The Ricochet Podcast - A Roseanne By Any Other Name

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

This week, we are very media centric: first, a few thoughts about the Ingraham-Hogg contretemps, then a deep dive into the Rosesanne phenomenon with noted TV expert Rob Long. After that, it’s out good pal Robert Costa, national political correspondent for The Washington Post and inexplicably a Phish fan (but we still love him). Finally, Niall Ferguson, the Hoover Senior Fellow and the author of... Source

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See JustEat.ie for details. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. But most of all, Lord, thank you for making America great again. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lallex, and today we talk to Bob Cost of The Washington Post and Neil Ferguson about Facebook. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast number 395.

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Rob Long is somewhere in a Faraday cage, unable to speak without a horrible buzzing sound bouncing back to us. But Peter Robinson is somewhere luxuriating in the warm bath of perfect technology, and he's going to tell you why you should join Ricochet. Peter? Thank you, James. Technology is perfect here today. You should join Ricochet because Ricochet is special.

It is conservative and it is civil and fascinating and interesting. And it's only five bucks a month to join the conversation, not only to read what you want to read, but to read all the content and to participate by putting up posts and asking questions and posting comments yourself. I stress, as we do every week, because it's important, it bears stressing every week, that our comments are interesting and intelligent and provocative, but they are also non-disgusting. How is that? We charge five bucks a month partly because we need the money to keep the operation up and running, but partly because that gives us the legal right to toss people out if they misbehave, with the result that we only attract people who are going to behave

and we do not have trolls in our comments. Come to Ricochet, troll-free, fascinating, fun, and you'll learn a load. Five bucks a month. Peter's right, and it's that ability to police the community that makes it civil and happy and a place to go for rest and respite from the usual degradations of the Internet. Now, I don't know if the Code of Conduct, which Ricochet has, would cover me saying this,

but I've always sort of thought, Peter, that Laura Ingraham was a 10-watt bulb in a 50-watt socket, and what's happened this week has not exactly changed my mind a lot. She apparently apologized for taunting one of the Parkland survivors, David Hogg. And this is what Charlie Cook went through as well, where if you take them seriously and argue with them, you're attacking children. You're expected to just simply roll over and assign absolute moral authority, and nothing they say can be challenged. How do you think this went down exactly? What do you think?

I am in the privileged position of having not the slightest idea because when I was traveling, when all of this happened, I missed two world-shaking events. I missed the Roseanne premiere, and I missed the kerfuffle involving Laura Ingraham. And when I did have a moment, finally, to watch a little something on the flight yesterday back, I did not turn to Fox News or News Full Stop. I watched the opening day game between the Giants and the Dodgers. And I am happy, as I'm sure Pat Sajak somewhere is sad that the Giants won. I also add that Laura Ingram is an old, old, old friend.

And so I don't know. I have to recuse myself, James. But will you tell me what I'm perfectly happy to delegate to you the job of saying what happened and what to make of it? Well, I used to listen to her on the radio here when she was on in the morning and um she had a you know the show was lively enough she had a great producer etc but the the quantity of insight that came from it seemingly was small but now she's vaulted into the public sphere because she criticized david hogg and taunted him of taunted is the word that david hogg is the kid the 17 year old parkland survivor okay got it the new york times is saying that she taunted him by virtue of mocking his inability to get into college or whatnot.

And so having been slammed for that, she apologized because some advertisers yanked their stuff from the show. Now, what's interesting to me about this is, I mean, we've been through the deal where we can't criticize the kids because they're kids. You simply have to repeat what they say and take it for granted. What I love is the way that every one of these incidences is now forcing companies to come down one way or the other and take a stand. And when I say love, I mean I hate it. Because now you have to have a running list in your head of which company is good, which one had a social media manager who folded and wanted a virtue signal.

Who took a knee and who didn't? It's fascinating to me, but it's not fun. It's the continued additional politicization of absolutely everything. Well, this week we actually had pro-Trump sitcom TV. This is new, millions tuned in. Rob Long is this beginning of a renaissance where Hollywood will say, we don't know any conservative sitcom TV. This is new. Millions tuned in. Rob Long, is this the beginning of a renaissance where Hollywood will say, we don't know any conservative sitcom writers. Get me some conservative sitcom writers.

What's the impact? Well, I certainly hope that's what's going to happen. I mean, my accountant and I both are planning for that. Look, Hollywood masters the – it's a very fine art that Hollywood has mastered, but it has mastered the art of learning the wrong lesson. Um, the, it'll, it, it will become, uh, the idea that Roseanne is not a pro Trump sitcom. It's a sitcom that simply accepts the fact that a family that is a blue collar white family in the industrial Midwest probably voted for Trump. And if you're going to do a show about a blue collar family in the industrial Midwest probably voted for Trump. And if you're going to do a show about a blue collar family in the industrial Midwest,

you better make sure that there's somebody there who voted for Trump. Now, luckily for the show, Roseanne herself, the actress, voted for Trump. She's a Trump supporter. And all it is, the show is, all the show is really doing is dealing with sort of contemporary family issues in which there are people who voted for Trump. It doesn't have to be pro-Trump. It just has to acknowledge the fact that this is what the – that there is another side. And so if Follett was going to learn any lesson, it shouldn't be put more pro-Trumpers on TV. It should be, if you're going to try to be broadly appealing to a wide swath of Americans, you should attempt to at least address the issues that are central to them.

