Episode 1058 Scott Adams - Talking to Bjorn Lomborg About His Book False Alarm, Ridiculous News

hey everybody come on in gather round it's gonna be a good one oh yeah i always say that but isn't it always right yeah you know it is i always say it's gonna be the best one and and then it is so i guess you got that going on um if everything works out i'm going to have author bjorn lomborg on here today but i'm terrible on follow-up so uh if that doesn't work out we'll make sure it works out soon but before i see if i can connect him uh i'll give him a few minutes if he's if he's up and around to uh to connect on periscope before we do that what do we do first always the same thing always the same thing the best thing ever it's a simultaneous sip and all you need is a copper mug of glass attack or chalice or steiner canteen sugar flask of a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine the end of the day the thing that makes everything better including coronavirus global warming climate change you name it it's all better with the sip join me now i can feel the earth begin to cool i can feel people's fevers beginning to go down just a little bit now bjorn is here yes let's make this work um please technology all right first try did not work bjorn if you can hear me it's not unusual for the first try not to work so um make sure that you're on a mobile device such as your smartphone i think you're back let's try again all right bjorn please work oh the technology is not working um i never know what the problem is when it doesn't work on the first few tries but we'll get this watch this i'm gonna make this work so i can see him uh continuing to try to connect hey bjorn are you there i can hear you success wonderful bjorn lomborg you are the author of false alarm this excellent book that i'm holding up right now and can i describe you as the president of the copenhagen consensus think tech would that be you certainly can yes and uh i'm looking at your uh your twitter profile in which you say that that involves smart solutions through economic prioritization which is exact you're talking my language now bjorn um and this is your new book false alarm when is this out is this out now this is not from uh yesterday so just fresh off the press all right and your topic of primary concern at least in terms of this book is climate change correct yes and before i start asking you some questions i have to tell you that you and i have a weird thing in common that you don't know about and uh correct me if this is wrong but i think i have a pretty good memory of this the first time i ever saw you was on an appearance on bill maher's show do you remember the first time you were on his show i it was actually my second time i remember that i contacted you afterwards okay yeah yeah yeah no yeah um and the thing i remembered was that you you put bill maher into cognitive dissonance because of course he's a big climate change doomer and he normally the doomers are talking to scientists not business people who are looking at both the costs and the benefits and know how to project things into the future as people like you do and you you completely destroyed his world view to the point where he the only thing he could do is act like you didn't you didn't just say something it was the damnedest thing i was watching and i said what just happened here and then i you know i realized it was just cognitive dissonance he couldn't he couldn't process how logically and obviously right you were because it didn't fit any of his worldview so he just pretended it didn't happen and went on so enough about me um so in your book false alarm available everywhere so i'm sure you can get it in everywhere the books are sold um you you're basically going through the skeptic would you call it the skeptical argument on climate science or do you have a term you prefer well i i would tend to think of it as the rational point of climate uh uh the rational climate argument because look what i'm trying to say is it's actually a real problem but the way that we've been presented with this is it's the end of the world and if you're being told this is the end of the world and and and remember this is not just uh uh a vague little sort of claim kids around the world are scared witless you know washington post survey showed that 57 of all american kids now are afraid of global warming and if you ask adults if you ask adults around the world it turns out that almost half of all adults in the world now believe that it's likely that global warming will lead to the extinction of the human race this is just this is just outrageously out there this is a way beyond reasonable concern this is a small alarm and so i try to say look that's not what the u.n climate panel is telling us it is a problem not the end of the world and we should fix it sparkly now uh we're having a little bit of connection problem i hope that will resolve itself but walk us through uh my understanding is that even the ippc the ultimate international body that tells you what's going to happen with climate change that if you actually look what they say their imp the impact on the you know the gdp in the future is trivial is that true it's well perhaps not trivial but it's very small so to give you a sense of proportion uh the they've done estimates of what is the negative impact on climate change in about 50 years so half a century from now the net impact of all climate change if we do nothing will be equivalent to each person on the planet losing somewhere between zero point two and two percent of his or her income hold on nothing wait but hold on let's let's add a little bit of context to that when you say losing it that's in that's an economic term right you don't actually start with more and then you end up with less i think what you're saying is that instead of making a hundred dollars over 50 years you only made 98 dollars exactly which means you wouldn't even know it you there would be nothing in your environment or your experience which would tell you you didn't get that extra two percent right well it would be very hard for anyone to notice just to give you a sense the u.n also expects that by in 50 years time the average person on the planet will be 2.63 times richer than we are today right so right do you just point now that means in the worst case instead of being true i'm rich by 2005 we will be 2.56 times rich yeah uh bjorn is bjorn if you have some place in your wherever you are that you've got a little stronger signal that would be good your signal is coming in and out but i look for the the viewers let me just uh the point is that you'll be 2.6 to 2.6 times richer by then so that little bit you didn't get that maybe you could have gotten you won't even know the difference um and the big problem with the climate change argument is that there are not enough people like you who are who are looking at not just the um the science of it because people get stuck on the science because it's not really a scientist who can tell you what the problem's going to be and people don't get that the person who can tell you what the problem is going to be is the person who can tell you what's going to happen to the economy because if the economy is still strong you can fix almost anything would you say that's true that's absolutely true and but but i i think we also need to recognize it's not like this is an unheard of argument uh so the only climate economist to get the nobel prizes bill northhouse from yale university and this is exactly what he points out he says look global warming gonna be a problem yeah and and by the way as far as i know i've never heard a scientist argue with what you say because you're sort of a slightly different domain than science but i don't think scientists say you're wrong do they well a lot of scientists are not comfortable with this not being alarmist so i think a lot of them will say that doesn't sound right talking about real world impacts one of the things that drive me up the wall and that's what i use uh pretty much the first third of the book to talk about is how you are being scared to stories that are technically true but often dramatically misleading let me give you one example uh last year uh washington told us how uh because global warming people need 187 billion people being flooded by the metric this one bjorn there's a little bit of problem with your connection i might break in and just summarize what what i'm hearing you saying so the audience hears it clearly so you're saying there was 187 million people projected to be uh victims of flooding is that what you said yes sorry i'm just trying to move to another part of the house does this work better that's better yes okay uh so yes 187 million people would get flooded this was the washington post uh headline and everywhere on the planet what that required was that nobody anything in the next 80 years so basically this yeah we're having more audio problems but i think what you're saying is that the assumption is that nobody would do anything about it there would no there would be no remediation over 80 years when in fact uh what is uh is that what's the country that's already underwater uh holland all right so yeah uh so so we can see that the uh the ability to remediate against flooding is pretty good if you have 80 years and you've got a lot of time now what what the what the study actually showed was if you allow people to adapt which of course they will of course you will not see 187 million people having to move you'll see 305 000 people having to move so it was 600 times exaggerated and of course remember every year more than twice that number move out just of california so it's it's not something that the world can't adapt and handle we're simply being told stories that are very scary but end up being very little representative of the real world because we forget adaptation is give me an idea what's behind all the exaggeration in the sense that the the obvious thing is that the the news model requires you to get worked up in order to click on things for them to get advertising income so aside from the the media which has an incentive to exaggerate things for their business model is there anything else behind the wrongness well i i think the the media part is an incredibly important part of it and and we we tend to forget that media exaggerates on all kinds of things it's just that global warming turns out to be such an incredibly good generator of really scary stuff but of course it's also because politicians love this setup look you can't really make a better setup than what you're seeing with global warming politicians get to say the end of the world is made but i can save you right and also we get to say i can save you and the cost will only come in the next election so yeah well you know i i i used to do uh you know financial projections and stuff in my corporate job long ago and the perfect situation for any corporate uh person is that you get to spend money today and be a hero for what you're fixing but nobody will know it will work until you've already been promoted or left for another job in other words exactly what you want to spend money today because that's how you get power and influence and hey look at all these things i did and then you will never be responsible for the outcome because that's in 80 years and oh absolutely and and you know the the fun thing is to see we've been doing this for 30 years so you can actually look back and see how little we've achieved so last year the un actually released a very surprisingly honest review of what we've achieved over the last 15 years and what they said was we cannot tell the difference after all the work up from obama and everybody else around the world all the money they could not tell differently in the world nothing since 2005.

