The Ricochet Podcast - A Little Bit of Sowell

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

This week, Jason Riley stops by to talk about his new documentary, Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, which aside from being great, is also free to stream on YouTube. So the second you finish this podcast, we expect you will watch it. But before we get to Jason, we visit with Steve Krakauer, who writes the must-read Fourth Watch newsletter about all things media. Source

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I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to Steve Krakauer about the media and Jason Reilly about Thomas Sowell. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 430. I'm James Lylex in Minneapolis. Rob Long, I believe, in New York. I can hear you! joining us in the first segment this week is steve crackauer author of the media watchdog fourth watch newsletter which he writes for the first news network previously worked at both cnn and nbc news so he knows the milieu and now he skewers his former employers on a regular basis good for him subscribe to his newsletter if you wish listen to his podcast and it's called the fourth watch podcast and you can follow him on Twitter. All that information, of course, is at Ricochet.com. Steve, welcome. Wow. Well, thank you for the introduction. I'm here in

Dallas and excited to be with you. Great, Dallas. Oh, fine. It's so good to have the great state of Texas with us as well. We really do between Minnesota, Texas, California. We got the nation covered. All right. Okay. We're going to get to Fox News. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Long is in New York. That's the media center. I'm in California. That's the other media center. Where do you get off covering the media from Texas? Well, yeah. No, I know. Well, look, I was in New York for about seven years myself. Uh, uh, and now I'm, I grew up in, uh, in New Jersey and lived in the East coast for a long time. Now I'm, uh, I'm an expat living in, living in Texas. And I think it's given me a different sort of perspective. You know, there's, there's a little bit of media here in Texas, but, uh, uh, but yeah, no, now, now it's, it's, it's a nice arm's length from,

from the media centers. Yes. Okay. So just so you know, James is going to conduct a wonderful interview. Rob and I will come in. Just so you know, Rob and I will be seething with this weird condescension. Who does he think he is living in Texas combined with, oh, how do we figure out how to get to Texas? How can we do it ourselves? All right, James, over to you. Just wanted to wrap that up. Jeff Zucker, CNN president, announced he's staying on to the end of the year. So what does that mean? And what direction do you think that CNN will continue to go? The only bright spot in all of this is I understand that CNN International is no longer playing in airports, the most hellish captive audience situation we've all been in. So what's next for the for the. Yeah, I know. You know, that was framed, you know, with with the news about Jeff staying for the rest i know you know that was framed you know with with the the news about jeff staying for the rest of the year although you know you also could look at it a certain way of his contract is not being renewed beyond this year he's going to be staying the length

of his contract there um so you know it depends on how you look at it look i i wrote last night at fourthwatch.media that jeff it was a wartime president i mean mean, for the last five years, CNN has real or perceived been in a war, really an existential war with the guy at the White House, Donald Trump, which Jeff and Trump go way back, back to their NBC days, also at The Apprentice. And, you know, their history is very much intertwined. Now, I would say that unless you have an impeachment of Donald Trump every month for the next four years, CNN's ratings are going to be declining from their peak over the last four years there. And I would say that the same goes across the media industry, whether you look at CNN's ratings, MSNBC, right on down the line to a lot of digital properties that really succeeded

over these last four years also. So no, we are now entering this peacetime period, I would say, between the media and the people in charge, which isn't really great for viewers necessarily and is not great for business either. So yeah, I would say the CNN that I worked at, which was in 2012, 2013, I worked very closely with Jeff in 2013, really enjoyed working with him. I think he's a really smart executive that cnn was drifting more towards the direction of like the anthony bourdain's of the world uh you know how do you how do you evolve into this sort of news-ish thing this news-ish product that i i wonder if that comes back that term news-ish okay i wonder if that comes back now now that uh that there's not

that the dominant story is not what donald trump is tweeting every day how did cnn conceive itself when you were there because i remember when it had its vogue in the first gulf war and i was working in washington in the news bureau and we all watched cnn it was our it was this huge big pipeline that gushed information 24 7 we loved it james earl jones would tell us that this is CNN. It had gravitas. And at some point, they decided they're going to pivot towards being MSNBC with a veneer of objectivity. How do they view themselves, though? Do they still view themselves, at least when you were there, from what you hear now, as objective, as the tellers of the truth? Right. Well, I think those are really two distinct periods there. You know, I think that when I was there, I got there in 2010. I was there until 2013. And I can say, you know, one of my

responsibilities in the 2012 election was essentially overseeing everything. How does TV look on digital properties? What does it look like on the website? What does it look like on social media? And so I was in, you know, as close as we could get, you know, to the Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama election all throughout the primaries, every debate night. And I really don't believe there was any thumb on the scale there at the time in 2012. I think that massively changed with Donald Trump in 2016 and certainly in 2020. So I think that that's completely shifted. No, I think CNN thought of themselves in many ways what they were, which is a massive news gathering operation across the world, and especially in the United States, really embracing that idea of being that, I don't want to say middle lane, but certainly the place that people can turn to for news. In the last four years, you look at that primetime is a good example, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, those were, depending on who you are, might describe them as entertaining shows. They certainly were not news.

I mean, I have friends who really enjoyed Don Lemon's show and would say, but then I still have to go somewhere else to get the news. So it really shifted in the last four years. That is not going to be sustainable. I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to carry the same sort of interest that Donald Trump had for the network. So they are going to have to ship, whether they ship back to where they were, which was interesting, but not necessarily good for business, or they go in a different direction. I think we'll see, but it's not going to be the same. Well, if you look back on 2012, oh, by the way, hello, this is Rob in New York.

Do you think you actually, yeah, right. Do you actually believe that 20, I mean, I think a lot of our listeners and me included would disagree with the idea that the coverage of the Mitt Romney and his campaign was fair. It did seem like there's been a thumb on the scale. Are we paranoid? Are we, is this just one more instance of conservatives complaining about liberal media bias? It certainly seemed to us in 2012 that the media had had chosen a side. Sure. Look, I think that CNN, like pretty much every other major, you know, journalistic entity, leans heavily left when you look at the people that are in their newsrooms. And I don't. Why is it so hard for them to admit that?

Why is that? Wouldn't it be easier if they just admitted it? Yeah. And in some ways, I actually think one of the positives for the media of the Trump era was that there was a shift to to embrace, as Jeff was saying, actually, to the L.A. Times when he announced that he was leaving or announced that he was staying, depending on how you frame it, that they embraced truth. You know, even even truth, if it was hard to to you know it was it was an aggressive kind of they didn't really i mean i watched it for a year and all and all it said was all it told me was a lot of lies about the this this russian nonsense right and i basically you know i don't know each other so full disclosure all our podcast listeners about rolling their eyes i loathed president trump supported him, but he didn't. This Russia business was a complete canard.

