancing and the other kinds of things to be careful, but they didn't shut

down their societies. They didn't have to because their citizenry knew how to behave their governments knew what steps to take to get the testing going and everything else. So my hope, my optimism is that the experience of this pandemic will lead us to be smarter in general about both the way everyday people respond to the crisis and have the government response. Maybe that's too optimistic, but I think there's reason to be hopeful of that. If we

look at the example of Asia. The second thing I'll mention is the vaccine. So one of the things that's come out of this past twelve months or ten months that's been remarkable is the development of these of these coronavirus vaccines. As I think I talked about with you and your last show that we did together, the previous world record for developing a vaccine for a novel virus was five years for the ebolavirus five years. We shattered

that record. Two different biotech come and these one American Maderna on another German bio Intact basically developed these mRNA based vaccines. M RNA is a is a type of genetic code material like DNA. They developed these mRNA vaccines and turn them around incredibly quickly, and we got them on the market in an incredible record time. And what's really really encouraging about that is that these mRNA vaccines are actually really easy to manufacture. They're really easy to develop.

It's almost like software. You type into genetic code, you PLoP out the vaccine and it's ready. The Maderna they had their vaccine, their first batch that they developed for testing that was ready to go in January February of last year, almost a year ago. So think about this. If we have another coronavirus or another virus that is amenable to that kind of technology, you could develop a vaccine much sooner. Once the genetic sequence of that virus

is published, you can develop the vaccine right away. And for those high risk individuals, frontline workers, nursing home residents, the people who are particularly vulnerable, you can get them vaccinated within a month of the pandemic or two months of the pandemic, instead of waiting for almost a year to get that vaccine out. And if you can do that, you can stem a lot of the damage that comes

from the serious illness from from a novel pandemic. Hopefully this is a situation we don't have to encounter for a while. But to me, that technological advance is one of the things that a lot of people aren't talking about that we can bring to the next crisis that we have if we are so unlucky as to have one.

A couple more questions. Though I know how busy you are, you hear a lot about the death rate from COVID, and I always say, like nobody, I always say on my radio show nobody hates death more than me, right like, so I am, I want to make it clear here that I am adamantly opposed to death. I wish we could live almost forever. I wish nobody's grandma ever died.

All those things the folk us again going back to the statistical analysis, the age of death from COVID, and you might need to say with COVID, but however you want to phrase that is either around the same age as the average age of death in the country as a as a whole, or maybe a little bit older, right, uh. And you can speak to that data better than I can.

So am I correct roughly in the in the average age of death from somebody who is being classified as a COVID death is not much different than the average age of death overall in the United States. That's uh, that's generally true. You know. Obviously it's older people who are typically dying of COVID. It's older people who died generally, yes,

um uh. And in fact, as you know, we we've published some analyzes that show that the real UH bulge are differential in in who's dying of COVID in United States relative to pre existing normal quote unquote death rates by age, Brackett, is that sort of upp upper middle age bracket rather than the elderly, because the elderly, as you say, are dying anyway. And this is this is something I think there's gonna be and I think this

may be the thing you're getting at. We may find as we sift through the data that the death rates of the elderly versus the death rates of the elderly in a normal year we're not that different. And or that the the the age of death is only you know, maybe a couple of months before the life expectancy for say an eighty five year old. Maybe that eighty five year old would have lasted until lady six, maybe it

would have last till Lady seven. And COVID, you know, pushed that a little earlier, but not by a dramatic amount. We don't know. I think those are some debates that are going on in the statistical community right now. But we'll start to learn about that. And another thing that we're going to have to study, Clay, is how many people died not because of COVID, but because they were locked in their rooms or they the average age of those people is going to be much younger, which is

where I was gonna go years lost of life. We talk a lot about death, but really, I think everybody out there when you take a step back and think about it from an analytical perspective, uh, and also the in factor in a little bit of emotion. The reason why when a five year old dies we feel so much worse than when an eighty five year old dies is because the five year old had so many lives, so much of their life left, so many years to

