The Ricochet Podcast - Ancient Highs and Lows

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

This week we move from the pits of a senseless war to the mount of the royal jubilee, and cover quite a bit of terrain in between. Our first guest is exiled Soviet dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev, whose extensive knowledge of Vladimir Putin is tough to match. We get his take on the man and his motivation; how the supposed mastermind of intelligence operations became the victim of Russian disinformation... Source

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This nation will rise up. Live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. For me, too, inflation. When we talk about the gas prices right now, this is indeed Putin's gas hike. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks. Today we have Yuri Yaryamageev on Russia and a special royal guest. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 596. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis. It's a beautiful day here.

And I'd like you to join Ricochet. And you say, why would I want to do that? If it's such a great thing, why don't Peter and Rob show up for the podcast at the same time? Well, they have. It's been a few weeks, but we're all back together. And happy to have you at Ricochet.com, where you too can be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. Peter, Rob, welcome back. We're all together again. How are things where you are, briefly, now that anybody cares, but we have to, you know, go through the motions of, you know, pretending that we're all settling down to a little chat here with scones and tea and the rest of it. Where I am, it's sunny, clement, and miserable.

I just tanked up $6.97 a gallon. Good Lord. $6.97. Now, we have to say, you're paying the California premium. Correct. I am, but it didn't used to be that big a premium. No. No. Yes. I don't expect it to be as high anywhere else in the country. But honestly, as that numbers turned faster than I've ever seen them turn before, I thought to myself, our

several times guest on this podcast, Mr. Schellenberger, who's running for governor against Gavin Newsom, may very well have a chance. Now, enough people in this state are going to be—right, people tank up, and they get angry when they tank up. There were no smiling faces at the gas station this morning. They don't just get angry when they tank up. They get angry when they buy groceries. The other day, I was looking at the price of eggs, which appeared to have doubled. I was looking at—I mean, I'm now foraging in ways at stores that i know do this and do that so i can get this at that time because i love that image everything every baseline for the because i do the grocery shopping and i

know what things cost every baseline price is just leaped way up and it ain't coming down so you take those two things together and rob do, do you think that President Biden is justified in his anger that he's not getting enough credit for doing the things that he's done to make America better? Well, you never it's never a good position politically to be saying, I'm not getting the credit I deserve. That's not the that's not that is always a sign of weakness. It was a sign of weakness in past administr administrations even very recent ones and it's a sign of weakness now you don't want to be doing that you want it to be obvious um the the the question is i mean just so you take take gas that gas is a perfect good example i used to go drive the dog to the beach up in malibu when i lived in la every week. And it just so happened that that was when I was needing to fill up gas.

And I filled it up on PCH and it was always expensive because, well, the gas along that way is expensive because there's only one gas station and it's hard to get there, et cetera, et cetera. PCH, Pacific Coast Highway for Californians. Exactly. And then you occasionally you'd say, well, forget that

i'm gonna just go over the hill and get go in the valley on the 101 freeway and get it tanked up in thousand oaks or calabasas where there's a gas station every 20 minutes every 20 seconds i mean um and that wasn't that much cheaper because california's got its own little cocktail of gas that's entirely formulated by environmental lobbies. So the question is for the American people, for the Californians, for American people in general, you know, when the prices go up and they include that weird premium we have for federal subsidies and for the special environmental stuff, are they going to realize that this is a process that's been going on a long time and unroll it you know california so they were smart would roll it back so yes we hope that there we can talk about covering schellenberger soon but my hope is that people connect these things it's not just putin it's not just stupid biden writing checks to everybody it's also this when we're rich it's easy to say

yes sure put a little gas tech oh sure we should have our own thing well it's fine we should all that stuff it's easy to say but when it starts to pinch what i hope is that it's a let me here's my analogy and peter interrupt me any minute um covid i believe i still believe this very strongly covid revealed in the stress it put on parents and students revealed just how broken the public education system is in America. Private is too, but that's, you know, hey, you pay your money, you get what you pay for. seem to be some pushback political social cultural pushback um from that and i hope that there'll be the same pushback now that we realize that we've been living in fantasy land thinking that we can have everything we want and we can kind of shrug our hands on shrug our shoulders ah what the hell you know put up you know more regulation better um and we realize there's a cost to that and i what i hope is that there's this revolution in America, cultural and political and environmental and all sorts of things that brings us back to normal.

It's coming. Back to Joe Biden. He has three isn't. The other is that, for reasons known best to his advisors, he simply, yes, I guess I Irish guy from Scranton. I grew up close to Scranton. I know Scranton, and it was a town where Irish people and Russians and Ukrainians and Poles went down into the mines, and they did that filthy work, and they came up dirty and covered in coal dust every day to make better lives for their kids. They were patriots. They were New Deal Democrats. They were suspicious of employers for good reason. They believed in unions, but they were patriots. They went to church on Sunday, overwhelmingly Catholic, and they paid attention to what bishops said. All right, that could have been Joe Biden. He's given himself out to the left, to the woke progressives. That's irreparable.

And this is what just occurred to me the other day for the reason that Rob pointed to. What? Hey, what's the message? He doesn't actually know how anything works. I looked him up on Wikipedia. He spent about two and a half years in the private sector practicing law. The rest of his professional life, and I mean the entire rest of his professional life, has been in government as a legislator. So he has no understanding of the kinds of tradeoffs and imperatives that drive forces in the market sector. He just doesn't know how much of America works. And when he was vice president, he said, well, no, he spent eight years as Obama's vice president. Look, I worked for a vice president. They're a lot closer to being legislators. They have talking jobs. Joe Biden is now two years into the first doing job as opposed to a talking job

that he's ever had in his life. He doesn't know how the country works. He doesn't know how the executive branch works. All was before, all his professional life, he's been able to talk his way out of political problems. And it just won't work. Not this time. So, we're stuck with a guy who is, all these columns that keep coming out with greater or lesser degrees of at least putative friendliness. If only the president would do this. We don't, even conservatives saying, we only have one president at a time, it's important for him to rally to do this. It's not going to happen. We have a president who is just broken and we have to hope for the best for the next two two and a half years until somebody

else takes that job i think it's true i mean this is exhibit a for why uh senators in general are terrible presidents they just all they know how to do is talk and blab and blather um but this guy especially seems so rudderless and the white house seems so undirected it's such a strange thing you know i'm always i'm amazed by the democratic party in general because it's really the american politics is not that complicated a mousetrap really you just you know the republicans were always cornered in this terrible position of having to say like mean things like well we have to cut taxes on business and we you know we have to uh raise money to fight the commies and all that stuff. And the Democrats could say things like, hey, we're worried about what's in your lunch pail.