Oh, yeah. CNN wrote it to, well, wrote it to the really the middling to low ratings, but they seem to write it very, very hard. And we know they would not do the same with Obama and we know they will not do the same with Joe Biden. Or are we being paranoid? No, no, I think that's absolutely right. I think, you know, what one, like I said, I think that the shift in the Trump era to a embrace this idea of what they really believe. I mean, you know, that the CNN was not holding back, not trying to pretend this, this veil of objectivity. Now, they would argue that that they still tried to have that I think viewers knew at that point, that's not the case anymore. Right. So,

so I actually think that's maybe a shift in the right direction because you're not pretending anymore. All right. But they are kind of now. I mean, they're pretending they're going back to neutral. I mean, I have a comedian friend who does a very funny thing on Twitter. His name is David Angelo. He will take some quotation mostly from CNN, from a newscaster on CNN, and he will pull quote it and superimpose it on the picture of that North Korean woman in North Korean dress who does the news of Pyongyang. And it's all about the great

leader. And it absolutely works. It's hilarious. And it works. And it seems to me that instead of being an opening for CNN to go back to living in a denial phase of objectivity, wouldn't it just be easier if they said, yeah, you know what, we're all liberals. So take what we say with a grain of salt. Would that be closer to telling the truth than what they're trying to do now? I think it would. But you know, I also, I would put CNN in the category of not just that they lean to the left, but very much part of the establishment legacy media that whether you're left or right, is going to have a certain coziness with power. And I think we saw that in the Obama era. I think we saw that, you know, you could even say to some degree in the Bush era. We did not see that over the last four years. And I think that we're going to see an unfortunate return to that now in the

Biden era as well. I mean, you know, yes, yes, there, there were stories that when I worked at CNN, I can tell you some examples of that, where I felt like even though CNN did some good reporting, it wasn't pushed even by CNN itself in this sort of, you know, 24 hour, we always have a great story. Let's, let's, you know, put, put it out there. Let's put it on all our platforms every hour. You know, it was, this is bad for the people in power. Let's kind of, you know, work around it. Right. I think that that it would be unfortunate if we see a return to that. But I think that's probably where we're going. So I know that everyone's going to jump in. So I have one more question. So we lost two years of this country. We spent just focusing entirely on Russia, which turned out to be nothing. And then we spent the four months, three months,

if you were watching CNN, and then we spent three months after the election, if you're watching Fox, focusing on equally idiotic claims of fraud and machines, election machines. How bad are these cable news operations? I mean, it seems to me that the solution should be to everybody turn them off. I mean, I don't get any meaningful news from CNN. I don't get any meaningful news from Fox. I don't get any meaningful news from any of this stuff.

And yet here we are talking about it. Are we talking about it too much? Well, look, I think that they are the cable news is still the prevailing cultural media product. I think when you're looking at CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, those are, you know, we put it out into Twitter and Facebook clips. Those are still what drives the cultural conversation when it comes to the media. But just as everything else from ESPN down to broadcast networks down to, you know, Bravo, the viewership is on a steady decline. That's just the, that's just the nature of the business. And I think that's, that's very scary for places like CNN, which are now talking about streaming networks,

Fox, which is taught, which has Fox nation. And I think it's putting a lot of resources towards that. These things are still on the decline on, on a, on a big level. Um, and, and look, we're still talking about fairly small numbers, even if you go. Yeah. 5 million at the most Tucker Carlson. Yeah. Which, which, you know, look, that that's the way Nielsen works, right. That's a, that's a, an average. So you're looking at maybe 20, 25 million people that are watching Tucker on a monthly basis. That's a huge number, but it's not, it's not everyone. I mean, there's a lot of people that never turn on Fox news. And so, so yeah, I think when you, when you look at the election fraud stuff, you know, I think that was mostly relegated to certain programs on Fox, which are the ones that are going to be getting sued right now by Dominion and Smartmatic. But it also was very much in a way helped lift in some ways the Fox second tier networks like the Newsmax's and the OAN's. Now, I think that we're going to see a bit

of a return to normalcy there with the levels of ratings getting back to where they are during the Biden era. Steve, I have only just recently made a decision about the way to think of the media that I think is A, correct, and B, finally, has permitted me to fight my way through to sanity. And it's this, that the model with which the gentleman with whom you're speaking now grew up, you were still a toddler in New Jersey when it already started to die. But the model, James is a newspaper man to this day. Rob and I grew up as media guys, not in news, but still. And the model was some notion of objectivity. That was the journalistic aspiration. And the business model that supported that or that correlated with it, that fit with it, was advertising of the kind that meant that the people who owned, and I'm talking about newspapers

and television and radio alike, the people who owned all three had an incentive to reach out to the broadest possible audience because you wanted to sell your classified ads to Democrats and Republicans alike. Okay. So I'm a legacy viewer. They're legacy properties. I'm a legacy viewer. I keep getting enraged by the New York Times and by CNN because they're so far to the left. And here's my new view. That model is dead. It's just dead.

And I'm putting this to you to see if you agree if I'm correct. And if this is really is the same view where I can settle and spend the rest of my life. And so what anybody who pays attention to the business side knows that that business model is long gone. And that the business incentives are now for media outlets to find what we would call niche markets. The niches can be quite large. You mentioned over the course of a month, Tucker Carlson may have 20 million viewers.

That's Rush Limbaugh, 25 million. Still in all, that's nothing like the audience that used to watch Cheers in the old days every single week. Okay. So the business model is we go after specific markets and there's this lag among viewers and I think even among journalists alike to think, well, still you should be objective. And Rob's point really is my point. Let's just drop it. I've decided as a viewer to drop it. CNN is what it is. And there's no point in my raising my blood pressure. The New York Times, I don't even, truly, I don't even think of it. There are a few interesting columns.

The news is just to see what the other side is thinking. It is a particular instrument of agitprop that a lot of people, not me, like to pay for. And so we're going back. Michael Barone used to argue this, and I used to resist it, but I think he was right. And he said this 15 years ago. We're going back to the mid-19th century when Tocqueville toured America. All the newspapers, all the broadsheets were partisan first, and everybody understood that. And it was a great time, actually, for consumers of news because you could get so many different viewpoints, even in small towns, even on the Ohio River as the frontier was being built out. Okay, am I right? Is the old notion, is the old model dead? And should we drop the old

pretense of objectivity? So I think you're absolutely right. And I think there's two parts to this. I think on the one hand is the objectivity part of it, which, look, I'm kind of a capital J journalist myself. I was a broadcast journalism major at Syracuse University. And I went through it, you know, this was back, you know, 15 or 13 years ago. And even then, social media didn't exist related to it. So I was, you know, it was very defined there. I think objectivity, though, even back then, and certainly for a long period of time, is really a false concept.

I think that it's about intellectual honesty is really what we should strive for. And to be honest with viewers, with readers. That is very well put. Yeah. And that's also what I try to do at Fourth Watch is look, I'm not unbiased, I'm not objective. And I don't demand that from anyone on the left or the right, just to be intellectually honest about it and have a consistency to it. So I do think that there's one element to that that is absolutely right. The other one, though, is the over-segmentation in some positive ways and some negative ways in our media landscape. That's partially just due to the shifts in digital and partially due to, I think, very much.

