The Ricochet Podcast - Bank On It

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

To mark the third anniversary of America’s Covid lockdown hysteria Rob, James and Peter give their uncredentialed thoughts on Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse and the FDIC doing something very different than what it was created for. They think through free market solutions, the fate of little banks and the buildings and what they meant for small town America. The guys also chat with Stanford Review... Source

I will do that after Rob, and then after Rob. You got to put this in. You got to leave this part in the show. I really insist this part is in the show. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips.

No new taxes. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs. Today, we're just going to talk amongst ourselves about banking, about this, about that, but we've got Walker Stewart from the Stanford Review to talk about what happened there. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Let me just say this to Stanford law students. I know federal judges at every level saw this and has angered them. It's going to hurt your clerkship chances. And I would say to Stanford's donors, call Stanford University president and let him know that this is unacceptable and you're going to pull their funding if there are not consequences here. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 634. I'm James Lilacs in absolutely ridiculously frigid Minnesota.

Peter Robinson is in California, where I gather that it's its usual temperate, moderate state. And Rob Long is in New York, which could be cold, could be spring, who knows. But gentlemen, enough of the weather, here we are. Welcome. Bank news. We know that Rob is chomping, I'm sorry, champing at the bit to talk. Before this, I was saying, you know, none of us are going to want to talk about this bank thing, because what do we know? All I know is that when Credit Suisse seems to have trouble and you're saying the Swiss, the Swiss are in trouble, that maybe I should be paying attention. But what can

I do? So, Rob, you have something have something to say bank well i would just say this about credit swiss credit swiss is really not connected to this at all credit swiss has been on its like last legs for the past two years um i have a feeling that it's like when you do a bad news dump on a friday because you want all the bad news out for a weekend um this is a lot of people are um emptying their garbage uh now because they can bury it in all this news. But I do think that we are in a, you know, this will shock you, James. I am not a banker. I don't like lots of numbers, nor arithmetic. that the federal government the janet yellen has basically said

has announced that every single deposit in every single bank in america at any number is now insured by the federal government which sounds bananas to me and it's again a complete perversion of what the fdic was supposed to do which is to protect people who aren't rich from losing their life savings. Now, maybe $250,000 is too low. Maybe it should be $350,000 because Biden's inflation is $250,000 isn't what it used to be two weeks ago. It isn't what it used to be.

But the idea that we're now going to insure everyone's deposits all the time instead of investigating a free market solution to this problem is a mistake. And a mistake that I think is going to really make us pay. We're going to be paying a lot. Well, Peter, you would agree, wouldn't you, that if the government agrees to backstop absolutely everything, there's no way that that would make anybody reckless in any way, thinking that their errors will be covered by uncle sugar right yeah listen this is tricky for me because this town is filled where i sit northern california this town is filled with people who object to the bailout of silicon valley bank on principle but are just delighted by it in practice i I know, I must be, half of my friends

had money in the Silicon Valley Bank. Well, so did Ricochet, let's be honest. And so did Ricochet. So did Ricochet, although lest our listeners get the wrong idea, we were well within the insured limit, exactly. We were covered by the city council. Right, not as if $100 We're covered by the city council. Right. Not as if $100 million just went down the chute. No, no, no. But yes, yes, yes, of course that's correct. engages in blanket insurance of all deposits through the banking system that does not make the risks go away it places the risks on the shoulders of the american taxpayer where they

were not before and it does not unleash the the magnificent power of the free market if you have if you're trying to protect small depositors i think that's great i think that's a i mean that's a good plan fdic is useful right but for people who had a million two million three million four million five million dollars in deposits or more which i found bizarre to find out why a company would have 15 or 20 million dollars in cash in a bank but whatever okay that's not my i'm not theFO. I don't get to judge that. But if you do, then you should be allowed and encouraged, in fact, maybe even fiduciarily compelled to purchase private insurance for those deposits. There's no reason why you couldn't do that.