And this is the lesson that they won't learn, but the only lesson that really matters, and to do it in a funny way. But Rob, you're saying in other words that by accepting the reality you that that hollywood should normalize trump isn't it their sworn obligation to resist every manifestation that says this is possibly normal aren't they supposed to fight that normal yeah that's that that is the problem with the left is that it invents a vocabulary that's nonsensical and then lives by it. But the problem is that it is normal for Trump to be president because he's president.

I was there. I remember watching it on TV. He became president. And the idea that you can come up with a glamorous-sounding phrase to normalize him, to sort of deny the fact that what happened happened is sort of silly and i think part of the problem that people have now which is one of the reasons they're turning off but i think the bigger question the bigger revelation here which is

something that um will be sort of i don't know if anyone viewing will notice uh for at least for another you know six months is that for the past 10 years, we've been told, and we've been telling ourselves in the media business and everyone else has been telling us, that broadcasting is dead, especially emphasizing the word broad.

That's over. There's no money to be made in trying to attract a large swath of Americans who cut across demographic age, race, sex, all those sort of lines. So that's not going to happen in the five million channel infinite broadband, infinite store with universe. That the smart move, if you're Hulu or Amazon or HBO or ABC, is to narrow cast and target

a smaller slice. Because I know what 18 to 39-year-olds want to watch. I know what 25 to 54-year-olds want to watch. I know what those people want to watch. So why try to sort of scattershot my audience? That has been the rule. And then along comes Roseanne, and she gets 18 million viewers for about a 20 share,

which is insane. Now, if that goes down next week, everything I'm saying now, just ignore it. Erase it. But if it holds or even comes close to holding, then what Roseanne has done

is not even resurrect a forum, which is sort of more abundant, which is the traditional multicam sitcom, but also to remind these enormous media businesses that they have been wrong, that they needed to set their sights higher, that they can't narrowcast, they can only broadcast, and if they do it right and they appeal to enough people, there's a giant pot of gold there. The problem is that Hollywood is now not staffed with anybody who can execute that as a plan. So my guess is the broadcast networks will subconsciously force themselves to learn the wrong lesson.

Because the right lesson is, if you go for a big audience, you go to be broadly appealing, you may not win any fancy awards. You may not be in the sophisticated dinner party, but you will instead be very, very, very, very successful and very, very, very rich. And that's enough for some, right? What, being rich or being at a fancy party? No, eventually the respect that you get for having success is sufficient coin of the realm that it will compensate for the social embarrassment you get. I mean, in other words, people will say, yeah, he may have gotten all this power because he put out these sitcoms that appeal to the hoi polloi and the dumb folk. But on the other hand, he's got a lot of power. What am I trying to say here?

Chop that off, Scott. I was trying to unmute myself here. Let me take another run at that, which would be this. Three, two, one. Well, some people will say that people in Hollywood prefer to go broke as long as they are seen as being socially aware, that they would rather trade fame and success for their peers' approval. And what I'm hearing from you is that is not necessarily true, that if somebody realizes that there's an audience out there to be had and gain success from that,

that in Hollywood, the superficial place that it is, that's sufficient social capital to be successful. Well, I don't think it's sufficient, but I know exactly what you mean. I think the problem, the reason that Roseanne and Roseanne, the success of the reboot is so, I think, irritating to people in the television business is because she did what you weren't supposed to be able to do. You know, you weren't supposed to be able to get an audience that large so that you were never asked to get an audience that large. The advertisers were never asking you to do that.

Your bosses were never asking you to do that. But now all of a sudden everybody woke up in the morning after Roseanne and said, Wait a minute. Do you mean to tell me there were 18 million people sitting there ready to watch a half-hour multicam sitcom that was about a blue-collar family and had a lot of social realism to it? We didn't know that. We thought everyone wanted to see quirky single-camera comedies about urbanites or the new girl or Will and Grace or something like that. We didn't know that this was possible and now that we do know

this is possible, now we have to do it and it's really hard. They're going to be coming after you, Rob, now because once they realize they need more conservative stuff, they'll be coming to you. Here's my pitch. I'm thinking of a sitcom, an awful lot like Cheers, but it's called Chairs. And instead of the guy sitting on stools at the bar, they're sitting at chairs around a round table in a bar.

And there's funny characters and a sexy bartender and all that kind of stuff. Let's talk about this later, but right now we've got a podcast to do. Listen, folks, we're going to get to some Washington Insider stuff in just a second. But before we do, we have to tell you about a wonderful new product that's coming your way if you are wise enough to go to MackWeldon.com. MackWeldon, their mission, it's simple, to make sure that all of your basics and beyond are smartly designed and to make sure that shopping for them is easy and convenient. They started from scratch and engineered their very own fabric. I mean, if you're talking about your shirts, your underwear, your socks, this is an engineered-from-scratch fabric to make sure that the design process was not just meticulous,

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I can hear you perfectly. James, if it sets you at ease, you are you. You are entirely yourself. Because it's just the strangest thing. It's like being in a submarine and speaking through a tube. But no such trouble submarine-wise would come to our next guest, Bob Costas, because he is there observing all from the lighthouse of the Washington Post. Bob Costas, he's the national correspondent for the Washington Post

and the host of Washington Week in Review. He's got all the insight of a professional political pundit with just half the calories. And when he's not attending endless fish shows, you can find him on Twitter, at Costa Reports. Bob, sorry about that. I gather there's a whole bunch of little small insults in there that you're expected to react to right now. Fish, seriously?

