Wins & Losses -Clay welcomes back Avik Roy

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis, play talks
with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in Wins and Lost his podcast.
I appreciate all of you hanging out with us. I
believe we're coming up right on forty of these long
form conversations that we have had, and the feedback on

(00:23):
them has been phenomenal. If this is the first one
that you're listening to, i'd encourage you to go check
them out from the world of sports, media, politics, business
and also some focus on COVID, which is what we're
gonna do again Part two with oh Vic Roy. And
before I bring him in, I gotta say it's rare
I get praise for anything that I do for my

(00:45):
wife in any part of my life at all. But
after our first conversation, which we had back in August,
she said, I wish everybody in the country could hear
him and could hear that conversation because it cut through
so much of the north Ways and got to the
essence of COVID our response how to balance out going

(01:05):
back to school. From the perspective of August, it now
has been whatever. It is nearly six months since we
last talked. We still are in the throes of much
of the COVID related hysteria I would call it. And
certainly we're now changing administrations because we're recording, uh the
day after the Biden inauguration, and so Ovic again, you're

(01:28):
coming at my wife's request for part two of this discussion.
So there's high there's high potential here, but also high
danger because I know for sure that she'll be listening,
and she even sent me a couple of questions that
she wanted me to ask. So first of all, thanks
for coming with us again. Thanks for being so great
in August. If you haven't heard that August conversation, I

(01:48):
would encourage you, maybe if you're starting this one, to pause,
go back into the podcast listen to that August conversation first,
because a lot of the background. I'm not necessarily going
to go back over again in because many of you
have already heard it and I want to kind of
get an update on your thoughts. So thanks for coming
on again. People loved our conversation last time, and I
hope we can help out a lot of people here

(02:10):
and they will enjoy this one. And get informed just
as well as they did back in August. Bakeley, what's
your wife's name, Laura l A R A And just
like you. Uh, she is from Oakland County, so she
went to lass Or High School. She grew up in Bloomfield.
So I went to the University of Michigan from there
and then we met in law school. So so Laura,

(02:32):
my wife is definitely listening right now. And uh, and
you guys are both fellow Michiganders at least in your youth. Yeah,
it's a drive by laws Er High to Detroit Country
Day every morning on my way because we talked about
we talked about that last time where Chris Webber had
gone to Detroit Country Day in Birmingham, Michigan, which is
where my wife and I got married back back in

(02:54):
the day back in two thousand four. Right, Yeah, well, uh,
thank for me, Thank you Laura for for those kind words,
and I hope I can live up to it this time.
All right, quick background again, I would encourage you if
you want a longer form background of how Ovic ended
up doing what he does, go listen to our August
twenty one conversation. But I just want to reset the

(03:15):
table because some people won't do that. You grew up,
like you just said, playing basketball with Chris Wheb at
h AT in Birmingham, Michigan. Uh. You then went to
m I T. And then you went to Yale for
medical school. Do you want to give people like a
two minute synopsis of what you do in your professional
life and have done in your professional life since leaving

(03:36):
and finishing your schooling. Yeah? So my my undergraduate major
was effectively molecular biology. So the genetics DNA and genetics worked,
and how how all that plays into how cells aren't work,
how our organs work, our bodies work, how diseases work.
And I went to med school, and then after med school,
I didn't practice medicine. I ended up joining an investment

(03:58):
firm called Being Capital to help them figure out the
biotech industry. So I spent a dozen years on Wall
Street in Boston and New York, so not not not
always in the physical Wall Street, but working as an
investor investing in biotech companies, including vaccine companies and companies
that developed treatments for various diseases, cancer, things like that,
And along the way I got really interested in healthcare policy.

(04:21):
Mitt Romney, as many people will know as the founder
of bank Capital, and I ended up working for his
presidential campaign in twelve. He and his team asked me
to help them design their health reform plan for the
twelve presidential race, and that led me down the rabbit
hole of Obamacare and health reform and public policy in general.
And now I run a think tank based in Austin,

(04:41):
Texas called the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity or
free opt dot org online f r e O p
P dot org, and we work on ways to expand
economic opportunity to those at least have it using free enterprise,
individual liberty, technological innovation, and plurals and in in other words, Uh,
people like me believe that free enterprise the thing that's

(05:02):
lifted people out of poverty all over the world, all
over the country, and we need to rededicate ourselves of
doing that for the people who are struggling to make
it in this incredibly challenging time that we live in now. Amen,
you're capitalist exactly, which is like it's like some people
are afraid to say they're actually capitalists nowadays. Uh. And so, uh,

(05:22):
the data and what I love about it. So I
talked about this back in August. But I became aware
of you because there was so much noise, uh in
this COVID coverage in the media. And I always say,
you know, I don't need people to tell me what
I should think. I would like to be able to
see the numbers myself and make rational decisions. And so

(05:44):
I first became aware of you because you were looking
at the stratification from an age range perspective of how
COVID was impacting different populations, right, because one of the
first flaws, I think, uh, the original ends as it were,
potentially of our response to COVID has been to treat
this as if it is an equal opportunity disease that

(06:07):
impacts everybody equally, much like because you hear this analogy
all the time the nineteen eighteen flew right, which had
a much more consistent impact across all age ranges, and
so the decision to shut down schools, for example, was
predicated on the idea, Oh, the places that did that
in nineteen eighteen had better success. But the problem is

(06:30):
that schools and school aged children, unlike in nineteen eighteen,
are not primary vectors for the spread of this disease.
So the positive impact in terms of lessening the spread
is not in any way. We're basically fighting the war
with the technology of the last war, when this new
war is entirely different, right, And that's what often happens
in wars. You try to take the lessons that you

(06:52):
learned from the last war. The problem is the situation
has changed and this isn't the same thing anymore. Yeah,
you know that that war with a hundred and three
years ago, and it's a completely different virus. I mean,
every virus is different. Influenza virus is the way they
behave are different than the way coronaviruses behave in your body,
the way they attack you, the kinds of people they attack.

(07:13):
We actually have known from from previous coronaviruses that coronaviruses
tend to attack older people, tend to be problematic at
nursing homes. So people who really looked at the science
quote unquote should have known that we really needed to
focus on protecting the elderly. But but that's not what
we did, and that was tragic. Okay, So I asked

(07:34):
you last time, what letter grade would you give our
I'm not trying to be partisan our political here I'm
just saying, as a policy perspective, what letter grade would
you give our response to COVID as a country. Oh boy,
that's a tough one. I mean, you know, I would
probably say, in fact, you know what here's all do
is we actually actually looked at all the advanced economic

(07:58):
countries in the world at free ap and be compared like,
how's everyone doing, both in terms of just desper capita,
in terms of like the actual policy responses, economic restrictions,
school closures. And you know, as time has gone on,
the grade that we would give the US as declined
because as time has gone on, we've been the country

(08:18):
that has actually the most lockdowns or some of the
most severe lockdowns. Not the most severe in the world
right now that goes to Australia New Zealand, but but
over the over the eleven month period, if you add
it all up, particularly because of California, New York, the
Blue or states where they've been much more aggressive on lockdowns,
we've had some of the most severe economic restrictions, and

(08:41):
yet California is seeing massive spike in cases the lockdowns
aren't doing anything right. So you put all that together,
the school closures, the lockdowns, and yet the spike in
cases and you have to say that that the US
is somewhere between a D and F, you know, overall
at this point. And it didn't have to be that way,
because we were going to have death due to COVID.

(09:03):
We were going to have people who are vulnerable who
were hit just like in every other country, every other
large country that's developed has had that problem. But where
we really have UM, what the beds, so to speak,
is that we did things that we're provably not working,
like keeping schools closed, like keeping the economy shut down
in certain states, instead of focusing on the real problem,

(09:25):
which was nursing homes and the elderly living in these
kind of dorm room like facilities where we need to
do more to protective. Finally we started to get the
message around that, but by the time we did, UH,
the virus had already spreads throughout those communities. All Right,
if the country gets somewhere between A D and F,
what does the American media get in the way that
they have covered uh COVID. In your mind, as a

(09:48):
guy who looks at the data, what grade would you
give the overall American media? Oh? I mean, f is
a generous grade, right, like you, you'd have to give
them worse than enough, because I mean the way that
media behaved was was almost a sabotage, uh, the way
we we responded to COVID. In fact, there's there's probably

(10:10):
no institution, if you can call the media an institution,
there's no institution that is more responsible for how bad
the US COVID response has been than the media. Just
to give some examples, So as you talked about Clay,
we know from the data that the overwhelming risk in
terms of severe illness, hospitalization death from from COVID nineteen

(10:34):
is in the elderly. And yet if you actually pull
average Americans and ask them, like, what's your what's my
perception of my risk from COVID, it's actually young people
who are the most scared of dieing of COVID because
the media has been telling them day in day out
for a year, for for months now that that they're
the ones who should be scared witless because they're the
ones not going to school, they're the ones on zoom

(10:55):
all the time with their teachers or whatever. So that's
just wanting example of the incredible malpractice that has gone
and you marry that with this part as an environment
where there's there's a there was has been such a
desire to blame Trump for everything that has gone wrong
that people haven't been willing to see or examine where

(11:18):
where things really have gone wrong. So the all the
things that the Governor Cuomo continues to do to mess
up the COVID response in New York for example, or
the restrictions in California that aren't working for example, or
the fact that you know schools if you you know,
have you seen Clay any articles about COVID breakouts and

(11:39):
schools for the last four months, and you know that
if there was one school in Kansas that had had
like people in the hospital because of COVID and because
they reopened the school, it would be on the front
page of the New York Times. So there's basically been
no incident of serious COVID problems from reopening schools. But

(11:59):
as anyone written any think pieces about wow, we've we've
kind of got the school thing wrong. No, it's been
this kind of people who moved on to the next
drive by thing to complain about. So yeah, I mean, look,
the media, the media has been terrible and you can
sort of shake your fist at the television or Twitter
or the New York Times or whatever you want to do.
But I try to think about it more in terms of, Okay,