you know isn't there that this feels like a subset of a problem that is plaguing basically every big public decision which is our data is undependable and the people who are analyzing the data are not qualified it feels like it's everything from coronavirus to you name it it just seems to be the same problem the data's bad and we don't know how to look at it anyway i i would i'll probably analyze it slightly differently because i think we you know we spent in in the order of what uh 50 billion dollars on on on climate research so it's not like we don't have a lot of good data i think there is a lot of organizations that want to convince you this is the end of the world because then they can get you to support really really expensive policies uh and i think we as taxpayers need to fight back and say look i'm happy to spend money on pro on solving real problems that'll actually have dramatic impact to better the world in the future but i'm not just going to spend my money to do almost no good and waste most of it and uh what do you think of uh if you had a moment to look at i don't know if you follow american politics enough but uh joe biden's two trillion dollar plan which i had to dig really hard uh i had to look through multiple articles to find out if nuclear energy was even part of it so 2 trillion and and the most of the coverage didn't even mention nuclear energy but i found one article that suggested he wants to go strong at nuclear and especially the new and the new designs which the trump administration doesn't talk about it but they're doing all of that stuff they're pushing for the the new test facilities etc um is that a productive way to go does that this is nuclear on your uh on your good list nuclear is definitely one of the solutions that we could envision for global warming i think the big problem about nuclear is that right now nuclear is much more expensive than most other power sources that's why we need a lot more research and development into you know the fourth generation nuclear power plants so for instance bill gates and many others are spending lots of resources to get that next generation that's going to be safer cheaper and also much more dependable if we can do that that'd be amazing but again this is just one of the many ways that we could fix climate you know innovation fundamentally is going to be the way that we will fix this problem like basically every other problem yeah exactly and when i look at the nuclear situation it's too expensive i don't know if you've dug into the the details of that enough to answer this question but the the things that are stopping us is number one it's hard to iterate if you if you try something it's really expensive to build a second nuclear energy plant and see if the the second one is better than the first one so it's not like building an iphone where you can just do it in the lab until you get it right so that's one problem the other problem is that we don't standardize the big ones so we've got multiple models and if you just built the same damn thing one after another even using current generation three technology before you even get to the super safer safer stuff of generation four could we do generation three let's call it current technology which has had uh zero deaths historically is that true zero deaths from it's very very very low deaths yeah i think it's zero actually if depending on how you count it and um are those the two problems you see iteration i guess uh government regulation and how long that takes but iteration and standardization are those are the two things that will change the economics my understanding again from from nuclear technology is that that's really what's been lacking we've been building masterworks uh each one of them instead of actually building just a long stream of them and and indeed that is one of the points that they're trying to do with forced generation to say if we can standardize this and basically build it like a uh uh uh a uh uh uh what do you say a factory of a forty sort of assembly plant sorry that was what i was looking for an assembly plant where we just churn out all of these and you just assemble them like liga uh lego on on on the spot and then you run it that will be enormously much cheaper but again it requires a lot of research and development because we're not there you know when you look at the new power plant set up nuclear power plants that they build around the world they end up being fantastically expensive and one of the reasons as you just pointed out is because there's all this regulation and i just find it's going to be very hard to imagine that that regulation will go away yeah and the secondary problem i understand is that if the nuclear power plant is are these one-offs then you don't have something that you can export to other countries and if you're not the uh let's say the big brother of the smaller nuclear program in the smaller country then somebody else is going to be and that could be china or china or russia so you so simply by not having a robust nuclear energy program in this country we're giving up uh we're giving up influence over a lot of the planet but worse when you go to space it's going to be nuclear power and if you don't own space you might as well just give up because whoever owned space owns the planet that's the end of it that's that's my opinion no but i i think i think the fundamental point here and the insight is to recognize that unless we get cheap green energy we're just not going to switch over because you're not going to convince most people around the planet to say all right i'll get the same power slightly less effectively slightly less dependably and much much more expensively that's just not a selling point for except for you know a few percent for people who are very very engaged in climate and so the reality is we need to invest a lot more into green energy research and development to do that and actually you know to his uh credit that is part of biden's plan so you know at least there's a lot of things in biden's plan and a lot of them i i think are going to be waste of money but that actually turns out to be a really good idea yeah um and there's also a weird thing that uh i can't get over which is the people who are most concerned about climate change you know they they tend to be focused on the political left i don't think that they understand how racist it is because that's their other biggest issue to let's reduce racism but if you say to the developing countries you can't use what we used to get here because it's too polluted then are you basically just telling all the brown people that they can't have what white people have now it's like oh no no we got here this way by using your oil and coal but you can't do that you're gonna have to wait why don't you just wait and we'll find something clean for you we don't know how long it'll take but until then you'll have to starve would you mind waiting it's the most freaking racist thing you've ever heard there's nothing there's no black lives matter thing there's no i mean this is this is on a level literally with slavery in terms of uh how prejudicial it is against people of other colors i mean it's it's massively destructive and yet the same group are in favor of both of those things and we think this all the time you know we're basically telling poor countries no you can't have uh coal power because it is going to make coal mine worse which is true but of course that coal power also going to make that country much much richer so we work together to look at what would it take to put in extra it would dramatically increase life quality in bangladesh the average person in bangladesh is about 16 richer yeah yeah create global war problems but just to give you a sense of proportion for every 100 you produce for bangladesh you create 20 cents of climate problems yeah we have a little audio problems again so let me let me uh just uh do one more topic here and then we'll let you get to the rest of your day i'm sure uh with a new book out you've got a lot to do this week my guess guesses um so i'm really interested in the uh the super storm and the natural disaster story where every time there's a hurricane somebody on television will tell us that climate change is what caused that darn hurricane what's the more reasonable rational view of the big storms and natural national or natural disasters so we're certainly not seeing more storms hitting the u.s actually if you look at landfalling hurricanes and strong landfalling hurricanes they've slightly declined over the last 120 years for the u.s but in general much much more importantly is that many more people live much closer to harm's way with much more stuff so fundamentally the reason why you see dramatic impacts of hurricanes now is because there's many more people you know look at florida coastal counties florida popular coastal population has increased over the last 120 years a 67 fold whereas the u.s population has only increased fourfold so clearly they also have much more expensive homes so clearly you're going to get a lot more damage and again if you want to help these people the way to do so is by getting better building code and also still they're going to get wiped out everyone yeah and you know i i always look at that situation and i ask myself who is it that lives on the beach because it's not the poor people right uh no okay in the united states i mean it must be different in other places but in the united states it feels like there's a pretty strong correlation between being rich and being able to have a house on the beach and if i were to ask if i were to say what would be the best thing for the economy of the united states i'm just joking here but just to make a point the best thing for the economy of the united states would be for a big storm to come by about every three years knock down all the rich houses and give the poor people not poor people but the middle class people who do construction more work because because the rich people have insurance insurance is priced to pay for itself the rich people live in their other house while the you know the beach house is being repaired i mean you you could imagine that it would be a plus to wipe out rich people's houses every few years just so people have enough to do to rebuild them uh i'm just kidding on that but yeah it would certainly teach them to be better at producing their houses well i mean and one of the big problems of course is that we're subsidizing rich people because we're subsidizing much of their insurance uh so we should definitely not be doing that and that of course would get fewer people to build close to harm's way right yeah subsidizing people to build that that's just crazy uh all right so what is it that i uh uh i'll give you the question that every author hates but uh since you're toward the beginning of your book tour i'll get you ready for it okay so this would just be practice the worst question everybody wants to hear as an author what is it i forgot to ask you in other words it's just a chance to mention something that maybe you wanted to mention that sure so so i think i think the the rest of the book really is about two things it's first of all talking about all the things that haven't worked so you know we we promised the paris agreement uh it's gonna cost one to two trillion dollars a year and it'll do almost nothing to actually fixing climate change we're telling you a little bit bjorn we're losing the audio a little bit um i think we got the gist of that though uh would you mind if we uh if we end now just because the audio is kind of sketchy sorry about that i don't know i can hear you perfectly oh okay you're cutting a little bit in now i'll make sure everybody knows your book i'm holding it up i'll tweet about you and i thank you very very much for uh for coming on this you're exactly the kind of author that my audience likes to hear from so thank you very much and good luck with the book hey thank you very much scott all right take care everyone all right bjorn is one of my favorite uh public figures has been for years because he he's one of the few people who look at the costs and the benefits and know how to do it it's a it's refreshing all right a few other things um yesterday i was trying to change a light bulb and i ended up tweeting about it because it was so hard it was one of those compact fluorescents and in in theory you just pull it out straight and push it in straight but it didn't work and so i'd spent over a month trying to change one light bulb i'd ordered different bulbs thinking maybe i had the wrong one i tried everything and uh the funniest part about it was listening to the other people's comments because when i tweeted it you know people weighed in with their comments but the funny part was how many people have thrown away perfectly good lamps and and light fixtures to change the light fixture because they couldn't figure out how to change the light bulb now if you've never tried to change a compact fluorescent light bulb you don't know how hard it is and again this is let me let me explain this is the entire process here's a hole here's the light bulb pushes straight in if you want to take it out pull it straight out and i spent a month not being able to do it even trying that exact thing and apparently other people have just thrown away their lamps changed their fixtures hired a handyman to just change the entire life texture because they couldn't change the light bulb and here's the point of this this was not just to complain about my uh personal inability to do things the larger point is this and i'm going to hit this a lot who tested that this is a gigantic national standard who tested that how many times did they have an average person come in and say hey can you see if you can change this bulb and then watch them now if you try to remove a compact fluorescent you'll find that it breaks in your hand about half of the time it breaks the glass part just breaks off in your hand when you're trying to just change the bulb uh nobody tested that and so i submit to you that we have a gigantic problem in this country and the world of products that were never tested and yet are now standard in all of our homes never test it um have you heard a lot about mary trump's book no you know mary trump the niece of trump who wrote an anti-anti-donald trump book and apparently the worst thing that uh that came out of this because it's the one that they pull from the book is that she alleges that donald trump paid someone to take his sats that's it now first of all i doubt it's true i mean anything's possible it wouldn't change my opinion of anything because i have that 20-year rule i just don't care what people did when they were 18.

do you care what anybody did when they were 18 would you would you say we've got to impeach this president because when he was 18 he did something clever that worked out well i'm sure it wasn't you know if it happened and by the way i would say the odds of it being true are not really that high but even if it is true that's it that's the best you have you're an insider you've got all this access to the family and the best you have is that when he was 18 he did something that any 18 year old would have done if they could have gotten away with it ah that's pretty empty apparently kanye is out he's out of the race but here's what's interesting um he actually did try to get on the ballots so there is uh documented evidence that he put real money into trying to get on the ballots so he was serious some of you wondered if he was serious but i think that's been answered he was serious now what do you make of the fact that he was in the race for you know less than two weeks do you say to yourself well that proves he's a flake and he was never really that serious and what kind of a president is he would he be if he didn't even plan the you know getting nominated and all that the way it should be here's my answer to that he played it perfectly i think kanye played it perfectly because here's what i always say there's nothing better for improving your odds of becoming president than having run in the past right uh trump had sort of flirted with running in the past and therefore because every time there was an election for several elections before the time he actually got elected trump's name was always in the top ten because he put it there trump put his name in the top 10 for every future election by simply making noise but not going very far in initial attempts or initial flirtations with running initial talking about running etc kanye is using the same play it you know people who have lost elections then went on to win were you know quite a few right nixon reagan trump himself it's fairly common biden is has run before and that has a lot to do with why he's uh where he is although being vice president was more of it and i would say that kanye's play of reminding us of kanye for president letting us wrestle with the idea for a little while and then waiting until 2024 was exactly exactly the right play exactly the right play because he didn't really have a chance of winning and everybody would have been mad at him if he if he changed the election result which he would have it probably would have caused trump to win sorry my cat's in the way so i don't think he could have played that better honestly the get in and get out in 2020 if i could have advised him you know if and i didn't by the way but if i could have advised him on the best way to play this i would have said this i always said flirt with it get in there get some noise but really you're getting ready for 2024.