Airsats, Grateful Dead for the millennial stoner crowd? Fish, really? I love fish. I got into Dave Matthews' band when I was in high school, and I migrated to fish and I've actually seen the Grateful Dead at least the latest version of the Grateful Dead over the last few years I have no apologies they're great American well speaking of great Americans stormy Daniels took the world by something on Sunday and we've heard very little subsequently about it

doesn't seem to have been the bombshell that unnerved the president or took the presidency down. How is Washington dealing with the post-Stormy situation? The Stormy situation is really intriguing because so much of it on the reporting side really comes down to the money and the exchange with Ms. Daniels before the election, Michael Cohen, the president's longtime lawyer. What was that situation? Who paid for it? Where did the money come from? What was the president, then candidate Trump's awareness of this kind of payment? Everything else, infidelity, salaciousness, interesting to a certain person, but the consequences here legally seem to be about that payment with the election. Hey, Bob, Peter here. So Congress is out on Easter recess or spring recess or whatever it's politically correct to call it these days.

What are they going to be hearing when they go home? Here's the question. Is it after Ed Gillespie lost in Virginia, after this string of Republican losses, Ed Gillespie in Virginia and the lunatic's name, whatever his name was, in Alabama, and now the 6th District of Pennsylvania, it looks as though if Donald Trump is the issue, Republicans lose. And in November, Donald Trump will be the issue. So is the town expecting the Democrats to take the House in November? That is the thought, Peter. When I'm talking to both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill,

they say, look, a Democrat now represents Alabama in the U.S. Senate. A Democrat now represents a U.S. House seat in southwestern Pennsylvania. Every day there seems to be a new member of the Congressional Republican Caucus who decides to retire. Look at Ryan Costello in the suburbs of Philadelphia. So the mood music, the whole feeling among lawmakers is that there is a Democratic wave coming. And the question is, what's the extent of this Democratic wave? And the Democrats certainly have liabilities.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi isn't exactly someone that Democratic candidates nationally are rallying around. But President Trump overwhelms all of these races. And so many of these candidates, the Republicans I'm talking to are saying they're trying to run on the tax cut. They're trying to run on the deregulation. But at the same time, they just keep feeling from their polling, from when they're meeting with with voters that this is going to be a referendum on the president. Hey, Bob, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. So this should have been a disaster week for the president with a self-inflicted, right? A million tweets, a tweet storm Sunday night after 60 minutes,

defensive, paranoid, nasty tweets on Monday morning as he's watching Fox and Friends. That didn't happen. If there's someone there, the White House, who's now looking at Donald Trump, the president, his boss, or her boss, and see, when you don't jump into the fray, you have a quiet week.

How did this week become a quiet week for President Trump is what I guess my question. It was quiet in a sense that he still fired the Veterans Affairs Secretary Shulkin with a tweet. And that became a little bit of a drama over the last few days. But it's been quiet because the president is being told by some of his attorneys, because of the nondisclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels, to stay quiet about that so he could try to enforce it at some point if he would like to legally. So there's a legal impetus for the president's quiet when it comes to Stormy Daniels. He thinks she may be speaking out of turn, out of contract, and he may want to enforce that or pursue turn out of contract and he doesn't want to

enforce that or pursue some kind of legal matter at some point so the only time yeah don't you say so the only time that donald trump can be relied upon to show restraint and self-discipline is when he's saving his own neck pretty much it seems i mean he's faced with at least when he's legally obligated or legally suggested to not say much i think the most interesting thing to me about his quiet is that you really see him consolidating the west wing when i talk to people who work there they say it's the president acting as his own spokesman his own chief of staff people have their job titles but it's really the president going back to his form,

the way he used to work at Trump Tower in that 26-floor suite and making decisions on his own, talking to outside advisors, sometimes more than people on the inside. Interesting. Bob, Peter, I heard Peter take breaths. Did you have a follow-up? Are you kidding? I've got dozens for Bob. I always, I've got, but go ahead, James, go ahead go ahead i've got so many just come to me if you run out how's that oh we were talking about the wave then the democrats expect that they're going to

gain power but there are two things that can happen one they can spend that power on impeachment and really split the country or two they can spend that power by saying, all right, we've got him now. Let's get what we want out of him. I mean, just as people say that Bill Clinton was moderated by the Republican wave that came midterm, the Democrats could say, this guy who has dispositionally been a Democrat for many years, we can now work with him and get stuff done. Are they thinking more revenge and impeachment, or are they thinking more, ah, what a wonderful opportunity to get some stuff? A lot's going to depend on what Bob Mueller's special counsel investigation does, because it is intriguing to hear Democrats not really talking about impeachment on the campaign

trail. Yes, Tom Steyer, the big Democratic donor, is airing ads across the country about impeachment, but most Democratic candidates, look at Conor Lamb, Doug Jones, and the kind of red state areas, they're running on economic populism. They're not really running as anti-Trump resistance candidates. And they do see the president as, in part, a non-ideological figure in the sense that he could be willing to do something on guns, gun control, maybe even do some trade measures that they could agree with as Democrats

who have more of that union view. So it's complicated for Democrats. It's a dance because they know their base wants this anti-Trump go for the jugular all the time, but they know the voters out there aren't really itching at this moment for impeachment. Do some want it? Sure. But that's not, so they're trying to balance their base and the moderates they need to win over to take control of the House and Senate. Bob, if Democrats had been in charge last week, this past month, how would the omnibus spending bill have been different? They're already working with Trump pretty closely, aren't they?

And they pushed the Republicans into a corner because they're a bipartisan deal. Yeah. So, OK, listen, Schumer support it. McConnell support it. What's your more domestic spending? There's more focus on the military in this budget than you would have in a Democratic budget. That's for sure. OK, can you explain what Jeff Sessions announced the other day?