(12:21):
the media has been terrible, what is the solution, right,
So if we ever have this kind of problem again,
how do we think about having a a better flow
of information to everyday people? And that's a harder thing
to think about. I mean, I I can't say that, Clay,
that I have the answer today because if you think
about the public health establishment, which which comes in alongside

(12:44):
the media for a lot of a lot of my criticism,
you know, you have the so called leading experts at
the leading universities saying the same things at the media,
saying that everyone needs to be terrified, hide in their
basements and uh and not go out. And that's the
only way to solve this problem. And that's ah, that's
not a sustainable policy. As we're seeing, like why is
it the COVID is COVID case rising today. It's because

(13:06):
people cannot sit in their basements for a year. They
just can't. And and the public health profession understood that
before COVID, the consensus, the conventional wisdom. The excess expert
opinion then pre COVID was well, you can't lock down
the economy. That never works because people eventually stop listening

(13:26):
to you and just go about their business. So you
have to have a better strategy than that. That was
the conventional wisdom among experts a year ago, and it
isn't today. And that's a curious thing so much that
I want to unpack from that, and it is. It
is incredibly frustrating, I know to a lot of people
who are listening out there to see the data right

(13:50):
like you do, and to have your background and not
be able to convey it to everyone what the data says.
And I always say, my wife says, I don't need
therapy because I get to say exactly what I think
every day, right for better or worse, uh, through my
radio show, through my television show. Like I'm fortunate in

(14:10):
many ways to be a member of the media, but
there are people out there who will come after me
on a regular basis because what I am sharing is
not the quote unquote conventional wisdom, right, or they'll say, well,
you're not a doctor, how in the world are you
able to have an opinion on the whether school should
be open or not. And my answer is, if you

(14:33):
are a reasonably intelligent person, being able to analyze data
is one of the most integral assets of any human anywhere.
Right risk analysis is arguably the most fundamental trait that
has allowed humans to exist and propagate as a species.
Right Like, that's innately what we all have to do.

(14:56):
But it seems to me that in this social media age, uh,
you know, if you said what I've been saying and
what you've been saying four months, Hey, elderly people, people
with suppressed immune systems, people with major health related concerns
are who COVID is attacking. We need to protect those people,
but we need to maintain the rest of our economy

(15:17):
and let our society function. The immediate response was, Oh,
you don't care about Grandma's You want everybody to die.
It seems too in many ways have been a fundamentally
broken marketplace of ideas because the right ideas haven't won
and carried the day, either in media or public policy.
It seems to me, you know, Clay, there's a there's

(15:39):
an analogy or a comparison. We can make the sports
here because you think about the whole moneyball sports analytics thing. Right,
all these people who came in who are sort of
nerdy ivy leaguers or whatever, just people who are math nerds,
never had played the sport, and they were always clashing
with the scouts, who are veterans of the game, you know,

(15:59):
using their intuition, their feel for the athletes to have
that view of UH. And then they always looked down
on the nerds. They said, oh, you know, you don't
you don't get it because you've never played the game.
You you know, you know, you've never seen anything. But
the nerds ultimately have have one that that that debate there, right,
and and and and the differences in sports. The right

(16:20):
answer wins right, the right answer wins championships, and the
right answer puts the best team on the field or
on the court. And so you can be vindicated if
you if you apply those unconventional UH methods to sports.
The difference in public policy is the tenure professors at
Harvard and Stanford, who more at Harvard than Stanford, we

(16:41):
should say, but but the tenure professors who say we
should we should keep schools closed and UH and and
terrify all the teenagers and the children. They're still Harvard professors,
they're still in position, so there's already some of them
are joining the Biden administrations. So in that sense, that's
the one thing about public policy is it's not a meritocracy.
Wrong ideas, wrong policies can continue to be conveyed and

(17:04):
continue to be in force even if they've been proven wrong.
That's fascinating and that's well said, and it's true, and
that's why I've always argued that sports represents the ultimate
foundation of the meritocratic ideal, because everybody's goal is to win,
and whoever makes it more likely that you are going
to win gets employed, right whether I mean, you can

(17:26):
have Antonio Brown, who's got all sorts of different issues
off the field, but if the Tampa Bay Buccaneers decide
that he makes it more likely they're gonna win a
football game, and if they think Tom Brady can work
with him, they're gonna find a way to bring him in. Right.
A talent ultimately trumps everything. Almost there is a limit
where your problems can exceed your talents, but that's relatively rare,
and there's a way too immediately vindicated and frankly in

(17:49):
the world that you're coming from which is the capitalistic environment,
a market based economy over time rewards in theory, the
best business so long as they're certain, you know, as
long as there's not a monopoly involved, as long as
there's not some sort of untoward practice taking place. But
that's why capitalism ultimately works so well. Right as you do,

(18:09):
much like in sports, get a verdict on whether or
not your business made sense totally, I mean, and that's
you know, that's uh. You know, there are economists who
say it's like, look, you know, if you if you're
a business, you don't have your incentive is to be
as inclusive as possible, cause you want every customer, you
want the employees working for you. And now, obviously it
hasn't always worked that way historically, but that's not because

(18:32):
the previous system was a free market system. It wasn't
because there was the prejudice, there was the segregation, there
was a gym crow, there was the stuff going on
that really prevented people from taking advantage of the talent
that was all around them. And uh, and companies obviously
work hard to try to change that. How frustrating is
it to you as someone who has been sharing the
data from the from the moment this all started. Why

(18:53):
school should be open, the stratification of age, range of death,
and how that can govern our decisions for that not
to have been inculcated fully into public policy, and to
see us here as we are now into a new administration,
not able to for instance, get kids back in school.

(19:14):
Because what drives me crazy? Ovic and we're talking to
O vic Roy. I encourage you to go follow him
at Ovic a v I k at a v I
k on Twitter. Be sure to catch live editions of
out Kicked the coverage with Clay Travis week days at
six am Eastern three am Pacific. What grows in the
forest trees? Sure, No. What else grows in the forest,

(19:36):
Our imagination, our sense of wonder, and our family bonds
grow too, because when we disconnect from this and connect
with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is
closer than you think. Find a forest near you and
start exploring. I Discover the Forest dot Org, brought to

(19:57):
you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council.
Look to your children's eyes to see the true magic
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look and see a tree, they see the wrinkled face
of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They
see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path that

(20:17):
could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless. Guide.
Is this fascinating world? Find a forest near you and
start exploring a Discover the Forest dot org brought to
you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council.
Look for your children's eyes to see the true magic
of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You

(20:38):
look and see a tree, They see the wrinkled face
of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They
see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path that
could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless. Guide.
Is this fascinating world? Find a forest near you and
start exploring it. Discover the Forest dot org brought to

(20:59):
you by the United States Force Service and the AD Council.
Is People who claim that they care about equity the
most are propounding now the most inequitable outcome of our
lives for the most part, in requiring kids in public schools,
very often in cities, who don't have WiFi at home,
who may not have parents at home and who don't

(21:21):
have access to outside of school education. To be outside
of school for a year, I mean, it makes me
want to pull my hair out as a kid who
went to public school K through twelve and now is
fortunate enough to live in a district where my kids
are in school, and I got a kid in private
school as well. But if you have advantages, which I do,
you can take advantage of those opportunities and give your

(21:43):
kids those advantages. But most kids don't have that in
this country. It's infuriating to me, you know, totally. I
mean the most. I tend not to get frustrated, Clay,
And just because, like, if you do what I do
for a living, which is trying to swayed people of
your ideas and things like that, if you're gonna get
frustrated when people don't listen to you, this isn't the

(22:05):
job for you, right Like you have to be you
have to be willing to accept that not everyone's gonna
agree with you, and that it's hard work. If you've
got a contrarian or dissenting opinion about the way the
world should be or the way the policy should be,
or the way the law should be. It's your It's
up to you to persuade everyone else that you're right,
and that's gonna mean talking a lot of people who
disagree with you. So that's if you don't have that
sort of temperament, then you know, you can't really do

(22:28):
this kind of thing. So in that sense, I'm I'm
emotionally fine, but I will say that the one, the
one moment or or period of time where I was
most my blood pressure was really arising, admittedly was a
selfish one where there was a point in time in
the in the spring or summer, I can't remember exactly
what it was now when the Austin the Travis County,

(22:49):
which is the county that contains Austin, Texas, where I live,
there was this unelected Travis County Interim Health Authority that
basically said all the private schools that have to say
close along with the public schools. And that was like,
you know for me, because I could, like you, I
can afford to send my kids to private school, which
again is you know, I feel terrible for the people
who don't have that luxury, But for me, that was like, wow,

(23:10):
this is like the government is going out of it
tway to make my life miserable on top of everybody else.
That was just sort of at a purely selfish level,
something that made me made me, uh you know, made
my blood pressure raise because go up. But but you're
right that that the incredible unfairness of it, that that
you and I can still send our kids to school,
but so many people cannot. It's just incredible. You know,

(23:32):
I testified before Congress, I want to say, seven or
eight times last last summer, last you know that sort
of spring, summer, fall time last year, and almost every
single one of the hearings was about racial inequities that
have been exacerbated worse than by COVID UM. And the
thing that was so surreal or crazy about those hearings is,

(23:56):
you know, there was a lot of talking about, oh,
you know, it's really terrible that um, you know, African
Americans are getting COVID and and dying of COVID at
disproportionate rates, which is true. But you know, it's also
true that the economic inequality uh that that has come
from government policy has disproportionately harmed minorities who are lower income,

(24:19):
who can't afford to go to private schools right or
send their kids to private schools, and that has been
I have to say, like an astoundingly hypocritical thing. You know,
do you have all these people saying, oh, it's really
terrible that that the virus uh, you know has disportionately
harmed lower income Americans who are disproportionately non white. Well, yes,

