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. Because what drives me crazy Ovic and we're

(19:17):
talking to O vic Roy. I encourage you to go
follow him at ovic a v I K at a
v I K on Twitter. Be sure to catch live
editions of Outkicked. The coverage with Clay Travis weekdays at
six am Eastern three am Pacific is. People who claim
that they care about equity the most are propounding now

(19:38):
the most inequitable outcome of our lives for the most part,
in requiring kids in public schools, very often in cities
who don't have WiFi at home, who may not have
parents at home, and who don't have access to outside
of school education, to be outside of school for a year.
I mean, it makes me want to pull my hair
out as a kid who went to public school K

(20:00):
through twelve and now is fortunate enough to live in
a district where my kids are in school, and I
got a kid in private school as well. But if
you have advantages, which I do, you can take advantage
of those opportunities and give your kids those advantages. But
most kids don't have that in this country. It's infuriating
to me, you know, totally. I mean the most. I

(20:23):
tend not to get frustrated play and just because, like,
if you do what I do for a living, which
is trying to persuade people of your ideas and things
like that, if you're gonna get frustrated when people don't
listen to you, this isn't a job for you, right
Like you have to be you have to be willing
to accept that not everyone's gonna agree with you, and
that it's hard work. If you've got a contrarian or
dissenting opinion about the way the world should be, or

(20:44):
the way policy should be, or the way the law
should be, it's your It's up to you to persuade
everyone else that you're right, and that's gonna mean talking
a lot of people who disagree with you. So that's
if you don't have that sort of temperament, then you
know you can't really do this kind of thing. So
in that sense, I'm I'm a most really fine, but
I will say that the one, the one moment or
or period of time where I was most my blood

(21:07):
pressure was really arising, admittedly was a selfish one where
there was a point in time in the in the
spring or summer, I can't remember exactly what it was
now when the Austin the Travis County, which is the
county that contains Austin, Texas, where I live, there was
this unelected Travis County Interim Health Authority that basically said
all the private schools that have to stay closed along

(21:29):
with the public schools. And that was like, you know,
for me, because I, like you, I can afford to
send my kids to private school, which again is you know,
I feel terrible for the people who don't have that luxury.
But for me, that was like, wow, this is like
the government is going out of a tway to make
my life miserable on top of everybody else. That was
just sort of at a purely selfish level, something that
made me made me, uh, you know, made my blood
pressure raise, because go up. But but you're right at

(21:52):
that that the incredible unfairness of it that that you
and I can still send our kids to school, but
so many people cannot. It's just incredible. You know, I
testified before Congress, I want to say, seven or eight
times last last summer, last you know that sort of spring, summer,
fall time last year, and almost every single one of

(22:12):
the hearings was about racial inequities that have been exacerbated
worse than by COVID um. And the thing that was
so surreal or crazy about those hearings is, you know,
there was a lot of talking about, oh, you know,
it's really terrible that, um, you know, African Americans are

(22:33):
getting COVID and and dying of COVID at disproportion of rates,
which is true. But you know, it's also true that
the economic inequality uh that that has come from government
policy has disproportionately harmed minorities who are lower income, who
can't afford to go to private schools right or some
of their kids to private schools. And that has been,

(22:54):
I have to say, like an astoundingly hypocritical thing. You know,
you have all these people saying, oh, it's really terrible
that that the virus uh, you know has disportuately harmed
lower income Americans who are dispportunately non white. Well, yes,
the government policies that have taken their jobs away from them,
taking their livelihoods away from them, taking their schools away
from them, has been incredibly harmful and it's going to

(23:19):
widen economic inequality of this country. And and you're you're
absolutely right that, you know, certainly at our organization, at
Free optote or we've we've worked hard to try to
make those points. And I think, you know, we've had
some success with that. I think there are lots of
um people of both parties, of both you know, ideologies
or whatever you want to say, progressive, conservative, independent, who

(23:41):
who realized that schools need to be reopened. The differences
on the Democratic side, the teachers unions are just such
a dominant force politically. No one wants to cross the
teachers unions and that has been the decisive factor. Can
you say, follow the science and in any way justify
schools being closed at this point in the United States
of America. No. And I think one of the things,

(24:04):
you know, we're gonna we're gonna do a kind of
an action after action report of the pandemic hope in
the hope that the pandemic is actually is over in
the next several months, as people get vaccinated. But I
think one of the things that's really gonna we're going
to really focus on in our writing is the absolute
disgrace of of the or or the gap or or

(24:27):
discrepancy between the people who use the word science most
often in their in their speeches or their tweets and
the actual science, which shows something completely different. And and
again what's been so troubling is that the people who
should have the most steak in scientific authority, the Anthony
Fauci's you know, these people at the universities that I've

(24:49):
been mentioning, they're the ones who have done the most
to undermine trust in quote unquote scientific authority. You know,
Fauci's running around saying, oh, it's so surprising that there
have have been COVID breakouts in schools. Um no one
ever expected that. We all expected that that there would
be massive outbreaks in schools after we were open. So
that's really quite strange. And I mean, what I'm thinking,

(25:11):
what bubble is this guy in? But clearly he is
in one right, and and that is a huge, huge problem,
And there needs to be a real self assessment in
the scientific community about about the politicization of basic information
around who's being impacted by the virus, what kinds of

(25:32):
UH interventions are working, what kinds of interventions are not working.
And my hope is that now that Biden is president,
we can start to have more of an honest conversation
about that. I feel like, you know, because so many
people in the academic world are anti Trump. No one
wanted to say that Trump was doing anything right while
Trump was in office. But maybe now that he's gone,

(25:52):
maybe it becomes safer, you know, for that Harvard professor
to say, like, actually, the Trump administration, they did this thing.
You know, I don't agree with that thing they did,
but they did this thing right, or they did that
thing right. Um, maybe the CDC was wrong in this
particular case or whatever. Maybe that conversation gets a little
more deep, deep politicized. Now that that binds an office,
we can only hope, but but we're going to certainly

(26:15):
do our part to to contribute to that conversation. I
can't wait to read that, and I want to make
sure that I help you distribute it to the best
way that we can. And in my limited world, certainly
we have a big audience in the world of sports,
and I will say. You said, you know, the the
overall public policy response has been very bad in the
world of all Republicans, Democrats, independence, whatever you want to say.