live compared to the eighty five year old. And one of the things I've said it to the extent that there is a gift at all. Can you imagine if we had COVID except it had taken all young people instead of primarily been old people. That's a totally different dynamic, which goes to your point about the vaccine. I mean, I've got young kids. I mean I would have been curled up in the basement right like I would have been terrified for them. And so when we talk about

the number of deaths that we have. The other thing that I don't here discussed very much is from an analyticaltistical perspective, in theory, if the people who are dying, are dying not necessarily with tons of years left on their life, right, they have comorbidity ease, they are otherwise unhealthy. People are talking about how this is an unprecedented death,

and I understand that. But in two, and in tree and four, and maybe even in one, if the vaccine gets distributed, well, isn't it likely that we would see a substantial decline in deaths? In other words, focusing on how many people are dying this year, to me, is missing that a lot less people would theoretically die in the next couple of years ahead, and not just rationalizing and recognizing we're not stopping death right, like the average age of death is going to still be what it is.

I hope we can continue to raise it. But every day, I think in this country, around eight thousand people die, and the overall understanding of that seems to be very limited in the media and the analysis and discussion of

this issue. Yeah, you know, it's it's one of those things that's going to be hard to tease that from just last year's dat because, as you said, who died with COVID, who died of COVID, we literally are not recording that information because the hospitals don't have an incentive too, So so that's gonna be a hard thing to to look at next year, I mean this year in and understand.

But you know, what you're what you're bringing up is that after several years, let's say we look at the period from five and say, okay, over that five year period, how many people in a particular age bracket died versus what we'd see in a non pandemic period. That's going to give you the answer that you're talking about in terms of it was there. It may not even be noticeable over ten years. It's probably not going to be noticeable at all if you average it out over ten years. Right.

In other words, we're all so much of social media, and much of media today is about reacting instantaneously to what's occurring at this exact point. But when you sort of expand your horizon, a lot of public policy decisions, it seems to me, are are based on trying to do something in this week or this month that doesn't

necessarily make sense. And look, I mean, you can say, even you know, broadening the perspective, you hear a lot of people say, once their businesses go public, oh, We've got to make sure that we make our quarterly numbers. But are you making the right decision in that quarter for the next ten years or you just trying to clear that hurdle right now. There's a difference between managing for the future and managing for right now. I guess it is one of the things that I'm trying to

get to. Well. Well, the thing that you're you're stimulating in my mind in terms of what to to mention as you say that, is something we haven't talked about yet, and that is the profound fiscal and economic changes that have tap have taken place over the last twelve months. We've increased the federal debt from twenty trillion dollars to twenty eight trillion dollars and bidens trying to add another

two trillion of that. The Federal Reserve increased the supply of US dollars, the effective supply of US dollars in the economy, by which, in theory, all else being equal, means that the dollars in your wallet are worth four fifths of what they were worth before, because literally the Federal Reserve just printed more dollars and flooded them into the economy, which went to the banks, which went to the wealthy, which went to the people who owned stocks

and uh and could benefit from all that extra cash flowing around, didn't go to ordinary people. And and those problems are gonna come back to haunt us. One of the things that I really worry about, I'm I'm I'm optimistic about our ability to handle a future pandemic for the reasons I mentioned. I'm a lot more concerned about what increasing the debt by eight trillion dollars and increasing the money supply by is going to do to push us into a long term fiscal crisis that we're not

going to be able to deal with. And people, you know, America has been such a stable and generally prosperous country for so long, people have forgotten what it's like to be in an environment where we really have a fundamentally unstable economy, and by fundamentally unstable, I'm talking vim our Germany, great depression, that kind of instability. And we are well on our way. We are well on our way to having basically the monetary policy of vim our Germany, and

look out if that ever comes to pass. And and there are a lot of scenarios I could, I could bore you with or terrify you with that that could take place over the next ten twenty years in that regard and not to me, that's the biggest mess that we're gonna have to clean up from the last twelve months.