(24:39):
the government policies that have taken their jobs away from them,
taking their livelihoods away from them, taking their schools away
from them, has been incredibly harmful and it's going to
widen economic inequality of this country. And and you're you're
absolutely right that, you know, certainly at our organization, at
Free optote or we've we've worked hard to try to
make those points, and I think, you know, we've had

(25:01):
some success with that. I think there are lots of
um people of both parties, of both you know, ideologies
or whatever you want to say, progressive, conservative, independent, who
who realized that schools need to be reopened. The differences
on the democratic side, the teachers unions are just such
a dominant force politically. No one wants to cross the

(25:21):
teachers unions and that has been the decisive factor. Can
you say, follow the science and in any way justify
schools being closed at this point in the United States
of America. No. And I think one of the things,
you know, we're gonna we're gonna do a kind of
an action after action report of the pandemic hope in
the hope that the pandemic is actually is over in

(25:45):
the next several months as people get vaccinated. But I
think one of the things that's really gonna we're going
to really focus on in our writing is the absolute
disgrace of of the or or the gap or or
discrepancy between the people who use the word science most
often in their in their speeches or their tweets and
the actual science, which shows something completely different. And and

(26:09):
again what's been so troubling is that the people who
should have the most steak in scientific authority, the Anthony
Fauci's you know, these people at the universities that I've
been mentioning, they're the ones who have done the most
to undermine trust in quote unquote scientific authority. You know,
Fauci's running around saying, oh, it's so surprising that there

(26:30):
haven't been COVID breakouts in schools. Um no one ever
expected that. We all expected that that there would be
massive outbreaks in schools after we're open. So that's really
quite strange. And I mean, I'm thinking, what bubble is
this guy in, But clearly he is in one right
and and that is a huge, huge problem. And there
needs to be a real self assessment in the scientific

(26:53):
community about about the politicization of basic information around who's
being impacted by the virus, what kinds of UH interventions
are working, what kinds of interventions are not working. And
my hope is that now that Biden is president, we
can start to have more of an honest conversation about that.
I feel like, you know, because so many people in

(27:16):
the academic world are anti Trump. No one wanted to
say that Trump was doing anything right while Trump was
in office. But maybe now that he's gone, maybe it
becomes safer, you know, for that Harvard professor to say, like, actually,
the Trump administration they did this thing. You know, I
don't agree with everything they did, but they did this
thing right, or they did that thing right. Um, maybe
the CDC was wrong in in this particular case or whatever.

(27:38):
Maybe that conversation gets a little more deep, deep politicized
now that that bidens an office. We can only hope,
but but we're going to certainly do our part to
to contribute to that conversation. I can't wait to read that,
and I want to make sure that I help you
distribute it to the best way that we can. And
in my limited world, certainly we have a big audience

(27:58):
in the world of sports. And I will say you said,
you know, the the overall public policy response has been
very bad in the world of all Republicans, Democrats, independence,
whatever you want to say. The media, I think in
general does deserve a grade worse than f which is
what you said. I'm actually somewhat encouraged that sports got

(28:18):
much of this right. Um, and it was a battle
to get it right. But when we talked back on
August twenty one, we didn't know whether college football acent
was going to happen. We now have crowned a champion.
We did not know whether the NBA was gonna be
able to finish their season. They did in the bubble.
Now they're out of the bubble. In the next season.

(28:39):
Major League Baseball finished their season with fans present in Texas.
The NFL has played their entire schedule so far. We're
talking in the week of the a f C in
the NFC Championship games. All of those sports, not to
mention countless high schools, as well as other sports that
are not anywhere near at popular on a collegiate level
or a professional vell Ovic there isn't a single death

(29:03):
or even serious illness that has been connected to coaching
or athletics, and the coaches are obviously older than the players.
But that's what the data told us was likely to happen.
And people are like, oh, wow, this actually ended up
being possible. Thankfully they took the chance and tried to
figure out a way to make it happen. What letter

(29:24):
grade would you give sports leagues for their willingness and
ability to play once they came back? Certainly NASCAR's involved, tennis,
all these other different sports. Uh. And are you at
least as appreciative as I am that we found a
way to get that done and that the data showed
low and behold that it was safe and it was
possible to do. Uh. Definitely appreciative, and not just that

(29:49):
they did it for for the sake of the athletes
who obviously worked so hard for those opportunities, but for
the rest of us, who, you know, just as human beings,
we needed something that was not political, at least mostly
not political, uh, and and that that we could that
we could point to and cheer about in our lives.
And in this very challenging year we've just had so grateful.

(30:09):
I'm grateful to the sports leagues that that worked hard
to make it happen. We and you know, and you've
covered it on your show. You know, it's not like
the sports league said, business as usual. There's a lot
of stuff and a lot of work, a lot of testing,
a lot of restrictions on attendance by the fans that
went into keeping sports going in a cautious, uh and
prudent way. And hopefully they've learned from that to realize, okay,

(30:33):
maybe we can we can uh loosen it up a
little bit now that we've learned that we can do
this safely and operate safely. But you know what really
comes back to in my mind, uh, Clay, is what
you said the beginning, capitalism, right, it's the financial incentive
for sports leagues to stay open was a big driver
of why they did stay open. And now at the time,

(30:53):
you know, last summer, last early fall, August, September, that
was you know, the sports pundit said, this is so terrible.
You know, these these leagues, particularly the you know in
terms of college sports, where you know there's the conflict
between amateurism and the money. These leagues are putting money
ahead of humanity. They're they're they're they're so greedy and
so terrible. And I look at it in exactly the

(31:15):
opposite way. It was the the financial or economic incentive
which motivated them to get it right, to figure out, hey,
there's got to be a way to do this safely.
We're gonna lose a lot of money if we don't
figure out how to do it safely, so let's figure
it out. And exactly the same dynamic play is true
with schools. So why is it that private schools around

(31:38):
the country are open and public schools are not. First
of all, you don't have teachers unions in private schools.
But a big part of it is if you're that
private school. If you're running a private school and you
say no, we're gonna go to zoom, no one, everyone's
gonna disenroll, no one's gonna show up at that school,
and your school is going to go broke because you're
not gonna get any tuition dollars in the door, whereas
in the public schools the money is flowing regard list

(32:00):
of what you do, So why keep the school open
when you're gonna get paid either way. So the economic
or financial incentives were absolutely a critical driver of why
public schools have been closed, but why sports leagues and
private schools were open so well said, I mean is
now not surprisingly, the sports media mostly there are exceptions,

(32:25):
you're listening to one of them, but the sports media
mostly followed the lead of the national media in making
the arguments. There's no way that it's safe to play
right a CBS Sports, for example, I talked about this
a lot on my radio program. They had an expert,
and you know how this works, the experts that say
the things that don't make headlines. Oh yeah, there's definitely

(32:47):
a way to play sports that doesn't make the headline.
The expert who comes out and literally at CBS Sports
guaranteed a football player would die and predicted there would
be at least three to seven as if you nick
you know Joe Namath back in the day, he guaranteed
a death and said he predicted that there would be
three to seven. That's a headline at CBS Sports they

(33:09):
finished the season in college football, and that's what he
was specifically making his prediction about. Everybody is fine, there
are no issues, and the story just disappears. Right, there's
no consequence for an expert, and I'm putting that in
quotation marks being a hundred percent wrong, particularly when those
people have tenure at universities. It's like it's it's impossible

(33:32):
for them to ever have a consequence. And that probably
goes back to your point. In a market based economy,
if you're wrong, you lose your job. In a university setting,
if you're wrong, you just write a new article explaining
why you were wrong. And uh, and and and or
completely ignoring it. There's no and there's no consequence. Yeah,

(33:52):
you know. In fact, you're reminded me of Uh. I
can't remember which a media organization was. May have been ESPN,
and may have been Yahoo or CBS. Uh. Lots of
people there was. There was a Big twelve expert that
the Big twelve A d. S recruited who said, actually,
you can operate the league safely and here's how you
do it. And there was a round of articles criticizing

(34:13):
that's right, and that expert saying, oh, the Big twelve,
just you know what, doctor shopping and found some idiot
off the street who who was going to validate what
they wanted to do and not listen to the science, right,
And that guy turned out to be right, and everyone
else turned out to be wrong, at least the ones
that say the big ten was listening to it is,
I mean, and and and all of this, you know,

(34:33):
and and again to kind of relitigate some of this.
You remember the myocarditis story that flared up. Oh my god,
if you get a if you get COVID, you're gonna
get myocarditis. Your heart's gonna be ruined forever. There's no
way we can play sports. Nobody had myocarditis issues either,
but if they did, that often happens with viral infections
in general. It wasn't specific to COVID and the media

(34:56):
what I called fear porn governed the day and and
candidly behind the scenes, I was having conversations with commissioners
as early as April, and I said, look, you're used
to people being in favor of your sport. Everybody in
the sports media is going to be opposed to you
guys playing college football this year. They're not going to
carry the water for the NFL. They're not gonna say, hey,

(35:18):
this is a brilliant idea. They're all going to buy
into the fear and curl up in the fetal position
and argue that there's no way that should be happening. Well,
as you know, Clay, I mean, it's been a long
standing dynamic in sports media that you know, sports writers,
sports commentators, they they particularly the ones who work at say,
major newspapers are major news organizations, right, they feel that

(35:41):
sort of inferiority complex of we're not the real journalists
like the people who work on you know who go
to Capitol Hill or cover the White House. So they
feel that that sense of, well, I have to do
what the the other journalists tell me to do, because
if I don't, then I'm going to be seen as
that fluffy sports reporter and not the hard journalists that
I really am. And so that sort of that sociological

(36:04):
element of the sports writing or sports media community plays
a big role in in their deference to to what,
to what other people are saying that they feel they
have to defer to. And so it's some of its fears,
some of it's that deference. Some of it is just
genuinely like, you know, being terrified or whatever. It is.
All that to say that, you know, what people like