No special counsel, but? So there's a clamor among some Republican lawmakers to have a special counsel to investigate different aspects of the Justice Department, the handling of all these different probes and decisions that were made over the last really two, three years, whether it's the campaign or since then the presidency. And this comes down to the text messages scandal at the FBI and different partisan suspicions on the right about who's really running the federal government, who's in charge of the FBI and the Justice Department. But Sessions is trying to split the hair a little bit.

He's moving, the Attorney General's moving to bring in people within the Justice Department to look into these issues, but he doesn't want to name another special counsel because that's a whole other endeavor with its own staff. It's kind of its own island. There's not an appetite by Sessions to do that, knowing how complicated the current special counsel situation is. Bob, a question for you as a journalist. I had a conversation, background here is unimportant, but I had a conversation yesterday with George Will, and George Will said, it is said that the American people are angry. I don't think they're angry. I think they're just exhausted.

And so what we've got here, we've got the IG's report, excuse me, the first thing we have is Comey's book is coming out. Then this is all we've got the IG's report. Ordinarily, my own feeling would be, wow, one huge story after another. What a great time to be selling newspapers or clicks online if you're a journalist. But it occurs to me that just as James said at the open, Stormy Daniels, a porn star, appears on 60 Minutes and talks about an affair with the president. And we've reached the stage where everybody just sort of says, yeah, well. So do you have the feeling that the reading – your readers, your consumers, is the public in some way just inured at this point? Is George Will right that there's a certain exhaustion setting in? Or are we in for a really roiling, fabulous, vivid time of huge stories and wonderful journalism?

I think it can be both. I'm glad for George Will that baseball season has finally started. We have something to distract him. Exactly. I love George Will. He's a great man. He's predicting the Nationals will go all the way, by the way. Yeah, that's the curse for the Nationals.

Every year they get predicted to be the World Series champion, and then they flame out. I love the Nationals. I've grown to love the Nationals. I think your point about exhaustion is right. I mean, it feels like last year was a decade, just in terms of the lived experience for all of us, going through the different news cycles.

But I think it's also a great time for journalism in the sense that accountability journalism is getting a lot of attention. Political reporting is getting a lot of attention. I can't imagine if Secretary Clinton had won, would there be this level of engagement with readers and audience? I doubt it, because there wouldn't be this level of news.

And I don't pick the winners, but it's definitely a bigger story. Scandal, controversy, inter-party tension, cross-party tension. It's just, every day is wild. And even on a quiet, so-called quiet week, as Rob was saying, there comes the fire in by tweet. Who knows what happens today? Well, they may be reactivated today, journalistically, but give them a Democratic administration. We might expect a little bit more quiescence. Rob, you had a question? a debate, which wasn't a debate, but a conversation between Mickey Kaus, the fully reconstructed former New Democrat, now sounds a lot like an old Republican, and Ann Coulter, who also sounds a lot like an old Republican.

And they were complaining about Trump's betrayal on immigration and, in general, his many, many problems, and they both predicted that he would be primaried. It is very difficult for a president, a Republican president anyway, even if he wins the primary, which he usually does, even if he beats the challenger in New Hampshire, as George W. Bush did in 1992, to then win the general. So the question is, who, if anyone, is going to primary Donald Trump? And what do you think the Democrat response to that will be? I think Ohio Governor John Kasich, certainly looking at Iran, he's on the cover of the

Weekly Standard this week, talking about it, calling the headline for the John McCormick piece, I believe it's a party of one. And I think the challenge for him is going to be, does he run as a Republican or not? Because is there really, is there a coalition there to get behind a John Kasich? I mean, he struggled in New Hampshire during 2016, did okay, but came nowhere close to winning. I think you're going to see some conservatives, kind of the never-Trump types, more the ideological movement conservatives, maybe someone from a think tank. Someone's certainly going to run, I think, against the president from that kind of traditional right perspective.

But I just don't see so many Republicans in Congress, whether you want to say co-opted or aligned, they are... At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March.

Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie. With Trump, and they think they need Trump to win. And there's not, unless there's some kind of firing Mueller episode where the whole party breaks, you just see time and time again, whether it's Stormy Daniels or the latest outburst or firing,

the Republican Party has stood with President Trump. It has changed the whole party. And the party that people think that Evan McMullin and his independent campaign in 2016 people thought that kind of the AEI types or Hoover Institution or just George Will, Paul Ryan, that these people still commanded political capital. I think they command respect as political figures, but their political capital is debatable in this kind of upheaval that we're all living through. Hey, Bob, what about Tom Cotton of Arkansas? I mean, he's worked so closely with the president on immigration.

He has made it clear repeatedly he's with the president on foreign policy. I don't see any move by Cotton, the primary president in trouble. If anything, he and Senator David Perdue of Georgia are the closest allies of the president in Congress. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. What about Ben Sasse, Bob? I mean, Sasse has been so limited in his criticism of the president. He seems to write these books and write a Facebook post and essays where he dances close to the line of mentioning the T word Trump. He doesn't. He just instead talks in vague terms about being an adult and he wins media plaudits for it. It's understandable what he's doing. He's creating this kind of mature conservatism that is going to be part of probably his public profile for decades to come.

But even he recognizes the risk of going directly at a president who relishes fights, and he's not done so. Got it. Right. But we're talking about a scenario in 2020 after what, if it's a blistering midterm and it looks like a tough Senate, a tough Senate for the Republicans to hold, what's the loss? Isn't the fact that they are ideologically close to the president helpful? You're saying if the president doesn't run for re-election? No, if the president does run for re-election, if you primary him, you could primary him. Not that I'm a moderate to his conservative, not that I am conciliatory to his true believing, but that I am everything that you like about Trump except the fleas.