(26:39):
The media, I think in general does deserve a grade
worse than F, which is what you said. I'm actually
somewhat encouraged that sports got much of this right, um,
and it was a battle to get it right. But
when we talked back on August twenty one, we didn't
know whether college football was going to happen. We now
have crowned champion. We did not know whether the NBA

(27:04):
was gonna be able to finish their season. They did
in the bubble. Now they're out of the bubble in
the next season. Major League Baseball finished their season with
fans present in Texas. The NFL has played their entire
schedule so far. We're talking in the week of the
a f C in the NFC Championship games. All of
those sports, not to mention countless high schools, as well

(27:24):
as other sports that are not anywhere near as popular
on a collegiate level or a professional level. Ovic there
isn't a single death or even serious illness that has
been connected to coaching or athletics and the coaches are
obviously older than the players, but that's what the data
told us was likely to happen. And people are like, oh, wow,

(27:47):
this actually ended up being possible. Thankfully they took the
chance and tried to figure out a way to make
it happen. What letter grade would you give sports leagues
for their willingness and ability to play once they came
back certain nascars involved tennis, all these other different sports. Uh.
And are you at least as appreciative as I am
that we found a way to get that done and

(28:09):
that the data showed lo and behold that it was
safe and it was possible to do. Uh. Definitely appreciative,
and not just that they did it for for the
sake of the athletes who obviously worked so hard for
those opportunities, but for the rest of us, who, you know,
just as human beings. We needed something that was not political,
if at least mostly not political. Uh. And and that

(28:32):
that we could that we could point to and cheer
about in our lives and in this very challenging year
we've just had so grateful. I'm grateful to the sports
leagues that that worked hard to make it happen. We
and you know, and you've covered it on your show.
You know, it's not like the sports league said business
as usual. There's a lot of stuff and a lot
of work, a lot of testing, a lot of restrictions
on attendance by the fans that went into keeping sports

(28:56):
going in a cautious, uh and prudent way. And and
hopefully they've learned from that to realize, okay, maybe we
can we can h loosen it up a little bit
now that we've learned that we can do this safely
and operate safely. But you know what really comes back
to in my mind, uh play is what you said
the beginning, capitalism, right, it's the financial incentive for sports

(29:17):
leagues to stay open was a big driver of why
they did stay open. And now at the time, you know,
last summer, last early fall, August, September, that was you know,
the sports pundit said, this is so terrible. You know,
these these leagues, particularly the you know in terms of
college sports, where you know, there's the conflict between amateurism
and the money. These leagues are putting money ahead of humanity.

(29:39):
They're they're they're they're so greedy and so terrible. And
I look at it in exactly the opposite way. It
was the the financial or economic incentive which motivated them
to get it right, to figure out, hey, there's got
to be a way to do this safely. We're gonna
lose a lot of money if we don't figure out
how to do it safely, so let's figure it out.

(30:00):
And exactly the same dynamic play is true with schools.
So why is it that private schools around the country
are open and public schools are not. First of all,
you don't have teachers unions in private schools. But a
big part of it is if you're that private school.
If you're running a private school and you say no,
we're gonna go to zoom, no one, everyone's gonna disenroll,
no one's going to show up at that school, and

(30:21):
your school is going to go broke because you're not
gonna get any tuition dollars in the door, Whereas in
the public schools, the money is flowing regardless of what
you do, So why keep the school open when you're
gonna get paid either way. So the economic or financial
incentives were absolutely a critical driver of why public schools
have been closed, but why sports leagues and private schools

(30:44):
were open. It's so well said, I mean, is now
not surprisingly the sports media mostly there are exceptions, you're
listening to one of them, but the sports media mostly
followed the lead of the now national media in making
the arguments there's no way that it's safe to play right.

(31:05):
CBS Sports, for example, I talked about this a lot
on my radio program. They had an expert, and you
know how this works, the experts that say the things
that don't make headlines. Oh yeah, there's definitely a way
to play sports that doesn't make the headline. The expert
who comes out and literally at CBS Sports guaranteed a
football player would die and predicted there would be at

(31:27):
least three to seven as if he were Nick, you
know Joe Namath back in the day. He guaranteed a
death and said he predicted that there would be three
to seven. That's a headline at CBS Sports. They finished
the season in college football, and that's what he was
specifically making his prediction about. Everybody is fine, there are
no issues, and the story just disappears right, there's no

(31:49):
consequence for an expert, and I'm putting that in quotation
marks being a hundred percent wrong, particularly when those people
have tenure at university. It's like it's it's impossible for
them to ever have a consequence. And that probably goes
back to your point. In a market based economy, if
you're wrong, you lose your job. In a university setting,

(32:11):
if you're wrong, you just write a new article explaining
why you were wrong, and uh, and and and or
completely ignoring it, there's no and there's no consequence. Yeah,
you know. In fact, you're reminded me of I can't
remember which a media organization was, may have been ESPN,
and may have been Yahoo or CBS. Uh. Lots of
people there was. There was a Big twelve expert that

(32:33):
the Big twelve A d. S recruited who said, actually,
you can operate the league safely and here's how you
do it. And there was a round of articles criticizing
and that expert saying, oh, the Big twelve just you know,
wet doctor shopping and found some idiot off the street
who who was going to validate what they wanted to
do and not listen to the science. Right, And that

(32:54):
guy turned out to be right, and everyone else turned
out to be wrong, at least the ones that say
the Big ten was listening to it is I mean
and and and all of this, you know, and and
again to kind of relitigate some of this. You remember
the myocarditis story that flared up. Oh my god, if
you get a if you get COVID, you're gonna get myocarditis.
Your heart's gonna be ruined forever. There's no way we

(33:14):
can play sports. Nobody had myocarditis issues either, but if
they did, that often happens with viral infections in general.
It wasn't specific to COVID. And the media what I
called fear porn governed the day, and and candidly behind
the scenes, I was having conversations with commissioners as early
as April, and I said, look, you're used to people

(33:36):
being in favor of your sport. Everybody in the sports
media is going to be opposed to you guys playing
college football this year. They're not going to carry the
water for the NFL. They're not gonna say, hey, this
is a brilliant idea. They're all gonna buy into the
fear and curl up in the fetal position and argue
that there's no way that should be happening. Well, as

(33:56):
you know, Clay, I mean it's in a long standing
dynamic in sports meet is that you know, sports writers,
sports commentators, they they particularly the ones who work at say,
major newspapers are major news organizations, right, they feel that
sort of inferiority complex of we're not the real journalists
like the people who work on you know, who go
to Capitol Hill or cover the White House. So they

(34:19):
feel that that sense of, well, I have to do
what the the other journalists tell me to do, because
if I don't, then I'm going to be seen as
that fluffy sports reporter and not the hard journalists that
I really am. And so that sort of that sociological
element of the sports writing or sports media community plays
a big role in in their deference to to what,

(34:42):
to what other people are saying that they feel they
have to defer to. And so it's some of its fears.
Some of it's that deference. Some of it is just
genuinely like, you know, being terrified or whatever. It is
all that to say that, you know, what people like
you and me and and the people who listen to
your podcast and other people out there who who who
have had the same point of view need to do

(35:05):
is to make sure that uh, as we go through this,
we're able to assess and and have that after action
report where we can say, okay, guys, let's learn from this.
Let's learn about what the so called experts told you
that was right, and what they told you that was wrong,
and certain things that were unknown. So to take the
example of myo karditis, I mean you and I were

(35:26):
more skeptical that was a serious issue. But you can
understand risk averse for college president's risk averse a D
saying you know what, we've we've got to be concerned
about this because I don't want it. I don't want
to deal with the litigation if you want to be cynical,
or I don't want to do with that on my conscience.
If somebody really gets sick, the kind of the you know,
the Reggie Lewis type thing, so you know, do the

(35:47):
m R I s do the testing every you know, UH,
Power five University certainly has the ability to arrange for
those tests if you if as someone's COVID positive, you
can you can look to see if there's information and
there aren't muscle and and and monitor in which they
did right. Most of the most of the big conferences
did that, and that's what allowed them to get that

(36:09):
that relief that this wasn't a big deal. So I
don't have a problem with if they're going to be
really risk averse, invest the extra money, since they make
so much money off college sports, at least the revenue sports,
you know, to invest in those tasks to see what's
going on, make sure that nothing's going wrong. But to
shut down the season altogether, that's stupid. You know, keep
an eye on it and if it looks like things