Right. But they seem to have really gone off the beam. And it's just it's like when you know when you're I think it's like when you're watching one of those lab rat mazes and you just can't believe the rat is so dumb that you can't figure it out you know there's a dumb rat and a smart rat and it just is like watching it from the sidelines if it wasn't you know we weren't all subjected to it in living in this country as americans it'd be it'd be almost comical to watch the democratic party try to uh fumble its um three point lead they have the White House, the House, and the Senate, and they still

can't get it together. And the formula is not that complicated. The cheese is over there. They're going for the electric shock again and again. The cheese is right there. All we have to do, we have to ask you to not be weird. Just don't be weird for like

a year. Just try not being weird for a year. You're asking people to give up their identities, their entire intellectual, emotional, personal identity. They're still worried about what's in your lunch pail, but it's no longer the quantity of it. They're concerned about whether or not you've got meat in your lunch pail because that's destroying the planet. They're worried about whether or not you've got meat in your lunch pail because that's destroying the planet. They're worried about whether or not you have some sort of factory farm. They're worried about things that they didn't used to be worried about because we had the luxury to just dream of this new world that we were going to be moving into. Biden himself speaks of the cost of gas as being part of this incredible transition that we're making, even though we're making no transition. But it's like we elected a senile wizard who knew no tricks, and his entire staff

consisted of alchemists who never really figured out that alchemy didn't work, but they just, well, if we have an opportunity to try alchemy, then we can do it. So they're all in there now trying to turn lead into gold, and it doesn't work because it's nonsense. The whole transitional element that they wanted to do for us was economic, cultural, political, sexual, social. They came in with this whole brave new world that we were supposed to get in. They're just saying a stun that the rest of us haven't gone along with it. But when, Rob, you say they used to be worried about that guy with the lunch pail, he doesn't matter anymore. Because if he doesn't come along willingly

to all of these new concepts and these new reorderings, these fundamental transformations that Biden and Obama are always talking about, then he simply has to be forced. And the American people, to their credit, have their backs and their dander up, and they're not going to be forced into this. So, yeah, well, you know, wait a minute, you were the one who just said that you were hopeful.

Peter, are you hopeful that actually they went too far and that people will say, okay, all right, fine, I'll call this person whatever they want to be called. I'm just not going to pretend that this person is that. You know, I am hopeful, but I'm hopeful for a reason that we're going to end up discussing in a podcast in two or three weeks, I suspect. I'm hopeful because it looks to me as though the Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe versus Wade. That means a regime of a certain kind of lie will have ended. Everybody knows at this stage that that clump of cells isn't a clump of cells, but a baby. And half the country has been lying to itself and trying to get the other half to become complicit in that lie. More important, or easier for Rob to join

in on, it is going to restore the constitutional balance between the central government and federalism it will require politics to take place the way they should take place in which all across the country in 50 different states people who are pro life people who are poor pro-choice are going to do what Americans should be doing which is convincing their neighbors I'm optimistic over the long term I'm very nervous over the next two and a half years because we have Putin and Xi Jinping, and we have a chief executive who is just broken and isn't going to get fixed.

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Slash Ricochet. See the site for details. And we thank Tommy John for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Yuri Yarem Ageev. with Nokia. Ph.D. in physics and applied mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He worked as a senior scientist for the Institute of Chemical Physics in the USSR Academy of Sciences. And as a consequence of his dissident activities, he was forced into exile. He's here now to give us some insider information. Welcome, Yuri. Thank you for joining us. Hi. So, we...

Yuri. Oh, go ahead, Peter. Yuri, we'll get in a moment to what the United States ought to do about Ukraine, but here's the first question. What did Vladimir Putin think he was doing? He could have simply tried to seize the eastern regions, the Donbas, and it seems to me there's a very good chance he'd have gotten away with that just the way he got away with seizing the Crimea some years ago. Instead, they attacked the whole country of Ukraine. On the first day, they shelled as far

west as Lviv. He sent in two armored columns to surround Kiev and take the capital deep inside the country. What was he thinking? Is he ill and desperate to make some kind of play for a legacy? Was he being lied to by his own military? Is he simply deluded that Russia still has some kind of old imperial mission to save the world from the West? What was he thinking? All the above, Peter. First, what was the reason and what provoked him exactly? Now, the main reason is that he felt more and more than he was threatened. Well, he says that Russia was threatened, but actually he means himself and his own power. And what was threatened by? By democratic developments around him? So first of all, Ukraine, but also we remember that democratic revolution started in Belarus and in Kazakhstan.

So all countries around Russia started to move in the democratic direction and inside Russia Navalny and his movement became serious opposition democratic opposition to his regime also so he really felt threatened and he felt that he needs to empower himself and the best way he saw empowering himself was a quick, decisive victory. And he was encouraged with Crimea and Donbas of 2014, particularly Crimea, which was such an easy victory. And so he Because he counted on really several days occupation of Ukraine and to empower himself more. Now, why he decided that it's possible? Because he was provoked by several things. First, by the weakness of the United States, particularly by the loss of Afghan war by Biden and decisive loss.

Secondly, he was misled by the intelligence about how strong his army is and how weak Ukrainian army is. And by intelligence, I mean not only his own intelligence, which definitely provided him absolutely false information that Ukraine would not resist. They would embrace, actually, Russian invasion. But I cannot say many good words about our own intelligence, which also, as you remember, said that if Russia attacks Ukraine, it would be cakewalk, you know, they would take it over in several days. And that was the opinion of many intelligence people here, of many analysts, which also encouraged Putin and I actually I consider our analyst and

intelligent partially responsible for this war by their misjudgment of Russia for the strength of Russian army weakness of Russian army and the strength of Ukrainian army. So that's why it happens. You know, he had a reason, and he was totally disinformed about the real situation, what might happen. Hey, thanks for joining us here. It's Rob Long in New York. Isn't it a little ironic that this guy who, two years ago, if you read the American press, you read the New York Times,

he was this Bond supervillain, this genius with all sorts of levers to pull to affect a United States election, champion of disinformation and compromise. You know, he seemed absolutely formidable. And yet he is the biggest I can I can't think of a bigger victim of the Russian intelligence services than Vladimir Putin. What must be going through the heads of the people around Putin right now, thinking, are we going to follow this guy all the way into the ditch? Is he going to pull us out of the ditch or are we going to have to take other measures? Question to me or to Peter? Oh, no, no, to you, not to Peter. Peter doesn't know anything. To you.