perfect i am entering a voluntary coronavirus quarantine starting today i believe which is not because i have coronavirus as far as i know i do have a test scheduled but it's not because i may or may not have coronavirus it's because i have some minor surgeries scheduled so the current process in case you didn't know for getting a surgery in this environment and by the way i expect the surgery to get cancelled it's in two weeks and i expect it to get canceled because of capacity but at the moment it's scheduled and that means that i have to quarantine for two weeks and that means no christina right i mean i'm talking about the serious kind of quarantine so that starts today i might get a little squirrely and i might do some evening podcasts just because i'll be here all alone for two weeks now the process is they'd like you to quarantine yourself for two weeks before surgery but one week before surgery i'll have the actual test that takes about two days to get a result so something like you know five days before surgery i'll have presumably a negative test and then i will uh go into my surgery i think they test again just before you go into surgery but i'm not sure all right uh there's a lot else going on today um i i always talk about stefan collinson who's an opinion person for cnn uh and he's i i start to think of him as triumph the insult dog so triumph the insult dog uh was on uh uh what's his name uh tall redheaded guy uh uh you know you know the you know the thing oh my god i just turned into joe biden you know the thing uh tall redhead night show uh give me the name why the hell am i blanking on his name you know it is all right um and he writes that uh this is a president who has tremendously failed to beat back the virus and has long since stopped trying to lead the country out of the darkness he's saying that the president has failed to beat back the virus and he stopped trying to lead the country out of the darkness now here's my question for cnn because they have a lot of a lot of commentary about the president doing everything wrong here's my question uh yeah conan o'brien thank you okay i don't feel bad that i can't remember a person named conan because that's not exactly bob all right um and here's my question for cnn what is it that the president should have done differently whoever asked that question if the president is doing everything wrong and as triumph the insult dog stefan collinson says that he's he's he's stopped trying to lead us out of the darkness and he's failed to beat back the virus what exactly should he have done differently because all of the decisions about closing and opening are local right the president i think did all the things that a president could do he closed international travel from china and europe so those are things the president can do he made sure that we had enough ventilators something a president could do and he you know uh did i think a good job or the country did or somebody did and getting the ppe and the protective stuff although we may be running out soon because of the new stuff what exactly is it that the president should have been doing should he have followed the expert's advice well if he'd followed the expert's advice he wouldn't have done the things that were right right he wouldn't have taken the virus seriously he wouldn't close travel from china he wouldn't have done those things if he'd listened to the experts and then what about the mask situation well that was complicated because there was a you know there was an effort to save the masks for the healthcare professionals which i agree with i don't know if that was the best way to do it but i'm not going to criticize i'm not going to criticize fauci or others for lying about masks if the purpose was it was just the only way to protect them for the health care people and i don't know another way if you said to me no scott the obvious way to do that would be tell the public the truth and just ask them not to hoard these supplies well in the real world that doesn't work in a pandemic people are gonna hoard you can ask them not to hoard oh but people are gonna hoard so if you can tell them they don't need to hoard there's no purpose to it maybe it's a better play so did fauci and other experts the surgeon general for example did they intentionally lie to us about the value of masks i don't know if all of them did some of them might have believed the other experts and just parroted them but if they did lie to us but the purpose of it was for our own good i'm actually okay with that i don't know if you are but i do not mind my leaders lying to me under the very unique circumstances that is in my best interest now usually that's not the case so you don't want lying to be approved i just don't know that there are too many cases like this one where unfortunately lying was maybe the only only good play for the benefit of the country i hate it i mean you could be you can hate it but if you don't have a better idea just keep that in mind all right and was there some expert who knew all the right answers and didn't tell the president was there was there some smart thing that smart experts knew that if they'd only told the president then he would have maybe implemented i haven't heard of any have you so when they say the president is failing don't you have to ask yourself at what are not other countries also having problems and is the president to blame for what happened with nursing homes not really now where you could have room for disagreement would be the the president advocating going back to school at the same time that um others would say that's a bad idea because it will increase infections i am solidly on the president's side on going back to school but here's the thing we live in a world where you're not allowed to tell the truth in public but i can watch this i'm going to tell the truth in public ask me and ask yourself if you've ever heard this going back to school will kill teachers and it will kill kids i'm in favor of it okay that's the first honest opinion you've ever heard in public going back to school will kill teachers some of them will kill some students probably not too many as a percentage will spread the infection will kill grandma when the kid comes home all of that's going to happen and it's almost certainly better than the alternatives because we don't have a better alternative we just don't so i think our best play is to do the best we can of protecting the teachers etc here's my suggestion i understand that teachers are far less enthusiastic about opening schools than parents are big surprise right who is surprised that the teachers many of them older many of them susceptible who is surprised that they wouldn't want to go to work in a crowd you know even with some social distancing it's kids so they're not going to be that disciplined uh who would be surprised the teacher doesn't want to go back to that environment you shouldn't be too surprised right and i don't think that we should abuse one professional class teachers who did not sign up for danger duty right people who decided to be teachers did not wake up one day and say i think i'd like to be on the front line of a dangerous situation no no i have a different opinion about the military and about health care professionals because they did sign up for that they did say i am going to intentionally put myself into infectious and or dangerous situations this is the career i choose there's a bigger benefit i take the risk if that's what we were talking about i'd say all right all right you know we'll send the kids back to school and you've signed up for it but teachers did not sign up for that risk it is completely unreasonable completely unfair for the rest of the public to try to force them back to work into a situation that at least half of them think is too dangerous given the costs and the benefits here's what i would suggest as a workaround are you ready the benefit of a teacher in the room as opposed to remote teaching is that it's it's just a first of all it's a way to get the kids out of the house so the parents can go to work so there's certainly a child you know watching process that you you need a physical school for secondly you need to hand out things and discipline people and say stop doing that etc here is my hybrid solution that the that the teacher only appears remotely if they prefer let's say the older teachers don't want to take the risk they can prefer they can appear on a television remotely to their class but you would have a much younger person let's say a college age type person who is the in-class manager if you will so let's put a name on it because they're not teaching the the young person who's the physical presence and the authority in the room would simply be a manager of the situation but the teaching would still come from the teacher who would be in a big old tv screen right in front of the class they could still hear the teacher the teacher could still see the class and anything physical that needed to be done could be done by the younger less risky you know person who's sitting in now or how about let me give you another suggestion let's say you build a separate entrances and exits and bathrooms for teachers so you have a situation where the teacher is just behind plexiglass the whole time just behind plexiglass and you never actually are physically could touch a teacher you couldn't even get close to them if you wanted to because the teachers in the front of the class and there's just a big plexiglass thing here they couldn't get there if they wanted to now you don't need plexiglas if you have enough space from the first row of desks to the teacher i mean it could be just a fence so that nobody you know gets close but you could probably figure ways around it now one of the things i heard is that it's impossible to open up the schools with social distancing in other words the desks being six feet apart there's just enough physical space i would challenge that assumption because i think that in an emergency situation you would use all of the space you might you might uh you know not use the gym for gym class because maybe it's too dangerous to have an inside gym class anyway so you might use some of the the gym floor you might use some of the cafeteria floor and while it's warm you make people eat outdoors you probably want to do that anyway so probably you could get pretty close now some students might want to still stay home and they could just tune in digitally just like anybody else so i think that the president's instinct to push toward reopening is absolutely correct if you take all the pluses and minuses of the economy et cetera into consideration but you have to protect the teachers you have to protect the teachers that is completely unreasonable to send them back into this virus petri dish i do not support that so if we don't have a solution that the teachers are okay with i say don't do it keep the kids home because you can try harder right if if your district hasn't figured out a way to keep the teachers safe they should boycott or strike or something and i would be on their side because we do have enough ways to keep them safe if we're not using it then they should not go to work that's my opinion but we do want to solve that all right um so ivanka trump is not getting enough attention in my opinion for her alternative career path effort so she's working on a deal i don't know all the details but i think she's working with big corporations to try to train and hire people who do not have college degrees so that you could say well i want to learn this specialty i don't need an english degree to do this job but if this corporation will teach me that's a good solution i think that's one of the best things happening in the country right now in terms of it makes sense on every level and it's just so obviously good for you know minority people it's obviously good for low-income people it's obviously good for anybody who doesn't want a college debt this is just one of the best things that's happening in the country and it gives us a little bit of coverage and then people mock it because it's ivanka right i mean it's it's a crazy world when the best things are ignored um joe biden had one of the most classic uh gaffes i've ever heard and this one he didn't even stop to correct it and he he said in a sentence we have to get our kids back to school and then he said in the same sentence we have to get our kids to market swiftly we have to get our kids to market swiftly and he didn't even stop to correct it they just went on what what are you kidding are you kidding so just add that to the list now again i remind you that the hilarious thing to me is watching democrats act like there's nothing wrong with biden i don't see it yeah yeah he misspeaks now then but nothing wrong of course the larger context is the wayfarer rumors are you aware of those all right the most ridiculous fake news or fake i guess it's a rumor it's not news that the actual news people are not covering this because it's not true which is strange for the news business usually they cover things whether they're true or not but in this case uh i would agree with them not covering it and the the rumor on the internet is that the the big company wayfair that sells furniture is a gigantic entity has been secretly using their the pages of their website to sell children instead of products okay i could stop there and you would say okay that doesn't sound true and you'd be right because wayfair is not really selling children but people have these fake pages and they've got their argument because this uses children's names on the products and has a price that doesn't make sense and i don't know if they're photoshopped or mistakes or what but what i can tell you with complete confidence wayfair is not selling children they're not selling your children but in the context of these wayfarer rumors which are all over the internet and again i say it wayfair isn't doing anything none of none of that's true it's ridiculous right now if i'm wrong on this you should never listen to me again okay if i'm wrong about this wayfarer thing being ridiculously stupid and not true if it turns out i'm wrong never listen to me again that's your deal you have permission to never listen to me again but i'm pretty confident about that one i've decided that uh non-fiction writers are the most dangerous people in the world because they don't know what they don't know but they think they know a lot and so the more i see writers writing stuff and they don't know what they're talking about they are seriously leading the world in the wrong place if you saw my bjorn lomborg uh conversation just now you know that the information that you and i receive about climate change is from writers mostly because i don't talk to scientists too much i just read what is written so really i'm reading the opinion and the framing from a writer and it's so dangerously bad and uh you know unable to look at costs and benefits and incapable of analyzing anything i want to give you an example of that um well yeah okay i got a good example that coming up uh it's in a bloomberg opinion piece there's a thread on it today that i tweeted but listen to this one um one sentence by an actual professional writer who gets paid by bloomberg or actually i don't know if it's an opinion piece do they get paid i don't know their business model but it's an opinion piece in bloomberg it has said this it was the this is one comment in a larger piece about um all the the rich people complaining about cancel culture so this is a piece in favor of cancel culture so we could stop right there you know you don't even need to know what the writer said if they're writing in favor of canceled culture maybe you shouldn't listen to them but let me let me read this ridiculous sentence quote could it be that increasingly diverse voices and rich conversations are a threat to their free speech uh and he's talking about the rich people who wrote the uh there was some 30 some people who signed a document against cancel culture so that's the context could it be that increasingly diverse voices and rich conversations are a threat to their free speech or more accurately the prerogative the prerogative i hate that word the prerogative of famous and powerful people to speak at length on all sorts of things without interruption or disagreement so this writer is asking the question if there's really a problem with canceled culture is there really is this really a bad thing all you rich famous writers or are you just complaining about it to get more space for your own ridiculous comments without any counter comments now i'm not even going to tell you what's wrong with this opinion because it's so stupid i don't need to right i'm pretty sure that the people railing against canceled culture do not have a secret agenda of silencing the rich and diverse voices and conversations i'm pretty sure that zero people have ever had that thought in their head zero zero people on the whole planet seven billion plus people not one person has ever had the thought because it's a stupid one that this writer has assigned it to them could it be that they don't like diverse voices and rich conversations uh no it could not be that and this is someone who's paid bloomberg actually princess stuff amazing amazing speaking of writers writer uh barry weiss barry b-a-r-i a woman's name in this case barry was uh until recently she just quit a staff writer and editor for the new york times and she was she describes herself as a centrist uh and in the world of new york times a centrist means far right that's that's my own framing not anything that anybody else said and although she does call herself a centrist but that means that she has some i would say as a centrist would be somebody who has a little bit of appreciation or empathy for the opinions on the right may not share them all but would have a little bit more appreciation for them but also for the left without necessarily agreeing with them all so that's my understanding of a centrist somebody's a little bit open to both sides but doesn't necessarily agree with either side at all things she she quit because she said that it was just an unfriendly place to work and that because she was not as left as the other people i'm paraphrasing this is not her words then she was basically it was just such a toxic environment that she just had to get out of there but here's one of her one of her uh comments in a lengthy uh resolution letter which is worth reading is that she said twitter is not on the masthead of the new york times but twitter has become its ultimate editor oi said uh and she she goes on stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions then she says i was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history now history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative well barry the first thing you got wrong is to assume that history was ever objectively written by anybody history is not objective history is written by the winners and you know whoever gets to write about it so she was wrong on that but i love this framing of the in this case the new york times the most let's say prestigious of all news organizations we might say that even they according to this insider who just quit are basically just parroting twitter now who is the first person who told you that influential people on social media are actually the new government i did right so social media has effectively become the new government because the media has to parent social media i don't know if they have to but their business model sort of influences them that direction and and once the social media and the media have you know formed an opinion the politicians fall in line so the politicians you know they may uh suggest a new idea but that is sort of up to social media and the public and then the and then the regular media to support it or not and then the politicians know what freedom they have to either go with it or not and of course when i say the public supports it or not i mean their side so there are only things in our world that are supported by the left and only things supported by the right and the few things in the middle we don't hear much about because it's not fun all right here's some more cancellations uh viacom cbs decided to can uh what's his name nick cannon because they allege he made anti-semitic comments in his podcast and here's the funny thing about it uh when i read the comments that he made i at least based i didn't hear the details maybe it's worse if you hear the the full thing but just the surface reporting of the things he said i don't know it just sounds like an opinion to me it did not sound like he was intentionally doing anything anti-semitic and indeed he considers himself sabbatic in other words and even he said this how can i be anti-semitic when the whole thing i was saying was that i'm semitic so you can't be anti yourself and i thought well okay you could argue whether he's semetic or not but you can't argue the point that if he includes himself in the in the group that he's criticizing then it's more like criticizing your own group it's a weird hybrid because who is it that gets to say that nick cannon is or is not semitic and you know he's got some story about black people being the real semitic people i don't know if it's true or false but whether it's true or false or has any historical backing i have no opinion i don't care doesn't matter doesn't sound right it doesn't sound right right i mean it doesn't sound right but that doesn't mean it's not right i just don't have any knowledge or information to argue it one way or the other but because he did not apologize he got canned and i asked you should you apologize for insulting your own group as you see it somebody says it was anti-white is what it was could be i didn't see the details did not see the details and there was something about the the rothschild in there that you know makes your eyebrow go up what what do you say about the rothschild because there might be a little conspiracy theory in there so i don't know what he said but i just note that that happened and he didn't apologize and i'm not sure that you should apologize if it's your actual opinion do you apologize if it's your opinion and you still hold it because that doesn't seem like an apology situation that seems like i just have an opinion and somebody didn't like it so they fired me i know i'm not supporting his opinion and i'm not attacking it uh it's just a weird hybrid that he did not have bad intentions whatsoever i think i think can't tell what people are thinking really but it looked like that all right um here's something i did that hasn't gotten me canceled and i think that that is hilarious i i tweeted this yesterday and where do you see how much attention it got i tweeted this i said have you ever seen an engineer scientist or statistician argue that police are killing black citizens at an alarming rate ask yourself why now do you see what i did there uh let me explain it because i think you see the general idea but there's a little bit more to it the natural frame for our conversations about big stuff and the black lives matter stuff is big stuff our natural frame is either the left versus the right or maybe black versus white or you know black versus non-black but our natural inclination is to just put things in this this group versus that group which is terribly unproductive and also makes you stupid because you're not really using reason you're just saying well what team am i on so i guess i support the team but what i did was reframe that instead of thinking it was black versus non-black or left versus right how about people who know how to look at data versus people who don't how about that that's my frame people who are trained to understand data and to analyze it versus people who don't and so i put this on here and you would think that i would get cancelled immediately for this but unlike nick cannon i think people are afraid of me meaning afraid to give attention to this point of view because you know if you gave attention to the point of view that the black lives matter protests the the primary trigger not the only topic they have they have general topics about systemic racism etc but the trigger the primary thing that the the protests have been about the george floyd situation is complete it's complete and i gave myself enough freedom by setting the groundwork in the things that i've done up to this point that i might be the only person in the world who can say that out loud do you know anybody else who's saying this that the black lives matter the trigger of it i'm not saying racism doesn't exist i'm not talking about the the larger questions that's another topic but just the question of police killing black people at a at an oversized alarming amount it just isn't true now when i change the frame to why is it that you don't hear any engineers scientists or statisticians uh being on the same side as the black lives matter protest the reason is these are all the groups that know how to look at data and there's a very simple data analysis mistake which caused all these protests and it's this they looked at the percentage of black people killed versus the percentage of white people killed by police and that's just a data analysis error because when you look at the percentage of black people killed by police you're not really looking at police violence against black people what you've done is you've accidentally studied how many black people commit crimes or how many black people live in a neighborhood that's a high crime neighborhood you've accidentally looked at the wrong thing because police are stopping black citizens at a higher rate why well most of it because it's the neighborhood they live in is higher crime and you know certainly there's a it's a separate issue of whether uh too many black people are being stopped and frisked the stop and frisk part is a i think its own topic but the correct way to look at it is in the total number of stops police encounters what percentage of them either black people were stopped were killed versus the percentage of white people killed when they were stopped by police now that would be the correct way to look at the data and when you do there's not much difference in fact white people are killed a little bit more often but not statistically so so the entire protests are built on this weird little lie that can only be supported so long as you never have in the news an engineer a statistician an economist or what's the third thing a scientist somebody who actually knows how to look at data you will never see somebody who knows how to look at data talk about this data because it would ruin the whole thing as soon as as soon as you talked about it now what that means and if you take this to the larger thing compare the issue of black people being killed by police which i think we'd all agree we want less of it right so if there's anything we can do to make less of that i'm all on board all right i'm completely on board with looking at new ways to do policing without police i think that's actually a really good path to explore but the only way i would do it is by testing as small to make sure it doesn't blow something up right so if if you wanted to replace police and the way that you wanted to do it is with some alternate methods let's test them totally let's test them see see what happens but do a small see if finding out if it works but here's my issue with the black lives matter protest over police killing police killing might be not might be probably is not probably is absolutely is i'm going to go for full certainty on this the smallest problem in the black community it's the smallest problem why are they protesting over their smallest problem the total number of people killed by police in general that's your smallest problem do you know what's a big problem how about uh health care for black people in general how about that yeah that's a way bigger problem health care for black people in general on a scale of 1 to 10 that's like a 10.