(36:29):
are going to go wrong, that's one thing. And remember
there were a lot of sports writers who said about
the college football season, say, oh, this is so pointless.
The whole season is gonna get shut down after two
weeks anyway, you know, why is anybody even bothering? And
as you said, you know the season basically, yes, there
were games that were canceled and things like that, but
but the season was played and and I think most

(36:51):
people are pretty pretty happy about that. And to go
to your point on the market based capitalistic economy being
the most efficient, which by the way, all of world
history proved, that's a whole another story. But for anybody
who wants to study the history of of economies UH
and UH and market based decision making in general. It's
probably not a surprise if you adopt that line of thinking,

(37:14):
that the NFL, which had the absolute most money at
stake and is the biggest business in all of pro sports,
had the most successful season because not only did they
play every single game as scheduled, all thirty two NFL
teams played all sixteen games, but they did it on
their schedule. They didn't even have so far UH that

(37:36):
the a f C and NFC championship games are Sunday,
We're talking in the middle of the week leading into that,
and then the Super Bowl. They've got two weeks to
be able to schedule that, but right now it's scheduled
as it typically is for two weeks after the Sunday
a f C n NFC championship games, and a lot
of them had fans present, but every television part of
their game, which is where the biggest part of their
revenue comes from. Guess what they did the best job

(37:59):
big business does, the best job in pro sports with
putting their product out there for people to watch, and
it's arguably the most difficult because of all the physical
contact that goes into football compared to let's say baseball
or tennis or something like that. Yeah, that's that's a
great point. You know, as you were talking, I was,
I was recalling the the European soccer summer soccer season

(38:22):
from last year. Right, not some of the league's didn't play,
but the ones that did had no problems. Right, everything
worked out just fine. Yeah, there were some positive tests here,
there are things like that, but but but the games
that were played were played and worked out just fine. Yes,
there weren't fans in the audience, and they would pump
in the crowd noise on the broadcast, but but otherwise
it worked and that was our first indication that actually

(38:44):
this could be done. Or two that to give us
the confidence, right, the real world example, so this could
be done. So so kudos to the NFL. I mean,
definitely very impressive that that they've managed to have everything
run on time. And um uh you know, and you
know part part of it too is you know, one
thing we we probably should you know take an account

(39:06):
here is pro athletes, particularly football players, there's so much
discipline involved, you know in being a pro athlete, you know,
in the NFL, it's just you know, you can get
cut so ruthlessly and have your career cut short if
you make one mistake. Um, and if you make it
to the pros, you're likely to have that discipline and

(39:27):
that maturity. And not everyone does. And we've seen some,
you know, notorious cases that not being the case. But
but most of the athletes have really stuck to it, right,
Whereas at the college level it's a little harder. Right,
these are kids, Um, you know, there's a there's a campus,
there's parties, there's people who admire them and want to,
you know, want a party with them. There's a lot
more temptation when when you're a college student to do

(39:50):
the wrong thing. And so you know, it's it's impressive
on both counts, right. It's impressive of the college season
managed to do as well as it did, even with
a lot of interruptions. And I'll be see you look
to the pros and say, hey, uh, you know, hats off.
We're talking to Ovic Roy. Free op dot org is
his website. Follow him on Twitter at ovic a v

(40:11):
I K at a v I k is his Twitter handle. Uh.
And this is the Winds and the Losses podcast. I
am Clay Travis, Fox Sports Radio has the best sports
talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows
at Fox Sports Radio dot Com and within the I
Heart Radio apps. Search f s R to listen live.

(40:32):
One of the challenges that I see that is the
largest in the world of sports and other places. And
I'm curious what you think about this. So much of
our media is anecdote driven, and the anecdote is used
to justify the overall story. So, and I'll give you
an example. If, as you mentioned, I remember, and this

(40:52):
is unfortunate, and I feel for his family, there was
a kid who died at Appalachian State University in Boone,
North Carolina of COVID or with COVID. It's not like
I've reviewed his medical files to know exactly, but his
death then becomes a front page New York Times article

(41:13):
talking about the challenges of going back to college. The
two million or four million, or whatever the heck number
it is of college kids that go back and don't
have any issues at all. It's all about framing. In
other words, if I wanted to write a story about
how dangerous it is for kids to drive back to
college at the end of summer, inevitably every year there

(41:37):
are kids who die driving back to college campuses. That
doesn't mean as a general rule that it is incredibly
dangerous for those kids to be driving back to college campuses. Inevitably,
every year there are college kids that get the flu
and die the seasonal flu. That doesn't mean that all
kids on college campus are in danger of the seasonal flu.

(41:59):
Outlier occur and as a data guy, outliers can be
fascinating for you, I'm sure to review, but they are
just that outliers. How much of our challenge in media
today is using anecdotal outlier stories to justify a preferred narrative,
such as sports can't happen because this college kid died,

(42:22):
even if it's in no way representative of the larger
data set. That is such a challenge, it seems to me,
because the story of one death is more overpowering than
sometimes the story of a million people being fine. You
know what I'm what I'm thinking about as you go
through that, and all all Well said is you know
my my My takeaway from from on that score is

(42:46):
every high school in America should require that its students
take a statistics class. Yes, because statistics are the thing
they drive so much of life nowadays, especially because we
have all this data being thrown at us because of
the world we live in, and we just don't know
how to process it, and we process it wrong. And
that that affects the way sports, you know, sports get

(43:07):
to analyze. That, that affects the way lawsuits happened, particularly
the class action type lawsuits. It affects government policy, obviously,
affects medicine, affects so many different things in our world. Uh.
And if people had that set, that understanding of statistics
and how to separate anecdotes from the overall uh context

(43:28):
of those of those anecdotes, you know, that would be
an important service that would do a lot to just
calm everyone down. I hope you know. Maybe that's ah,
that's uh pollyannas or naive of made to feel that way,
But I really do believe that if we could have
a country where people were more journalists, in particular, more numerous,

(43:49):
more affluent in statistics, it would be so much better.
I mean that the story that really crystallizes to me
everything that went wrong with the media coverage last year
was was the huge story. And I talked about it
the last time when I was on with You in
the in the New York Times, where it was claimed
that there was a South Korean study that was purported

(44:10):
to show that kids were infectious and it was dangerous
to reopen schools. And this was plastered all over the
New York Time. It was circulated to every school district
in the country, and there was reporting afterwards that said
that that basically there were a lot of you know,
school principles superintendents who wanted to open schools. They read

(44:31):
that article in The New York Times and said no,
we're not going to do it, obviously egged on by
the teachers unions. And it turned out that the that
the article totally misrepresented the data, and that once the
full data set came out, it was pretty clear that
in fact, kids were not infectious in South Korea, just
like kids were not infectious anywhere else, that schools had
been open and everything had been fine. But did the

(44:52):
New York Times retract their story. No, did the New
York Times run another story saying, hey, we got South
Korea were not really I mean, they did write another
article about South Korea, but it was a very mealy
mouth and no reader who didn't already know what's going
on would be able to know from that article at
the New York Times it made a terrible mistake. But
that's one journalist at one influential newspaper who's misunderstanding of

(45:17):
scientific data lead to something that impacted the lives of
tens of millions of kids all over the country. And uh,
that's that's something that just should not happen. And I
hope we can we can have a world in which
statistics are more a part of the conversation, where when
you encounter a fact or a uh, you know, a

(45:40):
journalistic assertion, we could do more to have statistics back
it up. Now, that alone won't solve the problem, because
you know, the old line from Benjamin Disraeli, the old
nineteenth century Prime Minister of of of Great Britain, was
there's lives, damn lives and statistics. We all know from
sports that that you can come up with lots of
different statistics to justify, uh, you know, anything that you

(46:02):
and anything that you want to believe or anything that
that are your prior So you have to go one
level below that and really understand which statistics accurately measure
things in which statistics don't. But just having that basic
understanding of you know, one anecdote is not, you know,
reflective of everything else. If one person dies in a
car accident, it doesn't mean you should hide in your garage.