Someone will do it. I think they all look at the experience of the 15, 16, or whoever ran last time, and diminished, reputation shredded is that they all know they've all dealt with president Trump. Now in the oval office, they've dealt with him behind the scenes. He can be vulgar, brutal. And that if you want to run against him,

fine, but your career is on the line, your reputation too. Right. Bob, go ahead, Rob, go ahead, Rob. Rob, entertain your notion. Where does Ben Sasse win

a primary? Where? I guess what I would say is he doesn't have to win, right? A sitting Republican president who is primary, even if he wins, even

if he trounces the opposition, has a very hard time in the general. If the Democrats... That's true. Look at George H.W. Bush, 92. Right. Exactly. I mean, Nixon was the one who managed to pull it off. But if you accept...

I mean, this is a fantasy. I'm talking this is pure science fiction I'm about to pitch to you. But if you accept the fact that the Democrats aren't idiotic and don't nominate a crackpot left-winger from some university faculty lounge somewhere, and they do nominate a sort of a normal – kind of a normal American for once in a long time and run on that normalcy, doesn't it look better for them? I mean, does it look better for them and better even for the Republican that challenges Donald Trump in the primaries who now has a jump on 2024? Yeah, I guess so.

I mean, if you want to run to find the party for the future, that's fine. But I think the party, there's a lot of people in the party who I cover who think everything's going to somehow go back to normal when Trump's gone. And maybe that's true, but it's just like,

I believe that if you run a Ben Sasse or a Tom Cotton, Trump will be just like the fever dream that everyone in the up with one person who's willing to do it, who might be willing to do it just as an act of political hygiene, as he would frame it in his own mind, and that is Mitt Romney. Sensible? I mean, plausible? Yes. Look at Romney running in Utah. He made a statement a couple days ago saying he's actually more to the right on immigration than President Trump.

I mean, that's not exactly a pitch to the center. But maybe he's recognizing. I think Romney always entertains the idea of being president. And Romney has the highest stature in the party. No, he does, right? No, no. You're right. Of course.

Of course. Of course. Actually. One more philosophical. I think Romney is more viable than a sass or a Cotton because Romney has already been a nominee. He has national stature. He could command attention. Right.

Hey, one more just philosophical question. president or a Republican candidate who didn't have the moxie to run against Trump. I mean, any Republican who is shying away from that fight seems like they're probably not fit to be in the Oval Office, where courage is really, I think, probably one of the chief characteristics you have to have. Is that a fair assessment? I mean, the fact that they're cowering away from the bully suggests they shouldn't be President Eden. And if they don't have true celebrity appeal,

I mean, I don't believe any other Republican could have won in 2016 in Wisconsin or some of these other states, like Michigan, without kind of celebrity populism. i mean i people were entranced by when i was covering the campaign and it wasn't about him being a republican and they didn't like republicans and i think republicans have to consider that's a huge thing for a lot of people they want change agents they want celebrity populism they want someone who's going to be a

hammer to the institutions they think have failed them i, that's what they're seeking. It's just, it's not Republicans nor Democrats really. I mean, Bernie Sanders is technically an independent, but he's a declared socialist. Bob, I have a last question for you. We know you've got to go because you've got a town to cover. Here's the last question. Presidents tend to get one year to put in place any policy changes. Even Ronald Reagan got his tax cut and then sort of sat back to see what would happen. If it would work, if the tax cut worked and he got economic growth, he'd get a second term. It worked out. So is Trump on the policy front?

Are we all done? Is now all the action moves to scandal and elections? True, false? For this year? Yes, we're done. We're done. Got it. Okay. Maybe a judicial nomination process if there's a Supreme Court vacancy, but otherwise, no.

Infrastructure's going nowhere. Immigration deal's going nowhere. The budget's been passed. It's done. Fact assessed. Well, that's finality. It's done. Fact assessed. Well, that's finality. Okay, well, then on to the next presidential election. And, Bob, when you say that you'd never seen that kind of populism before until you saw what Trump was doing,

I don't think you've even begun to consider what a Kasich-Crystal, Bill-Crystal team-up would be like. I mean, I can't wait to cover it. It'll be fantastic. If not a Will-Crystal. Bob, thanks. can't wait to cover it. It'll be fantastic. If not a Will Crystal. Bob, thanks. We'll see you on Twitter. We'll see you on the television. We'll read you in the paper. Thanks for being on the podcast. Bob, thank you, man. Thank you. We are kidding and joshing Bill Crystal, of course. I love him, but there are times when on Twitter he is I just I look and I think Bill, as they say in the rap world sometimes you're straight up tripping um

what's he done lately james oh there was some little uh um i don't think there was any presidential talk but he was i mean some of it's in jest but some of it is just, as you might say, hate and comfort to the other side. I do not live my life looking at Donald Trump as the bellwether of my happiness, and sometimes I think in Washington, D.C., people do. Rob, you were going to interrupt there because you felt that a segue was en route and it was your duty to ruin it? No, not at all. No, it wasn't at all. I'm just saying that what I would like is I would like for – I would be great if – I mean if somebody who's straight-up tripping, as it were, did in fact take a trip. It would be probably useful if a lot of those people in D.C. did actually get out, go on a vacation or something. I wish there was some way for them to do that. There clearly is not. It is impossible for them to do that. But were it not impossible, that would be them to do that. But were it not

impossible, that would be what I would recommend. But anyway, sorry, you were saying? This is sort of an assist on your part to help me, as though I am some aged person who needs to take your hand to go up two or three steps Hillary Clinton-like lest I fall. I need your help to get to the commercial.