if you were to say on a scale of 1-10 where is number of people killed by the police black people killed by the police during police stops that's a two one or a two on the scale of one to ten just because there's so few people involved how about a good education for black people you know better education especially in the inner cities areas where is that on a scale of one to ten ten ten that is ten and if the scale was higher it would be higher it's not anywhere close to the problem of police killing black people during stops not even close you know that one's a two education is a 10.

what are the democrats trying to do reduce the ability of black people to get a good education by removing school choice which is literally the only way to fix it nobody even has another idea really it's the only way so the black population has by um and i think that the illegitimate press is largely to blame for this imagine a world in which uh there were cons the protests were happening just the way they're happening now but if you turned on cnn they would say you know this is actually your smallest problem statistically if you're just to look at the numbers this is by far your smallest problem because all of the crime etc is coming from the same one thing you know bad education uh there's there are questions about family structure etc which i don't fully understand what's behind all of that i've got some real questions there uh about you know what is actually exactly behind the number of single parents etc i'd like to know more about that but um anyway if the news accurately reported things in the size that they should be reported the protest wouldn't be happening because every every time they turned on the news they'd be watching their own news source and their own news source would say okay they're working on the smallest problem and ignoring the big ones again and then all the protesters would say well that's not any fun why are we out here working on our smallest problems again did you know this was our smallest problem you didn't know either okay but now we know because it's on both the left and the right news sources which is usually more dependable if it's reported both ways so in my opinion the protests and all that come with it including the extra coronavirus if in fact there is any that comes out of it is entirely the illegitimate press's problem when i told you that non-fiction writers are the biggest risk to the country i mean this this is all non-fiction writers who are writing fiction ironically the the news business is just non-fiction writers that's what they do they write about non-fiction and if they wrote correctly and if they were good at their job in other words if their talent stack included the ability to look at data they would not be putting us in this position do you know what they'd be doing supporting things that would give black people a better education right because that would be the top priority not even close not even close to any of this other stuff all right um we found out recently that uh mark levin you know him from fox news and he's got a radio show i believe and other things and apparently a former wikipedia wikipedia editor and if you know the the model of wikipedia you have all these volunteer editors so for every topic you could have multiple editors who have been sort of approved i guess to be able to change things but the editors can get in battles so somebody could change something and then another editor can come in and change it back but they do have rules about what is right to change and what is not right to change and one of the rules is if you point to a source then you can keep it in there like you don't want to remove something that has a legitimate source uh but if you put something in there that's a claim without a source then another editor can successfully get rid of that but apparently there was this a huge battle over mark levin's page in which somebody kept filling it with untruths and the other editors would try as hard as they can to scrub it out but i guess it was just like a raging multi-year battle in which somebody continued to put smears on there and other people continued to try to get rid of them i don't know where it ended up i'm not sure if it's back to the smear or back to gone all right um uh oh i accidentally talked about that before all right there's a tweet that says that uh from uh dr uh call vinder cower so dr cower i think i'm pronouncing it right k-a-u-r uh tweeted that there are 53 plus published hydroxychloroquine studies for covet 19 uh showing strong efficacy as a prophylaxis and as treatment in early coven um so that's the claim the claim that there are 53 plus published studies showing that hydroxychloroquine works and that the government is sort of you know blocking it from being used and then on top of that uh dr zielinski who most of you know he was the doctor who is using hydroxychloroquine with all of his patients in new york and claimed a much better much better rate of recovery than other people like much much better so he's one of the leading proponents of hydroxychloroquine now here the first thing the first thing you need to know is in my understanding there is no gold standard test of this drug yet so you can fact check me on that but i don't believe there is any controlled clinical uh you know gold standard study using it as a prophylaxis but there do seem to be studies showing that if you give it to people when they're almost ready to die it doesn't help much so we've seen those as someone suggested and i think i have to agree it has the look of intentional failure the studies on hydroxychloroquine look to the untrained eye just an observer looking on like they were designed to fail because from day one the the uh the potential of the drug was always about giving it to you early that was always the claim but what got tested first what got tested first is giving people uh toxic doses more than you would ever give somebody when they were at the end of their life and it was just too late now if you were going to design a study to test the claim that a drug given early as a as a preventative prophylaxis or at least to catch things early if you were going to test that claim would you do it by a toxic dose given to people who are near death you wouldn't but suppose you were a big drug company and you wanted to make sure that people did not think hydroxychloroquine would work what would what kind of study would you fund if you wanted the public to think hydroxychloroquine which is cheap and widely available is not the way to go well if i were a drug company i would immediately fund a trial that i knew wouldn't work and it would look exactly like the trials that we saw now this is not uh i'm not claiming that's what happened i don't have any information that would suggest that that happened but i'm saying that if you're looking at it from the outside and you're even a little bit objective it looks like doesn't mean it happened looks like it was designed to get you the wrong result i know what a i know what a trial would look like if somebody's trying to get an accurate good useful result and it's the opposite of that right yeah i'm seeing in the comments that you say it sounds like that's exactly what happened we can't say that's what happened but we can say it looks exactly like it so but i want to make a comment on zielinski as well he tweeted out recently uh some data showing the different outcomes the death rates for various countries and he had them sorted by whether they used hydroxychloroquine early or they didn't now at the bottom of the list was the united states where it is not commonly used early it's only used too late and the death rate was very high and then the one at the top of the list they were using it early and the death rate was very very low compared to the united states not even close i mean way way difference and then as you go down the list you get down to countries that also use hydroxycholera queen early they also have way lower death rate than the united states so so far that's consistent right so all the people with hydroxychloroquine are having good results according to this one chart and the united states isn't is getting bad result but here's the problem if you look at the best people using hydroxychloroquine compared to the ones who are getting the worst result but are also using it in the same way early there's a gigantic difference it's like a 10 times difference so even the even the countries that reportedly are using it early there's something like a 10 times difference in their outcomes what does that tell you it tells me it's not the hydroxychloroquine but that chart was supposed to tell you that it took the chloroquine which one of us is right so dr zielinski obviously knows more about all of this than i do but the chart that he presented to make his case to me because i spend more time looking at data you know i used to do it for a living i've got a economics background etc but when i look at the data that he presented it says to me it's not the hydroxychloroquine it says that if you can have a 10 times difference using it there's something else going on there's probably something that some of these countries have in common beyond that so that doesn't mean it doesn't work i'm just saying that i i'm not convinced and i'm going to stick with my 30 chance it's a game changer which is a strong chance you know 30 is pretty solid chance but it's less than half right so i'm still on the side that if we were to do a controlled clinical style a gold standard scientific test that there's two to one chance you won't find it works all right but a 30 chance you will now if it turns out that it works will you say that i was wrong you should not because you should remember that i just put odds on it and if something goes the 30 way versus the 60 something percent way it doesn't mean i'm right or wrong because the only thing i could be right and wrong about was assigning the percentages and i've given room for it to go either way all right i've talked too much i've gone too long so i think i'll end it here somebody says you mess it up bro about what yeah i see in your comments you're asking about whether zinc is included or not included i've seen lots of contradictory studies i've seen studies that say it's not the zinc i've seen studies that say it is the zinc i've seen studies that say no no it's not the zinc it's the azithromycin and so there are studies that have both zinc and azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine and then you say well that worked but was it the azithromycin that some people say is the active ingredient or was it the zinc or was it the combination of the two or the combination of the three those are all the things we don't know and it's a lot all right and i will talk to you tomorrow

[Music]