(46:23):
If one person dies of COVID, it doesn't mean the
world's gonna end um. You know. That would obviously be
a welcome development. One way that I try to combat
that is in addition to talking to people like you
and hopefully sharing your worldview with my audience, is throughout
this entire COVID mess on my radio show, I've been

(46:43):
very transparent with the choices that I'm making in my
own life because people can say, oh, you're saying that,
But I think for most people out there who are
parents like you and me, our children are our most
prized possessions. My children, my oldest is in private school.
My two youngest go to school every day. I have
traveled with them on airplanes. I have taken them to

(47:05):
go watch NFL games. We have allowed them to play
in addition to going to school, all of their different
sports leagues in our neighborhood where the sports leagues are
going on, and I hope to be sharing that is anecdotal, right,
but it's me trying to live up to the data
under which I am telling them that the things that

(47:25):
I believe should happen, sports should be played, for example.
I'm living my life by that data too. I'm not
telling you to do one thing and then doing the opposite,
which frankly has been I think probably the most destructive
thing that public policy officials have have done. Whether it's
Gavin Newsom eating at the French Laundry restaurant, or so

(47:46):
many different politicians out there who tend to be more
affluent than the average person they represent, having their own
kids in private school going to class, while they are
allowing all of the public school kids who don't have
the same ability of resources as their own kids to
not be in school, right, so that hypocrisy. I'm trying
to live my life in the way that I would

(48:07):
say the data reflects I should. And that goes to
what I think is is a really big story here.
And I know this is basically what you do for
a living. You're talking about analyzing probability and statistics, which
I think Americans as a group do poorly, but also
success or failure to me in many parts of life
seems to be predicated on your ability to analyze risk

(48:30):
in this country, whether it's what you invest in, whether
it's what you do on a day to day basis,
your risk barometer. I would bet if there was a
way to study it, the people who are the best
at risk barometer basis are probably the most successful in
the country. Would you buy into that idea as well?
You know, that's that's such a great point, you know,

(48:51):
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

(49:12):
electoral results. Like if you look at the electoral election returns, Uh,
if you and you look at who's voting for whom,
what really is the driver more than race, more than income,
more than any other factor. Is Uh, do you have
a college degree or not? Uh? And if you do,
you tend to vote one way, and if you don't,
you tend to vote another way. That that's the most
powerful thing out there. And and you know, people who

(49:33):
are on the elite side, so Oh, that just means
that we the educated, smart people, you know what's best
for you all, and you're all you all, the rest
of you are dumb and ignorant. I look at it
a different way, which is now, I'm looking out my
window right now in downtown Austin, and there's a you know,
a twenty story building under construction right right across the
street here, and there are people climbing up on the scaffolds,
you know, cleaning the windows and laying down the insulation.

(49:56):
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

(50:17):
no risk. And frankly, I'm in that crowd, right, Like
I have a white collar job, I have a good income.
You know, we've we've talked about how my life is
pretty cushy compared to the people who can't send their
kids to school, et cetera. Like people who have that
sociological background or socioeconomic background they tend to be more
risk averse, right, because they're not used to dealing with
the world in which like if they're on if they're

(50:38):
careless about something, things can go badly wrong. Whereas blue
collar America, you're people are used to things going wrong.
People are used to having to be careful, they're used
to physical danger. And athletes to write you you you're
not You're careless about the way you train, You're careless
about the way you stretch, You're careless about the way
you run the football. You're gonna get injured, right, And
athletes are very aware of that um And so people

(51:03):
who deal with physical risk every day are much more
likely to look at something like COVID and say, you
know what, I can handle that, whereas it's the people
who sit on in front of a computer all day
who are terrified. It's also what I always say, is
like going to public school and going and I went
to some public schools that weren't very good, But there

(51:24):
is a benefit to knowing that you might get your
ass kicked at school, you know, like having that fear
where you know that you're not a hundred percent safe
and you have to carry yourself in a way that
analyzes risk. Maybe I shouldn't say that to that guy
right now, right because he might beat my ass, right,

(51:45):
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

(52:06):
world that anyone could ever live in. Right, Um, all
the data reflects that, But it seems to me that
our fear meters are so much more attuned to danger
than they ever have been before. And people who are
in COVID is a metaphor for this. People who are
not at risk, as you said when we started this conversation,
young people, they feel terrified, right. They think they're gonna

(52:28):
get and this isn't just COVID. They think they're gonna
get kidnapped, they think they're gonna get murdered. They think
something bad is going to happen to them, when statistically
most people have never been safer. If you're living in
America right now than any time in human civilization than
this exact moment. Yeah, you know that that's another great point, Clay,

(52:49):
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

(53:11):
always what happens with every train, it's not news. Right.
A plane crashing is news. A billion plane flights going
off and taken in landing is not news. So news
in and of itself is better easily able to spread now.
But there is I think a natural negativity bias because
good news happens far more frequently and therefore isn't news.

(53:34):
The negative tends to dictate and scare. Again, it goes
to your point on probability and statistics and analysis and
being able to contextualize what I was saying risk. You know,
that's absolutely right, And and the one thing I'm I'm
thinking about as you say that is how does technology
digital media change all that are our conventional wisdom, which

(53:55):
is obviously has some truth to it is uh, social media, Facebook, Twitter,
able news Uh, exacerbate or worse than those problems because
one of the things that people want to get motivated
and get angry about and share with their friends and
the stuff that they're mad about about the world. Right,
And that's certainly true. But it's also true that on
UM on digital platforms, you see people share inspiring stories. Yeah,

(54:18):
a lot of times. If you look at the stories
that are getting the most traffic, it's like, uh, and
I think you shared it. Actually, the story about Tom
Brady throwing the touchdown to Drew Brees a son beautiful
last weekend, right, like that got enormous traffic. So people
hunger for for good news too. And I guess the
thing is, can we think about again? I'm always trying

(54:40):
to think about what's the solution here? How do we
move beyond this and try to make things better? And
I feel like we've we've gotta think more, and media
organizations that that have an economic incentive to do so,
just think more about how do I share those inspiring stories,
the good news that the kindness, the sportsmanship, the things
that that we could show to our kids and say,
know what, be more like that? Guy, be more like

(55:02):
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,

(55:24):
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

(55:48):
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

(56:09):
is a symptom of the industry and universe in which
we live, not the cause of it. He is an
inarticulate voice in many ways for a conversation that needs
to happen. What always friend Trump is a whole different story.
But always frustrated me about Donald Trump was I just
wish somebody had been making some of the same arguments
that he was making with a factual foundation as opposed

(56:30):
to a gut foundation, which I think was very often
the way he was responding. Yeah, I mean that that's uh,
that's what I certainly hope for the same thing. I
hope that we can we can draw the lessons of
the criticisms of America that that Trump that that what
Trump was right about without the other aspects of Trump's

(56:52):
approach the life, that that we wouldn't want to teach
our kids or we wouldn't want to in terms of
the way we treat each other. Okay, all thatsolutely go ahead. No, Well,
I was gonna catch I had a big question here.
I was gonna try to hit you with. But all
this conversation we just had, um is, people are gonna
love it and fantastic, But you said you're working on

(57:13):
basically a retrospective to look back at the way the
society responded, to look back at the decision to shut
down schools? When is that going to come out? And
it's a cliche because it is true, especially if you
like history. Hindsight is right. We find out the errors
that we made and hopefully learn from them going forward
into the future. Who knows when the next pandemic might happen.