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Find your perfect vacation rental, tripping.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to our friends at Ricochet for sponsoring this, the tripping.com. I had that completely backwards. I spoonerized it, but take it in your head, cut and paste, turn it around. You know what I mean. And now we bring to the podcast, Neil Ferguson, senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and the Center for European Studies at Harvard. He's published 14 books, the latest of which is The Square and the Tower, Networks, Hierarchies, and the Struggle for Global Power. Welcome to the podcast, sir.

My pleasure. Peter, you were going to ask about Facebook. Peter Robinson, as you know, is an avid Facebook user. And so he's, ever since I read Orwell, I thank God that I didn't grow up as a citizen of Airstrip One. However, in your home of London, there are now more cameras per capita than in any other place on the earth. And in your new home of Northern California, I'm delighted to say that Neil and I are now colleagues at the Hoover Institution. This is the place where the technology is being produced. The free world is converging on 1984 almost faster than – well, more than the Soviet Union ever did. And this gives Neil Ferguson the queasies?

It does, although it's not so much the cameras I worry about. It's the fact that the telescreen is in our pockets in the form of smartphones, and nothing in Orwell led us to expect that we would volunteer to be under constant surveillance. Nor did Orwell foresee that it would in fact be the profit motive as opposed to totalitarianism that would lead us into a state of being under permanent surveillance. So I went back to 1984 to remind myself what Orwell says about the telescreen. And when I came across the word face crime in the midst of this great scandal about Facebook's leaking of our data here, there, and everywhere. I thought, that's just perfect, and face crime is my word of the week. Rob?

Well, Neil, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. So you mentioned face crime, and that leads us to some kind of legal action and regulation, and you've suggested that the business model of Facebook will have to be, it will be radically different. And even Mark Zuckerberg has suggested that there should be some kind of regulation. Doesn't that worry you? I mean, regulation by whom, but one of the things we've learned about regulatory agencies is that they

have very little understanding of the complexities of the industry that they regulate, as we discovered that in 2008. Do you think there's a regulatory agency or even a public that understands at all what the technology is that Facebook's using? Well, we already have regulation. It's just that the regulation is inconsistent. We have legislation that is inconsistent. If you go back to the 1996 Communications and Decency Act, the Telecommunications Act, it sets up this completely anomalous state of affairs where technology companies like Facebook are treated differently from content publishers, media

companies. Even although Facebook is now clearly the biggest content publisher on the surface of the earth, they're exempt from any liability for the content that appears on the platform. That looks like an anachronistic exemption to me now that Facebook is amongst the biggest corporations in the world. I think it's a false dichotomy to say the choice is between regulation and no regulation. The choice is between smart regulation and dumb regulation. Same was true in the financial sector back in the period before the crisis. There was plenty of regulation, it just didn't work. And I think if you look at the situation

we have today, it can't possibly be a sustainable state of affairs that a handful of companies know more about the citizens of this country than the citizens themselves and are using the private data of citizens to enrich themselves on a spectacular scale. Nor can I think we simply live with the state of affairs that 80% of Americans now consume news via either Facebook or Google. And that gives enormous political power to those companies. The newsfeed algorithm and the Google or YouTube search algorithms are the most powerful editors in the world. And they determine the kind of news that you see and I see if we rely on Facebook or Google to filter the news for us. So I think we should stop kidding ourselves that we can somehow leave things as they are.

The only question in my mind is, what do you do? Do you do antitrust? Do you break up these companies because they're just too big? I don't think that's the answer. Do you increase the power of the FTC? I'm not convinced that that's the answer, though. I think the FTC is about to come down hard on Facebook. I agree.

But the third option, I mean, the third option is clearly to give the courts some more and individuals some more standing in the courts. It's very hard to take action against these companies. For example, take Dennis Prager, who's currently suing YouTube because some of the content on his website has been marked restricted for obviously political reasons. I wish him luck in that lawsuit, but it's a very David and Goliath type operation to try and sue them. So I think we have three options, but we should stop kidding ourselves that the status quo is okay. Dennis Prager is already... Go ahead, James, sorry. No, Peter, ask your Sorry. No, Peter.

Ask your follow-up, Rob. Well, it isn't – are we talking about two different things here? It's the way where Facebook and these companies are using your information, the information of the individual, and the fact – coupled with the fact that they often – they're often a conduit for lies. It's awfully hard to sue a media company for lying. I mean, that would be, that would really go to the heart of their business model. But it isn't hard to give, as I think Zuckerberg is suggesting, to give more transparent tools to the users of these free services to reserve their privacy and their pathways, which is really what these algorithms measure, for private or to shroud some of them in permanent mystery.

I mean, isn't that the market solution? Give the consumer more control over the intellectual property? There's only one issue, and the issue is that Facebook and Google and other network platforms have harvested astounding amounts of data about individuals. And on the basis of that data, they make money from advertising. And advertisers are extremely anxious to advertise through platforms like Facebook and Google because of the precision with which they can target their adverts. And that precision is based on the user data. Now, it doesn't matter really whether you're selling lemonade or

political propaganda, you're going to use these platforms because they're tremendously powerful. And the problem is that that power, when it comes to the realm of politics is very clearly open to abuse, even unintentional abuse, if the algorithm is set up to send people ever more extreme versions of the views that they started by liking. And that is clearly what goes on on YouTube at the moment. And to some extent, I think it happens on Twitter, too. So I don't think it's two issues. And I think to say there's a market solution to all this is a little naive with all due respect. The reality is that the companies of Silicon Valley have largely been left to regulate themselves to an extent which is really remarkable. And what have they done? Built monopoly businesses, boasted that they were building monopoly businesses, and then used the data of users with a reckless disregard, even for the regulation that was imposed on them. It's clear to me, I think it will be very clear to the FTC,