Rob knows my, yes, that's a fair judgment. Well, again, who Putin is and who Putin was is always very exaggerated, you know, и кто Путин был, всегда были очень облегчены. Он был очень медиократным, от самого начала он был хавард-персоном, среднего уровня КГБ-офицером и ничего другого. Все остальное – фикшн и инвенция,

опять же, американский аналитик, европейский аналитик, политик, by again American analysts and European analysts, politicians, etc. So there was nothing special on him from the very start. Why his disillusion? Well, deceived or whatever by his intelligence.

First of all, I think his intelligence itself thought the same way. It was very bad intelligence which operated very poorly. But in addition to that, Putin built his authoritarian power inside Russia, which actually turned now into real totalitarian power, which actually discouraged all his subordinates to provide him with very bad information, which is typical for such political systems.

So anybody was afraid to tell him, to deliver him any bad news. They always tried to appease him and to present the situation that everything is great. And it's typical. It was typical for the Soviet Union, which eventually also became such internal disinformation, let's say. Now Putin is the product of his own disinformation, which he installed himself.

Yeah, I mean, I think that to me is the irony, of course, is that when you start to mess up, when you start to compromise the lines of information, you end up actually reading your own nonsense and believing it. The problem with our system is a lack of real feedback. You know, that's why they eventually collapse. You know, the system without feedback cannot operate properly. Well, even now, look, Russian army fights inside Ukraine, and the real person who seems to command it is Putin himself. Now, at the same time, he is not given right information of what happens inside Ukraine. So how you can command army without

knowing truth about what happens with their own side? The irony is the best source of information for him is probably the New York Times or the Institute for the Study of War website, which I recommend to everyone. Well, I can name you plenty of such great sources in America and in Western Europe. Who actually... Okay, so I have two more questions. One is, there's the cynical attitude I've been sort of collecting over time.

Maybe it's real politic. Maybe it's sort of American interests first, kind of cold, bloodless bloodless frankly kind of amoral the idea is um the russians have lost a lot 20 of their ability apparently let's keep this going for a while let's give the plucky ukrainians some serious artillery let's see how much destruction we can we can we can have the ukrainians do on the russian army let's see what happens if putin starts to lose again it doesn't seem to me right now just looking at this just just this morning that there's a a detectable change in russian strategy or russian command and control um i mean we're gonna lose a lot of ukrainians the ukrainians because a lot of ukrainians but there's a certain american cold bloodless attitude which is like well

they're gonna have a war let's make sure it's even because at least for ordinance and if it's even that way ukrainians are probably gonna win or at least the Russians are going to lose. They may get a sliver of eastern Ukraine to call their own, but at an enormous cost. Is that what you think is happening, first of all? And second of all, is that the right thing to do? Well, it's not only cynical attitude that you described. It's also very stupid attitude and very rational attitude. It's not in the interest of this country. Look, fast, quick, and decisive victory of Ukraine is in vital interest of our country. And when people ask what this war has to do with us, I mean, those people don't understand what happens in this world, you know.

Because actually what happens in Ukraine now is typical proxy war between democracy and totalitarianism. Very similar to many wars which happened during the Soviet period between Soviet communism and America and NATO, like Vietnam, Korea, whatever else. And actually, Russia openly declares that they fight war against America, not against Ukraine. They simply fight this war on Ukrainian territory, but their real enemy against which they fight is the United States of America. And to pretend that it doesn't happen, to ignore this fact, is simply stupid. Actually, the situation is very simple.

If Ukraine wins, America wins. If Ukraine loses, America loses. And as if it has not been enough losses recently for America. So there are only two kinds of people which I would say question whether we should support fully Ukraine in this war. Either anti-Americans who actually wish America to lose any war, and such people unfortunately exist in our country as we know, or such extreme isolationists who don't care about America losing its war as long as it doesn't lose its war on its own territory. But I think it's a very short-sighted and stupid approach,

and the loss of the war is the loss of the war. And as I say, if Ukraine loses this war, America loses this war. Okay, so just to follow up on that, what position would America, what would your recommendation be? I mean,

you know, we just sent money and we're sending artillery. What else should we do? Oh, much more. Look, why? Let me say the following thing. I believe that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this war is the most important war for the United States. Now, if we fought wars directly with our troops in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and bombed Serbia, Yugoslavia,

which was a much less important and questionable war in terms terms of interests of the United States. Why we became so restrained in this case? Why Biden declared from even before this war started that there would be no American troops on Ukrainian ground? Why would we say that there would be no fly zone, which was the rule for such war. You know, we shot Soviet jets over Korea, we shot Soviet jets over Vietnam, and even over Syria now.

We have to give Putin credit, though. I mean, this timing is really good. Any American president going to the American people and saying, we are going to fly, American pilots are going to fly over the war zone and drop bombs, that American soldiers will be in Ukraine. That president, in my opinion, would find zero percent support. Now, maybe it's the fault of Biden for absolutely flubbing the afghanistan exit maybe it's the just the exhaustion the american people have with foreign wars capital f capital w but within the realm of

political realism what should america do what can't what what i don't mean in an ideal sense i just mean in the in the tomorrow morning you're're in charge and it's the America that you're given 2022 in June. What are you going to do? Well, first of all, in terms of I understand what you're saying about American being tired. Hey, move those routers there. Oh,'s me your data center and as you can hear i'm making some big changes in here because ai is making some bigger ones everywhere so i took a little trip to nokia super fast routers optical interconnect fully automated the whole data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time

get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia of involvement of wars particularly that some of those wars had little explanation to americans but and maybe society is not very enthusiastic about direct involvement but there is followership and there is leadership. And actually, such attitude could easily change, could have gone for that and could have gained, actually, very soon, support by the society. But even if to put off for a while direct involvement in America, either on troops on the ground or no-fly zone, we can help much more with weapons, much more.