We have a system called titles insurance. And if you're a rich person, you should be insuring your fancy bank account the way you insure your fancy boat and your fancy mansion. And then that would actually unleash insurers this much more maybe i shouldn't be at silicon valley bank and then maybe silicon valley bank and that feedback loop that would happen would start to unwind its incredibly incredibly foolish um positions in you know treasuries and you also you mentioned a moment ago exploring a free market solution to the problem over the weekend one of the arguments we heard and the argument being made by friends friends of mine people i know at this time was really nervous very there was a it felt panicky it felt panicky so one of the arguments was this is not a panicked argument this is an argument argument that banking, if you're trying to read up on a bank and you're trying to read its financial statements and you're trying to make some judgment as to how

risky the bank is, it's almost impossible for an ordinary depositor to do so because banks are such complicated institutions. Bill Ackman, the big finance guy in Wall Street who was writing about the need to backstop and bail out SVB said, look, I'm a very sophisticated financial investor. I can't read the bank statements. David Sachs made a similar argument. And then lo and behold, it turns out there's really only one number. In this kind of circumstance, there's one number, and that number is Silicon Valley Bank, 90% of its deposits were uninsured. Now, that number was striking to me because very quickly, the little tiny bank where I do my personal banking thought, good Lord, there may be a run on that bank. And they immediately sent out a note to all of their depositors saying 11% of our deposits are uninsured.

There's not going to be a run on a bank where only 11% of the deposits are uninsured. All you need is one number. Now, of course, a few more numbers. You might want a little more information than that but but the notion that it's just impossible to judge the risk in a bank when you're putting in a deposit it seems to be just untrue on the face of it all the only yeah there's a little bit of information and i would actually add this is that i i don't know how to wire i don't know how to wire. I don't know how to look at a wiring plan for a house or look at wires in the house and decide if they're unsafe or not.

I don't know how to do that. I'm not good at that. I don't know how to look at a foundation and judge its soundness or not. But I know home insurers do it all the time. Correct. And they charge me for risk. And they charge me at the end of the year for risk, or monthly, or whatever it is.

And simply injecting some additional insurance that you have to pay above and beyond what the federal government is saying, we are guaranteeing this from our bank examiners, seems to me to be the ultimate and perfect solution if you want to hold a whole lot of cash in a bank. The alternative is the government pays for everything, you pay for, meaning we pay for everything, or we decide we don't want smaller banks anymore. We just want four or five big banks. And that is a solution that a lot of people are arguing for.

I think it's dangerous. I don't think we want four or five big banks, probably based in money centers, deciding banks are too important to be left to the you know rich people and you i mean and i don't want to sound paranoid but if you were paranoid if you're a paranoid person if you're a paranoid conservative you might say well what how much power do these banks have to defund delist the uh uncredit somebody they don't like so So, yeah. So why not just... So a lot of smaller banks are good. Insured deposits for small depositors are good. Large depositors with large cash positions

should be able to purchase independent free market insurance. And those insurers should... There's the problem right there, Rob, using those words, independent free market. Crazy notions. Like liberty and individual decision. the problem right there, Rob, using those words, independent, free market, crazy notions, like liberty and individual decision, because those can cause harm. At the end of the day, there can be harm when all of those actions do not have the proper outcome. So what we have now is an attitude of safetyism that says, well, instead of having this crazy, pell-mell,

red-toothed-and-clawed, dog-eat-dog world where individual companies can do as they like and purchase the insurance or not, we just need to know that everything will be backstopped because that will make everybody whole and it's safe. It assures the outcome that everybody wants. And yeah, I mean, small banks are good. Before the FDIC, it's always instructive to go to, you know, you go on Google Street View and you look at any small town and you will find what used to be the bank you will find to be you will find you will find a building that is there are two styles one of them is richardsonian romanesque it's on the corner it's got squat pillars and it says bank and it's chiseled in stone over the door and that place is long gone or there's the second farmers mutual which is on main street with its roman temples

looking like an embassy of the empire. And it went down in the tin panic or the depression or when somebody tried to corner the flax market or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, there's I think, however, that the instinctual desire, the instinctual fear out of, you know, it's a wonderful life of the run, the panic and the rest of it of the small bank that goes under is kind of done, that we assume that because of FDIC, with that nice little sticker and that sign that we see when we go to the bank, that will be made whole. But this is a whole different thing. To say above $250,000 is a whole different thing. James, you're touching on something very important to my mind. I'm no banker. I don't understand it in any great detail.