The cultural bubbles that we have, I think, are even more. And so I talk about the Acela media, the media that's based largely in New York City and D.C. I used to ride that Acela that just drove right on past lots of other areas that are between New York and D.C., but you kind of just went right from there and you're bulleted by it. That is a very small niche market. I mean, it's well, it's actually kind of big.

There's a lot of people there, but it has no real interest in capturing another point of view, not just like politically, but culturally, geographically, in what people prioritize. And I've seen that certainly since being in Dallas. But the key is the business model. You don't need a giant audience anymore to make money. We look at places like Substack, which a person, a single individual journalist, like a Glenn Greenwald, a Barry Weiss, can leave their publications and can develop an audience of, I don't know, 10,000, 20,000 paid subscribers and make a very good living that way. And they can reach people directly. It can feel very authentic.

Look at a podcast. I mean, you put, you know, you hear it in your ears. It's a very, it's a very intimate way of listening to it. And you can potentially, you know, make some money on that as well. So, so I think the barriers to entry are smaller and now you can get really zoned in on a very specific, you can call it a niche or an audience that you're trying to drive towards. And there's a lot of opportunity there. The one thing I would just say that I think is a missed opportunity for places like a CNN, New York Times, they have, I mean, Washington Post, I mean, Jeff Bezos money, you got billionaire behind you. Why not try to make an either part of your media property or a sub brand and try to capture an area that you're not already doing

it just it's a it's a stupid business move to not try to get other people that are not already interested in you to to to find that to find you and be interested yeah i mean i was gonna i like that phrase stupid business move because i've been in television business for my whole life and it seems to me that there's enormous amount of money and a huge audience still in large audiences, right? Everybody goes to niche because the niche seems to freak. It seems to absolve them of the hard job, which is getting a lot of people in the tent. So what was, you know, when I started, what was a 22, 23, 25 rating point is now was considered a success. Now a three is considered a success. That's not because people aren't watching. And it really isn't because the audience is fragmented. The audience will come and

watch a Big Bang Theory, they'll come and watch a show they like, and we can measure that pretty well. So my question to you is, I mean, and I'm sort of obsessed with this with this one person in America's name is Joe Manchin. And for years, Joe Manchin was kind of this, you know, he seemed like he was a hapless, very, very, very imperiled Democratic senator from a Republican state. He refused to switch parties. It was unclear why. No one really knew what his plan was. And it turns out his plan was just to play it right down the middle. And by playing it right down the middle, he is now arguably one of the most politically powerful Americans, elected officials, Americans in government. He seems like he's a smart guy, that he is some stuff he says is a little too

liberal for me. Some stuff he says is probably a little too conservative for other people. That's I get that. But isn't that isn't isn't isn't mansion vision a very, very good business prospect? And wouldn't it take just a hiring program on the part of outgoing Jeff Zucker to, I don't know, every every other hire, make sure he's a conservative paper or hillsdale college or something that doesn't seem like it'd be that hard and then you're really going to swing for the fence then you actually might have sustainably high ratings yeah that's it's really interesting you know i i haven't really thought about it that way but joe mansion i think is this great case study because you could make an argument and i think that probably the acela media would make this argument that joe mansion is a moderate he's a moderate, or he's maybe a moderate, you know, a conservative, whatever you want to frame it. And they could say, oh, well, we got moderates here. We've got, you know, we've got, you know, Nicole Wallace here from

MSNBC, or, you know, we've got our moderates already covered. But the important thing is, why is Joe- John Lennon describes himself as a moderate. Right, yeah, of course. He's an independent, a moderate. Look, Joe Manchin is very popular in West Virginia, right? Why? And that is much more interesting to me, and I think should be to the media world, than trying to capture this false moderation, you know, that Joe Manchin has. He's not just in the middle. He's perfect for an area, a state, which you maybe don't really have a lot of experience in, right? And I think you could certainly extrapolate that

out to the Midwest or the Rust Belt or down here in Texas. I am friends with a lot of people who have strong political views, and they're complicated. They're messy. I have friends who are gay, married, big Second Amendment supporters. I mean, across the spectrum. And why is that? Instead of trying to get some false sense of DC moderation, go and try to capture an audience that's interesting and complicated and nuanced. I think that's much more of a smart business model. As you were speaking just now, who's the media entrepreneur in Texas? You just said barriers to entry are low. A small audience. There's no money in Texas.

There's no audience in Texas. Texas is in all kinds of ways. Swallow deeply, Rob, I'm going to have to say it about New York and California. Texas is the future. Yeah, the talent, the growth, the growth. It's the place in America where diversity works, partly because, in my opinion, partly because the political establishment doesn't make a big deal of diversity. But if you want to come across the border from Mexico, head for Texas. That's where you'll be accepted more quickly. You'll get hired. Okay. So, it is, and it is in all kinds of ways, a world unto itself.

Who's making money in media in Texas? On the Texas audience. Yeah. No, it's smart. And I would just, a couple of things I can say. You know, I moved down here in 2014, working for Glenn Beck, who had previously moved down from New York to start The Blaze and is still at a giant movie studio out in Dallas here. So there's the thought there. The other thing, though, I think you talk about people that, you know, transplants from the coasts. Joe Rogan has now officially left LA and moved to Austin, and he didn't just bring his podcast

down there. He is actually starting a whole media empire down there. I just, we, uh, you know, one of my other jobs is working at the Megyn Kelly show, the executive producer of that. We just had Tim Dillon on, he is leaving LA to move to Austin, to be in part of that Joe Rogan circle of what he's building down there. So I think we're in the early days of this move that people from San Francisco and tech from LA. Yeah, it is happening. Markets work, it's happening.

Well, when Texas splits off into another country, it'll be the media center of its domain. And then Rob, of course, will move his television production facilities down there. And you'll be perfectly posed to Steve to do it. Anyway, I'd love to have you back again, because there's so much more we want to talk about this. It's an interesting period in the media. I've never seen anything like it, frankly, where the old models still persist in our minds and shape our expectations

of the new. Actually, one last exit question. Of all things, I got a a newspaper a brand new fresh newspaper in the mail the other day epoch times uh which i believe is uh the felon gong organization doing its best to bring what they believe to be a true perspective on china which i think is correct to the rest of us and somebody is betting that print isn't dead is print dead dead? Well, I think that print is certainly on the decline. I think that we're seeing less and less magazines that are going digital only. We're seeing newspapers that are going digital only. That said, I personally think that there's real value in tangible media. I still think that we're going to see a resurgence in the idea of everyone so attached to their phones, but that only makes it more of an excitement to get something that feels tangible there. It has to be the right product.