hey everybody

come on in gather round it's gonna be a

good one oh yeah

i always say that but isn't it always

right

yeah you know it is i always say it's

gonna be the best one

and and then it is so

i guess you got that going on um if

everything works out i'm going to have

author bjorn

lomborg on here today but i'm terrible

on

follow-up so uh if that doesn't work out

we'll make sure it works out soon but

before i see if i can connect him

uh i'll give him a few minutes if he's

if he's up and around

to uh to connect on periscope before we

do that what do we do first

always the same thing always the same

thing

the best thing ever it's a simultaneous

sip and all you need is

a copper mug of glass attack or chalice

or steiner canteen sugar flask of a

vessel of any

kind fill it with your favorite liquid i

like coffee

and join me now for the unparalleled

pleasure the dopamine the end of the day

the thing that makes everything better

including

coronavirus global

warming climate change you name it it's

all better

with the sip join me now

i can feel the earth begin to cool

i can feel people's fevers beginning to

go down

just a little bit now

bjorn is here yes let's make this work

um

please technology all right first try

did not work

bjorn if you can hear me

it's not unusual for the first try

not to work so um make sure that you're

on a mobile device

such as your smartphone i think you're

back

let's try again all right

bjorn please work oh the technology is

not working

um i never know what the problem is when

it doesn't work

on the first few tries but we'll get

this

watch this

i'm gonna make this work so i can see

him

uh continuing to try to connect

hey bjorn are you there

i can hear you success

wonderful bjorn lomborg you are the

author of

false alarm this excellent book that i'm

holding up right now

and can i describe you as the president

of the copenhagen consensus think tech

would that be you certainly can yes and

uh

i'm looking at your uh your twitter

profile in which you say

that that involves smart solutions

through economic

prioritization which is exact

you're talking my language now bjorn um

and this is your new book false alarm

when is this out is this out

now this is not from uh yesterday so

just fresh off the press all right and

your topic of

primary concern at least in terms of

this book is climate change

correct yes and

before i start asking you some questions

i have to tell you that you and i have a

weird thing

in common that you don't know about and

uh correct me if this is wrong but i

think i have a pretty good memory of

this

the first time i ever saw you was on an

appearance

on bill maher's show do you remember the

first time you were on his show

i it was actually my second time i

remember that i contacted you afterwards

okay yeah yeah yeah no yeah um and

the thing i remembered was that you you

put bill maher

into cognitive dissonance because of

course he's a big climate change

doomer and he normally the doomers are

talking to scientists

not business people who are looking at

both the costs and the benefits

and know how to project things into the

future as people like you do

and you you completely destroyed his

world view

to the point where he the only thing he

could do is act like you didn't

you didn't just say something it was the

damnedest thing i was watching and i

said what just happened here

and then i you know i realized it was

just cognitive dissonance he couldn't

he couldn't process how logically

and obviously right you were because it

didn't fit any of his worldview so he

just

pretended it didn't happen and went on

so

enough about me um

so in your book false alarm available

everywhere

so i'm sure you can get it in everywhere

the books are sold

um you you're basically going through

the skeptic would you call it the

skeptical argument

on climate science or do you have a term

you prefer well i

i would tend to think of it as the

rational point

of climate uh uh the rational climate

argument because look

what i'm trying to say is it's actually

a real

problem but the way that we've been

presented with this

is it's the end of the world and if

you're being told this is the end of the

world and and and remember

this is not just uh uh a vague little

sort of claim

kids around the world are scared witless

you know washington post survey showed

that

57 of all american kids now are afraid

of global warming

and if you ask adults if you ask adults

around the world

it turns out that almost half of all

adults in the world

now believe that it's likely that global

warming will lead to the extinction of

the human race

this is just this is just outrageously

out there

this is a way beyond reasonable concern

this is a small alarm and so i try to

say look that's not what the u.n climate

panel is telling us

it is a problem not the end of the world

and we should fix it sparkly

now uh we're having a little bit of

connection problem i hope that will

resolve itself but walk us through uh my

understanding is that even the

ippc the ultimate international body

that tells you what's going to happen

with climate change

that if you actually look what they say

their imp

the impact on the you know the gdp in

the future

is trivial is that true it's

well perhaps not trivial but it's very

small so to give you a sense of

proportion

uh the they've done estimates of what is

the negative

impact on climate change in about 50

years

so half a century from now the net

impact

of all climate change if we do nothing

will be

equivalent to each person on the planet

losing somewhere between

zero point two and two percent of his or

her income

hold on nothing wait but hold on let's

let's add a little bit of context to

that

when you say losing it that's in that's

an economic term right

you don't actually start with more and

then you end up with less

i think what you're saying is that

instead of making a hundred dollars

over 50 years you only made 98 dollars

exactly which means

you wouldn't even know it you there

would be nothing in your environment or

your experience

which would tell you you didn't get that

extra two percent

right well it would be very hard for

anyone to notice

just to give you a sense the u.n also

expects

that by in 50 years time the average

person on the planet

will be 2.63 times richer than we are

today

right so right do you just point now

that means

in the worst case instead of being true

i'm rich by 2005 we will be

2.56 times rich

yeah uh bjorn is

bjorn if you have some place in your

wherever you are that you've got a

little stronger signal that would be

good your signal is coming in and out

but i look for the the viewers let me

just uh

the point is that you'll be 2.6 to

2.6 times richer by then so that little

bit you didn't get

that maybe you could have gotten you

won't even know the difference

um and

the big problem with the climate change

argument is that there are not enough

people like you

who are who are looking at not just the

um

the science of it because people get

stuck on the science because it's not

really a scientist

who can tell you what the problem's

going to be and people don't get that

the person who can tell you what the

problem is going to be

is the person who can tell you what's

going to happen to the economy

because if the economy is still strong

you can fix almost anything would you

say

that's true that's absolutely true

and but but i i think we also need to

recognize

it's not like this is an unheard of

argument

uh so the only climate economist to get

the nobel prizes bill northhouse from

yale university

and this is exactly what he points out

he says

look global warming gonna be a problem

yeah and and by the way as far as i know

i've never heard a scientist argue with

what you say

because you're sort of a slightly

different domain than science

but i don't think scientists say you're

wrong do they

well a lot of scientists are not

comfortable with this not being alarmist

so i think a lot of them will say that

doesn't sound right

talking about real world impacts one of

the things that drive me up the wall and

that's what i use

uh pretty much the first third of the

book to talk about is

how you are being scared to stories that

are

technically true but often dramatically

misleading let me give you one example

uh last year uh washington

told us how uh because global warming

people need 187 billion people being

flooded by the

metric this one bjorn

there's a little bit of problem with

your connection i might break in and

just summarize what

what i'm hearing you saying so the

audience hears it clearly so you're

saying there was 187

million people projected to be uh

victims of flooding is that what you

said

yes sorry i'm just trying to move to

another part of the house does this work

better

that's better yes okay uh

so yes 187 million people would get

flooded this was the

washington post uh headline and

everywhere

on the planet what that required was

that nobody anything in the next 80

years so basically

this

yeah we're having more audio problems

but i think what you're saying is that

the

assumption is that nobody would do

anything about it there would no

there would be no remediation over 80

years when in fact

uh what is uh is that

what's the country that's already

underwater uh

holland all right so yeah uh

so so we can see that the uh the ability

to remediate

against flooding is pretty good if you

have 80 years

and you've got a lot of time now what

what the

what the study actually showed was if

you allow people to adapt which of

course they will

of course you will not see 187 million

people having to move

you'll see 305 000 people having to move

so it was 600 times exaggerated

and of course remember every year more

than twice

that number move out just of california

so it's it's not something that the

world can't

adapt and handle we're simply being told

stories

that are very scary but end up being

very little representative

of the real world because we forget

adaptation is

give me an idea what's behind all the

exaggeration

in the sense that the the obvious thing

is that the the news model

requires you to get worked up in order

to click on things for them to get

advertising income

so aside from the the media which

has an incentive to exaggerate things

for their business model is there

anything else

behind the wrongness

well i i think the the media part is an

incredibly important part of it and

and we we tend to forget that media

exaggerates on all kinds of things

it's just that global warming turns out

to be such an

incredibly good generator of really

scary stuff

but of course it's also because

politicians

love this setup look you can't really

make a better setup than what you're

seeing with

global warming politicians get to say

the end of the world is made

but i can save you right and also

we get to say i can save you and the

cost will only come in the next election

so yeah well you know i i i used to do

uh you know financial projections and

stuff in my

corporate job long ago and the perfect

situation for any

corporate uh person is that you get to

spend money today and be a hero for what

you're fixing

but nobody will know it will work until

you've already been promoted or left for

another job

in other words exactly what you want to

spend money today

because that's how you get power and

influence and hey look at all these

things i did

and then you will never be responsible

for the outcome because that's in 80

years

and oh absolutely and and you know the

the fun thing is to see

we've been doing this for 30 years so

you can actually look back

and see how little we've achieved so

last year the un actually

released a very surprisingly honest

review

of what we've achieved over the last 15

years and what they said was

we cannot tell the difference after all

the work up from obama and everybody

else around the world

all the money they could not tell

differently

in the world nothing since 2005.