(57:36):
If you had been able to look at the data
set that you have right now, you're reviewing all everything
that has happened with COVID. What would have gotten us
in a in public policy? What would have gotten the
media and a in coverage? What would have been the
best response that we could have had. Let's pretend that
you and I are able to implement American policy, or

(57:59):
maybe not me at all. You back in March, when
this virus is just arriving on our shores. Probably it
was here in December or whatever else, but March, when
we really start responding to it. What was the right response?
What should we have done to have the most effective
possible American response to COVID? We Well, first of all,

(58:19):
I love that you're like you're now my editor and
you gave me a deadline, or you give us a
deadline when your your articles out, So I'm gonna I'm
gonna do it. I'm gonna say, Okay, we'll get this
out by the end of February, so I can't wait. Yes,
I'll get it out of the end of February. And
you know, I'll say a couple of things that you
know obviously this is this is we can have a
we have a whole hour and a half conversation about

(58:41):
that question. But I'll say maybe we will when your
whole paper comes out, because I'd love for you to
come back after I have a chance to read it
and digest it, for you to be able to talk
about it with us, because I think my audience would
love it. But uh, okay, dive in broad picture question
that I just asked. Yeah, and look, there's a lot
to say about this topic. And you know, in fact,
I just interviewed uh the now former HHS Secretary Alex

(59:04):
asar on a lot of this stuff last week. You
can find it on YouTube if you google my name
and his um. More to say about that, But I'll
say a couple of things to to to what the
appetite of you and your listeners. First is if you
actually look at which countries have performed well this time
around with COVID, it was mostly the countries of the

(59:25):
Pacific Rim East Asia. And why is that. It's because
the countries of the Pacific Rim have encountered the coronavirus before.
They had encountered Stars Kobe one in two thousand three,
and it was because of their experience with that first
Stars code coronavirus, or at least the one that we

(59:47):
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

(01:00:08):
take to get the testing going and everything else. So
my hope, my optimism is that the experience of this
pandemic will lead us to be smarter in general about
both the way everyday people respond to the crisis and
have the government response. Maybe that's too optimistic, but I
think there's reason to be hopeful of that. If we

(01:00:29):
look at the example of Asia. The second thing I'll
mention is the vaccine. So one of the things that's
come out of this past twelve months or ten months
that's been remarkable is the development of these of these
coronavirus vaccines. As I think I talked about with you
and your last show that we did together, the previous

(01:00:50):
world record for developing a vaccine for a novel virus
was five years for the ebolavirus five years. We shattered
that record. Two different biotech come and these one American
Maderna on another German bio Intact basically developed these mRNA
based vaccines. M RNA is a is a type of
genetic code material like DNA. They developed these mRNA vaccines

(01:01:14):
and turn them around incredibly quickly, and we got them
on the market in an incredible record time. And what's
really really encouraging about that is that these mRNA vaccines
are actually really easy to manufacture. They're really easy to develop.
It's almost like software. You type into genetic code, you
PLoP out the vaccine and it's ready. The Maderna they

(01:01:36):
had their vaccine, their first batch that they developed for
testing that was ready to go in January February of
last year, almost a year ago. So think about this.
If we have another coronavirus or another virus that is
amenable to that kind of technology, you could develop a
vaccine much sooner. Once the genetic sequence of that virus

(01:01:56):
is published, you can develop the vaccine right away. And
for those high risk individuals, frontline workers, nursing home residents,
the people who are particularly vulnerable, you can get them
vaccinated within a month of the pandemic or two months
of the pandemic, instead of waiting for almost a year
to get that vaccine out. And if you can do that,

(01:02:17):
you can stem a lot of the damage that comes
from the serious illness from from a novel pandemic. Hopefully
this is a situation we don't have to encounter for
a while. But to me, that technological advance is one
of the things that a lot of people aren't talking
about that we can bring to the next crisis that
we have if we are so unlucky as to have one.

(01:02:37):
A couple more questions. Though I know how busy you are,
you hear a lot about the death rate from COVID,
and I always say, like nobody, I always say on
my radio show nobody hates death more than me, right like,
so I am, I want to make it clear here
that I am adamantly opposed to death. I wish we
could live almost forever. I wish nobody's grandma ever died.
All those things the folk us again going back to

(01:03:01):
the statistical analysis, the age of death from COVID, and
you might need to say with COVID, but however you
want to phrase that is either around the same age
as the average age of death in the country as
a as a whole, or maybe a little bit older, right, uh.
And you can speak to that data better than I can.

(01:03:22):
So am I correct roughly in the in the average
age of death from somebody who is being classified as
a COVID death is not much different than the average
age of death overall in the United States. That's uh,
that's generally true. You know. Obviously it's older people who
are typically dying of COVID. It's older people who died generally, yes,

(01:03:42):
um uh. And in fact, as you know, we we've
published some analyzes that show that the real UH bulge
are differential in in who's dying of COVID in United
States relative to pre existing normal quote unquote death rates
by age, Brackett, is that sort of upp upper middle
age bracket rather than the elderly, because the elderly, as

(01:04:03):
you say, are dying anyway. And this is this is
something I think there's gonna be and I think this
may be the thing you're getting at. We may find
as we sift through the data that the death rates
of the elderly versus the death rates of the elderly
in a normal year we're not that different. And or
that the the the age of death is only you know,

(01:04:25):
maybe a couple of months before the life expectancy for
say an eighty five year old. Maybe that eighty five
year old would have lasted until lady six, maybe it
would have last till Lady seven. And COVID, you know,
pushed that a little earlier, but not by a dramatic amount.
We don't know. I think those are some debates that
are going on in the statistical community right now. But
we'll start to learn about that. And another thing that

(01:04:48):
we're going to have to study, Clay, is how many
people died not because of COVID, but because they were
locked in their rooms or they the average age of
those people is going to be much younger, which is
where I was gonna go years lost of life. We
talk a lot about death, but really, I think everybody

(01:05:10):
out there when you take a step back and think
about it from an analytical perspective, uh, and also the
in factor in a little bit of emotion. The reason
why when a five year old dies we feel so
much worse than when an eighty five year old dies
is because the five year old had so many lives,
so much of their life left, so many years to
live compared to the eighty five year old. And one

(01:05:32):
of the things I've said it to the extent that
there is a gift at all. Can you imagine if
we had COVID except it had taken all young people
instead of primarily been old people. That's a totally different dynamic,
which goes to your point about the vaccine. I mean,
I've got young kids. I mean I would have been
curled up in the basement right like I would have
been terrified for them. And so when we talk about

(01:05:54):
the number of deaths that we have. The other thing
that I don't here discussed very much is from an
analyticaltistical perspective, in theory, if the people who are dying,
are dying not necessarily with tons of years left on
their life, right, they have comorbidity ease, they are otherwise unhealthy.
People are talking about how this is an unprecedented death,