How do we get our our fiscal and economic picture back in line because if we don't, the rising generations are never gonna know what it's like to have to have had that that success, in that prosperity that that people that are my age and your age take for granted. Be sure to catch live editions of Out Kicked the coverage with Clay Travis weekdays at six am Eastern three am Pacific. We're talking to Ovic Roy. He works at free opt dot org. He is at a v I

k thank him for talking with us. I keep saying I have two more questions, but I do. I think have only two more questions now. One of those questions, uh that is out there is one that my wife asked me to ask you specifically, what is this vaccine

going to do? Presuming that everybody starts to get the vaccine, when do you think things can get back to quote unquote normalcy and walk us through because she was like, hey, they're saying that you're still gonna have to wear a mask after you're vaccinated because you might still then be asymptomatic and able to spread it even after vaccination, which her concern is if that's true, then how do we

get back to normalcy? Uh? And can you break down the vaccination process and what it looks like in means to the average person out there? That was her big question, um, because she doesn't think there's an in depth discussion enough about what the vaccination actually means in terms of our lives. Yeah, great question, Laura. So first of all, we should we should mentioned there's multiple vaccines. They're not identical. The MODERNA vaccine and the bio Intech vaccine and the new Johnson

and Johnson vaccine. They're all a little different, um, and they all seem to work, which is the good news. They're all a little different and so, uh So there'll be a lot of different vaccines that are that are out out there that you can get access to, just like there are a lot of different COVID tests that you can get access to, but they work and that's reassuring. So for the people out there, who are who are have been skeptical of whether the vaccines work or not,

or whether it's some you know, government plot. Um, I'm pretty competent that the vaccines have been studied well as they do work and that they are affective. So, uh, will you be in line to get it? Will you be in line to get a vaccine? Like? Is that something that you care about or your kids as opposed to your parents who may want to get a vaccine? Like, what would your personal decision be? Yeah, I've I've signed

up on the Austin website. Now I'm you know, I'm forty eight years old, and I'm you know, I don't I don't have any serious serious illnesses, so I'm not I'm not going to be the front of the line eye idem. I wouldn't want to cut in line. I want the greatest risk to get it first. But but yeah, when it comes out, I'll definitely get When I'm able

to get it, I'll definitely get it. And the good news is, you know, again, for all the catterwauling in the press and and from from people with a partisan point of view, the fact is, uh, we've we've started to to overcome some of the stupidity, particularly at the state level, in terms of blocking people from getting the vaccine. The rules that that really uh Florida Dennis excuse me, Roder Santas and Florida Uh innovator, where you just give it to everyone over sixty five. You know, let's just

do that. Show him your driver's license, boom boom, straightforward, get all the over sixty five people the vaccines, then go work down from there. That's the right way to go. And that was really bungled by by a number of people, as the Santis done the best job almost of any governor in the country, despite the fact that he's been

criticized rapidly by many people in the media. Absolutely, you know, I mean this vaccine thing is only reinforced what you and I talked about with the nursing homes uh in back in August. I mean, it was the Santis who did the right thing, which is, let's just open it up to everybody over sixty five. We're not gonna grill you on exactly what you're medical history. We're gonna look at your driver's license boom, and if there's extra vaccine

at the end of the day, boom. You know, stick it in the arm of the pizza guy right Whereas Andrew Cuomo New York is literally saying to clinics, if you give the vaccine to someone who isn't in the right subgroup that I've dictated, I will find you a million dollars. And what does that do that He's a lot of vaccine is getting wasted because at the end of the day they run out of people who were at the clinic to give the vaccine to and they literally have to throw out the remaining doses. It's just

profoundly idiotic. And it just goes to show, oh again, it's like consistent with what happened before. You have one, uh one governor in particular, who stands out as a data driven guy who's always doing the right thing and based on the science, and they have another guy who's just operating from ego and instinct and and messing up NonStop. So, by the way, also the one that gets criticized is the one who's actually looking at the data. That's what's

so frustrating to me from that perspective. There are a ton of people listening to us right now that are like, wait, Florida Governor Rhonda Santis has done one of the best jobs in the country. I saw on CNN that there were people at the beach in Florida and that everybody was gonna die in Florida, right, and that they're opening bars and that their restaurants are open, and that schools