(36:28):
you and me and and the people who listen to
your podcasts and the other people out there who who
who have had the same point of view need to
do is to make sure that uh, as we go
through this, we're able to assess and and have that
after action report where we can say, Okay, guys, let's
learn from this. Let's learn about what the so called
experts told you that was right, and what they told

(36:50):
you that was wrong, and certain things that were unknown.
So to take the example of myo karditis, I mean,
you and I were more skeptical that was a serious issue.
But you can understand risk averse for college president's risk
averse a D saying you know what, we've we've got
to be concerned about this because I don't want it.
I don't want to deal with the litigation if you
want to be cynical, or I don't want to do

(37:10):
with that on my conscience. If somebody really gets sick,
the kind of the you know, the Reggie Lewis type thing,
so you know, do the m rs do the testing
every you know, uh, power five university certainly has the
ability to arrange for those tests if if as someone's
COVID positive, you can you can look to see if
there's inflamation and there aren't muscle and and and monitor

(37:33):
in which they did right, most of the most of
the big conferences did that, and that's what allowed them
to get that to that relief that this wasn't a
big deal. So I don't have a problem with if
they're gonna be really risk averse, invest the extra money,
since they make so much money off college sports, or
at least the revenue sports, you know, to invest in
those tests to see what's going on, make sure that

(37:53):
nothing's going wrong. But to shut down the season altogether,
that's stupid. You know, keep an eye on it and
if it looks like things are are going to go wrong,
that's one thing. And remember there were a lot of
sports writers who said about the college football season, say, oh,
this is so pointless. The whole season is going to
get shut down after two weeks anyway, you know, why
is anybody even bothering And as you said, you know

(38:14):
the season basically, yes, there were games that were canceled
and things like that. But but the season was played
and and I think most people are pretty pretty happy
about that. And to go to your point on the
market based capitalistic economy being the most efficient, which by
the way, all of world history proves that's a whole
another story. But for anybody who wants to study the

(38:35):
history of economies UH and UH and market based decision
making in general, it's probably not a surprise if you
adopt that line of thinking, that the NFL, which had
the absolute most money at stake and is the biggest
business in all of pro sports, had the most successful
season because not only did they play every single game

(38:57):
as scheduled, all thirty two NFL teams played all sixteen games,
but they did it on their schedule. They didn't even
have so far UH that the a f C and
NFC championship games are Sunday, We're talking in the middle
of the week leading into that, and then the Super Bowl.
They've got two weeks to be able to schedule that,
but right now it's scheduled as it typically is, for
two weeks after the Sunday a f C and NFC

(39:19):
championship games, and a lot of them had fans present,
but every television part of their game, which is where
the biggest part of their revenue comes from. Guess what
they did the best job, biggest business does, the best
job in pro sports with putting their product out there
for people to watch. And it's arguably the most difficult
because of all the physical contact that goes into football

(39:41):
compared to let's say baseball or tennis or something like that. Yeah,
that's that's a great point. You know, as you were talking,
I was, I was recalling the the European soccer summer
soccer season from last year. Right, not some of the
league's didn't play, but the ones that did had no problems. Right,
everything worked out just fine. Geah, there were some positive
tests here, there are things like that. But but but

(40:03):
the games that were played were played and worked out
just fine. Yes, there weren't fans in the audience and
they would pump in the crowd noise on the broadcast,
but but otherwise it worked and that was our first
indication that actually this could be done, or two that
to give us the confidence, right, the real world example,
so this could be done. So so kudos to the NFL,
I mean, definitely very impressive that that they've managed to

(40:26):
have everything run on time. And um uh you know,
and you know, part part of it too is you know,
one thing we we probably should you know, take ato
account here is pro athletes, particularly football players, there's so
much discipline involved, you know, in being a pro athlete.
You know, in the NFL, it's just you know, you

(40:47):
can get cut so ruthlessly and have your career cut
short if you make one mistake. Um, and if you
make it to the pros, you're likely to have that
discipline and that maturity. Not everyone does, and we've see
some you know, notorious cases that not being the case.
But but most of the athletes have really stuck to it, right,
Whereas at the college level, it's a little harder. Right,

(41:08):
these are kids, Um, you know, there's a there's a campus,
there's parties, there's people who admire them, who want to
you know, want a party with them. There's a lot
more temptation when when you're a college student to do
the wrong thing. And so you know, it's it's impressive
on both counts, Right's impressive of the college season managed
to do as well as it did, even with a

(41:29):
lot of interruptions and obviously you look to the pros
and say, hey, uh, you know, hats off. We're talking
to Ovic Roy. Free op dot Org is his website.
Follow him on Twitter at ovic a v i k
at a v I k is his Twitter handle. Uh
and this is the Wins and Losses Podcast. I am
Clay Travis. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk

(41:52):
lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at
Fox sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart
Radio app search f f are to listen live. One
of the challenges that I see that as the largest
in the world of sports and other places. And I'm
curious what you think about this. So much of our
media is anecdote driven, and the anecdote is used to

(42:17):
justify the overall story. So, and I'll give you an example. If,
as you mentioned, I remember, and this is unfortunate, and
I feel for his family, there was a kid who
died at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, of
COVID or with COVID. I It's not like I've reviewed
his medical files to know exactly, but his death then

(42:40):
becomes a front page New York Times article talking about
the challenges of going back to college. The two million
or four million, or whatever the heck number it is
of college kids that go back and don't have any
issues at all. It's all about framing. In other words,
if I wanted to a story about how dangerous it

(43:01):
is for kids to drive back to college at the
end of summer, Inevitably every year there are kids who
die driving back to college campuses. That doesn't mean, as
a general rule, that it is incredibly dangerous for those
kids to be driving back to college campuses. Inevitably, every
year there are college kids that get the flu and

(43:23):
die the seasonal flu. That doesn't mean that all kids
on college campus are in danger of the seasonal flu.
Outliers occur, and as a data guy, outliers can be
fascinating for you, I'm sure to review, but they are
just that outliers. How much of our challenge in media
today is using anecdotal outlier stories to justify a preferred narrative,

(43:48):
such as sports can't happen because this college kid died,
even if it's in no way representative of the larger
data set. That is such a challenge, it seems to
me because the story of one death is more overpowering
than sometimes the story of a million people being fine,
you know what I'm what I'm thinking about as you

(44:09):
go through that, and all all Well said is, you know,
my my, My takeaway from from on that score is
every high school in America should require that its students
take a statistics class because statistics are the thing they
drive so much of life nowadays, especially because we have
all this data being thrown at us because of the

(44:31):
world we live in, and we just don't know how
to process it, and we process it wrong. And that
that affects the way sports, you know, sports get to analyze. That,
that affects the way lawsuits happened, particularly the class action
type lawsuits. It affects government policy, obviously, affects medicine, affects
so many different things in our world. Uh. And if
people had that set, that understanding of statistics and how

(44:53):
to separate anecdotes from the overall uh context of those
of the the anecdotes, you know, that would be an
important service that would do a lot to just calm
everyone down. I hope you know, maybe that's a that's
uh pollyannas or naive of made to feel that way,
but I really do believe that if we could have

(45:14):
a country where people were more journalists, in particular, more numerous,
more affluent in statistics, it would be so much better.
I mean that the story that really crystallizes to me
everything that went wrong with the media coverage last year
was the was the huge story h and I talked
about it the last time when I was on with

(45:34):
you in the in the New York Times, where it
was claimed that there was a South Korean study that
was purported to show that kids were infectious and it
was dangerous to reopen schools. And this is plastered all
over the New York Time. It was circulated to every
school district in the country, and there was reporting afterwards
that said that that basically there were a lot of

(45:57):
you know, school principles superintendents who wanted to open schools.
They read that article in the New York Times and
said no, we're not going to do it, obviously egged
on by the teachers unions. And it turned out that
the that the article totally misrepresented the data, and that
once the full data set came out, it was pretty
clear that in fact, kids were not infectious in South Korea,

(46:18):
just like kids were not infectious anywhere else. That schools
had been open and everything had been fine. But did
the New York Times retract their story? No, did the
New York Times run another story saying, hey, we got
South Korea wrong. Not really. I mean, they did write
another article about South Korea, but it was a very
mealy mouth and no reader who didn't already know what's

(46:38):
going on would be able to know from that article
that The New York Times had made a terrible mistake.
But that's one journalist at one influential newspaper who's misunderstanding
of scientific data lead to something that impacted the lives
of tens of millions of kids all over the country.
And uh, that's that's something that just should not happen.

(46:59):
And I hope we can. We can have a world
in which statistics are more a part of the conversation,
where when you encounter a fact or a uh, you know,
a journalistic assertion, we could do more to have statistics
back it up. Now, that alone won't solve the problem,
because you know, the old line from Benjamin Disraeli, the
old nineteenth century Prime Minister of of of Great Britain,

(47:23):
was there's lives, damn lives, and statistics we all know
from sports that that you can come up with lots
of different statistics to justify, uh, you know, anything that
you and anything that you want to believe or anything
that that are your prior. So you have to go
one level below that and really understand which statistics accurately
measure things in which statistics don't. But just having that

(47:43):
basic understanding of you know, one anecdote is not, you know,
reflective of everything else. If one person dies in a
car accident, it doesn't mean you should hide in your garage.
If one person dies of COVID, it doesn't mean the
world's gonna end um, you know, that would obviously be
a welcome development. One way that I try to combat
that is, in addition to talking to people like you

(48:06):
and hopefully sharing your worldview with my audience, is throughout
this entire COVID mess on my radio show, I've been
very transparent with the choices that I'm making in my
own life because people can say, oh, you're saying that,
But I think for most people out there who are
parents like you and me, our children are our most
prized possessions. My children, my oldest is in private school.