(01:06:15):
and I understand that. But in two, and in tree
and four, and maybe even in one, if the vaccine
gets distributed, well, isn't it likely that we would see
a substantial decline in deaths? In other words, focusing on
how many people are dying this year, to me, is

(01:06:36):
missing that a lot less people would theoretically die in
the next couple of years ahead, and not just rationalizing
and recognizing we're not stopping death right, like the average
age of death is going to still be what it is.
I hope we can continue to raise it. But every day,
I think in this country, around eight thousand people die,

(01:06:56):
and the overall understanding of that seems to be very
limited in the media and the analysis and discussion of
this issue. Yeah, you know, it's it's one of those
things that's going to be hard to tease that from
just last year's dat because, as you said, who died
with COVID, who died of COVID, we literally are not
recording that information because the hospitals don't have an incentive too,

(01:07:20):
So so that's gonna be a hard thing to to
look at next year, I mean this year in and understand.
But you know, what you're what you're bringing up is
that after several years, let's say we look at the
period from five and say, okay, over that five year period,

(01:07:40):
how many people in a particular age bracket died versus
what we'd see in a non pandemic period. That's going
to give you the answer that you're talking about in
terms of it was there. It may not even be
noticeable over ten years. It's probably not going to be
noticeable at all if you average it out over ten years. Right.
In other words, we're all so much of social media,
and much of media today is about reacting instantaneously to

(01:08:03):
what's occurring at this exact point. But when you sort
of expand your horizon, a lot of public policy decisions,
it seems to me, are are based on trying to
do something in this week or this month that doesn't
necessarily make sense. And look, I mean, you can say,
even you know, broadening the perspective, you hear a lot
of people say, once their businesses go public, oh, We've

(01:08:24):
got to make sure that we make our quarterly numbers.
But are you making the right decision in that quarter
for the next ten years or you just trying to
clear that hurdle right now. There's a difference between managing
for the future and managing for right now. I guess
it is one of the things that I'm trying to
get to. Well. Well, the thing that you're you're stimulating
in my mind in terms of what to to mention
as you say that, is something we haven't talked about yet,

(01:08:48):
and that is the profound fiscal and economic changes that
have tap have taken place over the last twelve months.
We've increased the federal debt from twenty trillion dollars to
twenty eight trillion dollars and bidens trying to add another
two trillion of that. The Federal Reserve increased the supply
of US dollars, the effective supply of US dollars in

(01:09:11):
the economy, by which, in theory, all else being equal,
means that the dollars in your wallet are worth four
fifths of what they were worth before, because literally the
Federal Reserve just printed more dollars and flooded them into
the economy, which went to the banks, which went to
the wealthy, which went to the people who owned stocks

(01:09:31):
and uh and could benefit from all that extra cash
flowing around, didn't go to ordinary people. And and those
problems are gonna come back to haunt us. One of
the things that I really worry about, I'm I'm I'm
optimistic about our ability to handle a future pandemic for
the reasons I mentioned. I'm a lot more concerned about
what increasing the debt by eight trillion dollars and increasing

(01:09:53):
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

(01:10:15):
unstable economy, and by fundamentally unstable, I'm talking vim our Germany,
great depression, that kind of instability. And we are well
on our way. We are well on our way to
having basically the monetary policy of vim our Germany, and
look out if that ever comes to pass. And and
there are a lot of scenarios I could, I could

(01:10:35):
bore you with or terrify you with that that could
take place over the next ten twenty years in that
regard and not to me, that's the biggest mess that
we're gonna have to clean up from the last twelve months.
How do we get our our fiscal and economic picture
back in line because if we don't, the rising generations
are never gonna know what it's like to have to

(01:10:56):
have had that that success, in that prosperity that that
people that are my age and your age take for granted.
Be sure to catch live editions of Out Kicked the
coverage with Clay Travis weekdays at six am Eastern three
am Pacific. We're talking to Ovic Roy. He works at
free opt dot org. He is at a v I
k thank him for talking with us. I keep saying

(01:11:17):
I have two more questions, but I do. I think
have only two more questions now. One of those questions,
uh that is out there is one that my wife
asked me to ask you specifically, what is this vaccine
going to do? Presuming that everybody starts to get the vaccine,
when do you think things can get back to quote
unquote normalcy and walk us through because she was like, hey,

(01:11:41):
they're saying that you're still gonna have to wear a
mask after you're vaccinated because you might still then be
asymptomatic and able to spread it even after vaccination, which
her concern is if that's true, then how do we
get back to normalcy? Uh? And can you break down
the vaccination process and what it looks like in means

(01:12:04):
to the average person out there? That was her big question, um,
because she doesn't think there's an in depth discussion enough
about what the vaccination actually means in terms of our lives. Yeah,
great question, Laura. So first of all, we should we
should mentioned there's multiple vaccines. They're not identical. The MODERNA
vaccine and the bio Intech vaccine and the new Johnson

(01:12:25):
and Johnson vaccine. They're all a little different, um, and
they all seem to work, which is the good news.
They're all a little different and so, uh So there'll
be a lot of different vaccines that are that are
out out there that you can get access to, just
like there are a lot of different COVID tests that
you can get access to, but they work and that's reassuring.
So for the people out there, who are who are
have been skeptical of whether the vaccines work or not,

(01:12:46):
or whether it's some you know, government plot. Um, I'm
pretty competent that the vaccines have been studied well as
they do work and that they are affective. So, uh,
will you be in line to get it? Will you
be in line to get a vaccine? Like? Is that
something that you care about or your kids as opposed
to your parents who may want to get a vaccine? Like,
what would your personal decision be? Yeah, I've I've signed

(01:13:08):
up on the Austin website. Now I'm you know, I'm
forty eight years old, and I'm you know, I don't
I don't have any serious serious illnesses, so I'm not
I'm not going to be the front of the line
eye idem. I wouldn't want to cut in line. I
want the greatest risk to get it first. But but yeah,
when it comes out, I'll definitely get When I'm able
to get it, I'll definitely get it. And the good
news is, you know, again, for all the catterwauling in

(01:13:31):
the press and and from from people with a partisan
point of view, the fact is, uh, we've we've started
to to overcome some of the stupidity, particularly at the
state level, in terms of blocking people from getting the vaccine.
The rules that that really uh Florida Dennis excuse me,
Roder Santas and Florida Uh innovator, where you just give
it to everyone over sixty five. You know, let's just

(01:13:52):
do that. Show him your driver's license, boom boom, straightforward,
get all the over sixty five people the vaccines, then
go work down from there. That's the right way to go.
And that was really bungled by by a number of people,
as the Santis done the best job almost of any
governor in the country, despite the fact that he's been
criticized rapidly by many people in the media. Absolutely, you know,

(01:14:13):
I mean this vaccine thing is only reinforced what you
and I talked about with the nursing homes uh in
back in August. I mean, it was the Santis who
did the right thing, which is, let's just open it
up to everybody over sixty five. We're not gonna grill
you on exactly what you're medical history. We're gonna look
at your driver's license boom, and if there's extra vaccine
at the end of the day, boom. You know, stick
it in the arm of the pizza guy right Whereas