are open. It's it's that's what's so frustrating to me, is the media is actually selling us something that's fundamentally not true. And I saw, by the way, on Florida data yesterday, sixty eight percent of all people that have gotten the vaccine in Florida, more than anybody in the country, are sixty five or over. And so they're specifically focusing

on the people who are dying of COVID. Yeah, they've have been very smart about it, again compared to other places where say, well, you have to be sixty five and live in a nursing him and have a pre existing condition, and then maybe we'll get the vaccine to you. But if you're not, then you have to wait until we're through with all those people first. I mean, it's

just totally dumb, just logistically and uh. And credit to the Santists for seeing through that, and and the CDC, the so called you know, gold standard at the CC. All the bureaucrats of the CDC, they contributed to this problem by creating a very unwieldy the kind of thing that bureaucrats would do, not based on real world how things work, how things get distributed. So, uh, kudos to the santists. And then the Trump administration in its waning days,

UH saw that and said, hey, this is stupid. That is what the CDC put out doesn't make any sense. Let's uh, let's overrule them. Of course, there were a lots of people to go, oh, you're overruling the CDC, but no, they did the right thing there. And you know you have Biden now saying well, and I want to answer a lar's question about this, do you have Biden out? They're saying, you know, well, are are big plan.

The thing we're gonna do that's different from Trump is we're going to make sure that we deliver a hundred million doses of COVID over the next hundred days. Well, do you know what the run rate is of vaccines in the last couple of days of the Trump administration was to one point five million a day, meaning that if Biden does nothing, just lets the Trump administration plan play out, they'll have delivered a hundred fifty million doses

over the next hundred days at least. So you know, there's a lot of like Biden put out this big press release the other day saying, Oh, here's all the things I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make people produce pp I'm gonna deliver a hundred million dolls of cod It's like, this is all common sense stuff that's already being done.

And the good news is again there there's obviously been a lot of snappy there's a lot of things that have gotten messed up in the early going here, but the good news is we're learning from that in real time. I do think we're gonna get easily through a hundred million doses in the first hundred days. We should have all the at risk populations of people who actually want to take the vaccinumously. There are a lot of people who are scared of it or don't want to take

it for pill sophical reasons. But the people who want to take the vaccine who are over sixty five should all get it by March uh if you know, if they want to, then we start going to the general populations. And my hope is that let's call it, let's call it July. Uh. We you know, the the vast majority of people who want to get vaccinated should be well on their way to getting vaccine at least the first

shot and hopefully the second. And that means that from a standpoint of the way viral transmission works, the virus is not going to be a problem. Right if you've got that much immunity in society, the virus is not going to really be able to get the traction to continue to spread even if not everybody has gotten the vaccine. Think about the measles vaccine. Not everybody gets the measle vaccine.

Not everybody gets the flu shot every winter, and yet enough people do that that that we don't have influenza pandemic. So similarly, here, if enough people get the vaccine, we should be able to return to normal life. So I don't agree with the people are saying no, we have to behave as if we're still in law down for for most of this year. I think for the first quarter is still going to be tough sledding. But but once we get to to the April May June time frame,

I do think things should start to subside. Hopefully the stacks on the cases and the hospitalization starts to subside to and that'll be the thing that hopefully turns around that allows us to build more momentum for for reopening schools, reopening the economy, etcetera. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live.

I'm Clay Travis. This is Wins and Loss as you're hearing from O vicroy legit last question for you, and I think we could talk all day, by the way, I could just I could just keep unpacking so much of what you're saying and continue this conversation, and I hope people have enjoyed it. I said, legit last question. But I do want to ask you this. How is

free ap dot org funded. If people are listening to this right now and they love what you're saying and they're like, man, I want to go check out more of the work they're doing their capitalists or do you guys raise money? Are you privately funded? What is the method by which you are able to do the work that you do. Well, thank you for asking that, Clay. Because we are a nonprofit of five oh one C three tax exept, nonprofit, nonpartisan, and we basically survive our donations.