(48:29):
My two youngest go to school every day. I have
traveled with him on airplanes. I have taken them to
go watch NFL games. We have allowed them to play
in addition to going to school all of their different
sports leagues in our neighborhood where the sports leagues are
going on, and I hope to be sharing that is anecdotal, right,

(48:49):
but it's me trying to live up to the data
under which I am telling them that the things that
I believe should happen, sports should be played, for example,
I'm living my life that data too. I'm not telling
you to do one thing and then doing the opposite,
which frankly has been I think probably the most destructive
thing that public policy officials have have done, whether it's

(49:12):
Gavin Newsom eating at the French Laundry restaurant, or so
many different politicians out there who tend to be more
affluent than the average person they represent, having their own
kids in private school going to class, while they are
allowing all of the public school kids who don't have
the same ability of resources as their own kids to

(49:32):
not be in school, right, so that hypocrisy. I'm trying
to live my life in the way that I would
say the data reflects. I should and that goes to
what I think is is a really big story here.
And I know this is basically what you do for
a living. You're talking about analyzing probability and statistics, which
I think Americans as a group do poorly, but also
success or failure to me in many parts of life

(49:56):
seems to be predicated on your ability to analyze risk
in this country, whether it's what you invest in, whether
it's what you do on a day to day basis,
your risk barometer. I would bet if there was a
way to study it, the people who are the best
at risk barometer basis are probably the most successful in
the country. Would you buy into that idea as well?

(50:19):
You know, that's that's such a great point, you know,
I it's not just what your ability to analyze risk,
but it's your attitude toward risk. I mean, one of
the one of the things that led to the to
the rise of Donald Trump in a sense is this
divide between blue collar America and you know, college college,
e book smart America. And we're seeing that in the

(50:43):
electoral results. Like if you look at the elector election returns, uh,
if you and you look at who's voting for whom,
What really is the driver, more than race, more than income,
more than any other factor, is uh, do you have
a college degree or not? And if you do, you
tend to vote one way, and if you don't, you
tend to vote another way. That that's the most powerful
thing out there. And and you know, people who are

(51:04):
on the elite side say, oh, that just means that
we the educated, smart people, you know what's best for
you all, and you're all you all, the rest of
you are dumb and ignorant. I look at it a
different way, which is, you know, I'm looking out my
window right now in downtown Austin, and there's a you know,
a twenty story building under construction right right across the
street here, and there are people climbing up on the scaffolds,
you know, cleaning the windows and laying down the insulation.

(51:26):
And those people understand risk, right, because if if they
don't strap themselves in and they don't act carefully, they're
gonna fall off of that platform and and and die
literally die. Right. They understand the risk of of of
their jobs. And the challenge for a lot of sports writers,
a lot of academics, people who basically live lives with

(51:48):
no risk, and frankly, I'm in that crowd, right, Like
I have a white collar job, I have a good income.
You know, we've we've talked about how my life is
pretty gushy compared to the people who can't send their
kids to school, et cetera. Like people who have that
sociological background or socioeconomic background, they tend to be more
risk averse, right, because they're not used to dealing with
the world in which, like, if they're on if they're

(52:09):
careless about something, things can go badly wrong. Whereas blue
collar America, You're people are used to things going wrong.
People are used to having to be careful. They're used
to physical danger. And athletes too, right, you you you're not.
You're careless about the way you train, You're careless about
the way you stretch. You're careless about the way you
run the football. You're gonna get injured, right, and athletes

(52:29):
are very aware of that. Um And so people who
deal with physical risk every day are much more likely
to look at something like COVID and say, you know what,
I can handle that, whereas it's the people who sit
on in front of a computer all day who are terrified.
It's also what I always say is like going to

(52:50):
public school and going and I went to some public
schools that weren't very good, But there is a benefit
to knowing that you might get your ass kicked at school.
You like having that fear where you know that you're
not a hundred percent safe and you have to carry
yourself in a way that analyzes risk. Maybe I shouldn't
say that to that guy right now, right because he

(53:14):
might beat my ass, right, And I feel like we
have and and look at every generation is getting safer
progressively in the United States. Right, So, uh, this, this,
and that's been going back in time. The data would
reflect from the moment people got on ships and came
to our shores. Life life links are growing. Like we
are living in the least dangerous time in the world

(53:37):
that anyone could ever live in. Right, Um, all the
data reflects that. But it seems to me that our
fear meters are so much more attuned to danger than
they ever have been before. And people who are in
COVID is a metaphor for this. People who are not
at risk, As you said when we started this conversation,
young people, they feel terrified, right, They think they're gonna

(53:59):
get and this isn't just hovid. They think they're gonna
get kidnapped, they think they're gonna get murdered, they think
something bad is going to happen to them, when statistically
most people have never been safer if you're living in
America right now than any time in human civilization than
this exact moment. Yeah, you know that that's another great point, Clay,

(54:19):
that that there's a negativity and you know we've been
complaining a lot on on this interview, but you know,
like there's a negativity to uh, to journalism today that
something good happening typically isn't news, right, Like if something
bad happens, if a train derails, that's news. If a
train goes and stays on its tracks, which is almost

(54:42):
always what happens with every train, it's not news. Right.
A plane crashing is news. A billion plane flights going
off and taken in landing is not news. So news
in and of itself is better easily able to spread now.
But there is I think a natural negativity by is
because good news happens far more frequently and therefore isn't news.

(55:05):
The negative tends to dictate and scare. Again, it goes
to your point on probability and statistics and analysis in
being able to contextualize what I was saying risk You know,
that's absolutely right. And and the one thing I'm I'm
thinking about as you say that is how does technology
digital media change all that are our conventional wisdom, which

(55:26):
is obviously has some truth to it, is Uh, social media, Facebook, Twitter,
cable news, Uh exacerbate or worse than those problems because
one of the things that people want to get motivated
and get angry about and share with their friends and
the stuff that they're mad about about the world. Right,
And that's certainly true. But it's also true that on
UM on digital platforms, you see people share inspiring stories

(55:49):
a lot of times. If you look at the stories
that are getting the most traffic, it's like, uh, and
I think you shared it. Actually, the story about Tom
Brady throwing the touchdown to Drew Brees the sun beautiful,
Yes that weekend, right, like that got enormous traffic. So
people hunger for for good news too. And I guess
the thing is, can we think about again, I'm always

(56:10):
trying to think about what's the solution here? How do
we move beyond and try to make things better, and
I feel like we've we've gotta think more, and media
organizations that that have an economic incentive to do so,
just think more about how do I share those inspiring stories,
the good news that, the kindness, the sportsmanship, the things
that that we could show to our kids and say,
you know what, be more like that guy. Be more

(56:33):
like Tom Brady and du Brees after a hard fought game.
Don't be like the sore loser or whatever. You know.
I think there's an opportunity in there. It's interesting to
me because if you think about, let's take a step
back and just think about it from a capitalistic perspective,
there is big incentive to get financial stories right, such
that people will pay huge amounts of money to, you know,

(56:55):
get a Wall Street journal or a Bloomberg article or
wherever it is to them first right. And getting that
news right from a financial perspective is incredibly important. It
seems to me that there and so the quality I
would say, you may disagree. I'm not an expert in
finance journalism, but it seems to me the quality of
finance journalism is higher than the quality of many other

(57:19):
types of journalism because what pays in many other types
of journalism, is not nuance or analysis or intelligence. Necessarily,
it's emotion. And the emotion can be good, Oh look
how great Tom Brady is and Drew Brees after that
game they're throwing a pass. But the emotion can also
be hyper negative, which is why I say, look, Trump

(57:40):
is a symptom of the industry and universe in which
we live, not the cause of it. He is an
inarticulate voice in many ways for a conversation that needs
to happen. What always friend Trump is a whole different story.
But always frustrated me about Donald Trump was I just
wish somebody had been making some of the same arguments
that he was making with a fact will foundation as

(58:01):
opposed to a gut foundation, which I think was very
often the way he was responding. Yeah, I mean that
that's uh, That's what I certainly hope for the same thing.
I hope that we can we can draw the lessons
of the criticisms of America that that Trump, that what
Trump was right about without the other aspects of Trump's

(58:23):
approach the life, that that we wouldn't want to teach
our kids, or we wouldn't want to in terms of
the way we treat each other. Okay, all that absolutely
go ahead. No, Well, I was gonna cut I had
a big question here. I was going to try to
hit you with. But all this conversation we just had
um is, people are gonna love it and fantastic. But

(58:43):
you said you're working on basically a retrospective to look
back at the way the society responded to look back
at the decision to shut down schools. When is that
going to come out? And it's a cliche because it
is true, especially if you like history. Hindsight is right.
We find out the airs that we made and hopefully
learn from them going forward into the future. Who knows

(59:04):
when the next pandemic might happen. If you had been
able to look at the data set that you have
right now, you're reviewing all everything that has happened with COVID.
What would have gotten us in a in public policy,
what would have gotten the media and a in coverage?
What would have been the best response that we could

(59:24):
have had. Let's pretend that you and I are able
to implement American policy, or maybe not me at all.
You back in March, when this virus is just arriving
on our shores. Probably it was here in December or
whatever else, but March when we really start responding to it.
What was the right response? What should we have done
to have the most effective possible American response to COVID

(59:49):
We Well, first of all, I love that you're like,
you're now my editor, and you gave me a deadline.
Are you know it's a deadline when you your articles
think out. So I'm gonna I'm gonna do it. I'm
gonna say, Okay, we'll get this out by the end
of February, so we're recording. I can't wait. Yes, I'll
get it out of the end of February. And you know,
I'll say a couple of things. You know, obviously this
is this is we can have a we can have

(01:00:10):
a whole hour and a half conversation about that question.
But I'll say, maybe we will when your whole paper
comes out, because I'd love for you to come back
after I have a chance to read it and digest it,
for you to be able to talk about it with us,
because I think my audience would love it. But uh, okay,
dive in broad picture question that I just asked, Yeah,
and look, there's a lot to say about this topic.
And you know, in fact, I just interviewed uh the