I don't know what necessarily that is yet. But no, I don't think any media platform that was once popular, even as a nostalgia play, it is immune from coming back. And I think Prince certainly would fit that bill. Steve, we'll have you back again. And again, everybody check the Ricochet.com site where you can find all the necessary URLs and Twitter handles and the rest of it so you can follow what he has to say

and read what he writes. And we thank you for being on the Ricochet podcast today. Good luck and give our regards to the- Thanks, Steve. Yes, well, Prince, we all know what his fortunes are give our regards to them. Thanks. Thanks, Steve. Yes, well, print, we all know what its fortunes are, and it seems to be. I seem to remember at some point that everybody was talking that the future of print was

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And now we welcome to the podcast, Jason Riley, opinion columnist of the Wall Street Journal, where his column Upward Mobility has run since 2016. He's also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And now he narrates the new documentary, Thomas Sowell, Common Sense in a Senseless World. What a great title. Traces Sowell's journey from humble beginnings to from the Hoover Institution to becoming one of the era's greatest economists, political philosophers and prolific authors. So let's talk about this documentary. We've had the doctor, the great man on the show a few times, and I could just sit and listen to him speak on anything, but it's the

pith. It's the great gem-like quality of some of the things that he says. Is it what he says, how he says it? Is it a combination of the two? Is it the fact that he says things with such clarity that few other people are willing to say today? Why does Thomas Sowell mean so much to so many people? And thanks for coming with us today to talk about this. I think he is someone who knows a great deal about a lot of things, and he's able to bring that all together and explain it in plain English. And I really think that people appreciate his ability, you know, to speak to his fellow intellectuals at their level, but also to speak to non-intellectuals. I think that's something he got from Milton Friedman, frankly, and Friedman's public intellectualism. It was very important for Friedman to be able to talk about economics to non-economists, and he spent a lot of his post-academic career doing that, engaging students on campuses and lecturing widely and so forth.

And I think that was sort of a model for Tom and his public intellectualism. Jason, Peter here. I've known Tom for a long time because I've been at the Hoover Institution for a long time. He's appeared on Uncommon Knowledge. My standing rule is Tom gets to appear on Uncommon Knowledge anytime he wants to appear on Uncommon Knowledge. And that turns out to be every time he has a new book coming out, which is new book once a year, new edition of an older book, and also once, twice a year, roughly, for some years now. And in the old days, when I first got to know him, Tom Sowell was compelling and interesting. But in recent years, maybe it's to do with social media, but that's what I'm coming to is the question. In recent years, Tom Sowell has become an intellectual rock star. How is it that Tom went from being really compelling and one of the best anybody would say of economists and especially striking because he was an African-American conservative, which is interesting and it's

compelling to being a figure. I don't know what kind of responses you were getting to the documentary, but every time we put up a new show on Uncommon Knowledge, I get emails from people around the world saying how great this man is, how much he means to them? What's happened there? It's an interesting question. I think that the initial response we've gotten to the documentary bears that out as well. You had mentioned to me before that when you have Ramon as a guest, young people especially appreciate him. We're finding the same thing with the documentary.

It's reaching a lot of young people. And I guess it is social media. And I think that, unfortunately, prior to social media, the left, and the Black left in particular, the civil rights establishment types, the Black academic crowd, had done a pretty good job of effectively canceling Thomas Sowell before that term was in vogue. He was someone who was, you know, persona non grata, and the mainstream media could ignore him. And when they wanted views on blacks and so forth, they simply, you know, went to their Rolodex and called up the NAACP or the Urban League or Congressional Black Caucus types and let them speak on behalf of blacks. And I think social media has been an end run around those gatekeepers. And maybe we're seeing the fruits of that and soul's uh popularity in his

dotage got it got it rob hey jason it's uh rob long in new york thank you for joining us um i've told this story to what is dr soul professor soul is it like a is just thomas soul i can never i never know how to how to actually refer to him when he's there. I always kind of write a sentence in my head so I don't have to use a title. But I told this to him, this story. I was walking in west Los Angeles to have lunch with a friend of mine, and I passed an outdoor coffee shop. It's like a Starbucks. And there was a young African-American girlamerican girl reading a conflict of visions and i walked right past her and then you know my then you know how you like you see an image and then my brain just

started to sort it out like and i stopped like about you know 20 feet away from her i thought is she reading thomas soul and i did that thing you do in cartoons i sort of walked backwards and looked at her and she sort of looked up and wasn't that wasn you do in cartoons i sort of walked backwards and looked at her and she sort of looked up and wasn't that wasn't great and uh i just pointed the book and i said how is it and she looked at you it's interesting just kind of non-committal but she's reading it and i walked away um how do you get or should we get that book in the hands of more young black Americans? Wow. That's a good question. I think videos like the documentary videos that that that Peter's been doing over the years with Tom, social media in general has been the way to do that.

You know, I think... Jason, you are such a lousy salesman. Dude, you have a magnificent biography of Tom coming out, which people can see on Amazon right now. The title is Maverick. Okay, sorry. Sure, but what the social

media can do is whet the appetite of these individuals. And maybe then they'll go on and read the books. And that's what I'm hoping the biography will do. But it's... I just am amazed

at how many people don't know about, about SLO. I mean, keep in mind, he was, you know, he had a syndicated column that ran in hundreds of newspapers for 30 years. Right. Um, so it wasn't hard to find. Um, but, um, but like I said, you, you, you, uh, the, the, the left in general has done such an effective job of keeping him out of that pantheon of great intellectuals in America. You know, they go to Skip Gates at Harvard or Cornel West or today Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi.

And those are the great black thinkers in america today and tom has been even though he's written circles around those guys um uh he he's been he's been kept from from being mentioned among them and and i i you know so so i'm i'm glad that that we there's this resurgence of interest in him and particularly among among these groups the other thing i think that that is is that soul has been so prescient over the years in his, what he's written about. I mean, we're having these discussions about social justice and income inequality, and Sowell has been on top of this for 40 years. And he's traced, you mentioned conflict of visions, he's traced these various political philosophies back down

through the hundreds of years and not only here in america but across the ocean in in europe and britain and so forth and so tom has been way ahead of the curve on on this stuff uh multiculturalism and and so forth and identity politics and um and it's there's a there's a um there's a fan website or Twitter feed for him and has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. Tom's not on social media, but the at Thomas Sowell handle has hundreds of thousands of followers. And all this guy does that runs it is simply post quotes from Tom's columns and books unaccompanied by any other commentary. It just simply finds a sentence or two and post it every other day or so. And he's getting more than a hundred thousand extra followers every year just doing that. So, I mean, Soul has been,

has been, you know, been, been quotable and the, and then these very cogent, cogent soundbites for a long, long time. And I think people appreciate them all the more now. You mentioned social media, and I thought to myself, it's the voice. Tom writes brilliantly, but the presence that comes through, and above all, I think, in his voice. But you know, hearing you talk just now, I thought to myself, how would I sum up Tom? Tom Sowell is a free man. You listen to him and he truckles to no one, not to opinion, not to acclaim. He is a free man. That I think is what it really comes down to. I think,