So we get donations from people like you, people who are listening to this uh podcast or radio show, and where we we get donations from also charitable foundations that we apply to grants from and and so we basically you hit up as many people as we'll We'll take the calls, take the meetings, and give them our our pitch about what we're doing and say, hey, look, if you're if you're looking for a set of ideas that can bring Republicans and Democrats together to make the country better,

to expand freedom and expand prosperity, particularly for the little guy who's struggling in this day and age, take a lookal what we're doing and and help support our scholars and and you know, to take the example of our our COVID work. Right. So it wasn't just me. You know, you're you're having me on your show, and I appreciate that, appreciate the chance to share what we work on. But it was a whole team of people who put together

our work, like on on reopening schools. Yes, we had our healthcare people talking about the COVID piece of it, the virus piece of it, right, but we also had our education experts, people like Dan lips for who's our expert on case through twelve education, Preston Cooper, who's our expert on on college and vocational school and how to reopen those schools. And so we had a plan that went from how to reopen preschools to grade schools, the

high schools, the colleges to trade schools. We went through it all, and that's because we're able to leverage our whole team of scholars, not just in in biotech and healthcare, but also in education and economics and housing and other areas to do this kind of work. So and we wouldn't be able to do that if it weren't for for the donations of of the people like the people

who are listening to this podcast. So if you're interested in supporting our work, whether it's a ten dollar check or if if you're Clay, if you have Clay Travis money a bigger chest than that, you can click on the donate tab on our website and I legitimately am going to donate today. I'm meant to ask this the last time, so free op dot org. I mean, I'm just I'm just so impressed with the work that you're doing, and I think we need more work like this, and

so I'm going to head uh straight there. So, if you are also enjoying this conversation and you want to to support free op dot org, is where you go? Okay, last question for you, so, and the reason why I would use Vietnam as an example is Vietnam is almost universally decided to have been the biggest failure of American public policy for most of the last fifty years. Right, let's go all the way back to to Vietnam. The

smartest people got it all wrong on Vietnam. In the years that have ensued since Vietnam finished, that has become the consensus opinion. We got it wrong. We didn't foment the right public policy, we wasted a lot of lives, we didn't do what would have been best for the country. I would imagine almost everybody out there listening right now, there's very few people who are like in the camp of Vietnam was expertly executed by the United States government.

Will we reach the point I know you said, you've got your report coming out at the end of February where masses of American population recognized that lockdowns, that shut downs, that schools being closed was a failure of policy. Or are so many people committed to what their opinion was in real time through social media and everything else, that people will be unwilling to recognize what the data tells them because it conflicts with the emotions they felt in

that moment. And I at asked that question because I think it's significant and important that we learn from the mistakes that we make in public policy in our country. Will we end up because I think you would agree with me right now that the data is almost uniform that lockdowns don't make sense, and you can use Fortunately, because of federalism, we've got all these fifty different states

that may have implemented a little bit different policy. And I think it's clear that California hasn't had some radically better result than Texas, or that certainly New York hasn't been better than Florida. In fact, it's far worse. I use those four states because they're the most populous. In other words, the virus was gonna virus, right, like we weren't going to be able to escape it based on a public policy decision exclusively, Will we reach that consensus?

When does that consensus come? If we are ever going to reach it, I think it's going to take a long time, Clay, because you know, the people who were involved as debate, people like you and me and the people who we disagreed with, pretty invested in their point of view at this point, right, Nobody wants to admit

they're wrong. Nobody is going to be inclined to admit the wrong, even if they secretly believe they're Some people just don't believe they're wrong because they're not gonna look at the data that doesn't confirm their own preconceptions, right. So I think it's gonna take some time for that

to happen. But that's where organizations like free Up hopefully can play a role, along with obviously guys like you, in terms of doing the research, doing the analyzes that we can then circulate uh in the media, circulate with with our our peers and colleagues that show UH that

that's the case. Right. So it's up to the people like us who have the views that we have or the hypotheses or whatever you want to call it, to actually do the research, do the work to show that actually, if you look at California and you look at Texas, and you look at the economic restrictions that they put in or didn't put in, here was how that affected the rate of COVID infections and their hospitalizations in debt.