(01:00:32):
now former h h S Secretary Alex asar on a
lot of this stuff last week. You can find it
on YouTube if you google my name. And is um
more to say about that. But I'll say a couple
of things to to to what the appetite of you
and your listeners. First is, if you actually look at
which countries have performed well this time around with COVID,

(01:00:54):
it was mostly the countries of the Pacific Rim East Asia.
And why is that. It's because the countries of the
Pacific Rim have encountered the coronavirus before they had encountered
Stars Kobe one in two thousand three, And it was
because of their experience with that first Stars code coronavirus,

(01:01:17):
or at least the one that we call the first
Stars coronavirus, that led them to when this one came around,
they took it seriously from from day one. They did
the social distancing and the other kinds of things to
be careful, but they didn't shut down their societies. They
didn't have to because their citizenry knew how to behave
their governments knew what steps to take to get the

(01:01:40):
testing going and everything else. So my hope, my optimism
is that the experience of this pandemic will lead us
to be smarter in general about both the way everyday
people respond to the crisis and have the government response.
Maybe that's too optimistic, but I think there's reason to
be hopeful of that if we look at the example

(01:02:01):
of Asia. The second thing I'll mention is the vaccine.
So one of the things that's come out of this
past twelve months or ten months that's been remarkable is
the development of these of these coronavirus vaccines. As I
think I talked about with you and your last show
that we did together, the previous world record for developing

(01:02:22):
a vaccine for a novel virus was five years for
the ebolavirus five years. We shattered that record. Two different
biotech companies, one American maderna On another German bio Intact,
basically developed these mRNA based vaccines. M RNA is a
is a type of genetic code material like DNA. They

(01:02:42):
developed these mRNA vaccines and turn them around incredibly quickly.
We got them on the market in an incredible record time.
And what's really really encouraging about that is that these
m RNA vaccines are actually really easy to manufacture. They're
really easy to develop. It's all us like software. You
type in the genetic code, you PLoP out the vaccine,

(01:03:04):
and it's ready. The Maderna they had their vaccine, their
first batch that they developed for testing, that was ready
to go in January February of last year, almost a
year ago. So think about this. If we have another
coronavirus or another virus that is amenable to that kind
of technology, you could develop a vaccine much sooner. Once

(01:03:25):
the genetic sequence of that virus is published, you can
develop the vaccine right away. And for those high risk individuals,
frontline workers, nursing home residents, the people who are particularly vulnerable,
you can get them vaccinated within a month of the
pandemic or two months of the pandemic, instead of waiting
for almost a year to get that vaccine out. And

(01:03:46):
if you can do that, you can stem a lot
of the damage that comes from the serious illness from
from a novel pandemic. Hopefully this is a situation we
don't have to encounter for a while. But to me,
that technological advance is one of the things that a
lot of people aren't talking about that. We can bring
to the next crisis that we have if we are

(01:04:06):
so unlucky as to have one. A couple more questions, though,
I know how busy you are. You hear a lot
about the death rate from COVID, And I always say,
like nobody, I always say on my radio show, nobody
hates death more than me. Right Like, so I am.
I want to make it clear here that I am
adamantly opposed to death. I wish we could live almost forever.
I wish nobody's grandma ever died. All those things. The

(01:04:30):
focus again, going back to the statistical analysis, the age
of death from COVID, and you might need to say
with COVID, but however you want to phrase, that is
either around the same age as the average age of
death in the country as a as a whole, or
maybe a little bit older, right, uh. And you can

(01:04:50):
speak to that data better than I can, so am
I correct, roughly, in the in the average age of
death from somebody who is being classified as a COVID
death is not much different than the average age of
death overall in the United States. That's uh, that's generally true,
you know, obviously it's older people who are typically dying
of COVID. It's older people who die generally, yes, um uh.

(01:05:14):
And in fact, as you know, we we've published some
analties that show that the real bulge are differential in
in who's dying of COVID in the United States relative
to pre existing normal quote unquote death rates by age
bracket is that sort of upper upper middle age bracket
rather than the elderly, because the elderly, as you say,

(01:05:34):
are dying anyway. And this is this is something I
think there's gonna be and I think this may be
the thing you're getting at. We may find as we
sift through the data that the death rates of the
elderly versus the death rates of the elderly in a
normal year we're not that different. And or that the
the the age of death is only you know, maybe

(01:05:56):
a couple of months before the life expectancy for say
eighty five year old. Maybe the eight five year old
would have lasted until lady six, Maybe it would have
last till lady seven. And COVID, you know, pushed that
a little earlier, but not by a dramatic amount. We
don't know. I think those are some debates that are
going on in the statistical community right now, but we'll
start to learn about that. And and another thing that

(01:06:19):
we're going to have to study, Clay, is how many
people died not because of COVID, but because they were
locked in their rooms or they and in fact, the
average age of those people is going to be much younger,
which is where I was going to go, years lost
of life. We talked a lot about death, but really

(01:06:40):
I think everybody out there when you take a step
back and think about it from an analytical perspective. Uh,
and also the in factor in a little bit of emotion.
The reason why when a five year old dies we
feel so much worse than when an eighty five year
old dies is because the five year old had so
many lives, so much of their life, left, so many
years to live, compared to the eighty five year old.

(01:07:03):
And one of the things I've said it to the
extent that there is a gift at all. Can you
imagine if we had COVID, excepted had taken all young
people instead of primarily been old people. That's a totally
different dynamic, which goes to your point about the vaccine.
I mean, I've got young kids. I mean I would
have been curled up in the basement, right like I
would have been terrified for them. And so when we

(01:07:24):
talk about the number of deaths that we have, the
other thing that I don't here discussed very much is
from an analytical statistical perspective, in theory, if the people
who are dying are dying not necessarily with tons of
years left on their life, right, they have comorbidities, they
are otherwise unhealthy. People are talking about how this is
an unprecedented death, and I understand that. But in two,

(01:07:50):
and in tree, and in four and maybe even in one,
if the vaccine gets distributed, well, isn't it likely that
we would see a substantial decline in deaths. In other words,
focusing on how many people are dying this year, to
me is missing that a lot less people would theoretically

(01:08:10):
die in the next couple of years ahead, and not
just rationalizing and recognizing we're not stopping death, right like,
the average age of death is going to still be
what it is. I hope we can continue to raise it.
But every day, I think in this country, around eight
thousand people die. And the overall understanding of that seems

(01:08:30):
to be very limited in the media and the analysis
and discussion of this issue. Yeah, you know, it's it's
one of those things that's going to be hard to
tease that from just last year's data because, as you said,
who died with COVID, who died of COVID, we literally
are not recording that information because the hospitals don't have
an incentive too. So so that's gonna be a hard

(01:08:52):
thing to look at next year, I mean this year
in and understand, but you know, what you're what you're
bringing up is that after several years, let's say we
look at the period from five and say, okay, over
that five year period, how many people in a particular

(01:09:12):
age bracket died versus what we'd see in a non
pandemic period. That's going to give you the answer that
you're talking about in terms of it was there, and
it may it may not even be noticeable over ten years.
It's probably not going to be noticeable at all if
you average it out over ten years. Right. In other words,
we're all so much of social media and so much
of media today is about reacting instantaneously to what's occurring

(01:09:34):
at this exact point. But when you sort of expand
your horizon. A lot of public policy decisions, it seems
to me, are are based on trying to do something
in this week or this month that doesn't necessarily make sense.
And look, I mean, you can say even you know,
broadening the perspective. You hear a lot of people say
once their businesses go public, Oh, we've got to make

(01:09:55):
sure that we make our quarterly numbers. But are you
making the right decision in that quarter for the next
ten years or you just trying to clear that hurdle
right now. There's a difference between managing for the future
and managing for right now. I guess it's one of
the things that I'm trying to get to. Well, Well,
the thing that you're you're stimulating in my mind in
terms of what to mention as you say that is

(01:10:16):
something we haven't talked about yet, and that is the
profound fiscal and economic changes that have taps have taken
place over the last twelve months. We've increased the federal
debt from twenty trillion dollars to twenty eight trillion dollars,
and Biden's trying to add another two trillion of that.
The federal reserve increased the supply of US dollars, the

(01:10:39):
effective supply of US dollars in the economy, by which,
in theory, all else being equal, means that the dollars
in your wallet are worth four fifths of what they
were worth before, because literally the Federal Reserve just printed
more dollars and flooded them into the economy, which went
to the banks, which went to the wealthy, which went

(01:11:00):
to the people who owned stocks and uh and could
benefit from all that extra cash flowing around. Didn't go
to ordinary people, and and those problems are gonna come
back to haunt us. One of the things that I
really worry about, I'm I'm I'm optimistic about our ability
to handle a future pandemic for the reasons I mentioned.
I'm a lot more concerned about what increasing the debt

(01:11:22):
by eight trillion dollars and increasing the money supply by
is going to do to push us into a long
term fiscal crisis that we're not going to be able
to deal with. And people, you know, America has been
such a stable and generally prosperous country for so long,
people have forgotten what it's like to be in an
environment where we really have a fundamentally unstable economy, and

(01:11:47):
by fundamentally unstable I'm talking bym our Germany great depression,
that kind of instability, and we are well on our way.
We are well on our way to having basically the
monetary policy of I our Germany and look out if
that ever comes to pass. And and there are a
lot of scenarios I could I could bore you with
or terrify you with that that could take place over

(01:12:09):
the next ten twenty years in that regard, and not
to me, that's the biggest mess that we're gonna have
to clean up from the last twelve months. How do
we get our fiscal and economic picture back in line,
because if we don't, the rising generations are never going
to know what it's like to have to have had
that that success and that prosperity that that people that

(01:12:31):
are my age and your age take for granted. Be
sure to catch live editions have outkicked the coverage with
Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern three am Pacific,
and we're live here outside the Perez family home just
waiting for the and there they go almost on time.
This morning. Mom is coming out the front door strong
with a double armed kid carry looks like dad has

(01:12:52):
the bags, daughter is bringing up the rear. Oh but
the diaper bag wasn't closed. Diapers and toys are everywhere.
Oh but mom has just nailed the perfect car seat
buckle for the toddler. And now the eldest daughter, who
looks to be about nine or ten, has secured herself
in the booster seat. Tad zips the bad clothes and

(01:13:13):
they're off. But looks like Mom doesn't realize her coffee
cup is still on the roof of the car and
there it goes. Oh, that's a shame. That mug was
a fan favorite. Don't sweat the small stuff. Just nailed
the big stuff, like making sure your kids are buckled
correctly in the right seat for their agent's eyes. Learn
more n h t s A dot gov slash The
Right Seat visits h s A dot gov slash The

(01:13:37):
Right Seat, brought to you by NITZA and the AD Council.
What grows in the forest trees, Sure, No, what else
grows in the forest our imagination, our sense of wonder,
and our family bonds grow too, because when we disconnect
from this and connect with this, we reconnect with each other.