that Facebook didn't abide by the decree of 2011. And who knows who has the data now, because it wasn't just Cambridge Analytica who took advantage of this enormous hole in Facebook's privacy rules. I should imagine the great many bad actors took advantage of it. And the tip of the iceberg is all we're currently seeing. The market's not going to fix this because a natural monopoly has emerged in social networking. We are going to have to do something either in the realm of legislation or in the realm of regulation to constrain the companies before they abuse their power anymore. They have already abused it. Do you think they're

just going to stop? Neil, James Lilac's here in Minneapolis. I work for a newspaper, so I have all sorts of kaleidoscopic reasons to loathe Facebook and the way they scrape traffic, the way they take content. But that's not something that we can necessarily regulate. If we put down laws that say they have to have a very simple, transparent EULA so everybody knows what they're doing, they have to have opt-in to everything that possibly gives an inkling of your personal data to the company. If we construct that wonderful device in which nobody feels like they're actually sitting in the panopticon, well, bring it back to 1984, which you mentioned before, when Winston Smith was astonished that O'Brien could turn off the television, when he had that meeting to give him the copy of the New Dictionary, and he turned off the telescreen.

And Winston Smith was, you can do that. The thing is, today, nobody wants to turn it off. It's too useful. It's too ubiquitous. So we can regulate it however we want to protect data and privacy. But the fact is, it's still going to be this huge information conduit in people's rooms. But never once has it ever, in my estimation, changed anybody's mind. Who was a Hillary person who voted for Donald Trump because all of a sudden the algorithm started giving them particular memes?

Is it indeed that effective, is my last question. Well, that's actually the wrong question. The question is, who was a Hillary Clinton supporter who didn't turn out on November the 8th, 2016. If you talk to the Facebook insiders, I had think separately of the Russians who were taking out Facebook advertisements, was to suppress turnout amongst Hillary supporters. And I think it worked. And anybody who thinks deeply about what happened in 2016 knows that the crucial variable was, in fact, the no-shows of people who had been Obama supporters four years before. And the efforts that the Facebook advertisers went to to try to discourage people,

I think were really an extremely important part of what happened then. So I would say, to put it really simply, that what we saw in 2016, not only in the United States, but also in the UK in the case of Brexit, revealed very clearly the excessive political power that Facebook has now acquired. It's openness to abuse by bad actors. And I don't think anything that has been proposed by Mark Zuckerberg or his lieutenants so far makes a whit of difference. That is still the business model, selling advertising, taking YouTube where the content comes from that they're seeing. And we're a long way away from having fixed the problem. In my view, nothing much has changed. And Zuckerberg himself admitted that in his interviews last week when

he noted that there were almost certainly bad actors playing the same kind of games this year as there were two years ago well with the clocks are striking 13 so we have to let you go thank you for joining us today on the podcast we hope to have you again soon been my pleasure neil thank you thank you very much. Bye, everybody. Bye. And we have you there, Rob. Rob, are you in New York? I am in New York.

You are in New York. And Peter, you are in California. I am indeed. Right. So California, verdant place, overflowing with produce. Rob in New York, which, of course, everything is sent there because it's the center of the universe. You've got to consider me here in March in the middle of the continent. Do you know how brown it is around here? Do you know how gray and depressing

and what a raw scrape it is? The idea that you would actually see something like a fresh green bean is a startling idea. But the other day, I got, oh, probably 50, 60 of them dropped right off at the door. Oh, great. I had to go to the supermarket for those. You did?

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And my dad saw a market opportunity, saw a niche of the independent guys who were getting hosed at the big truck plazas because they didn't belong to the big fleets. And he said, let's give the independent guys the discount. Well, so what he loses in that he gains in volume and there's inside sales the guys come into the station and buy the jerky and the beef and the rest of it and they spread the word until he's draining the diesel tanks every single day now because the guys who come in so the other go ahead but your dad has a place it's big enough for the this is the kind of place where the trucks park overnight. Is that, he doesn't,

we don't have a facilities for them to park overnight, but they can pull in and gas. Got it. Okay. Got it. So he's telling me that this is compensating for the loss of the diesel business that they had because they fill the trains, the trains that come from the ports on the West and head East.

They stop in Fargo at two, three o'clock in the morning. And our guys go out there and fill them up with diesel, which itself is an interesting story because there are pollution control agents that view them from space. There's a satellite that interrogates the site to make sure that there's no spillage, so they have to drag charcoal mats out. I mean, it's just insane. But the diesel, the train business had slowed down in the last couple of years because – and I said, really, why? And he said, well, there just wasn't as much traffic.

The economy was soft. The last two years of Obama, the transport of goods had really diminished. But he said in the last year, it's picked way up and it's fast and it's snappy again. The trains are moving. So all of these little things, the little ways are about the economy, the little signs and trickling down, you don't get until you talk to somebody who's got a niche. And their niche will tell you so much about the behavior of people and the way things are out there in flyover countries. Absolutely fascinating. Those little indicators, you know, it used to be that those little indicators would – some guy would be there and would telegraph back or send a telex back to the financial markets.