you know isn't there that this feels

like a subset

of a problem that is plaguing basically

every big public decision which is

our data is undependable and the people

who are analyzing the data are not

qualified

it feels like it's everything from

coronavirus to

you name it it just seems to be the same

problem

the data's bad and we don't know how to

look at it anyway

i i would i'll probably analyze it

slightly differently because i think we

you know we spent in

in the order of what uh 50 billion

dollars on

on on climate research so it's not like

we don't have

a lot of good data i think there is a

lot

of organizations that want to convince

you this is the end of the world because

then they can get you

to support really really expensive

policies

uh and i think we as taxpayers

need to fight back and say look i'm

happy to spend money

on pro on solving real problems that'll

actually have

dramatic impact to better the world in

the future but i'm not just going to

spend my money to do almost no good and

waste most of it

and uh what do you think of uh if you

had a moment to look at

i don't know if you follow american

politics enough but uh joe biden's

two trillion dollar plan which i had to

dig really hard

uh i had to look through multiple

articles to find out if

nuclear energy was even part of it so 2

trillion

and and the most of the coverage didn't

even mention

nuclear energy but i found one article

that suggested

he wants to go strong at nuclear and

especially the new

and the new designs which the trump

administration

doesn't talk about it but they're doing

all of that stuff

they're pushing for the the new test

facilities etc

um is that a productive way to go does

that this

is nuclear on your uh on your good list

nuclear is definitely one of the

solutions that we could envision

for global warming i think the big

problem about nuclear is

that right now nuclear is much more

expensive than most other power sources

that's why we need a lot more research

and development

into you know the fourth generation

nuclear power plants

so for instance bill gates and many

others are spending lots of resources

to get that next generation that's going

to be safer

cheaper and also much more dependable

if we can do that that'd be amazing but

again

this is just one of the many ways that

we could fix

climate you know innovation

fundamentally is going to be the way

that we will fix this problem

like basically every other problem yeah

exactly

and when i look at the nuclear situation

it's too expensive i don't know if

you've

dug into the the details of that enough

to answer this question but

the the things that are stopping us is

number one it's hard to

iterate if you if you try something it's

really expensive to build a second

nuclear energy plant

and see if the the second one is better

than the first one so it's not like

building an iphone where you can just do

it in the lab until you get it right

so that's one problem the other problem

is that we don't standardize

the big ones so we've got multiple

models

and if you just built the same damn

thing one after another even using

current

generation three technology before you

even get to the

super safer safer stuff of generation

four

could we do generation three

let's call it current technology which

has had uh

zero deaths historically is that true

zero deaths from it's very very very low

deaths yeah

i think it's zero actually if depending

on how you count it

and um are those the two problems you

see

iteration i guess uh government

regulation and how long that takes

but iteration and standardization are

those are the two things that will

change the economics

my understanding again from from nuclear

technology is that that's really what's

been lacking we've been

building masterworks uh each one of them

instead of actually building

just a long stream of them and and

indeed that is one of the points that

they're trying to do with forced

generation

to say if we can standardize this and

basically build it like a

uh uh uh a uh uh

uh what do you say a factory of a

forty sort of assembly plant sorry that

was what i was looking for

an assembly plant where we just churn

out all of these and you just

assemble them like liga uh lego on on on

the spot

and then you run it that will be

enormously much cheaper but again

it requires a lot of research and

development because we're not there

you know when you look at the new power

plant set up nuclear power plants that

they

build around the world they end up being

fantastically expensive and

one of the reasons as you just pointed

out is because there's all this

regulation and i just find it's going to

be very hard to imagine that that

regulation will go away

yeah and the secondary problem i

understand is that if the

nuclear power plant is are these

one-offs

then you don't have something that you

can export to other countries

and if you're not the uh let's say the

big brother of the smaller nuclear

program

in the smaller country then somebody

else is going to be

and that could be china or china or

russia so you so

simply by not having a robust nuclear

energy program in this country

we're giving up uh we're giving up

influence over

a lot of the planet but worse when you

go to space

it's going to be nuclear power and if

you don't own space you might as well

just give up

because whoever owned space owns the

planet that's the end of it

that's that's my opinion

no but i i think i think the fundamental

point here and the insight is

to recognize that unless we get cheap

green energy

we're just not going to switch over

because you're not going to convince

most people around the planet to say all

right i'll get the same power

slightly less effectively slightly less

dependably

and much much more expensively that's

just not a selling point for

except for you know a few percent for

people who are very very engaged in

climate

and so the reality is we need to invest

a lot more into green energy research

and development

to do that and actually you know to his

uh credit

that is part of biden's plan so you know

at least there's a lot of things in

biden's plan and a lot of them i

i think are going to be waste of money

but that actually turns out to be a

really good idea

yeah um and there's also a weird thing

that

uh i can't get over which is the people

who are most concerned about climate

change

you know they they tend to be focused on

the political

left i don't think that they understand

how racist it is

because that's their other biggest issue

to let's reduce racism

but if you say to the developing

countries you can't use what we used

to get here because it's too polluted

then are you

basically just telling all the brown

people that they can't have what white

people have

now it's like oh no no we got here this

way by using

your oil and coal but you can't do that

you're gonna have to wait why don't you

just wait and we'll find something clean

for you

we don't know how long it'll take but

until then you'll have to starve would

you mind

waiting it's the most freaking racist

thing

you've ever heard there's nothing

there's no black lives matter thing

there's no

i mean this is this is on a level

literally

with slavery in terms of uh

how prejudicial it is against people of

other colors

i mean it's it's massively destructive

and yet the same group are in favor of

both of those things

and we think this all the time you know

we're basically telling poor countries

no you can't have

uh coal power because it is going to

make coal mine worse which is true

but of course that coal power also going

to make that country

much much richer so we work together

to look at what would it take to put in

extra

it would dramatically increase life

quality in bangladesh

the average person in bangladesh is

about 16

richer yeah yeah

create global war problems but just to

give you a sense of proportion for every

100

you produce for bangladesh you create

20 cents of climate problems yeah

we have a little audio problems again so

let me let me uh just uh do one more

topic here and then we'll

let you get to the rest of your day i'm

sure uh with a new book out you've got a

lot to do this week

my guess guesses um so i'm

really interested in the uh the super

storm

and the natural disaster story where

every time there's a hurricane

somebody on television will tell us that

climate change is what caused that darn

hurricane

what's the more reasonable rational view

of the big storms and natural national

or natural disasters

so we're certainly not seeing more

storms hitting the u.s actually if you

look at landfalling hurricanes

and strong landfalling hurricanes

they've slightly declined

over the last 120 years for the u.s

but in general much much more

importantly is

that many more people live much closer

to harm's way with

much more stuff so fundamentally the

reason why you see

dramatic impacts of hurricanes now is

because there's many more people you

know look at florida coastal counties

florida popular coastal population has

increased over the last 120 years

a 67 fold whereas the u.s population has

only increased fourfold so clearly they

also have much more expensive homes

so clearly you're going to get a lot

more damage and again

if you want to help these people the way

to do so

is by getting better building code and

also

still they're going to get wiped out

everyone

yeah and you know i i always look at

that situation and i ask myself

who is it that lives on the beach

because it's not the poor people right

uh no okay in the united states i mean

it must be different in other places but

in the united states

it feels like there's a pretty strong

correlation between being rich and being

able to have a house on the beach

and if i were to ask if i were to say

what would be the best thing for the

economy of the united states

i'm just joking here but just to make a

point the best thing for the economy of

the united states

would be for a big storm to come by

about every three years

knock down all the rich houses and give

the poor people

not poor people but the middle class

people who do construction

more work because because the rich

people have insurance

insurance is priced to pay for itself

the rich people live in their other

house while the

you know the beach house is being

repaired i mean you you could imagine

that it would be a plus

to wipe out rich people's houses every

few years just so people have

enough to do to rebuild them uh i'm just

kidding on that but

yeah it would certainly teach them to be

better at producing their houses well

i mean and one of the big problems of

course is that we're subsidizing

rich people because we're subsidizing

much of their insurance

uh so we should definitely not be doing

that and that of course would get fewer

people to build close to harm's way

right yeah subsidizing people to build

that that's just crazy

uh all right so what is it that i uh uh

i'll give you the question that every

author

hates but uh since you're toward the

beginning of your book tour

i'll get you ready for it okay so this

would just be practice

the worst question everybody wants to

hear as an author

what is it i forgot to ask you

in other words it's just a chance to

mention something that maybe you wanted

to mention that sure

so so i think i think the the rest of

the book really is about

two things it's first of all talking

about all the things that haven't worked

so

you know we we promised the paris

agreement uh

it's gonna cost one to two trillion

dollars a year and it'll

do almost nothing to actually fixing

climate change

we're telling you

a little bit bjorn we're losing the

audio a little bit um i think we got the

gist of that though

uh would you mind if we uh if we end now

just because the audio

is kind of sketchy sorry about that i

don't

know i can hear you perfectly

oh okay you're cutting a little bit in

now i'll make sure everybody knows

your book i'm holding it up i'll tweet

about you and i thank you very very much

for

uh for coming on this you're exactly the

kind of author that my audience

likes to hear from so thank you very

much and good luck with the book

hey thank you very much scott all right

take care everyone

all right bjorn is one of my favorite uh

public figures has been for years

because he

he's one of the few people who look at

the costs and the benefits

and know how to do it it's a it's

refreshing all right a few other things

um yesterday i was

trying to change a light bulb and i

ended up tweeting about it because it

was so hard it was one of those compact

fluorescents

and in in theory you just pull it out

straight and push it in straight

but it didn't work and so i'd spent over

a month trying to change one light bulb

i'd ordered different bulbs thinking

maybe i had the wrong one

i tried everything and uh the funniest

part about it was

listening to the other people's comments

because when i tweeted it

you know people weighed in with their

comments but the funny part was how many

people have thrown away

perfectly good lamps and and light

fixtures to change the light fixture

because they couldn't figure out how to

change the light bulb

now if you've never tried to change a

compact

fluorescent light bulb you don't know

how hard it is

and again this is let me let me explain

this is the entire process

here's a hole here's the light bulb

pushes straight in

if you want to take it out pull it

straight out

and i spent a month not being able to do

it

even trying that exact thing and

apparently other people have just thrown

away their lamps

changed their fixtures hired a handyman

to just change the entire life texture

because they couldn't change the light

bulb

and here's the point of this this was

not just to

complain about my uh personal inability

to do things

the larger point is this and i'm going

to hit this a lot

who tested that this is a gigantic

national standard

who tested that how many times did they

have

an average person come in and say hey

can you see if you can change this bulb

and then watch them

now if you try to remove a compact

fluorescent you'll find that it breaks

in your hand

about half of the time it breaks the

glass part just breaks off in your hand

when you're trying to just change the

bulb

uh nobody tested that and so

i submit to you that we have a gigantic

problem in this country

and the world of products that were

never tested and yet are now standard in

all of our homes

never test it um have you heard a lot

about

mary trump's book

no you know mary trump the niece of

trump who wrote an

anti-anti-donald trump book

and apparently the worst thing that uh

that came out of this because it's the

one that they pull from the book

is that she alleges that donald trump

paid someone to take his sats

that's it now first of all i doubt it's

true i mean anything's possible

it wouldn't change my opinion of

anything because i have that 20-year

rule

i just don't care what people did when

they were 18.