And actually, our position should be to provide Ukraine with most sophisticated weapons. Superior to Russian weapons. Why shouldn't we give... But that's a different argument with a threshold. With a

line that you don't cross. We'll give you what you need to fight for your own country, have your own people fight for your own country. And that, I think, I don't think that would be the hardest thing to explain to American people. Just short of, and I'm not arguing for his statement, but just short of the idea that American soldiers in uniform are going to be in Ukraine, which I think would be a political mistake. It would actually ultimately hurt the Ukrainians. But again, even without American soldiers in American uniforms, why not to provide Ukraine jets?

Why don't you provide Ukraine all modern missiles? And look, again, the United States restrains itself on everything. For example, it's ready to give missiles now to Ukraine, but it says we won't give you long-distance missiles because you can shoot targets in Russia. So what is wrong about that? If Russia sends its missiles from its own territory to destroy American cities and kill the civilian population and children there. What's wrong by Ukraine in response to shut down those missiles?

Now, they say we give you harpoons, but only short distance harpoons, because they are afraid that Russia would sink Black Sea Navy. What's wrong? Sorry, Ukraine would sink Black Sea Navy navy but what is wrong with

ukraine sinking black sea navy because this black sea navy is armed with cruise missiles which again shoot at ukrainian cities so there is nothing wrong and the crossing of line is the most Це наймисної концепції для багатьох політиків. Тому що, насправді, Росія робить, що вона вже може, без обов'язків, які їм можна дозволити. Вони не можуть це робити. Ця обов'язка, ця лінія, є важливий концепт, тому що ця боротьба означає таке. Росія не робить ніякого такого, що може зберігати серйозні відбування з нашого боку. Тому що це є боротьба. Тому якщо ми вирішимо боротьбу, яка може бути для нас, то ми автоматично вирішимо боротьбу з Росією. Це буде більше. of what is permissible to us, we automatically expand boundaries for Russia. It will do more.

So actually, our inaction, when action is expected, escalates the situation on Russian behalf much more than if we actually act. That may sound strange, but that's exactly what happens. Because whenever Russia expects that we can give such weapon or we can do something, and we voluntarily refuse to do that, we expand boundaries of permissible to Russia, and this is escalation.

Otherwise, if we do otherwise, if we start to narrow those boundaries, И это эскалация. Русские. Normandy, it was bombing of Tokyo, and all the things, that was escalation. If you want quick victory, we should actually help Ukraine to escalate its efforts, and we should do everything to prevent Russia to escalate its efforts, meaning punish them for each thing that they do and restrain them more and more. What some are hoping is that Russia collapses from within. This may be a pipe dream. This may be possible. We don't know.

It's obscure here. But what would you say are the greatest domestic pressures on Putin right now? Well, the greatest domestic pressure will develop. It's a dynamic process. First of all, everything we're talking about changes every day. That's very important to understand. Whether we're talking about the attitude of American society, Ukrainian society, Russian society, it changes every day.

It strongly depends on what happens in Ukraine. If Ukrainian army wins, the first effect gets more and more victories. The first effect it has on Russian army itself. So that is a crucial part of the Russian society itself. Because, I mean, the ideal scenario for us, I believe, я вважаю, ідеальним сценарієм був би зниження російської армії. З-за повної зниження її моралу, тому що вони не втрачають на бій, і так далі. І я думаю, що це має бути одним з головних таргетів.

Зараз, інша російська соціальність розвивається швидше, тому що вона не відчуває те, що російська армія відчуває у Україні. The rest of the Russian society would develop slower because it doesn't feel the things which the Russian army feels inside Ukraine. But eventually it will get to them, and it will get through several things. It will get through losses, through the body bags, you know, which would come to more and more parts in Russia. It would get through economic sanctions, which people would start to feel more and more. And unless Putin could deliver them real victory,

the society would turn against Putin. Putin will lose. Putin's regime will lose. If Ukraine wins, the Putin regime will lose. Actually, it will lose anyway. It's a question of time, you know, because they already failed in this first and main attempt of this blitzkrieg, you know, immediate war.

But if Ukraine really has quick and decisive victory, we can expect Putin's regime collapse very soon. And that's in our best interest, again. Look, there are people, again, in the West who try to save Putin's face, which is repugnant to me, you know. You cannot save

the face of the murderer and criminal, you know. It's a perverted attitude. But actually, what those people are saying, they try to save Putin's power inside Russia. You know, but saying that they try to save his face, they say that actually, why should we help Putin to keep his power in Russia? It's again completely irrational. The person who kills people all around the world and who threatens us with nuclear weapons,

why should we help him to keep power? You know, in our best interest is for him to lose power. And I don't suggest that we do it directly from our side. But as I say, a quick and decisive victory by Ukraine is the most direct way for the collapse of Putin's regime. Dr. Yuriy Magayev, thank you for joining us today. I hope to have you back when we discuss the post-Putin Russian situation and how opportunities

were no doubt squandered, but we can always hope. Thank you for joining us. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Well, you know, the thing is, if you watch television or your documentaries on Russian history, you know it's a series of missed opportunities and the rest. Tragic, isn't it?

Then again, you might say, that guy was in Russian. How could you tell? It's true. I love the pronunciation. And one of the fun things, actually, when it comes to accents like that, is going to watch television that has... I mean, there are certain British shows I've seen where I need subtitles, and thankfully the Americans do provide them. But that doesn't mean I always want to watch television that has, I mean, there are certain British shows I've seen where I need subtitles. And thankfully, the Americans do provide them.

But that doesn't mean I always want to watch American television. You know, sometimes you want to watch it from other countries. Listen, they'll catch you. They'll catch you. They'll see your IP address. Well, that's where you have to pull a little trick. Because you, for example, Netflix. If you're watching Netflix without using ExpressVPN, it's like buying tickets to a music festival, but only being allowed to watch the prescribed acts that you don't even get to select.

So in other words, it's like this. There's this whole world of television out there that exists in various streaming systems and places around the world you can't get because when you're coming in, they look at where you're coming in from and say, wrong country. So you kind of got a little spoofing thing you have to do. You just choose a UK server. Now you're tearing out your hair. How can I possibly change my server location? Express VPN. That's how you want to get control of where you want to watch your Netflix or your other streaming websites. Tell them where you think they think you are. Listen, if you want

to watch Parks and Rec, you have to be watching from the UK. Or you can open up ExpressVPN app, select UK, tap a single button, and when you refresh the page, voila, you're there. Of course, I wouldn't say voila because it's UK. It would be more like a France thing, but you get the drift. Along with access to a long list of shows you can't get anywhere else before, you can enjoy blazing fast speeds to stream in HD. And it's not just Netflix. You can change your location to see restricted content from the BBC, iPlayer, YouTube, and more. And ExpressVPN works on all your devices, your phone, your tablet, your smart TV, your laptop. They're all compatible. So be smart and be safe. Stop paying full price for streaming services and

only getting access to a fraction of their content. It's money's worth at ExpressVPN.com slash Ricochet. And don't forget to use that link, ExpressVPN.com slash Ricochet, to get an extra three free months at ExpressVPN. We thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, the Lord of Canoe. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. I'm sure I'm... The Earl of Canoe. The Earl of Canoe?