Yes. I saw 27 more trucks bunkering or fueling than I did last month. Things are picking up. Yeah. And now it's, well, also as I was driving through Minnesota, I noticed that a gas station that had been just an empty blot, just this closed, sad, dusty soap window thing for the last three or four years is open again, which is a sign in this small town. And in another small town, you can tell that empty windows had filled up, and there was a sense of, there's a little brightness and crispness to the main street.

And to go back to Fargo, and of course Fargo is still booming, and still building, and still rising. So it's, the people who, if you spend all of your time, I'm sorry you guys, you coastal elites. I know that Rob at least makes a point of getting out across the driving, traveling Charlie thing. And Peter, you get out. Yesterday, so one story from the middle of the country, Austin, Texas. I had a little time before going to the airport, so I did a jog.

Well, actually, I reached the stage at which I did a hobble around the campus of the University of Texas. And there was a student plaza where there were tables set up to recruit students for this, that, and the other. And the University of Texas is a university. So there was a table there for some sort of feminist pro-abortion – I don't know what it was, but it was there, the sort of thing. I barely registered because it's at every university. But this was Texasas and the next table was sign up for bible study god bless the middle of america we rarely think of austin texas is this

classic americana location but there are kids there from there are kids there from the texas henderlands there are kids there at the texas hender There are kids there from the Texas Henderlands. It's Texas, baby. I love that state. One of the things that I got when I was home, I asked my father if he had any old photo books that I could take and scan, and he found one that belonged to my grandfather's sister. She'd gone out to

visit her sister, who was a schoolteacher in Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, out in the Badlands. It's 1911 this is wow yeah so wow so civil civilization is just taking a hold here they got a brick school house which they're very proud of they've got a downtown which is not much but they're it's it's when you look at these pictures and you see two of them out they're posing with guns they're out in the fields,

and the woman, Lily, the sister, the school teacher, has got a rifle, and she's aiming it just because this is what we have up here for sport. A picture today, which if you took it to school today, the picture would get confiscated, and you'd be wrong to tell of your great-great-grandmother. Yeah, right.

The picture, and this is the school teacher who's actually in the photograph holding the picture. But when you look at a porch, a screen porch on a house in the middle of nowhere, and it's machine-turned with all these exquisite little details, where they had nothing, but they brought with them as many of the little fineries and trapperies of civilization as they could. And from that sprung the state and the culture and North Dakota. But they brought with them as many of the little fineries and trapperies of civilization as they could. And from that sprung the state and the culture and North Dakota. And I'm looking at the pictures now of 107, eight years ago, and the faces look remarkably familiar to what I saw when I went home. Well, I mean, at that point, the state had only been a state for 15 years or 20 years. Not that long, right? Oh, sure. I 1911, there were...

I mean, it's amazing to think about how... Go ahead, sorry. No, it's just in 1911, there would have been plenty of people around who remembered the Indian Wars. There would have been Civil War veterans still around in North Dakota. There would have been people who remembered

plowing the... Plowing the... What is it called in the prairie? Not the topsoil, but plowing for the first time virgin land in those days. The field. 1911, here's how young the country is. Were you struggling in the prairie? Not the topsoil, but plowing for the first time, virgin land in those days. The field. 1911, here's how young the country is. Were you struggling for the word field?

No, there's a word for the – it's not – no, no, no. There's a word in the prairie. Plowing that dirty stuff where my salad grows. 1911 was the year Ronald Reagan was born. That's how young the country is. Yeah, it's amazing to think that. But I would just push back a little bit on the coastal elites issue, because I think if you're kidding, if you are on, I know, of course, but I mean, for that same metric that you noticed

about a roadside diesel fuel as an indicator of economic activity, if you're living on the coast and you want to see your version of that, go to the nearest port and see if it's working at night. See how many shifts the Longshoremen's Union is working. If you're in Southern California, go to Long Beach or Seattle or the Baltimore Port, which isn't that busy, but is still – or Savannah. You're right. It's amazing what you can see. All the information you need to know about the American economy is right there.

I feared that you were going to say, if you're on the coast, you can go to Soho, and if there's a Dolce & Gabbana store that's opened up in that place, it was empty for six months. James does not stop. James does not stop. But we must in a second. However, we have to say happy Easter to everybody.

We have happy Easter, happy season, you know, happy pastel bunny season to those people. What does it mean? Divorce it from all cultural constructs. But is it time with the family, you guys? Are you importing the family, going elsewhere? We'll have three of the five kids at home. We'll go to mass someplace, and then we're going up to San Francisco and just finding a place to eat. We may end up having an Easter feast in Chinatown.

Dim sum. Yeah. And, Rob, you're in New York, so godless New York, so you'll be going to the ball and Balthazar temple, right? No, my brother and his family are unexpectedly coming in today, so we will gather. They're going to spend Easter in Connecticut with her family, and

I, of course, will go to I will probably I don't know if I'll go to I don't know if I'm going to get to church today. It's Good Friday when we're recording this, but I will definitely be there tomorrow night for the – Easter in Connecticut. Easter, yeah. Easter in Connecticut.

I love that movie. All right, guys. Everybody else, it's been wonderful. Blessed weekend to everybody, and we'll see you next week, and we'll see you all in the comments. Oh, by the way, if you would really like to help, you can join. $2.50 a month, cheap. HelloFresh.com, Tripping.com,

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incredible food, and a place to stay. Your life is made easier by Ricochet, and it'll be made more civil and kind, and you'll be amongst friends if you just join two, cheap, two, 50 a month. Gentlemen, it's been fun as ever. We'll see you

next week here at Ricochet on 3.0. Sod. Happy holidays, fellas. Sod is the word for which I was searching. Sod. Next week, boys. Sod off, Peter. Ricochet. Join the conversation.