do you care what anybody did when they

were 18 would you

would you say we've got to impeach this

president because when he was 18 he did

something clever that worked out well

i'm sure it wasn't you know if it

happened and by the way

i would say the odds of it being true

are not really that high

but even if it is true that's it that's

the best you have

you're an insider you've got all this

access to the family

and the best you have is that when he

was 18 he did something that any 18 year

old would have done if they could have

gotten away with it

ah that's pretty empty

apparently kanye is out he's out of the

race but here's what's interesting

um he actually did try to get on the

ballots

so there is uh documented evidence that

he put real money into trying to get on

the ballots so he was serious

some of you wondered if he was serious

but

i think that's been answered he was

serious now what do you make of the fact

that he was in the race for you know

less than two weeks

do you say to yourself well that proves

he's a flake and

he was never really that serious and

what kind of a president is he

would he be if he didn't even plan the

you know getting nominated and all that

the way it should be

here's my answer to that he played it

perfectly i think

kanye played it perfectly

because here's what i always say there's

nothing better

for improving your odds of becoming

president

than having run in the past right

uh trump had sort of flirted with

running in the past

and therefore because every time there

was an election for

several elections before the time he

actually got elected

trump's name was always in the top ten

because he put it there trump put his

name

in the top 10 for every future election

by simply making noise but not going

very far

in initial attempts or initial

flirtations with running

initial talking about running etc kanye

is using the same play

it you know people who have lost

elections then went on to win

were you know quite a few right nixon

reagan

trump himself it's fairly common

biden is has run before and that has a

lot to do with why he's

uh where he is although being vice

president was more of it

and i would say that kanye's play

of reminding us of kanye for president

letting us wrestle with the idea for a

little while

and then waiting until 2024 was exactly

exactly the right play exactly the right

play because he didn't really have a

chance of winning and everybody would

have been mad at him if he

if he changed the election result which

he would have it probably would have

caused

trump to win sorry my cat's in the way

so i don't think he could have played

that better honestly the get in and get

out in 2020

if i could have advised him you know if

and i didn't by the way

but if i could have advised him on the

best way to play this i would have said

this

i always said flirt with it get in there

get some noise

but really you're getting ready for

2024. perfect

i am entering a voluntary coronavirus

quarantine

starting today i believe which is

not because i have coronavirus as far as

i know

i do have a test scheduled but it's not

because i may or may not have

coronavirus it's because i have some

minor surgeries scheduled so the current

process

in case you didn't know for getting a

surgery in this environment

and by the way i expect the surgery to

get cancelled it's in two weeks and i

expect it to get canceled

because of capacity but at the moment

it's scheduled

and that means that i have to quarantine

for two weeks

and that means no christina right i mean

i'm talking about the serious kind of

quarantine

so that starts today i might get a

little squirrely

and i might do some evening podcasts

just because i'll be here all alone for

two weeks

now the process is they'd like you to

quarantine yourself

for two weeks before surgery but one

week

before surgery i'll have the actual test

that takes about two days to get a

result

so something like you know five days

before surgery

i'll have presumably a negative test

and then i will uh go into my surgery

i think they test again just before you

go into surgery but i'm not sure

all right uh

there's a lot else going on today

um i i always talk about stefan

collinson who's an opinion person for

cnn

uh and he's i i start to think of him as

triumph the insult dog

so triumph the insult dog uh was on

uh uh what's his name uh

tall redheaded guy uh uh you know

you know the you know the thing oh

my god i just turned into joe biden

you know the thing uh tall

redhead night show

uh give me the name why the hell am i

blanking on his name

you know it is all right um

and he writes that uh this is a

president who has tremendously failed to

beat back the virus

and has long since stopped trying to

lead the country out of the darkness

he's saying that the president has

failed to beat back the virus

and he stopped trying to lead the

country out of the darkness

now here's my question for cnn because

they have a lot of

a lot of commentary about the president

doing everything wrong

here's my question uh yeah conan o'brien

thank you

okay i don't feel bad that i can't

remember

a person named conan because that's not

exactly

bob all right um

and here's my question for cnn

what is it that the president should

have done differently

whoever asked that question if the

president is doing everything wrong

and as triumph the insult dog stefan

collinson says

that he's he's he's stopped trying to

lead us out of the darkness and he's

failed to beat back the virus

what exactly should he have done

differently because

all of the decisions about closing and

opening are local

right the president i think did

all the things that a president could do

he closed international travel

from china and europe so those are

things the president can do

he made sure that we had enough

ventilators

something a president could do and he

you know

uh did i think a good job or the country

did or somebody did

and getting the ppe and the protective

stuff

although we may be running out soon

because of the new stuff

what exactly is it that the president

should have been doing

should he have followed the expert's

advice

well if he'd followed the expert's

advice he wouldn't have done the things

that were right

right he wouldn't have taken the virus

seriously he wouldn't

close travel from china he wouldn't have

done those things

if he'd listened to the experts

and then what about the mask situation

well that was complicated because there

was a

you know there was an effort to save the

masks for the healthcare professionals

which i agree with

i don't know if that was the best way to

do it but i'm not going to criticize

i'm not going to criticize fauci or

others for lying about masks

if the purpose was it was just the only

way to protect them for the health care

people

and i don't know another way if you said

to me no scott the obvious way to do

that

would be tell the public the truth and

just ask them not to hoard

these supplies well in the real world

that doesn't work in a pandemic people

are gonna hoard

you can ask them not to hoard oh but

people are gonna hoard

so if you can tell them they don't need

to hoard

there's no purpose to it maybe it's a

better play

so did fauci and other experts

the surgeon general for example did they

intentionally lie to us

about the value of masks i don't know if

all of them did

some of them might have believed the

other experts and just parroted them

but if they did lie to us but the

purpose of it was for our own good

i'm actually okay with that i don't know

if you are

but i do not mind my leaders lying to me

under the very unique circumstances that

is in my best interest

now usually that's not the case

so you don't want lying to be approved

i just don't know that there are too

many cases like this one

where unfortunately lying was maybe the

only

only good play for the benefit of the

country i hate it

i mean you could be you can hate it but

if you don't have a better idea

just keep that in mind all right

and was there some expert who knew all

the right answers and didn't tell the

president

was there was there some smart thing

that smart experts knew that if they'd

only told the president

then he would have maybe implemented i

haven't heard of any

have you so when they say the president

is failing

don't you have to ask yourself at what

are not other countries also having

problems

and is the president to blame for what

happened with nursing homes

not really now where you could have

room for disagreement would be the

the president advocating going back to

school

at the same time that um

others would say that's a bad idea

because it will increase

infections i am solidly on the

president's

side on going back to school

but here's the thing we live in a world

where you're not allowed to tell the

truth in public but i can

watch this i'm going to tell the truth

in public ask me

and ask yourself if you've ever heard

this

going back to school will kill teachers

and it will kill kids

i'm in favor of it okay

that's the first honest opinion you've

ever heard in public

going back to school will kill teachers

some of them will kill

some students probably not too many as a

percentage

will spread the infection will kill

grandma

when the kid comes home all of that's

going to happen

and it's almost certainly better than

the alternatives

because we don't have a better

alternative we just don't

so i think our best play is to do the

best we can

of protecting the teachers etc here's my

suggestion i understand that teachers

are far

less enthusiastic about opening schools

than parents are

big surprise right who is surprised that

the teachers

many of them older many of them

susceptible who is surprised that they

wouldn't want to go to work

in a crowd you know even with some

social distancing

it's kids so they're not going to be

that disciplined

uh who would be surprised the teacher

doesn't want to go back to that

environment

you shouldn't be too surprised right and

i don't think

that we should abuse one professional

class

teachers who did not sign up for danger

duty right people who decided to be

teachers

did not wake up one day and say i think

i'd like to be on the front line of a

dangerous situation

no no i have a different opinion about

the military and about health care

professionals

because they did sign up for that they

did say

i am going to intentionally put myself

into

infectious and or dangerous situations

this is the career i choose

there's a bigger benefit i take the risk

if that's what we were talking about i'd

say all right

all right you know we'll send the kids

back to school and

you've signed up for it but teachers did

not sign up for that risk

it is completely unreasonable completely

unfair

for the rest of the public to try to

force them back to work

into a situation that at least half of

them think is too dangerous

given the costs and the benefits here's

what i would suggest

as a workaround are you ready

the benefit of a teacher in the room as

opposed to

remote teaching is that it's it's just a

first of all it's a way to get the kids

out of the house

so the parents can go to work so there's

certainly a

child you know watching process

that you you need a physical school for

secondly

you need to hand out things and

discipline people and say stop doing

that

etc here is my hybrid

solution that the that the teacher

only appears remotely if they prefer

let's say the older teachers don't want

to take the risk

they can prefer they can appear on a

television remotely to their class

but you would have a much younger person

let's say a college age type person

who is the in-class

manager if you will so let's put a name

on it because they're not teaching

the the young person who's the physical

presence and the authority in the room

would simply be a manager of the

situation

but the teaching would still come from

the teacher who would be in a big old tv

screen right in front of the class

they could still hear the teacher the

teacher could still see the class

and anything physical that needed to be

done could be done by the

younger less risky

you know person who's sitting in now

or how about let me give you another

suggestion let's say you build

a separate entrances and exits and

bathrooms for teachers

so you have a situation where the

teacher is just behind plexiglass

the whole time just behind plexiglass

and you never actually are physically

could touch a teacher you couldn't even

get close to them if you wanted to

because the teachers in the front of the

class and there's just a big

plexiglass thing here they couldn't get

there if they wanted to

now you don't need plexiglas if you have

enough space from the first row of desks

to the teacher i mean it could be just a

fence so that nobody

you know gets close but you could

probably

figure ways around it now one of the

things i heard is that

it's impossible to open up the schools

with social

distancing in other words the desks

being six feet apart there's just enough

physical space

i would challenge that assumption

because i think that in an emergency

situation you would use all of the space

you might you might uh you know not use

the gym

for gym class because maybe it's too

dangerous to have an inside gym class

anyway

so you might use some of the the gym

floor you might use some of the

cafeteria floor

and while it's warm you make people eat

outdoors you probably want to do that

anyway

so probably you could get pretty close

now some students might want to still

stay home and they could just

tune in digitally just like anybody else

so i think that the president's instinct

to

push toward reopening is absolutely

correct

if you take all the pluses and minuses

of the economy et cetera into

consideration

but you have to protect the teachers you

have to protect the teachers

that is completely unreasonable to send

them back into this

virus petri dish i do not support that

so if we don't have a solution

that the teachers are okay with i say

don't do it

keep the kids home because you can try

harder

right if if your district hasn't figured

out a way to keep the teachers safe

they should boycott or strike or

something

and i would be on their side because we

do have enough

ways to keep them safe if we're not

using it

then they should not go to work that's

my opinion but we do want to solve that

all right um

so ivanka trump is not getting enough

attention

in my opinion for her alternative career

path

effort so she's working on a deal i

don't know all the details but i think

she's working with big corporations

to try to train and hire people who do

not have college degrees

so that you could say well i want to

learn this specialty

i don't need an english degree to do

this job but if this corporation will

teach me

that's a good solution i think that's

one of the best things happening in the

country right now

in terms of it makes sense on every

level and it's just so

obviously good for you know minority

people it's obviously good for

low-income people

it's obviously good for anybody who

doesn't want a college debt

this is just one of the best things

that's happening in the country and it

gives us a little bit of coverage and

then people mock it because it's ivanka

right i mean it's

it's a crazy world when the best things

are ignored

um joe biden had one of the most

classic uh gaffes i've ever heard

and this one he didn't even stop to

correct it

and he he said in a sentence we have to

get our kids back to school

and then he said in the same sentence we

have to get our kids to market

swiftly we have to get our kids

to market swiftly and he didn't even

stop to correct it they just went on

what what

are you kidding

are you kidding so just add that to the

list

now again i remind you that the

hilarious thing to me

is watching democrats act like there's

nothing wrong with biden

i don't see it yeah yeah he misspeaks

now then but

nothing wrong of course the larger

context is the

wayfarer rumors are you aware of those

all right the most ridiculous fake news

or fake i guess it's a rumor it's not

news that the actual

news people are not covering this

because it's not true

which is strange for the news business

usually they cover things whether

they're true or not

but in this case uh i would agree with

them not covering it and the

the rumor on the internet is that the

the big company wayfair

that sells furniture is a gigantic

entity

has been secretly using their the pages

of their website

to sell children instead of products

okay i could stop there and you would

say okay that doesn't sound true

and you'd be right because wayfair is

not really selling children

but people have these fake pages and

they've got their argument because this

uses children's names on the products

and

has a price that doesn't make sense and

i don't know if they're photoshopped or

mistakes or what

but what i can tell you with complete

confidence

wayfair is not selling children

they're not selling your children but in

the context of these wayfarer rumors

which are all over the internet and

again i say it

wayfair isn't doing anything none of

none of that's true

it's ridiculous right now if i'm wrong

on this

you should never listen to me again okay

if i'm wrong about this wayfarer thing

being ridiculously stupid and not true

if it turns out i'm wrong never listen

to me again

that's your deal you have permission to

never listen to me again

but i'm pretty confident about that one

i've decided that uh non-fiction writers

are the most dangerous

people in the world because

they don't know what they don't know but

they think they know a lot

and so the more i see writers writing

stuff

and they don't know what they're talking

about they are seriously

leading the world in the wrong place if

you saw my bjorn

lomborg uh conversation just now

you know that the information that you

and i receive

about climate change is from writers

mostly because i don't talk to

scientists too much

i just read what is written so really

i'm

reading the opinion and the framing from

a writer

and it's so dangerously bad and

uh you know unable to look at costs and

benefits and

incapable of analyzing anything i want

to give you an example of that

um well yeah okay

i got a good example that coming up

uh it's in a bloomberg opinion piece

there's a thread on it today

that i tweeted but listen to this one

um one sentence by

an actual professional writer who gets

paid by bloomberg

or actually i don't know if it's an

opinion piece do they get paid

i don't know their business model but

it's an opinion piece in bloomberg

it has said this it was the this is one

comment in a larger piece

about um all the the rich people

complaining about cancel culture

so this is a piece in favor of cancel

culture

so we could stop right there you know

you don't even need to know what the

writer said

if they're writing in favor of canceled

culture

maybe you shouldn't listen to them but

let me let me read this ridiculous

sentence

quote could it be that increasingly

diverse

voices and rich conversations are a

threat

to their free speech uh and he's talking

about the rich people who wrote

the uh there was some 30 some people who

signed a document

against cancel culture so that's the

context could it be that increasingly

diverse voices

and rich conversations are a threat to

their free speech

or more accurately the prerogative

the prerogative i hate that word

the prerogative of famous and powerful

people to speak at length

on all sorts of things without

interruption or disagreement

so this writer is asking the question

if there's really a problem with

canceled culture is there really

is this really a bad thing all you rich

famous writers

or are you just complaining about it to

get more space for

your own ridiculous comments without any

counter comments

now i'm not even going to tell you

what's wrong with this

opinion because it's so stupid i don't

need to right

i'm pretty sure that the people railing

against canceled culture

do not have a secret agenda of

silencing the rich and diverse

voices and conversations i'm pretty sure

that

zero people have ever had that thought

in their head zero

zero people on the whole planet seven

billion plus people not one person has

ever had the thought

because it's a stupid one that this

writer has assigned it to them

could it be that they don't like diverse

voices and rich conversations

uh no it could not be that

and this is someone who's paid bloomberg

actually princess stuff

amazing amazing speaking of writers

writer uh barry weiss barry b-a-r-i

a woman's name in this case barry was

uh until recently she just quit a staff

writer and editor for the new york times

and she was she describes herself as a

centrist

uh and in the world of new york times a

centrist

means far right

that's that's my own framing not

anything that anybody else said

and although she does call herself a

centrist but that means that she has

some

i would say as a centrist would be

somebody who has a little bit of

appreciation

or empathy for the opinions on the right

may not share them all but would have a

little bit more appreciation for them

but also for the left without

necessarily agreeing with them all so

that's my

understanding of a centrist somebody's a

little bit open to both sides but

doesn't necessarily agree with

either side at all things she

she quit because she said

that it was just an unfriendly place to

work and that because she was not as

left as the other people i'm

paraphrasing this is not her words

then she was basically it was just such

a toxic environment that she just had to

get out of there

but here's one of her one of her uh

comments

in a lengthy uh resolution letter which

is worth reading

is that she said twitter is not on the

masthead

of the new york times but twitter has

become its ultimate editor

oi said uh and

she she goes on stories are chosen and

told in a way

to satisfy the narrowest of audiences

rather than to allow a curious public

to read about the world and then draw

their own conclusions

then she says i was always taught that

journalists were charged with writing

the first

rough draft of history now history

itself

is one more ephemeral thing molded to

fit the needs of a predetermined

narrative well barry the first thing you

got wrong

is to assume that history was ever

objectively written by anybody

history is not objective

history is written by the winners and

you know whoever gets to write about it

so she was wrong on that but

i love this framing of the

in this case the new york times the most

let's say

prestigious of all news organizations we

might say

that even they according to this insider

who just quit

are basically just parroting twitter

now who is the first person who told you

that influential people on social media

are actually the new government i did

right so social media has effectively

become the new government

because the media has to parent social

media

i don't know if they have to but their

business model sort of

influences them that direction and

and once the social media and the media

have you know formed an opinion the

politicians fall in line

so the politicians you know they may uh

suggest a new idea

but that is sort of up to social media

and the public and then the

and then the regular media to support it

or not

and then the politicians know what

freedom they have to either go with it

or not

and of course when i say the public

supports it or not i mean

their side so there are only things in

our world that are supported by the left

and only things supported by the right

and the few things in the middle we

don't hear much about because it's not

fun

all right here's some more cancellations

uh

viacom cbs decided to can

uh what's his name nick cannon

because they allege he made anti-semitic

comments

in his podcast and here's the funny

thing about it

uh when i read the comments

that he made i at least based

i didn't hear the details maybe it's

worse if you hear the the full thing

but just the surface reporting of the

things he said

i don't know it just sounds like an

opinion to me it did not sound like

he was intentionally doing anything

anti-semitic

and indeed he considers himself sabbatic

in other words and even he said this how

can i be anti-semitic when the whole

thing i was saying was that i'm semitic

so you can't be anti yourself

and i thought well okay you could argue

whether he's semetic or not

but you can't argue the point that if he

includes himself in the in the group

that he's criticizing

then it's more like criticizing your own

group it's a weird hybrid

because who is it that gets to say that

nick cannon is

or is not semitic and you know he's

got some story about black people being

the real semitic people

i don't know if it's true or false but

whether it's true or false

or has any historical backing i have no

opinion i don't care

doesn't matter doesn't sound right it

doesn't sound right

right i mean it doesn't sound right but

that doesn't mean it's not right i just

don't have any knowledge or

information to argue it one way or the

other

but because he did not apologize he got

canned and i asked you

should you apologize for insulting your

own group

as you see it

somebody says it was anti-white is what

it was could be i didn't see the details

did not see the details and there was

something about the the rothschild in

there

that you know makes your eyebrow go up

what what do you say about the

rothschild because

there might be a little conspiracy

theory in there so i don't know what he

said

but i just note that that happened and

he didn't apologize

and i'm not sure that you should

apologize if it's your actual opinion

do you apologize if it's your opinion

and you still hold it

because that doesn't seem like an

apology situation

that seems like i just have an opinion

and somebody didn't like it so they

fired me

i know i'm not supporting his opinion

and i'm not

attacking it uh it's just a weird hybrid

that he did not have bad intentions

whatsoever

i think i think can't tell what people

are thinking really but it looked like

that

all right um

here's something i did that hasn't

gotten me canceled and i think that that

is

hilarious i i tweeted this

yesterday and where do you see how much

attention it got

i tweeted this i said have you ever seen

an engineer scientist or statistician

argue that police are killing black

citizens at an alarming rate

ask yourself why now do you see what i

did there

uh let me explain it because i think you

see the general idea but there's

a little bit more to it the natural

frame

for our conversations about big stuff

and the black lives matter stuff is big

stuff

our natural frame is either the left

versus the right

or maybe black versus white or

you know black versus non-black but our

natural inclination

is to just put things in this this group

versus that group

which is terribly unproductive and also

makes you stupid

because you're not really using reason

you're just saying well what team am i

on

so i guess i support the team but what i

did was reframe that

instead of thinking it was black versus

non-black or left versus right

how about people who know how to look at

data versus people who don't

[Laughter]