I think. But you're only eliciting this idea right now. I'll have to mull this one over, Jason. We'll discuss it when I have you on Uncommon Knowledge to talk about your new book. All right, I'll shut up. James. The great thing about Soul, of course, is, and right, I get those tweets as well, and they're wonderful. They're just absolute pith without any subcutaneous fat. But rather than talking about the great man, let's hear him. Here's a soundbite, I believe, from the documentary about the cynicism of contemporary African-American leaders. Step your knee on our neck. All the incentives politically offer for black leaders to blame all problems in the black community on the larger society. And that enables them to take on the role of being the defender of the black community against enemies,

which in turn creates the situation in which many blacks don't feel that anything that they do is going to help themselves unless it's done politically as a group, that there's no point. I mean, why would you, if you believe what they they say why would you want to knock yourself out in the school knowing that the man is not going to let you get anywhere right so what he said then applies to the two gentlemen that you discussed earlier uh talking about coats and candy who each of which in a combination have interjected new phrases that sort of perform this rhetorical sleight of hand that have changed the dialogue that we're having. It is insufficient now, according to Kendi, to be not racist. You have to be anti-racist, which most people think, oh, well, that's easy. Of course, everybody's anti-racist, but it has a very specific mean. Likewise, equity replacing equality is something

that changes the definition without really explaining what's going on. You had a column again in The Wall Street Journal, a quote from it. Progressives put the racial equity squeeze on Biden. And that's how this is going to play out. Quote, you wrote nothing quickens the pulse of progressives like talk of systemic racism and white supremacy. So it's hard to know if Mr. Biden is just telling leftists what they want to hear. But it's more than that. If the president is serious about focusing on equal outcomes instead of equal opportunities, then heaven help us. So talk a little bit about this and why nobody seems to be explaining the difference between equality and equity. It's almost as if they want us to conflate the two, isn't it?

Yeah, there's a lot of semantic word games going on here. And one reason Sol has been on top of it for so long is that all it really is is Marxism, particularly with Kendi. And Tom is a Marx scholar. He studied, he was a Marxist himself throughout his 20s. And so he knows this stuff inside and out. He knows the history of ideas and the history of economic thought. And he's seen this coming for a long time. And yeah, what you're getting here is a sort of rehash of the same old Marxism that we've seen. You know, Mark Stelton, these power structures,

he was talking about capitalists and proletariat and so forth, but the Kennedys of the world are talking about racial power structures. So all black problems are the responsibility of whites and the responsibility of whites to solve. And that's the game that they're playing. One of the things that Solis pointed out so effectively is that first this notion that

equality of outcomes or proportionate outcomes among groups is somehow the norm. He says you don't find this anywhere down through history, not in America, not in other countries, not today, not yesterday, not 100 years ago, not 300 years ago. And so the idea that we've set this up, this framework that someone like Kendi has set up to where he doesn't see proportional outcomes, it is evidence that something is amiss, is just wrong on its face, that he's starting, it's something we've never seen before.

And the other thing that Sol is effectively pointed out is that racism has been the constant down through history, but the progress of various groups and ethnicities has not been constant. It's waxed and waned. You know, inequality has narrowed during some areas and widened in other areas, and not necessarily based on how much racism existed. I mean, you can look at the gains that Blacks were making in the 40s and 50s and 60s at a time when no one would argue there was less racism than today, and then see that a lot of those trends stalled or in some cases reversed course in the 70s and 80s and 90s. So again, using racism as this all-purpose

explanation for the income or the outcomes, the disparate outcomes that we see today, Sol has spent a career knocking this down left and right empirically. And what a lot of people don't know, and it goes back to your story about the young Black woman reading A Conflict of Visions, you know, Sowell began writing about race reluctantly. It was not his, he did not set out to be this iconoclastic intellectual. It's how he wanted to teach. And he wanted to teach economics and the history of economic thought. That's what he studied in school. He's an expert on people like Marx

and Adam Smith and those guys, the classical economists. And that was his first love. And that is what he wrote about in the 60s and did not turn his attention to racial issues until the 1970s

and did so reluctantly. He said, there aren't enough people out there speaking honestly about the problems that Blacks face. And the civil rights movement has taken a turn for the worse here. They're barking up the wrong tree in what they are interested in doing to help Blacks. And someone's got to tell the truth. And there aren't enough people out there doing it. And I'm going to take it upon myself. He saw it as a duty, frankly, the way he puts it. But it was not what he set out to do as a career. Jason, all I want to say is that it's been an effort for me to suppress the questions I have about your last couple of columns. I've worked very hard to keep this to a Tom Sowell show.

Okay, thanks, man. His legacy is in great hands. And we thank you for doing what you're doing. So the book is, and when will it be out? The book is Maverick. It will be out May 25th. It's available for pre-order on Amazon now. And it's primarily an intellectual biography of Tom. Talks about where he's made his mark as a scholar,

how he'll be remembered. And again, I hope that it does, like the documentary, whet people's appetite, and particularly young people, and get them to pick up some Tom Sowell books and give them a look. And the documentary is Tom Sowell, Common Sense in a Senseless World.

And where can people see that? People can see that, well, they can go to soulfilm.com and see where it will appear on their local public television channel. And they can also stream it on Amazon or Vimeo or YouTube. So there are a number of ways to see the film. Yeah, no, we will post all those links on Ricochet, and I think we will also embed the video from YouTube so people can see it. Ricochet.com. That's where you can see it. Oh, fantastic. Jason Riley, thank you for joining us today. Unless, of course, I'm Peter and Rob have something. I know we could

probably talk to you for another hour or so, but you got a life and we probably should let you get to it. Jason, all I want to say is that it's been an effort for me to suppress the questions I have about your last couple of columns. I've worked very hard to keep this to a Tom Sowell show. Okay, thanks, man. Thank you, Mr. Riley. I guess you can get it on YouTube and Vimeo, which is nice to know that Vimeo is still a platform and still going on. I've got stuff on Vimeo. I pay them a little extra every single year so I can host my videos there without advertisements and without YouTube stepping in and saying, I am not sure that we like the music that we use or the thing that you said. And Vimeo at this moment seems a little bit more free.

But then again, you know, when you're on the web, sometimes you wonder whether or not- Something you can do about that, though. Big tech controls everything. There's no way around that. That's why they're called big tech, James, because they're incredibly powerful. Powerful. Just omnipotent. I would say omnipotent.