The Earl? Yeah, I have to give you guys tutorials on these. You know what? Okay. I am stepping back. I am handing this over to... He is the Earl of Canoe.

Then you would address him as Lord Canoe. No, not necessarily so. I'm an American. I'm not required to do so. I would do so out of respect and decency, but I'm not required to. But

why don't we just hand it off to you, Peter? You do the introduction, because you know the deets, the ins, the outs. In an earlier, much, much earlier, now long-lost phase of my life, I studied at Oxford with a man who is joining us now.

He is my old friend, Charles Hay, who is also the 16th Earl of Canule, a Scottish title awarded to your family by James II and VII or I and VI, which was it, Charles? I can't remember which James. Charles I. It was, well, actually it was Charles I. He got a… Charles I. Charles I gave us the title in 1633.

Things did not end well for Charles I, but that's a different matter. Charles Canuel, my friend Lord Canuel, the Earl Canuil, whom I will from now on address as Charles, is a member, is a hereditary member of the House of Lords, where he sits on a committee which is attempting to hold Britain together while they have a prime minister who's not unlike our president. Charles, you needn't say a thing about this. I'm offering my own opinion here. So that Britain is in the same position we're in where we're looking to people just one step down from the top to hold everything together. of the ascension to the throne in 1952 of a 25-year-old mother of two who is now 96 years old. Charles, I clicked on YouTube yesterday to watch the beginnings of these festivities, the flyby, this suddenly frail little old lady walking out to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to acknowledge a vast crowd, the entire country has stopped everything to celebrate this woman's seven decades on the throne. Why? Make sense of this to Americans. Well, I think you all have quite a good sense already, in fact. I always find Americans know a lot about our country, as we, I think, know a lot about yours.

But it's four whole days of celebrations that are going on. And I think that what one finds in the country is a sense of her greatness, a sense of gratitude to her, and a sense um it's a historical moment um and the trouble is such i mean i i i can't speak to anyone who has any sentient um memories of um of time before when she was queen because you have to be more than 70 years old of course uh to do that and it's um it is a astounding what a constant thing she's been. And you've just been talking about the disappointing president and mentioning a disappointing prime minister. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center.

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I'm a cross-bencher, so I'm independent. But she is never disappointed. And we've had lots of disappointing prime ministers, even in my lifetime. And you've had one or two disappointing presidents as well. So I think that's why there is this sense, and it's unleashed the most tremendous atmosphere in the vast majority of the country here with people wanting to celebrate. Charles, can you, these Republicans want to get in on it, Republicans with small r's,

so just be slightly careful. Rob is in this country a tremendously aristocratic figure, but he's going to put on the guise of a slightly skeptical man when it comes to the monarchy. But can you, for Americans, she's omnipresent, she's on the stamp, she's on the coins. Every time she totters out to the balcony, it makes television news. But what is her job really? What does she actually do? This is this distinction between hard power of which she has virtually none and soft power which somehow everyone knows she possesses, but it's tremendously elusive question to

try to actually define what she does, at least to me. Well, I think, again, to interpret your question, it's saying what is her residual power? And she has quite a lot of residual power if you're an academic constitutional lawyer. But one's seen the residual power, I think, in three ways in my lifetime. The first residual power is one of simply talking to the prime minister. She has a weekly chat. And of course, she knows a lot more about the country than all but the most experienced

prime ministers. And she's seen it all before in her 70 years. And she's super sharp. I mean, she's super sharp. There's no question of her cognitive ability having been diminished at all and she's very aware of everything going on so she's actually quite an interesting sounding board for a prime minister and therefore she has that element i mean no one else has that ability secondly she has the power of convening things and so if there is a a problem um she actually could say let's discuss this and convene half a dozen people into a room and i dare say that she exercises that fairly um rarely but she does have a series of uh of of places where she can convene people to discuss uh problems and at least introduce people to each

other and acts as a sort of neutral ground having people who might have arguments and that power of convening things which often used to take place as lunches in Buckingham Palace or in other ways has I think been extended for the use of technology but that has been something which she has exercised i think very carefully and well in her reign and in fact her her son exercised that as well the final thing if one wants a real example of the use of constitutional power twice in my lifetime we've gone through a general election and ended up in a hung position i.e where there is no obvious answers to who's going to form the government. And that happened in 1974, and it happened in 2010. And what happens then is that the monarch invites someone to form a government.

And as I said, it's not obvious at all. And twice, she had to exercise, therefore her her choice obviously she had lots of um submissions and she had advice and everything like that but she chose and both times she chose clearly in my view the right answer um constitutionally and and correctly so uh she's she's um as you said, hard power, not really there. Soft power, still there in reasonable amounts. Thank you for joining us. Lord Canule? That's one way. I just call me Charles.

Charles, I think that's right. I was just trying to figure it out. I'm always wrong, however I do it. So she is an extraordinary person, and she does sort of span this sort of – I mean, obviously she came to – she ascended the throne in the early 50s, but she is sort of, I think, indelibly connected to a wartime royal um that she's sort of the world war ii she was a young volunteer of some kind and mechanic she does seem to have had an enormous amount of experience and wisdom 96 years old but 96 years old the question isn't is she great yes she's i think she's fantastic pretty much everybody who seems to be coming after her when there's a line and you can tell who they are, doesn't seem to be even close to her level. I mean, I would not, I don't, I'm not a British citizen, as you might have imagined, but I could not imagine the crack pottery that King Charles might apply when he's trying to sort of invite someone to form a government.

My God, who would Charles invite? So, isn't there a sense of, I mean, part of the celebration, isn't it also tinged with this disquiet of, oh my God, look who's next, or am I being unkind, which I often am? You're certainly being unkind. i often am you're certainly being unkind are you also incorrect right well i i mean i the thing is it's it's always the same and i think when you have a very very good ceo or a very good professor at a university and they retire or no longer there always worry about who's following after and they're following after doesn't follow after for life that's the thing that person who follows afters life. That's the thing.