And it's it's pretty clear that that that nothing really happened there and and or that that that that that the Texas or Florida model was vindicated. I think that's that's going to be some of the work that that that people at Free Up and L we're going to have to do to make that point clear. So it's up to researchers who want to who want to test that hypothesis or or or or or prove it to do that work. And and that's where organizations like us

really make a difference. Through the whole reason we started Free Up. Free Up is only five years old, four and a half years old, and the whole reason we started is because even though this country is so big, three foundered thirty million people, there was literally nobody doing this kind of work. If we didn't do it, which sounds crazy, Like I look around them, like, how is it possible that we're the only ones writing these you know,

long arctics. I say that in sports every day. How is it possible that OutKick is the only place doing what we do. It's it's scary, honestly. Yeah. And so it just, uh, you know, puts a little more pressure on us maybe to work harder and get that stuff out there. And and we certainly take that responsibility seriously

and are are going to continue to do that. So so keep an eye on on our Twitter account, on our website and uh and hold us accountle if we don't get it done, and asked us to when when that work is going to come out, because it's important

to get it done. It's not only important to get it done, it's also important for the very scientific method itself, because the idea that experts know everything to me is one of the lasting legacies of COVID that is going to be the most destructive, because the scientific method is predicated on coming up with hypotheses, testing them, and always expecting that you may be wrong, whereas it seems to me that social media is predicated almost entirely on never

admitting you were wrong about anything. Yeah, you know, I mean you mentioned Vietnam. We we we talked about it on the last interview as well. You know, we obviously talked about COVID. Think about the housing crisis in two thousand eight. Right, all the experts said, housing prices only go up, they never go down, because that's what historical charts show. But of course, you know, every trend is

made to be broken. And you have a housing bubble, you have a financial bubble, you have uh institutions behaving recklessly, people behaving recklessly, over leveraging their their their equity in their homes, and boom, you have a crash. Right, And that's what happened. And there were the people that that Michael Lewis wrote about in The Big Short, which was a great book and a great you know, I mean, and obviously the author of Moneyball as well, and The Blindside,

incredible writer. Like what, what's the running theme of all those all those books, all those movies. It's that the experts didn't get it right, and there was some random creative nerd out there who was right where the experts were wrong. And so that's a you know, there's a balance, right. We don't want to say science doesn't matter that you know, you should just ignore everything that a scientist says because

the scientists are always wrong. That's not true. But it's also true that experts, particularly experts who have a political point of view, often uh uh, you know, aren't willing to see countervailing or contradictory evidence that that conflicts with their world viewing. So the balances somewhere in the middle. The balances have a healthy skepticism of of what you hear from the so called experts. Don't automatically assume they're

wrong either, but have that healthy skip to skepticism. Do your own work, do your own checking, ask intelligent questions. That's what we should have done in two thousand and eight with the natural crisis. That's what we should have done with the Vietnam war or the Iraq war. That's what we should do with COVID and everything else that comes along along the way. And if we do that, we'll have a much more healthy society uh and hopefully better response to the challenges that come before us in

the future. I'm donating to him free op dot org. Got encourage you to do it as well. I'd also encourage you to go follow uh oh vic Roy at a v I K. You can thank him for coming on and talking to our OutKick audience here, and when you publish, hopefully in late February, since you've now established a date. When you published that and I have a chance to read it, we will get you on again.

I appreciate you answering my wife's questions uh and uh, and again give her credit because she loved this interview and she said, you've got to get him on again, and you've got to talk to him again and get an update. So I appreciate everything that you're doing at your organization, and I appreciate time you gave us today. Hey Sam do you thanks for being a voice for for for the real the real truths out there on

these issues really really important. Your your audience. You've you've grown such a big audience and you have, uh you know, the trust of so many people, and you've used it, uh for for social good to to get people the information they need. So people like me are grateful to you for that. Oh vic Roy, go follow him at A V I K. I am Clay Travis. This is Wins and Losses. I think. This is the first time we've ever had a guest on twice, so you know how highly I think of him. Go donate free op

dot org. Appreciate all of you. Go check out the rest of our Wins and Losses conversations, including Ovic and Eyes first conversation, which is up from August one. Thank you, my man, Thanks to all you, and I hope you guys enjoy it, share with your friends. This has been Wins and Losses