Well, no, they don't have complete omnipotent i would say omnipotent well no they don't have what complete omnipotence what well well as you know you look around and you may think that uh big tech's trying to suppress your free speech they don't agree with what you're doing uh you may recall of course that there's deplatforming going on all the time you may have heard that little story about parlor and amazon and aws and all the rest of it and you and you not a ricochet not a ricochet no not a we are rock solid but what if you don't want somebody to know that you're going to ricochet i mean it's absurd to say that because it's a fairly anodyne center right it's a reasonable place there's no hotbed of sedition and insurrection

there but you never know what they think and you never know what's happening to your data out there right and you know where i'm going with this there, right? And you know where I'm going with this, don't you? Of course you know where I'm going. That would be a VPN. Everybody knows they should have one, but the question is which one, which one's the best? Well, it's pretty clear from us. If you want to take a stance, how about going to a VPN that actually looks at what we're facing, knows what we're facing, and makes a point of telling you that they're on your side when it comes to this, that they want to protect your personal data from big tech and the VPN that you use for that is express VPN. In case you were wondering whether I was going to get around to the product

name, express VPN, every device, whether you're on your phone, your laptop, or your television has a unique string of numbers called your IP address, right? So when you search for stuff,

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go to expressvpn.com slash ricochet. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash ricochet to get three, count them, three extra months free. Go to expressvpn.com slash ricochet right now to learn more. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, gentlemen, we've got all our guests out of the way here. We haven't had any chance to talk. What's going on in your world? I, at the moment, am dealing with a daughter in quarantine at Boston University. So I'm really worried about that.

Because she tested positive or because that's just the way it's going for all the kids? One of her roommates did one of our roommates did so they have to spend 10 days in this apartment 10 days um with no human contact whatsoever and they they you know they left them some uncle ben's uh microwavable rice and some chili and they bring up food every two days and i was on the phone this morning trying to see if i could send a package well you can't you said how can't. How can they decide? How can they control that? I don't understand. There are too many people who want to send their kids things in quarantine, so we're not going to do it. At which point I did that. You know, for the amount of money that you people

are charging, you... Yes, exactly. Because it is logistically impossible to take a box delivered by UPS at the door and walk it up three stories. Can't be done. Nothing goes in and nothing goes out. They're very sorry, but an exception has to be made. Now, in the annals of COVID and quarantine and what people have gone through, this is a very minor thing. But it's also emblematic of every single institution that we have bumped up against at this point during this thing that either fails us or turns a cold shoulder what people need. I mean, the vaccine rollout, how's it going where you guys are going? It's almost impossible to tell

here. We have good news. We have bad news. We have our epidemiologist, Mike Osterholm, saying, no, let's only have one shot. Get a lot of people. I mean, nobody knows when they're going to get it. Absolutely nobody really has an idea because you don't get a little piece of paper that says, hello, citizen of Hennepin County, number 7456. You are slated to probably get it at the end of May. Here is the place where you're going to get it make a rate you're in the queue that but no no so where you are well and new york has actually kind of got its act together for the past three weeks um the state and the city mostly because i think both of the chief executives of the city and the state have been kind of sidelined

in a lot of ways i mean cuomo has been absolutely chastened by the news that came out of a couple weeks ago that the actual how he was fiddling with the numbers of the the old people he sent back to rest homes who then died um and the bloom is off the rose there i think which is good so it seems to be moving more quickly this week has been tough because of the snow but um i think that you know know, bureaucrats are put on and bureaucrats and administrators are rule makers and rule enforcers. That's their job. So everything's everything's become more the thing it's supposed to be in even in the most irrational way. So teachers unions are more teachers union than they ever were before. bureaucrats are more bureaucratic than they ever were before. Bureaucrats are more bureaucratic than they ever were before. And I think people are seeing that there's a general kind of freak out from the

managerial people in our lives that isn't, it's simply not echoed in on the street. I mean, most people on the street are kind of cool. I mean, everybody's sort of, I don't know, what do the kids say, the chill in New York City. The people, the bureaucrats, of course, and the teachers unions are lunatic. I was on a meeting, sort of was invited to a town hall kind of ish meeting with a new someone who's running for Manhattan borough president. I mean, I haven't participated in New York City politics at all, but I thought my friend of mine put it together. I thought it was new. And this is Manhattan, the Manhattan borough president election. It's really the the election is between Castro, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. And you're rooting for Trotsky, right's saying about the city's tax base are Republican. That's all they are. They're 100 percent Republican. And so maybe that's a sign that that the mask is off, ironically. starting to see a lot of these bureaucratic supposed to be disinterested bureaucracies is in fact uh little nests of crack pot left wing agitating propaganda machines who don't really

care if your student if your kids are going to school and don't really care if you have to wear five masks and don't really care if you have to stay if they're making you stay inside all they really care about is enforcing their little rules and making sure that your daughter, that none of her friends gets that package and puts it in front of her door and knocks on it. And by the way, your daughter is a young person. She's really, really not in any trouble. It's the old people that are. And why can't she have her package from you? Correct.

She has 10 days in isolation. And again, compared to what other people have been through this year, it's nothing. You know, the fact that her school, her school or her first year at college was torn in half. She had to live in a basement, that she had to do it all virtually

and the rest of it. Then she goes back and she gets stuck in this. These are really minor things compared to it. But cumulatively, when you add up everything that everybody has gone through it's it's this this we don't see the the scratch marks on the human soul that have been inflicted by this we're starting to well in children in the children we're starting to right but they but again they don't care and the message that as rob was saying you get from the teachers you they don't care. And the message, as Rob was saying, you get from the teachers, they don't care. And when they talk about safety, I'm not going to risk my life for all of this and the rest of it.

The idea that nobody can bring a UPS package up to her place because the entire building is suffused with virulent Ebola is stunning to me, is stunning. There was a piece in CNN, and I wrote about this at Ricochet, telling us what we can look forward to after vaccination. And the first question that they answered is, well, can I take off my mask now? And the CNN piece said, well, short answer is no. Let's face it. What you should do is think of your mask as a friend, as a longtime companion that you're going to have to get used to. And that's the world in which they believe that they think people will willingly go and people willingly will not. They absolutely, the idea that now we're being told that after everybody's vaccinated, that we still all have to conform to these protocols, because as the CNN piece put it,

we are still dealing with a deadly disease. That's the term that they used, deadly. Right. And what's weird about it too, is which it is which it is to stump but again yeah yeah but what's weird as the vaccines start are distributed as the rates of infection go down as the the the crisis recedes right now they're doubling down now now we're talking about three masks right we weren't talking about three masks in may right or in april when or in april here in new york city when the hospitals really were stressed out no we're talking about it now as if as if they're worried they're worried this is going to be over and i have and i you know there's a whole bunch of ways to look at it there's the sort of Marxist way. And there's I look at it like I look at the Freudian way as I do now everything. There are people, a lot of whom love this. They love the street sidewalk enforcements.

They love the citizenry, the outrage. They love it all. They love it, and they don't want to give it up. It's been fun for them. No, these are the people who were the blackout inspectors in World War II in a small town in Kansas, where there's absolutely no chance whatsoever of the Nazi the you know the nazi bombers coming over but they would be there to whistle and point and shame somebody who didn't have their blackout curtains up because they love the the ability to adapt and flourish in the structure of constriction um because they get to be on the party i mean again the idea that a box a box a small package could not be had rob peter let me ask you guys if your child was in quarantine for 10 days,

what would you like to send them? Well, as it happens, my child was in quarantine for 10 days at Dartmouth College. Did you send them any food? Did you send them any food? No, no. They were delivering food. It was a slightly different arrangement because she was in quarantine.