The person who follows after often gets tossed by the board in two or three years. And that can happen. But my point is not so much that that sanction isn't available, but you don't quite know how people will be. And the thing is that every now and then in a monarchy, you'll have an absolutely terrific monarch, and then you might have some quite ordinary ones or whatever. And I'm not saying that I expect Charles, if he ascends the throne ever,

that he will be ordinary. I mean, he has the chance to prove himself at that point, and he would have studied for the role over many years. But you have to have a head of state, and the method that we have is to have a monarch. And a monarch has quite a lot of portraying things, and I'm sure that if, going back to my two examples in 1974 and 2010, if the monarch exercised something wrongly there, there would then be a constitutional crisis and there would be a change

in our country. And so I think it's sort of fairly self-patrolling. I mean, the courts and parliament would not stand by if they thought that the monarch was doing something utterly wrong. I'm just pushing you back on this a little bit, because I'm probably putting you in a terrible position. But it does seem like the Queen represents a certain kind of, I'm not going to say ancient, but a traditional British character.

Stiff upper lip, duty, patriotism, a willingness to sacrifice an enormous amount of her life for her country um it doesn't seem like her offspring have that certainly her at least one of her sons is a is a you know two steps from prison and the other the oldest son the heir seems to be sort of have a wayward life it's an indulgent life um and then have been sort of in the thrall of a lot of sort of weird new age uh stuff maybe the one after him is going to sort of right the ship a bit he seems like he's sort of put together right but it does seem like the thing is unraveling or again am i am i misreading it well i think in any family um you get sheep of every color frankly and um

you're just not going to take my bait are you well no no i think the thing is that um you will you will get that uh problem that you have some members of the family who are not satisfactory and i mean we did have of course in edward the eighth who's the queen's uncle who sent a friend briefly in 1936 we had someone i think would have been a very unsatisfactory monarch and and he abdicated and um of course there was an awful lot of behind the scenes arm twisting and things to go on that ultimately resulted in his abdicating and i think think the thing about every other monarchy around is that you do have some wrong-ins in the family as well, and you just have to live with that. And I dare say there's

some wrong-ins in the first families of the presidential system. Sorry, Peter. Yes, no, no, you, yes, yes, yes. I was waiting for that counterattack. That will shut us up right away. We began this program, you weren't with us, but we began this so I'm on the other side of the planet from you, even over here we feel that this 96-year-old woman represents a set of virtues, a moment in the Second World War of undoubted greatness, and that Britain has changed. So here you are upholding a family tradition that goes back to Charles I. I've heard you talk about your father whom you revered, who grew up in a different world from yours.

Here you are after a very successful career in business, you did not have to devote your years, your, I hate to say your final years because I'm about as old, I'm actually a year or two older than you are, as I recall, but you did not have to volunteer for this position as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords, which is quite hard work. You didn't have to do that, but here you are holding together, helping to hold together a 1,000-year-old institution, the House of Lords, and you're raising children. You have, your daughters are teenaged children. In fact, somebody must be about ready to go off to university. How do you, two questions,

how do you and your wife attempt to transmit in your own family the values that you consider enduring, the distinctively British values that you consider enduring, while adapting to a changed world, and does the queen help you? When your children were little, would you say, no, no, that's not something the queen would like? Is there some...I'm trying to get at this question. What it really comes down to is that we have children and either we transmit certain things to the children or we don't. Even as Rob was saying, either this institution changes generations successfully,

or there's going to be trouble. How do you handle that in your own family, and does having a monarchy as a model in the country help? Well, thank you for that. Firstly, the sort of family trope is you learn, you earn, you serve. And you can do it in a different order, but the idea is that you try and do all three things in your life. And that's something that I believe in, and I, as it were,

it came down to me, and I've tried to pass it on to our children. It would be up to them to decide whether they follow that formula. I got to the serve bit of my life, and I got the opportunity to arrive in the boards and that's where altruism slightly stops because actually I've been absolutely fascinated by it I arrived with almost the perfect skill set at the time that I arrived at almost the perfect age I was jolly lucky and that's why I chair the European Affairs Committee, which had to deal with the whole of Brexit and is now dealing with the political side of the Ukraine war. And I'm a deputy speaker now as well.

So I find it absolutely fascinating and enthralling, and in a rather selfish way, I therefore pursue it. And for all these various posts, it has to be agreed by the house so it's not a sort of something so every house has the opportunity to vote me off as it were but i've survived quite a few votes so um but it's a it's it's utterly fascinating and it's a great privilege to be involved yes it's slightly odd to be a hereditary peer. Only about 15% of the Lords are still hereditary. But I would have had a go

at becoming a peer in the other ways if that hadn't been the case, because I still believe in the you serve bit. And as for the monarchy, well, I think she's the ultimate new person who serves. And I regard her as being a jolly good beacon showing me the sort of way I should behave.

And I think I'd find it more difficult if the monarch was someone less obviously jolly good. If only there was a composer who could do her justice. I was thinking this would be a great time to have a William Walton. Did Orban's Scepter, did the Crown Imperial. We need a Jubilee theme. And I thought, who would do it exactly? I took a look online at what the Albert Hall concert was, because apparently back in March they had a Jubilee concert. And it's a parade of great British music, the most British music you can imagine.

From Holst, of course, to Jupiter, The Pomp and Circumstance, Greensleeves, Fantasia, Crown Imperial, and Butterworth. I mean, it's wonderful stuff. And apparently the BBC or somebody is holding a party in a couple of days with all of these meretricious forgettable pop stars,

none of whom will really go down in memory with them, like the composers I just mentioned. And you wonder whether or not she sums up an era of British culture that none of whom will really go down in memory with like the composers I just mentioned. And you wonder whether or not her, her, she sums up an era of British culture that was lost long ago. That when Tony Blair started, you know,

swapped out rule Britannia for cool Britannia is that horrible ad campaign had it, that, that some fundamental aspect of English culture was. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, Hey, it's me. Your data center. fundamental aspect of English culture was... fully automated, the whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready.

Someday is here with Nokia. On its way out for good. But you hope that there will be somebody who can channel those old spirits musically as they did once. But I'm not hopeful. Are you? I don't know. I mean, she's been

also a deputy lieutenant for my area, which means that I represent the Queen every now and then. I'm going to represent her tomorrow at something. And she's... Are you in Perthshire now? Where are you? Up in Scotland? In rural Perthshire, middle of nowhere in Scotland.