how about that that's my frame people

who are trained

to understand data and to analyze it

versus people who don't and so i put

this on here and you would think that i

would get cancelled immediately for this

but unlike nick cannon

i think people are afraid of me meaning

afraid to give attention to this point

of view

because you know

if you gave attention to the point of

view that the black lives matter

protests the the primary trigger not the

only topic they have

they have general topics about systemic

racism etc

but the trigger the primary thing that

the

the protests have been about the george

floyd situation

is complete it's complete

and i gave myself enough freedom

by setting the groundwork in the things

that i've done

up to this point that i might be the

only person in the world who can say

that out loud

do you know anybody else who's saying

this that the black lives matter

the trigger of it i'm not saying racism

doesn't exist

i'm not talking about the the larger

questions that's another topic

but just the question of police killing

black people

at a at an oversized alarming amount

it just isn't true now when i change the

frame to

why is it that you don't hear any

engineers scientists or statisticians

uh being on the same side as the black

lives matter protest

the reason is these are all the groups

that know how to look at data

and there's a very simple data analysis

mistake

which caused all these protests and it's

this

they looked at the percentage of black

people killed

versus the percentage of white people

killed

by police and that's just a data

analysis error

because when you look at the percentage

of black people killed by police

you're not really looking at police

violence against black people

what you've done is you've accidentally

studied

how many black people commit crimes or

how many black people

live in a neighborhood that's a high

crime neighborhood you've accidentally

looked at the wrong thing because police

are stopping

black citizens at a higher rate why

well most of it because it's the

neighborhood they live in is higher

crime and

you know certainly there's a it's a

separate issue

of whether uh too many black people are

being stopped and frisked

the stop and frisk part is a i think its

own topic

but the correct way to look at it is in

the total number of stops

police encounters what percentage of

them

either black people were stopped were

killed versus the percentage of white

people killed

when they were stopped by police now

that would be the correct way to look at

the data and when you do there's not

much difference

in fact white people are killed a little

bit more often but not statistically

so so the entire

protests are built on this weird little

lie

that can only be supported so long as

you never have in the news

an engineer a statistician

an economist or what's the third thing a

scientist

somebody who actually knows how to look

at data

you will never see somebody who knows

how to look at data

talk about this data because it would

ruin the whole thing

as soon as as soon as you talked about

it now what that means

and if you take this to the larger thing

compare

the issue of black people being killed

by police

which i think we'd all agree we want

less of it right so if there's anything

we can do to make less of that

i'm all on board all right i'm

completely on board with looking at new

ways to do

policing without police i think that's

actually a really good

path to explore but the only way i would

do it is by testing as small

to make sure it doesn't blow something

up right so

if if you wanted to replace police

and the way that you wanted to do it

is with some alternate methods let's

test them

totally let's test them see see what

happens but do a small

see if finding out if it works but

here's my

issue with the black lives matter

protest over police killing

police killing might be not might be

probably is not probably is absolutely

is i'm going to go for

full certainty on this the smallest

problem in the black community

it's the smallest problem why are they

protesting over their smallest problem

the total number of people killed by

police in general

that's your smallest problem do you know

what's a big problem

how about uh health care for black

people in general

how about that yeah that's a way bigger

problem

health care for black people in general

on a scale of

1 to 10 that's like a 10.

if you were to say on a scale of 1-10

where is number of people

killed by the police black people killed

by the police during police stops

that's a two one or a two

on the scale of one to ten just because

there's so few people involved

how about a good education for black

people

you know better education especially in

the inner cities areas

where is that on a scale of one to ten

ten

ten that is ten and if the scale was

higher

it would be higher it's not anywhere

close to the problem of police killing

black people during

stops not even close you know that one's

a two

education is a 10. what are the

democrats trying to do

reduce the ability of black people to

get a good education

by removing school choice which is

literally the only way to fix it

nobody even has another idea really it's

the only way

so the black population has

by um and i think that the illegitimate

press

is largely to blame for this imagine a

world in which

uh there were cons the protests were

happening just the way they're happening

now

but if you turned on cnn they would say

you know this is actually your smallest

problem

statistically if you're just to look at

the numbers

this is by far your smallest problem

because all of the crime

etc is coming from the same one thing

you know bad education uh there's there

are questions about family structure etc

which i don't fully understand what's

behind all of that

i've got some real questions there uh

about

you know what is actually exactly behind

the number of single parents etc

i'd like to know more about that but um

anyway if the news accurately reported

things in the size that they should be

reported

the protest wouldn't be happening

because every every time they turned on

the news they'd be watching their own

news source and their own news source

would say okay they're working on the

smallest problem and ignoring the big

ones again

and then all the protesters would say

well that's not any fun

why are we out here working on our

smallest problems again

did you know this was our smallest

problem you didn't know either okay but

now we know

because it's on both the left and the

right news sources

which is usually more dependable if it's

reported both ways

so in my opinion the protests and all

that come with it including the extra

coronavirus

if in fact there is any that comes out

of it

is entirely the illegitimate press's

problem when i told you that non-fiction

writers are the biggest risk to the

country i mean this

this is all non-fiction writers who are

writing fiction

ironically the the news business is just

non-fiction writers that's what they do

they write about non-fiction

and if they wrote correctly and if they

were good at their job

in other words if their talent stack

included the ability

to look at data they would not be

putting us in this position

do you know what they'd be doing

supporting things that would give black

people a better education

right because that would be the top

priority not even

close not even close to any of this

other stuff

all right um we found out

recently that uh mark levin you know him

from fox news and he's got a radio show

i believe and

other things and apparently a former

wikipedia

wikipedia editor and if you know the the

model of wikipedia you have all these

volunteer editors

so for every topic you could have

multiple editors

who have been sort of approved i guess

to be able to change things

but the editors can get in battles so

somebody could

change something and then another editor

can come in and change it back

but they do have rules about

what is right to change and what is not

right

to change and one of the rules is if you

point to a source

then you can keep it in there like you

don't want to remove something that has

a legitimate source

uh but if you put something in there

that's a claim without a source

then another editor can successfully get

rid of that

but apparently there was this a huge

battle over

mark levin's page in which somebody kept

filling it with

untruths and the other editors would try

as hard as they can to scrub it out

but i guess it was just like a raging

multi-year battle

in which somebody continued to put

smears on there and other people

continued to try to get rid of them

i don't know where it ended up i'm not

sure if it's back to the smear or back

to

gone all right

um

uh oh i accidentally talked about that

before

all right there's a tweet that says that

uh from

uh dr uh call vinder

cower so dr cower

i think i'm pronouncing it right k-a-u-r

uh tweeted that there are 53 plus

published hydroxychloroquine studies

for covet 19 uh showing strong efficacy

as a prophylaxis and as treatment in

early coven

um so that's the claim the claim that

there are 53

plus published studies showing that

hydroxychloroquine works

and that the government is sort of you

know blocking it from being used

and then on top of that uh dr zielinski

who most of you know he was the doctor

who is using hydroxychloroquine

with all of his patients in new york and

claimed

a much better much better rate of

recovery than other people like much

much better

so he's one of the leading proponents of

hydroxychloroquine now here the first

thing

the first thing you need to know is in

my understanding there is no

gold standard test of this drug yet

so you can fact check me on that but i

don't believe there is any controlled

clinical uh you know gold standard study

using it as a prophylaxis but

there do seem to be studies showing that

if you give it to people

when they're almost ready to die it

doesn't help much

so we've seen those as someone suggested

and i think

i have to agree it has the look of

intentional failure

the studies on hydroxychloroquine look

to the untrained eye just an observer

looking on

like they were designed to fail because

from day one

the the uh the potential of the drug was

always about giving it to you early

that was always the claim but what got

tested first

what got tested first is giving people

uh

toxic doses more than you would ever

give somebody

when they were at the end of their life

and it was just too late

now if you were going to design a study

to test the claim

that a drug given early as a as a

preventative prophylaxis

or at least to catch things early if you

were going to test that claim

would you do it by a toxic dose

given to people who are near death you

wouldn't

but suppose you were a big drug company

and you wanted to make sure that people

did not think hydroxychloroquine would

work

what would what kind of study would you

fund

if you wanted the public to think

hydroxychloroquine which is

cheap and widely available is not the

way to go

well if i were a drug company i would

immediately fund a trial that i knew

wouldn't work

and it would look exactly like the

trials that we saw

now this is not uh i'm not claiming

that's what happened i don't have any

information that would suggest that that

happened

but i'm saying that if you're looking at

it from the outside and you're even a

little bit objective

it looks like doesn't mean it happened

looks like it was designed to get you

the wrong result

i know what a i know what a trial would

look like if somebody's trying to get

an accurate good useful result and it's

the opposite of that

right yeah i'm seeing in the comments

that you say it sounds like that's

exactly what happened

we can't say that's what happened but we

can say it looks exactly like it

so but i want to make a comment on

zielinski

as well he tweeted out recently uh

some data showing the different outcomes

the death rates

for various countries and he had them

sorted by whether they used

hydroxychloroquine early

or they didn't now at the bottom of the

list was the united states where it is

not commonly used

early it's only used too late and the

death rate was very high

and then the one at the top of the list

they were using it early

and the death rate was very very low

compared to the united states not even

close i mean way way difference

and then as you go down the list you get

down to countries

that also use hydroxycholera queen early

they also have way lower death rate than

the united states

so so far that's consistent right

so all the people with

hydroxychloroquine are having good

results

according to this one chart and the

united states isn't is getting bad

result

but here's the problem if you look at

the best people using hydroxychloroquine

compared to the ones who are getting the

worst result

but are also using it in the same way

early

there's a gigantic difference it's like

a 10 times difference

so even the even the countries that

reportedly are using it early

there's something like a 10 times

difference in their outcomes

what does that tell you it tells me it's

not the hydroxychloroquine

but that chart was supposed to tell you

that it

took the chloroquine which one of us is

right

so dr zielinski obviously knows more

about

all of this than i do but the chart that

he presented to make his case

to me because i spend more time looking

at data you know i used to do it for a

living i've got a

economics background etc but when i look

at the data that he presented

it says to me it's not the

hydroxychloroquine

it says that if you can have a 10 times

difference

using it there's something else going on

there's probably something

that some of these countries have in

common beyond that

so that doesn't mean it doesn't work i'm

just saying that

i i'm not convinced and i'm going to

stick with my 30

chance it's a game changer which is a

strong chance

you know 30 is pretty solid chance but

it's less than half

right so i'm still on the side that if

we were to do a controlled

clinical style a gold standard

scientific test

that there's two to one chance you won't

find it works

all right but a 30 chance you will now

if it turns out

that it works will you say that i was

wrong

you should not because you should

remember that i just put odds on it

and if something goes the 30 way versus

the

60 something percent way it doesn't mean

i'm right or wrong

because the only thing i could be right

and wrong about was assigning the

percentages

and i've given room for it to go either

way all right

i've talked too much i've gone too long

so i think i'll end it here

somebody says you mess it up bro about

what

yeah i see in your comments you're

asking about whether zinc is included or

not included

i've seen lots of contradictory studies

i've seen studies that say it's not the

zinc

i've seen studies that say it is the

zinc i've seen

studies that say no no it's not the zinc

it's the azithromycin

and so there are studies that have both

zinc and azithromycin

and hydroxychloroquine and then you say

well that worked

but was it the azithromycin that some

people say is the active ingredient or

was it the zinc or was it the

combination of the two or the

combination of the three

those are all the things we don't know

and it's a lot

all right and i will talk to you

tomorrow