She was in a dorm that was set aside for freshmen, and the freshmen were simply not permitted to leave that dorm except under specific circumstances for 10 days. I didn't need to. So they were delivering food every single day. She wasn't in quite the, your daughter's in an apartment. It sounds as though it's a different arrangement, but, but, uh, this is a rare chance for you to participate in a segue. That's why I threw it to you. And apparently you're not looking at the rundown list you didn't know it was coming oh i see i see because we no i missed the queue i missed the queue altogether sad it's sad james meat yeah i would send i would send my child underwear i would if i could meet my child meat but no way to send them meat that's impossible

especially good meat they need protein in quarantine. Come on, Peter, wake up. The thing of it is, here is, I don't know if you're listening to this podcast as we're doing it or in the weekend that we're doing it, then you're thinking, oh my gosh, the Super Bowl is coming up. I got to get some meat because I got some guys coming over. Or if you're listening to this after the Super Bowl, you're thinking next year I'm going to have a party, but how am I going to feed everybody? Well, it's not just the Super Bowl that means meat. It's every single day. If you want to have meat, which we all do, and meat is good. So you got your chips and your dips and your cheese and your crackers, but meat, meat, even if you're not a Super Bowler, even if you didn't have a party, you know what? There is

a reason to celebrate. And that is because, get this, ButcherBox, right? We've been talking about ButcherBox for a long time. We've told you all the wonderful things that they give you. They've given you free ground beef. They've given you free bacon. Get this. ButcherBox is offering one rack of St. Louis ribs, one pack of bacon, and one pack of pulled pork for free in your first box. Yeah, you heard that right. ButcherBox believes everybody deserves high quality, humanely sourced meat, and that everybody includes you. So every month, they send a box of the highest-quality meat for a better price you're going to get at the grocery store, frankly. That gives me more time to spend cooking and sharing delicious meals with family and friends when they come over for events, of course, with masks. Never be without something to cook for dinner because there's always meat in the freezer. You don't have to worry.

One last trip to the grocery store, and you get a better and more affordable selection too. Every month, ButcherBox ships a curated selection of high quality meats right to my house and all the meats free of antibiotics and added hormones. Each box has nine to 11 pounds of meat, which is enough for 24 individual meals or 12 if you're really gluttonous, but not 24. It's packed fresh, shipped frozen, vacuum sealed,

so it stays fresh. You can customize your box or you can go with one of theirs. And either way, you get exactly what you want and you get more. Again, if you're a new customer and get this, free rack of St. Louis ribs, one pack of bacon, and one pack of pulled pork on your first box, free. That's one rack of ribs, pack of bacon, and a pack of pulled pork for free in the first box so go to butcherbox.com slash ricochet that's butcherbox.com slash ricochet and oh we thank butcherbox for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast well uh even though the game's coming up um and people may be listening to this uh afterwards i think you guys are such noted sports experts that the you know the book wants to know where are you putting your money? Tell me again,

who's playing. I was with green Bay all season long. And I have to say, I know. So, so hoping for Brady, right. Hoping for the old guy pulling for the old Rob,

but don't you know, his politics are wrong. I think we're supposed to get a permanent or permutations of, of, of penumbras of his politics. And we're supposed to, we're supposed to hate him, aren't we supposed to, we're supposed to hate him, aren't we?

Yeah, we are supposed to hate him. I mean, he, he is old. I mean, that's the most amazing thing. I mean,

this guy, he is old. I guess I like him. I guess. I mean, it's hard for me to wrap my head around Tom Brady playing for anyone other than the Patriots. So I,

I, that's just sort of a harder jump for me, but I kind of hope he, he, they play it. I kind of, I'm on their side. Cause I,

I feel like he should retire soon because this is going to get that. We're going to start hearing creaks and moans and weird noises from the field as his bones and, tired sinews snap or he's just going to make old guys look bad because no old guy is going to be like him i'm not sure i i has anybody seen giselle bunchkin lately yes yes it's possible that he's absorbing all of her life force and that she's actually just she's a withered husk that looks like... I've just been told that he's 43, but I feel like 43 is for a quarterback. An NFL quarterback is old.

For a quarterback, that's 112. Sure, absolutely. Yes, yes. That's wheelchair age for a quarterback. Hey, if I may, James, shift the topic from sports to your... Actually, one of your favorite topics, which is media. Rob has an absolutely fascinating piece in the current issue of commentary,

in which he argues that television is about to become really interesting. And Rob, you want to explain that thesis? It just fascinated me. I mean, my analogy is when restaurants in New York City have to close or everybody has to move outside, suddenly all the rules about eating outside, how many tables and heaters and all that stuff, all those rules are thrown out and we suddenly are eating outside. So all of the apparatus of Hollywood is designed to keep you from doing the thing that you want to do, right? I mean, we always say that any successful movie or television show is a mistake a mistake essentially it's a it's a the system did not work the system is designed to crush that um however the pipelines are now dry in hollywood i mean there's been a trickle of production for the past 12 18 months 12 months uh and there was a brief resurgence of it in the summer and then it collapsed again and then they'll collapse the beginning of the year so there's not that much to watch and the the question call as soon as sort of evidence of preponderance of vaccinated people or people like me who are coursing with life-giving antibodies

at a certain point there's going to be an argument from the paymasters like just say yes to everything just yes they can make that show they can make that move let's not think about it too much let's not put this in development process let's just make it let's just put essentially put the tables outside on the sidewalk let's let people walk around with cocktails let's just figure it all out later and what that's going to mean is about a year from now maybe a year and a half from now there's going to be a lot of stuff that we're going to be able to watch that did not wasupervised. And some of it's going to be really awful, but some of it's going to be really, really, really interesting.

That's a fascinating idea. And I think, of course, you're right. You would know. But that means that instead of everybody being so very careful and focus testing and, and, and, and tinkering and getting the notes, the notes, Rob, of course, are you saying that we're entering a phase of, of noteless production? Well, not noteless. I mean, let's not, you know, we're never going to go back to each, but we are entering a phase where the, the priority, the first three priorities are going to be get this thing made.

We need something to put on. And that will be enough. That will be enough. I mean, look, people will always chime in because this is a collaborative medium, which I get. But it will be harder and harder and harder and harder and harder to fulfill the pipeline, to fill the pipeline, and also supervise every little jot and tittle, which will be kind of fun, fun to watch. I mean, again, a lot of it's going to be terrible, but some of it will be good.