And if you look at the map of Scotland, Jolly Difficult, and say, well, where is the middle of it? And you put your pin down, it'll be pretty close to here. And what's the event, just to give us a feel for how the whole country is celebrating, what's the event in Perthshire tomorrow that you'll be attending? There's a great big sort of local area parade, and then it's a sort of event ring and lots of different things are going on inside the event ring including pipe bands I've got the thing here all sorts of military reenactments of various things songs and dancing and more pipe bands And it's just a sort of excuse to get together and have a thoroughly good afternoon of fun, really.

And it's all for charity. And there will be many thousands of people there in areas where there are actually not many people. So the turnout rates are huge for this. But I haven't really answered your question. It's hard to answer. It really is. Because, I mean, cultures change, things change. But there's still

an essentially British sound, right? And there's a character to all of the arts that seems now to be symbols of a culture that has passed. We in America have the same. Will you settle for bagpipes, James?

He's going to be getting it. There is a bagpipe tune, but I haven't mentioned that deliberately because I love the pipes, and I'll be listening to lots of pipes over the course of the next couple of days, but I don't like the new tune, I'm afraid. But the Queen, one of the things that she's wanted to do with the jubilee is to make sure that it's marked in various permanent ways and um so what she decided that she would like trees planted and britain is actually not a very big country but so far 1.2 million trees have been planted. And that's about halfway.

We've had to, under the rules of the planting, we stop planting now and you start again in October. And there'll be lots more planted then. Certainly, we'll be planting some trees. And so I think she's trying to reflect the permanence marker stone of the Platinum Jubilee in another way. And I think it's a pity that there isn't a... It's a very nice idea of yours. There should have been the top composer composing

something and the top poet composing something, and some of it would have been very worthwhile. Well, maybe we'll do that for her 100th year of the throne. I can't wait to see The Forest the next time I'm in England, and we thank you for joining us today, and best wishes to the sceptered isle, and of course to the Queen.

Thank you very much. Goodbye, all. And I'm sure that the Queen sleeps on the finest. God save the Queen. I'm sure that the Queen sleeps. Wait, did Rob just say those words? Yeah, he's polite. God save the Queen, of course.

Charles, you've won him over. Not too sure about God save the King afterwards, but, you know, we'll live. Fair enough. Uh-oh, where are we? No, I was just going to say that it's probably certain that the Queen sleeps on the finest sheets. And you're probably thinking... Oh, nice. on the finest sheets. And you're probably thinking, oh, and you're, oh,

but the most obvious segue you can think of. There's not, I know, but I hadn't thought of it. It's not a jot of inspiration or imagination that went into it.

Untroubled sleep with royal. Uneasy lies. Uneasy sleeps. They had the word, the crown, right? Unless you're her age, you're probably sleeping quite fine.

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who's coming by. And it's always great to see people you knew from way back when, especially when they're doing well. There's an old guy from Speech and Debate that I knew. He was a jock. He was into funk music and ended up teaching jazz at a Texas university, which is great. But regrettably, I'm going to show him a newspaper office and it's

something in less than its peak of excitement. So all those movies that he watched, front page, all the president's men expecting this bustling place with people running around clattering, clacking on typewriters and smoking. No, sorry, Not like that anymore. But that's just me. Regretting the loss of the noisy profane newsroom with grifters and Damon Runyon types hanging around the margins and guys in hats and dames

and skrs, skrs, skrs. The front page. All of that stuff. I have to let you go. You've got some stuff here to talk about. Wonderful Ricochet events that I wish I could be at. And then discuss the, well, whatever you wish. So I'll see you next week. And thank you, everybody, for putting up with my babbling here.

I'm gone. Next week, James. Next week, James. Well, we did accomplish. We be we overlap for a little bit the three of us all together it's going to be sort of itinerant summers um i should say that last night we had a no dumb questions uh for members only if you're not a member of ricochet you missed it but you should join and you could hear charles cook who is um not only sort of helping us out a lot of ways technically here at ricochet and sort of joining the team, but he is also a firearms expert.

And, you know, he's a he's an actual gun nut. I mean, he's a fan and he's a collector and he's serious about it. So he's my first turn to whenever I'm about to say something about firearms, because I know he'll know more than I will. And he got

some great questions from Ricochet members, so we thank him for that. Coming up next, I don't know if it's next week. It's like on the 16th, 15th. Check it out. Go to Rickshay.com. You can see the Byron New York show. Our podcast is going to have a DC event with Molly Hemingway.

And we're very grateful to Hillsdale College, DC Hillsdale, DC for helping us put this together. Live taping of the Byron York Show with Molly Helen Lee. Now completely full. Unfortunately sold out, but you can get it in anyway.

That's sold out in about 11 hours. So if Ricochet members here try to register and would still like to come, email Alex at Ricochet.com. Alex at Ricochet.com. That's Alex Rosenwald. And we will do our best

to accommodate. It sold out really quickly. And that's a good sign. If you're we will do our best to accommodate. Um, it sold out really quickly. Um, well, and that's a good sign. Um, if you're not a member, you should join and,

um, come to the next one. Um, we're doing a lot of things like this, a lot of Notre Dame questions, and these are all good reasons to join Ricochet. In addition to helping us pay off our infuriating, um, uh,

legal settlement for, um, what was in fact, we were targeted because of our if you could believe it, we were targeted because of my politics. If you could believe it. By the left.

We are trying to pay that off. So if you've been thinking about joining and you're thinking, why bother? Do it. Because first of all, we need it. And second of all, we'd love to see you at the next big Ricochet live event. We've had about four or five in the... Very quickly. Also, just

so you know, on the Ricochet Network, Take Back Our Schools, our podcast really about schools, they have a great discussion this week on what this new thing called social-emotional learning and the relationship between that new buzzword and critical race theory and diversity, equity, inclusion. And you'll be not surprised to know that there is a connection and you should absolutely listen to it. It's sort of riveting.