(01:13:59):
The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest
near you and start exploring. I Discover the Forest dot org,
brought to you by the United States Forest Service and
the ad Council. Adoption of teams from foster care is
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(01:14:22):
brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by the
families that lived them, with commentary from experts. Visit adopt
us Kids dot org, slash podcast or subscribed to Navigating
Adoption presented by adopt us Kids, brought to you by
the U. S Department of Health, the Human Services Administration
for Children and Families, and the ad Council. We're talking
to Ovic Roy. He works at free op dot org.

(01:14:44):
He is at a v I k thank him for
talking with us. I keep saying I have two more questions,
but I do I think have only two more questions now.
One of those questions, uh that is out there is
one that my wife asked me to ask you specifically,
what is this vaccine going to do? Presuming that everybody
starts to get the vaccine, when do you think things

(01:15:06):
can get back to quote unquote normalcy and walk us
through because she was like, hey, they're saying that you're
still gonna have to wear a mask after you're vaccinated
because you might still then be asymptomatic and able to
spread it even after vaccination, which her concern is if
that's true, then how do we get back to normalcy? Uh?

(01:15:29):
And can you break down the vaccination process and what
it looks like and means to the average person out there?
That was her big question, um, because she doesn't think
there's an in depth discussion enough about what the vaccination
actually means in terms of our lives. Yeah, great question, Laura.

(01:15:49):
So first of all, we should we should mentioned there's
multiple vaccines. They're not identical. The Maderna vaccine and the
Biointech vaccine and the new Johnson and Johnson vaccine. They're
all a little different, um, and they all seem to work,
which is the good news. They're all a little different
and so uh So, there'll be a lot of different
vaccines that are that are out out there that you
can get access to, just like there are a lot

(01:16:09):
of different COVID tests that you can get access to
but they work and that's reassuring. So for the people
out there who are who are have been skeptical of
whether the vaccines work or not or whether it's some
you know, government plot. Um, I'm pretty competent that the
vaccines have been studied well as they do work and
that they are effective. So, um, will you get in
the line to get it? Will you be in line

(01:16:29):
to get a vaccine? Like? Is that something that you
care about or your kids as opposed to your parents
who may want to get a vaccine? Like, what would
your personal decision be? Yeah, I've I've signed up on
the Austin website. Now I'm you know, I'm forty eight
years old, and I'm you know, I don't I don't
have any serious serious illnesses, So I'm not I'm not
going to be the be the front of the line
eye idem. I wouldn't want to cut in line. I

(01:16:51):
want the create a risk to get it first. But
but yeah, when it comes out, I'll definitely get When
I'm able to get it, I'll definitely get it. And
the good news is, you know, again, for all the
catterwauling in the press and and from from people with
a partisan point of view. The fact is, uh, we've
we've started to to overcome some of the stupidity particually

(01:17:12):
at the state level in terms of blocking people from
getting the vaccine. The rules that that really Florida Dennis
excuse me, Roda Santis and Florida uh innovator, where you
just give it to everyone over sixty five. You know,
let's just do that, show him your driver's license, boom boom, straightforward,
get all the over sixty five people the vaccine, then
go work down from there. That's the right way to go.

(01:17:33):
And that was really bungled by by a number of people,
as the Santis done the best job almost of any
governor in the country, despite the fact that he's been
criticized rapidly by many people in the media. Absolutely, you know,
I mean this vaccine thing is only reinforced what you
and I talked about with the nursing homes uh in
back in August. I mean, it was the Santis who
did the right thing, which is, let's just open it

(01:17:54):
up to everybody over sixty five. We're not gonna grill
you on exactly what you're medical history. We're gonna look
a your driver's license, boom. And if there's extra vaccine
at the end of the day, boom, you know, stick
it in the arm of the pizza guy. Right Whereas
Andrew Cuomo New York is literally saying to clinics, if
you give the vaccine to someone who isn't in the
right subgroup that I've dictated, I will find you a

(01:18:16):
million dollars. And what does that do that He's a
lot of vaccine is getting wasted because at the end
of the day they run out of people who are
at the clinic to give the vaccine to and they
literally have to throw out the remaining doses. It's just
profoundly idiotic. And it just goes to show again it's like,
consistent with what happened before, you have one, uh one
governor in particular, who stands out as a data driven

(01:18:38):
guy who's always doing the right thing and based on
the science, and you have another guy who's just operating
from ego and instinct and and messing up NonStop. So
either way, also the one that gets criticized is the
one who's actually looking at the data. That's what's so
frustrating to me. From that perspective, there are a ton
of people listening to us right now that are like, wait,
Florida Governor Rhonda Santis has done one of the best

(01:18:59):
jobs in the country. I saw on CNN that there
were people at the beach in Florida and that everybody
was gonna die in Florida right and that they're opening
bars and that their restaurants are open, and that schools
are open. It's it's That's what's so frustrating to me
is the media is actually selling us something that's fundamentally
not true. And I saw, by the way, on Florida
data yesterday, sixty eight percent of all people that have

(01:19:21):
gotten the vaccine in Florida, more than anybody in the country,
are sixty five or over, and so they're specifically focusing
on the people who are dying of COVID. Yeah, they
have been very smart about it, again compared to other
places where say, well, you have to be sixty five
and living in nursing him and have a pre existing
condition and then maybe we'll get the vaccine to you,

(01:19:41):
but if you're not, then you have to wait until
we're through with all those people first. I mean, it's
just totally dumb, just logistically and uh, and credit to
dissenters were seeing through that, and and the CDC the
so called you know gold standard at the CC, all
the bureaucrats of the CDC, they contributed to this problem
by creating a very unwieldy the kind of thing that
bureaucrats would do, not based on real world how things work,

(01:20:03):
how things get distributed. So, uh, kudos to the santists.
And then the Trump administration in its waning days, UH
saw that and said, hey, this is stupid that what
the CDC put out doesn't make any sense. Let's uh,
let's overrule them. Of course, there were a lot of
people to like, oh, you're overruling the CDC, but no,
they did the right thing there. And you know you
have Biden now saying well, and I want to answer

(01:20:24):
Lara's question about this, do you have Biden out? They're saying,
you know, well, are our big plan. The thing we're
gonna do that's different from Trump is we're going to
make sure that we deliver a hundred million doses of
COVID over the next hundred days. Well, do you know
what the run rate is of vaccines? In the last
couple of days of the Trump administration, was to one
point five million a day, meaning that if Biden does nothing,

(01:20:47):
just lets the Trump administration plan play out, they'll have
delivered a hundred fifty million doses over the next hundred
days at least. So you know, there's a lot of
like Biden put out this big press release the other
day saying, Oh, here's all the things I'm gonna I'm
gonna make people produce pp I'm gonna deliver a hundred
million dollars of cod It's like, this is all common
sense stuff that's already being done. And the good news

(01:21:09):
is again there there's obviously been a lot of snappy
there's a lot of things that have gotten messed up
in the early going here, but the good news is
we're learning from that in real time. I do think
we're gonna get easily through a hundred million doses in
the first hundred days. We should have all the at
risk populations of people who actually want to take the vaccinomusly.
There are a lot of people who are scared of

(01:21:30):
it or don't want to take it for philosophical reasons.
But the people who want to take the vaccine who
are over sixty five should all get it by March uh.
If you know, if they want to, then we start
going to the general populations. And my hope is that
let's call it, let's call it July. Uh. We you know,
the the vast majority of people who want to get

(01:21:50):
vaccinated should be well on their way to getting vaccine
at least the first shot and hopefully the second. And
that means that from a standpoint of the way viral
transmission works, the virus is not going to be a problem.
Right If you've got that much immunity in society, the
virus is not going to really be able to get
the traction to continue to spread even if not everybody
has gotten the vaccine. Think about the measles vaccine. Not

(01:22:12):
everybody gets the measle vaccine, not everybody gets the flu
shot every winter, and yet enough people do that that
we don't have influenza pandemic. So similarly here, if enough
people get the vaccine, we should be able to return
to normal life. So I don't agree with the people
are saying no, we have to behave as if we're
still in lockdown for for most of this year. I

(01:22:34):
think for the first quarter it's still going to be
tough sledding. But but once we get to to the
April May June time frame, I do think things should
start to subside. Hopefully the stats on the cases and
the hospitalization starts to subside to and that'll be the
thing that hopefully turns around that allows us to build
more momentum for for reopening schools, reopening the economy, et cetera.