Terrible perhaps in wonderful ways, though. I mean, there's lots of terrible television that got really good that was choked off very early because it just didn't garner the numbers. And there are all kinds of first seasons out there that litter the landscape that in their second or third might have been wonderful. So I hope that some of this stuff they stick with. The models change, right? I mean, you no longer have to deliver 23, 27 episodes for a season. You can do a limited run of six or eight or nine, 10, like the British model. Yeah, although the British models make any money either. mean yes there will be that but remember the number one shows on every streaming service

are reruns from broadcast television that those are the most popular shows they have they they were and when when um comcast streaming service clawed back the office just to have it on its service right it was a serious blow to netflix amazon right now is experiencing somehow there's a there's a fan base on amazon a huge one for um reruns of malcolm in the middle so there's a you know the seed corn is over here in big audiences you need big audiences to love a show to know the name to know the title you need that title to matter to people introducing a title to people from a standing start is a very very expensive proposition um and it is not a business model um so we'll see uh it will also happen they're also all going to go quickly back to advertising

as i've been saying for the past year that is going to happen because there's just no way for them to make money the way they make they're trying to make it now. No one in the history of the entertainment business in Hollywood has ever had only one income stream, only one revenue path. You collaborate with people who have multiple revenue paths. That's the only way it makes sense. Is there any – you both know the history of the town better than I do. Is there any – well, I'm thinking back to the 30s in Hollywood, old, old, old, old Hollywood. But Reagan used to say, Reagan was in Hollywood, he arrived in Hollywood

in the 30s. I used to know this number. In his first three years, he appeared in something like 21 films. And he used to say they didn't want them good. They wanted them Thursday, which sounds like the same kind of mentality you're talking about now and what did the 30s produce the 30s produced 1939 which was the greatest year hollywood ever had in my opinion mr smith goes to washington the wizard of oz you can go on and on and on people were learning learning how to do it people were learning in that atmosphere i don't i don't know is there a parallel there yeah there probably is a parallel there i mean the difference yeah the the idea was volume and you had an audience that showed up every weekend um and and and every evening so yeah there was a parallel i mean the difference is that um

they they had a factory um that was gonna make a picture no matter what. They already had the assembly line. They already had the assembly line. So now every movie is its own kind of unit, financial unit and physical unit. And so you'd spend three or four months on a movie or even a TV show just getting the deal points set, which of course you didn't have to do back then. At some level, do you regret in that can do at some level do you

do you regret in some way or at some level the end of the studio system and is there any way for a netflix for the big new money to recreate it precisely it just always struck me i'd love to have it yes yeah because people got to know each other and you didn't have this six six months to get the deal done before you can even start casting that didn't happen in the old days right uh no it didn't happen in the old days but mostly it's because the money wasn't as good in the old days for success and success i mean there are people in hollywood right now we're making have hundreds of millions of dollars because they've had some successful tv shows or successful movies that they own um that didn't happen back then i i suspect the problem is that the like everything else is like there is you're fighting for not an one audience like which door you're going to go

into right you know you're we know we're going to see the movies right so which movie are we going to see that's the way television used to be we know we're going to watch tv we got three choices four or three and a half when fox was invented. Right. So really not that much competition back in those days. Right. Rarely you saw you rarely saw a comedy and a comedy competing on a network broadcast primetime schedule. It's comedy in a cop show. And then if the comedy and the cop show were successful in the third network said, well, we're just going to put a news, you know, hour long news on there. Because what's right.

Why? Why fight 2020? Right. Primetime Thursday. At that point. hour-long news on there because what's right why button why fight 2020 right prime time thursday um at that point yes you you you you can you can make a lot of great tv 2020 or whatever the competitive aspect of it now i kind of like right and it feels to me like just what i was talking about earlier with steve krakauer um there's opportunity to get a big audience you just have to swing for the fence. Right now, no one's trying to do that. What they're trying to do is get in that sweet spot between a five and a six,

which means be really, really specific, and you don't mind if you're turning people off. That's not really a – I mean, there's only one person right now who is making a big bet in the other direction, and that person is Rupert Murdoch. And traditionally he's makes piece of pretty good, better. Well, the declined,

the end of the studio system meant the rise of the tour. So we got all these smart guys who were making movies in different ways that paid homage to what was before, but also invented new ways of looking at movies, which is great. You're Scorsese's, your cop is in the rest of it, but I'm with Peter.

There is something about the studio system. And it wasn't that they were learning necessarily in the 30s. I mean, they'd already been making movies for a quarter century. They had the visual vocabulary down pat. They had the technology. It was a question of adapting to sound and becoming more sophisticated and inventing new things. There's no reason they couldn't have done in 1929 what Greg Toland and Orson Welles did in 1939.

Okay, I mean, they could have done it. It's just you had smart guys who came up with new ideas. But what they did have was the assembly line, which most of the time turned out pretty mediocre stuff, genre pictures. But they had a devotion to the genres and you would get your Western, you'd get your wrestling picture, you'd get your crime picture, your cop picture, your detective, your musical,

your romance, all of those things would come out in a regular fashion and they'd all be the same and they'd all have the same people in them. Oh, there's Dick Powell again, but there was a certain sort of continuity of culture that occasionally would produce something marvelous. You can, I mean, Casablanca is my favorite movie, period, because it just is. There are others that I think are better. There are others I love, but I can never not be in love with that movie. And it really is nothing more than the product of the studio system where every single element is perfect. Everything is perfect in that movie. And then, I mean, you can watch them make movies that kind of get close to it, but fail. And then afterwards, you can watch them make the same movie again and again and again and again. We're going to drop, you know, we'll drop Green Street in

this year. We'll have Hedy Lamarr. But they could never recapture the magic of that one. But even when the studio system didn't get magic, they produced something watchable that provided a cultural glue. It was part of the sinew and the marrow of the country and the culture. So it was something about which everybody had an opinion. Everybody had seen. Everybody went to the theater. And if you go on Google Street View now and go to the smallest of towns, no matter where, from Texas to Iowa to California to Maine, every town has this shuttered theater, this small little jewel box that had a wonderful marquee. And they can strip the marquee,

they can paint the thing over, but you can still tell that it used to be this little palace of imagination and memory and fantasy, if only by the placement of the windows that surely once held posters. You can tell. tell and those communal centers those places to which people went are mostly gone and it's it's i mean that's how it works that's how that's how cultures change but it was a lot it was a it was a great loss and while rob's right to say that this new era coming up is going to be really interesting we're still going to be watching it atomized alone in dark rooms with flickering lights um by ourselves so good whoa that was just a downer james in the end i mean it was really it was interesting interesting interesting and then he just fell off an emotional cliff well i'm not gonna i'm not gonna show i don't want to start my weekend that way give me

something here well there's some good stuff on TV. There's absolutely wonderful stuff on TV. And frankly, I feel guilty sometimes that I get bigger and better television sets so that my own little sitting here in Zager and Evans in the year 2025 environment is more preferable than going. TV's not small. The screens just got big. Yeah. The obverse of Sunset Boulevard. The obverse of Sunset Boulevard, exactly.

But still, when I was a kid and watching old movies, I just thought, how does Edith Head have the time to design movies, clothing for every single movie that I see? I mean, you became fluent in two things. You're right. Who did the costumes and what Roman numerals were? I mean, I come from the generation that learned the Roman numerals from Three Stooges movies. Yes, yes, yes. All right, boys. And speaking of the Three Stooges, we should probably leave. This podcast was brought to you not by Three Stooges, no, but by a great, wonderful variety of folk.

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