And the only way to combat this stuff is to know about it and take back our schools as the place to find it out. And, of course, Kryptonite with rich goldberg um uh all of this sort of crypto stuff he's he's getting deep into it but it's incredibly accessible i can understand it but i can understand you can understand it he's got two great guests this week um um talking about how cryptocurrency is being used by um i guess terrorists uh and how it's been embraced by um certain groups for fundraising and it's really worth listening to um crypto is not going away so and it's complicated but rich makes it easy peter you back i saw you had some i'm sort of back my my the arm that holds

my microphone just fell off the desk for reasons i don't understand it just collapsed can you hear me that's the yeah i can hear you not your own arm the the mechanical arm so i'm sort of trying to hold the microphone as it as the a heavy weighted arm attempts to pull it away from me over the side of the desk onto the floor but if that's the worst problem i encountered today it will have been an unusually easy day not bad uh now i mean i i know we should wrap here but i mean um i have a question yeah go ahead have you seen top gun i haven't i hear it's good though no yeah i think it's it is it is perfect of its kind but but A, I want to be careful about getting too enthusiastic before.

Of course, I never want to express an opinion and get out in front of you who actually know about films. I think it's perfect of its kind as pop entertainment, but when I saw the original in the 80s and it all came back, I could remember sitting in the theater in 86, 87, and the movie seemed connected with a moment in the country. We'd been through the 84 Olympics in Los Angeles, this whole rebirth of morale, the economy was booming, Reagan got reelected. Roger Ailes' campaign slogan for the 1984 re-election campaign, Mourning Again in America, actually felt, of course, hokey to some extent, but true enough that Reagan carried 49 out of 50 states.

And here was this sense of pride and fun involved in the American military. It all felt as though the movie was expressing something or connected to something big about the country at that time and now it's just it's just an entertainment an extremely well done entertainment but just an entertainment that doesn't seem to have any connection with anything else that was sort of that was the one to sing bit of it disappointing bit of it to me. Boy.

So there's your homework assignment. Well, we used to call that a, we used to call that kind of movie, which it just, we used to call it a deal memo that it sort of, it represented more of the sort of deal that they'd used to put it together than it did an actual story.

So maybe there's something like that going on. It's too bad, but it's a, you know, look, I mean, they're after all the hand-wringing about theaters and movies are dead and no one's going to the theater anymore it turns out that people are going to the theater and um the big budget

movies which are i mean like that was one of them um even sort of medium high budget movies are going to premiere in the theater you're still gonna be able to go to the movies right um you may not be getting any popcorn apparently movies there's a popcorn shortage but you'll be able to go to the movies. You may not be getting any popcorn, apparently, in the movies because of the popcorn shortage, but you'll be able to go to the movies. The multiplex we went to has 20 screens. 16 of those screens were showing Top Gun. Well, that's a lot of screens.

That's a big first weekend. You divide it, but you get something called the per-screen average. That's kind of how they do it, but I'll bet you some of those screens, they count as one because they probably have them you know running at the same time or something um meanwhile the uh uh apparently student loans are being forgiven for about half a million borrowers up to 5.8 billion dollars so um i took seven or eight years to pay off mine you didn't have student loans aristocrat that you are i'm sure but no not yet but i remember writing that check every single month and and yet i mean it just i mean even the merits of it if you

if you if there are merits of it i'm all years i love to hear the argument for the merits of it um they don't seem to be any merits of it when we're facing massive inflation are there or am i just sort of listening economically i mean because there's money up in money out yeah it's it's a stupid thing to do it's an unjust thing to do but you know what i am filled with glee because if the Democratic Party wanted to do one thing, take one action, that just cemented the notion that there is a new Republican Party, that the Republican Party is a working party, working class party, workers party. This is it.

It's the Democrats who engage in this huge transfer from ordinary working people to college, to people graduating from fancy colleges and getting degrees in gender studies, and then going off and discovering that as a social worker, you don't get paid enough to repay your student loan. Please. I mean, that's another half a dozen House seats that'll flip to the Republicans, as far as I can tell. I mean, in, you know, just to just in speaking of details here, this is debt accumulated by borrowers who. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated.

The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. Went to a for-profit college called corinthian college or corinthian colleges i guess uh which a file for bankruptcy about seven years ago eight

years ago and um file for bankruptcy because i think there was some fraud involved so these are people who seem to have been could be described as victims of this um of misleading practices in education which um is sort of hilarious because i mean i'm not sure that princeton and brown and yale and harvard don't also mislead you in thinking that your degree in deconstructionist french literary philosophy also listen now you're touching a surface. I'm going to leave you. I had an Uber driver not that long ago, Uber driver to the airport not that long ago, and we started chatting, and I discovered that he was a recent graduate of Princeton University.

Oh, that's interesting, I said, thinking that's also a little bit puzzling. What's going on here? I didn't put the question quite that way. And he said, well, my mom and dad are Mexican. I grew up in San Jose. I got to Princeton. They said, oh, yeah, of course. You should do, you should major in Hispanic studies.

You should major in Hispanic studies. Your mom and dad are first, you're a first generation American and you get the treasure of attending Princeton University. And all the messages he gets there are major in Hispanic Studies. And then he graduates from Princeton University and discovers that it is pretty hard to get a job with a Hispanic Studies major, so he's driving an Uber. Unbelievable. Speaking of fraud in education. Well, right. I mean, that's the argument for the for-profit, against the for-profit colleges has always come from the non-profit colleges who think that they're trying to protect their business. But I do believe this is the first salvo in what will be larger debt forgiveness so that we can reach 15 inflation and really relive the fifth the 70s

um now any summer plans peter i know we gotta run but any uh what are you i i think we're headed off to the mountains for a piece of july and um and my wife is headed over to spain in a few days to see as listeners may or may not know this, my wife is Cuban and because Fidel Castro occupied Cuba while she was growing up, her family went to Spain. She went to Spain as a girl many summers. She has cousins and very good friends, friends from her childhood over in Spain. She's headed over to Spain in a few days to see family and cousins. I'm a little bereft about that because I don't know quite what to do with it.

I stopped shaving, I stopped changing my clothes. I can't sleep at night. It's a mess when she's gone, but she'll be enjoying herself. What about you? Where are you going to be? I'm going to be around here. I'm going to probably go to the Cape probably in the beginning, end of June, beginning of July. And then I've got to put together the rest of my summer, which I think is going to be kind of busy.

I'm not quite sure exactly what the details are yet. Come to California. Yeah, maybe so. Although, you know, California. It's not yesterday. It feels like a very yesterday kind of a place. Used to be the tomorrow place, and now it's tomorrow came. I know.

I can't say that. I can't say that. Either way, wherever we are, talk to you next week. Next week, Rob. Ricochet. Join the conversation.