(01:22:57):
Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk line up
in the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox
Sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio
app search f s R to listen live. I'm Clay Travis.
This is Wins and Loss as you're hearing from ovicroy legit,
last question for you, and I think we could talk
all day, by the way, I could just I could

(01:23:18):
just keep unpacking so much of what you're saying and
continue this conversation, and I hope people have enjoyed it.
I said, legit last question. But I do want to
ask you this, How is free op dot org funded.
If people are listening to this right now and they
love what you're saying and they're like, man, I want
to go check out more of the work they're doing
their capitalists, or do you guys raise money. Are you

(01:23:38):
privately funded? What is the method by which you are
able to do the work that you do? Well, thank
you for asking that, Clay, Because we are a nonprofit
of five oh one C three tax exept, nonprofit, nonpartisan,
and we basically survive our donations. So we get donations
from people like you, people who are listening to this
UH podcast or or radio show, and where we we

(01:24:00):
get donations from also charitable foundations that we apply to
grants from and and so we basically you hit up
as many people as we'll We'll take the calls, take
the meetings, and give them our our pitch about what
we're doing and say, hey, look, if you're if you're
looking for a set of ideas that can bring Republicans
and Democrats together to make the country better, to expand

(01:24:21):
freedom and expand prosperity, particularly for the little guy who's
struggling in this day and age, take a local what
we're doing, and and help support our scholars and and
you know, to take the example of our COVID work. Right,
So it wasn't just me, you know you you're you're
having me on your show, and I appreciate that, appreciate
the chance to share what we work on. But it
was a whole team of people who put together our work,

(01:24:42):
like on on reopening schools. Yes, we had our healthcare
people talking about the COVID piece of it, the virus
piece of it, right, but we also had our education experts,
people like Dan lips for who's our expert on case
through twelve education, and Preston Cooper, who's our expert on
on college and vocational school and how to re open
those schools. And so we had a plan that went

(01:25:03):
from how to reopen preschools, two grade schools, the high schools,
the colleges to trade schools. We went through it all
and that's because we're able to leverage our whole team
of scholars not just in in biotech and healthcare, but
also in education and economics and housing in other areas
to do this kind of work. So and we wouldn't
be able to do that if it weren't for for

(01:25:23):
the donations of the people like the people who are
listening to this podcast. So if you're interested in supporting
our work, whether it's a ten dollar check or if
if you're if you have Clay Travis money, a bigger
check than that you can click on the donate tab
on our website and and I legitimately am going to
donate today. I'm meant to ask this the last time,
so free opt dot org. I mean, I'm just I'm

(01:25:44):
just so impressed with the work that you're doing, and
I think we need more work like this, and so
I'm going to ahead, uh straight there. So, if you
are also enjoying this conversation and you want to to
support free op dot org, is where you go? Okay,
last question for you. So, and the reason why I
would use Vietnam as an example is Vietnam is almost

(01:26:05):
universally decided to have been the biggest failure of American
public policy for most of the last fifty years. Right,
let's go all the way back to to Vietnam. The
smartest people got it all wrong on Vietnam. In the
years that have ensued since Vietnam finished, that has become
the consensus opinion. We got it wrong. We didn't foment

(01:26:27):
the right public policy, we wasted a lot of lives,
we didn't do what would have been best for the country.
I would imagine almost everybody out there listening right now,
there's very few people who are like in the Camp
of Vietnam was expertly executed by the United States government.
Will we reach the point I know you said, you've
got your report coming out at the end of February

(01:26:49):
where masses of American population recognized that lockdowns, that shut downs,
that schools being closed was a fell year of policy.
Or are so many people committed to what their opinion
was in real time through social media and everything else,

(01:27:09):
that people will be unwilling to recognize what the data
tells them because it conflicts with the emotions they felt
in that moment. And I I asked that question because
I think it's significant and important that we learn from
the mistakes that we make in public policy in our country.
Will we end up because I think you would agree

(01:27:30):
with me right now that the data is almost uniform
that lockdowns don't make sense and you can use Fortunately,
because of federalism, we've got all these fifty different states
that may have implemented a little bit different policy. And
I think it's clear that California hasn't had some radically
better result than Texas, or that certainly New York hasn't

(01:27:50):
been better than Florida. In fact, it's far worse I
use those four states because they're the most populous. In
other words, the virus was gonna virus, right like, we
weren't gonna be able to escape it based on a
public policy decision exclusively, Will we reach that consensus? When
does that consensus come? If we are ever going to

(01:28:12):
reach it, I think it's going to take a long time, Clay,
because you know, the people who were involved in this debate,
people like you and me and the people who we
disagreed with, pretty invested in their point of view at
this point, right Nobody wants to admit they're wrong. Nobody
is going to be inclined to admit there wrong, even
if they secretly believe they're wrong. And some people just

(01:28:32):
don't believe they're wrong because they're not gonna look at
the data that doesn't confirm their own preconceptions, right, So
I think it's gonna take some time for that to happen.
But that's where organizations like free Up hopefully can play
a role, along with obviously guys like you, in terms
of doing the research, doing the analyzes that we can
then circulate uh in the media, circulate with with our

(01:28:55):
our peers and colleagues that show uh, that that's the case, right.
So it's up to the people like us who have
the views that we have, or the hypotheses or whatever
you want to call it, to actually do the research,
do the work to show that actually, if you look
at California and you look at Texas, and you look
at the economic restrictions that they put in or didn't
put in, here was how that affected the rate of

(01:29:17):
COVID infections and their hospitalizations in debt. And it's it's
pretty clear that that that nothing really happened there and
and or that that that that that that the Texas
or Florida model was vindicated. I think that's that's going
to be some of the work that that that people
at Free Up and else we're going to have to
do that to make that point clear. So it's up
to researchers who want to who want to test that

(01:29:39):
hypothesis or or or or or prove it to do
that work. And and that's where organizations like us really
make a different. The the whole reason we started free Up.
Free Up is only five years old, four and a
half years old, and the whole reason we started is
because even though this country is so big, freefundered thirty
million people. There was literally nobody doing this kind of
work if we didn't do it, which sound it's crazy,

(01:30:00):
Like I look around them, like, how is it possible
that we're the only ones writing these you know, long
art I say that in sports every day. How is
it possible that OutKick is the only place doing what
we do? It's it's scary, honestly. Yeah. And so it just, uh,
you know, puts a little more pressure on us maybe
to work harder and get that stuff out there. And
and we certainly take that responsibility seriously and are are

(01:30:23):
going to continue to do that. So so keep an
eye on on our Twitter account, on our website and
uh and hold us account of if we don't get
it done, and ask us to when when that work
is going to come out, because it's important to get
it done. It's not only important to get it done,
it's also important for the very scientific method itself, because
the idea that experts know everything to me is one

(01:30:44):
of the lasting legacies of COVID that is going to
be the most destructive because the scientific method is predicated
on coming up with hypotheses, testing them, and always expecting
that you may be wrong, whereas it seems to me
that social media is predicated almost entirely on never admitting
you were wrong about anything. Yeah, you know, I mean

(01:31:07):
you mentioned Vietnam. We we we talked about it on
the last interview as well. You know, we've obviously talked
about COVID. Think about the housing crisis in two thousand eight, right,
all the experts said housing prices only go up, they
never go down, because that's what historical charts show. But
of course, you know, every trend is made to be broken.
And you have a housing bubble, you have a financial bubble,

(01:31:29):
you have uh institutions behaving recklessly, people behaving recklessly, over
leveraging their their their equity in their homes, and boom,
you have a crash. Right, And that's what happened. And
there were the people that that Michael Lewis wrote about
in The Big Short, which was a great book and
a great monm you know, I mean, and obviously the
author of Moneyball as well, and The Blindside, incredible writer. Like,

(01:31:49):
what what's the running theme of all those all those books,
all those movies. It's that the experts didn't get it right,
and there was some random creative nerd out there who
was right? Where the expert it's for wrong, And so
that's a you know, there's a balance, right. We don't
want to say science doesn't matter that you know, you
should just ignore everything that a scientist says because the

(01:32:10):
scientists are always wrong. That's not true. But it's also
true that experts, particularly experts who have a political point
of view, often uh uh, you know, aren't willing to
see countervailing or contradictory evidence that that conflicts with their
world view. So the balance is somewhere in the middle.
The balances. Have a healthy skepticism of of what you

(01:32:30):
hear from the so called experts. Don't automatically assume they're
wrong either, but have that healthy, skipted skepticism. Do your
own work, do your own checking, ask intelligent questions. That's
what we should have done in two thousand eight with
the natural crisis. That's what we should have done with
the Vietnam War or the Iraq war. That's what we
should do with COVID and everything else that comes along
along the way. And if we do that, we'll have
a much more healthy society and hopefully better responses to

(01:32:55):
to the challenges that come before us in the future.
I'm donating to them free op dot org. I encourage
you to do it as well. I'd also encourage you
to go follow oh Vic Roy at a v I K.
You can thank him for coming on and talking to
our OutKick audience here and when you publish, hopefully in
late February, since you've now established a date. When you
published that and I have a chance to read it,

(01:33:16):
we will get you on again. I appreciate you answering
my wife's questions uh and uh, and again give her
credit because she loved this interview and she said, you've
got to get him on again, and you've got to
talk to him again and get an update. So I
appreciate everything that you're doing at your organization, and I
appreciate the time you gave us today. Hey, same do you.
Thanks for being a voice for for for the real,

(01:33:37):
the real truth out there on these issues really really important.
Your your audience. You've you've grown such a big audience
and you have, uh you know, the trust of so
many people and you've used it, uh for for social
good to to get people the information they need. So
people like me are grateful to you for that, Oh
Vic Roy. Go follow him at A V I K.
I am Clay Travis. This is Wins and Losses. I

(01:33:58):
think this is the first time we've ever had a
guest on twice, so you know how highly I think
of him. Go donate free op dot org. Appreciate all
of you. Go check out the rest of our Wins
and Losses conversations, including overcon Eyes first Conversation, which is
up from August one. Thank you, my man, Thanks to
all you, and I hope you guys enjoy it. Share
with your friends. This has been Wins and Losses.

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