(01:14:35):
Andrew Cuomo New York is literally saying to clinics, if
you give the vaccine to someone who isn't in the
right subgroup that I've dictated, I will find you a
million dollars. And what does that do that He's a
lot of vaccine is getting wasted because at the end
of the day they run out of people who were
at the clinic to give the vaccine to and they
literally have to throw out the remaining doses. It's just

(01:14:56):
profoundly idiotic. And it just goes to show, oh again,
it's like consistent with what happened before. You have one,
uh one governor in particular, who stands out as a
data driven guy who's always doing the right thing and
based on the science, and they have another guy who's
just operating from ego and instinct and and messing up NonStop. So,
by the way, also the one that gets criticized is

(01:15:18):
the one who's actually looking at the data. That's what's
so frustrating to me from that perspective. There are a
ton of people listening to us right now that are like, wait,
Florida Governor Rhonda Santis has done one of the best
jobs in the country. I saw on CNN that there
were people at the beach in Florida and that everybody
was gonna die in Florida, right, and that they're opening
bars and that their restaurants are open, and that schools
are open. It's it's that's what's so frustrating to me,

(01:15:41):
is the media is actually selling us something that's fundamentally
not true. And I saw, by the way, on Florida
data yesterday, sixty eight percent of all people that have
gotten the vaccine in Florida, more than anybody in the country,
are sixty five or over. And so they're specifically focusing
on the people who are dying of COVID. Yeah, they've
have been very smart about it, again compared to other

(01:16:02):
places where say, well, you have to be sixty five
and live in a nursing him and have a pre
existing condition, and then maybe we'll get the vaccine to you.
But if you're not, then you have to wait until
we're through with all those people first. I mean, it's
just totally dumb, just logistically and uh. And credit to
the Santists for seeing through that, and and the CDC,
the so called you know, gold standard at the CC.

(01:16:23):
All the bureaucrats of the CDC, they contributed to this
problem by creating a very unwieldy the kind of thing
that bureaucrats would do, not based on real world how
things work, how things get distributed. So, uh, kudos to
the santists. And then the Trump administration in its waning days,
UH saw that and said, hey, this is stupid. That
is what the CDC put out doesn't make any sense.

(01:16:43):
Let's uh, let's overrule them. Of course, there were a
lots of people to go, oh, you're overruling the CDC,
but no, they did the right thing there. And you
know you have Biden now saying well, and I want
to answer a lar's question about this, do you have
Biden out? They're saying, you know, well, are are big plan.
The thing we're gonna do that's different from Trump is
we're going to make sure that we deliver a hundred
million doses of COVID over the next hundred days. Well,

(01:17:07):
do you know what the run rate is of vaccines
in the last couple of days of the Trump administration
was to one point five million a day, meaning that
if Biden does nothing, just lets the Trump administration plan
play out, they'll have delivered a hundred fifty million doses
over the next hundred days at least. So you know,
there's a lot of like Biden put out this big
press release the other day saying, Oh, here's all the

(01:17:27):
things I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make people produce pp
I'm gonna deliver a hundred million dolls of cod It's like,
this is all common sense stuff that's already being done.
And the good news is again there there's obviously been
a lot of snappy there's a lot of things that
have gotten messed up in the early going here, but
the good news is we're learning from that in real time.
I do think we're gonna get easily through a hundred

(01:17:50):
million doses in the first hundred days. We should have
all the at risk populations of people who actually want
to take the vaccinumously. There are a lot of people
who are scared of it or don't want to take
it for pill sophical reasons. But the people who want
to take the vaccine who are over sixty five should
all get it by March uh if you know, if
they want to, then we start going to the general populations.

(01:18:10):
And my hope is that let's call it, let's call
it July. Uh. We you know, the the vast majority
of people who want to get vaccinated should be well
on their way to getting vaccine at least the first
shot and hopefully the second. And that means that from
a standpoint of the way viral transmission works, the virus
is not going to be a problem. Right if you've

(01:18:30):
got that much immunity in society, the virus is not
going to really be able to get the traction to
continue to spread even if not everybody has gotten the vaccine.
Think about the measles vaccine. Not everybody gets the measle vaccine.
Not everybody gets the flu shot every winter, and yet
enough people do that that that we don't have influenza pandemic.
So similarly, here, if enough people get the vaccine, we

(01:18:51):
should be able to return to normal life. So I
don't agree with the people are saying no, we have
to behave as if we're still in law down for
for most of this year. I think for the first
quarter is still going to be tough sledding. But but
once we get to to the April May June time frame,
I do think things should start to subside. Hopefully the

(01:19:13):
stacks on the cases and the hospitalization starts to subside
to and that'll be the thing that hopefully turns around
that allows us to build more momentum for for reopening schools,
reopening the economy, etcetera. Fox Sports Radio has the best
sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our
shows at Fox sports Radio dot com and within the

(01:19:34):
I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live.
I'm Clay Travis. This is Wins and Loss as you're
hearing from O vicroy legit last question for you, and
I think we could talk all day, by the way,
I could just I could just keep unpacking so much
of what you're saying and continue this conversation, and I
hope people have enjoyed it. I said, legit last question.
But I do want to ask you this. How is

(01:19:54):
free ap dot org funded. If people are listening to
this right now and they love what you're saying and
they're like, man, I want to go check out more
of the work they're doing their capitalists or do you
guys raise money? Are you privately funded? What is the
method by which you are able to do the work
that you do. Well, thank you for asking that, Clay.
Because we are a nonprofit of five oh one C

(01:20:16):
three tax exept, nonprofit, nonpartisan, and we basically survive our donations.
So we get donations from people like you, people who
are listening to this uh podcast or radio show, and
where we we get donations from also charitable foundations that
we apply to grants from and and so we basically
you hit up as many people as we'll We'll take

(01:20:38):
the calls, take the meetings, and give them our our
pitch about what we're doing and say, hey, look, if
you're if you're looking for a set of ideas that
can bring Republicans and Democrats together to make the country better,
to expand freedom and expand prosperity, particularly for the little
guy who's struggling in this day and age, take a
lookal what we're doing and and help support our scholars
and and you know, to take the example of our

(01:21:00):
our COVID work. Right. So it wasn't just me. You know,
you're you're having me on your show, and I appreciate that,
appreciate the chance to share what we work on. But
it was a whole team of people who put together
our work, like on on reopening schools. Yes, we had
our healthcare people talking about the COVID piece of it,
the virus piece of it, right, but we also had
our education experts, people like Dan lips for who's our

(01:21:22):
expert on case through twelve education, Preston Cooper, who's our
expert on on college and vocational school and how to
reopen those schools. And so we had a plan that
went from how to reopen preschools to grade schools, the
high schools, the colleges to trade schools. We went through
it all, and that's because we're able to leverage our
whole team of scholars, not just in in biotech and healthcare,

(01:21:44):
but also in education and economics and housing and other
areas to do this kind of work. So and we
wouldn't be able to do that if it weren't for
for the donations of of the people like the people
who are listening to this podcast. So if you're interested
in supporting our work, whether it's a ten dollar check
or if if you're Clay, if you have Clay Travis
money a bigger chest than that, you can click on

(01:22:04):
the donate tab on our website and I legitimately am
going to donate today. I'm meant to ask this the
last time, so free op dot org. I mean, I'm
just I'm just so impressed with the work that you're doing,
and I think we need more work like this, and
so I'm going to head uh straight there. So, if
you are also enjoying this conversation and you want to
to support free op dot org, is where you go? Okay,

(01:22:26):
last question for you, so, and the reason why I
would use Vietnam as an example is Vietnam is almost
universally decided to have been the biggest failure of American
public policy for most of the last fifty years. Right,
let's go all the way back to to Vietnam. The
smartest people got it all wrong on Vietnam. In the

(01:22:48):
years that have ensued since Vietnam finished, that has become
the consensus opinion. We got it wrong. We didn't foment
the right public policy, we wasted a lot of lives,
we didn't do what would have been best for the country.
I would imagine almost everybody out there listening right now,
there's very few people who are like in the camp
of Vietnam was expertly executed by the United States government.

(01:23:12):
Will we reach the point I know you said, you've
got your report coming out at the end of February
where masses of American population recognized that lockdowns, that shut downs,
that schools being closed was a failure of policy. Or
are so many people committed to what their opinion was

(01:23:34):
in real time through social media and everything else, that
people will be unwilling to recognize what the data tells
them because it conflicts with the emotions they felt in
that moment. And I at asked that question because I
think it's significant and important that we learn from the
mistakes that we make in public policy in our country.

(01:23:57):
Will we end up because I think you would agree
with me right now that the data is almost uniform
that lockdowns don't make sense, and you can use Fortunately,
because of federalism, we've got all these fifty different states
that may have implemented a little bit different policy. And
I think it's clear that California hasn't had some radically
better result than Texas, or that certainly New York hasn't

(01:24:19):
been better than Florida. In fact, it's far worse. I
use those four states because they're the most populous. In
other words, the virus was gonna virus, right, like we
weren't going to be able to escape it based on
a public policy decision exclusively, Will we reach that consensus?
When does that consensus come? If we are ever going

(01:24:40):
to reach it, I think it's going to take a
long time, Clay, because you know, the people who were
involved as debate, people like you and me and the
people who we disagreed with, pretty invested in their point
of view at this point, right, Nobody wants to admit
they're wrong. Nobody is going to be inclined to admit
the wrong, even if they secretly believe they're Some people

(01:25:00):
just don't believe they're wrong because they're not gonna look
at the data that doesn't confirm their own preconceptions, right.
So I think it's gonna take some time for that
to happen. But that's where organizations like free Up hopefully
can play a role, along with obviously guys like you,
in terms of doing the research, doing the analyzes that
we can then circulate uh in the media, circulate with

(01:25:23):
with our our peers and colleagues that show UH that
that's the case. Right. So it's up to the people
like us who have the views that we have or
the hypotheses or whatever you want to call it, to
actually do the research, do the work to show that actually,
if you look at California and you look at Texas,
and you look at the economic restrictions that they put
in or didn't put in, here was how that affected

(01:25:45):
the rate of COVID infections and their hospitalizations in debt.
And it's it's pretty clear that that that nothing really
happened there and and or that that that that that
the Texas or Florida model was vindicated. I think that's
that's going to be some of the work that that
that people at Free Up and L we're going to
have to do to make that point clear. So it's
up to researchers who want to who want to test

(01:26:07):
that hypothesis or or or or or prove it to
do that work. And and that's where organizations like us
really make a difference. Through the whole reason we started
Free Up. Free Up is only five years old, four
and a half years old, and the whole reason we
started is because even though this country is so big,
three foundered thirty million people, there was literally nobody doing
this kind of work. If we didn't do it, which

(01:26:28):
sounds crazy, Like I look around them, like, how is
it possible that we're the only ones writing these you know,
long arctics. I say that in sports every day. How
is it possible that OutKick is the only place doing
what we do. It's it's scary, honestly. Yeah. And so
it just, uh, you know, puts a little more pressure
on us maybe to work harder and get that stuff
out there. And and we certainly take that responsibility seriously

(01:26:51):
and are are going to continue to do that. So
so keep an eye on on our Twitter account, on
our website and uh and hold us accountle if we
don't get it done, and asked us to when when
that work is going to come out, because it's important
to get it done. It's not only important to get
it done, it's also important for the very scientific method itself,
because the idea that experts know everything to me is

(01:27:12):
one of the lasting legacies of COVID that is going
to be the most destructive, because the scientific method is
predicated on coming up with hypotheses, testing them, and always
expecting that you may be wrong, whereas it seems to
me that social media is predicated almost entirely on never
admitting you were wrong about anything. Yeah, you know, I

(01:27:35):
mean you mentioned Vietnam. We we we talked about it
on the last interview as well. You know, we obviously
talked about COVID. Think about the housing crisis in two
thousand eight. Right, all the experts said, housing prices only
go up, they never go down, because that's what historical
charts show. But of course, you know, every trend is
made to be broken. And you have a housing bubble,

(01:27:56):
you have a financial bubble, you have uh institutions behaving recklessly,
people behaving recklessly, over leveraging their their their equity in
their homes, and boom, you have a crash. Right, And
that's what happened. And there were the people that that
Michael Lewis wrote about in The Big Short, which was
a great book and a great you know, I mean,
and obviously the author of Moneyball as well, and The Blindside,

(01:28:16):
incredible writer. Like what, what's the running theme of all
those all those books, all those movies. It's that the
experts didn't get it right, and there was some random
creative nerd out there who was right where the experts
were wrong. And so that's a you know, there's a balance, right.
We don't want to say science doesn't matter that you know,
you should just ignore everything that a scientist says because

(01:28:39):
the scientists are always wrong. That's not true. But it's
also true that experts, particularly experts who have a political
point of view, often uh uh, you know, aren't willing
to see countervailing or contradictory evidence that that conflicts with
their world viewing. So the balances somewhere in the middle.
The balances have a healthy skepticism of of what you

(01:28:59):
hear from the so called experts. Don't automatically assume they're
wrong either, but have that healthy skip to skepticism. Do
your own work, do your own checking, ask intelligent questions.
That's what we should have done in two thousand and
eight with the natural crisis. That's what we should have
done with the Vietnam war or the Iraq war. That's
what we should do with COVID and everything else that
comes along along the way. And if we do that,
we'll have a much more healthy society uh and hopefully

(01:29:22):
better response to the challenges that come before us in
the future. I'm donating to him free op dot org.
Got encourage you to do it as well. I'd also
encourage you to go follow uh oh vic Roy at
a v I K. You can thank him for coming
on and talking to our OutKick audience here, and when
you publish, hopefully in late February, since you've now established
a date. When you published that and I have a

(01:29:43):
chance to read it, we will get you on again.
I appreciate you answering my wife's questions uh and uh,
and again give her credit because she loved this interview
and she said, you've got to get him on again,
and you've got to talk to him again and get
an update. So I appreciate everything that you're doing at
your organization, and I appreciate time you gave us today.
Hey Sam do you thanks for being a voice for

(01:30:04):
for for the real the real truths out there on
these issues really really important. Your your audience. You've you've
grown such a big audience and you have, uh you know,
the trust of so many people, and you've used it,
uh for for social good to to get people the
information they need. So people like me are grateful to
you for that. Oh vic Roy, go follow him at
A V I K. I am Clay Travis. This is

(01:30:26):
Wins and Losses. I think. This is the first time
we've ever had a guest on twice, so you know
how highly I think of him. Go donate free op
dot org. Appreciate all of you. Go check out the
rest of our Wins and Losses conversations, including Ovic and
Eyes first conversation, which is up from August one. Thank you,
my man, Thanks to all you, and I hope you
guys enjoy it, share with your friends. This has been
Wins and Losses

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