We both said the same thing which is less but you do kind of like you do yeah i do well i mean i'm not a man but i but i scanned a postcard of a holiday in last night so yeah exactly no so think of those banks those community banks scattered across the midwest the nature of agriculture has changed farms and by and large gotten bigger there's a lot of big agribusiness agribusiness of at scale doesn't need small banks but there are still family farms and the town banker who knew families who knew who was responsible and who wasn't and who understood the rhythm of farming you borrow you buy your fertilizer you buy your seed you know what the market is good you buy you place your future sales you repay your seed, you know what the market is going to buy, you place your future sales, you repay them. People know it. And then when it comes time,

I need an addition on the house. The banker says, no problem. I know you. I had a banker buddy who used to claim, plausibly to me, that when he was driving through the middle of the country, he'd come to a small town and it would look as though it was just sad. Houses hadn't been repainted, lawns weren't being taken care of. And two or three towns further along, there'd be a town that looked in pretty good shape. And he would claim he could tell at a glance the difference was the bank. The banker knew his customers and was willing to lend to them and there was a sense of trust that extended to financial trust in the community. think he's wrong i think he's wrong and i'll tell you why in a second here but um you may be right but here's my thought on that far harwood north

dakota is where my family is from it's a little town about 10 miles north of fargo and it's infinitesimal it's got a vh double he's got a VHW, it's got a, you know, Veterans of Foreign Wars Club. It's got a big elevator. It's got a general store. This is when I was a kid. And a scattering of houses. It's absolutely tight. It's a Hamlet. It's a Berg. It's nothing. Where's the school? Well, the school is down at the schoolhouse property, which was, you know, because when they platted out North Dakota, they would reserve room for the schoolhouse. And even if the schoolhouse had been destroyed 30 years before, when they consolidated the district, everybody still referred to that land as the schoolhouse land.

It's funny you mention that. But there was one bank, and the bank was built in the 60s, early 60s. It looked like Mad Men-style international architecture, Mesean architecture dropped down in this little North Dakota hamlet. Tiny, but a jewel box of modernism. It was just beautiful. And you're right. In that instance, the people who ran it knew everybody around.

They knew how the crops were doing. They knew what the prices were. Harwood still didn't prosper until it became a bedroom community of Fargo. But you're right. They had a bank. And just the fact that the only modern thing that had been built in 50, 60 years in this tiny little non-existent town was this beautiful little bank. I always found fascinating. But the reason that some towns look bad and other towns look better, maybe the banker, it's also because those towns were founded

on the distance of horses, how far you had to get from the farm to the place where you bought your stuff. And then cars come along and the cars shorten the distances. So about every third town prospers and the other towns don't. And the one that has the little nucleus of business downtown, that, that one hung on and the rest of them withered a bit. And I think it more, it has more to do with automobile and distance and where the farmer goes on Saturday to get his feed and his shoes. But that's, you know, that's maybe everybody looks at it from their own particular angle and sees it differently. Well, you know, I maybe everybody looks at it from their own particular angle and sees well you know i i i know we got to move on but i i this is actually something i've never asked james about i've kind of always wanted to and i i know we're sort of far afield on the idea

of banks but i think in general this comes under the heading we all think or we think or i think or whatever that uh multiple banks good a few money center banks bad uh federal deposit insurance for um the small depositor whatever we wanted we can define that up if we want to but you know not not zillionaires seems good um and anything above that we as this comes up has cast either those people either have to find other ways or they lose their money. That's what happens in capitalism. Losing your money is something that happens. Okay, so that. But, because we're talking about the actual physical banks.

When I was in college, I was studying architecture. One of the most beautiful kind of genre of architecture we studied were of course midwestern banks and the most beautiful ones were made or designed by an architect named louis sullivan yep and some are still around and i haven't i've never seen one in perp in person but i assume that james has yes and i want james to tell me if there is beautiful in person they are they and they are as like extraordinary like works of art but also works of like uh symbol symbolism like you can trust this place and it's and they're kind of like they're not classical they're not like they're not you know uh they don't like they but they they seem real right yeah they're utter and total break with with with american norms. And it's not

just Sullivan, Elmsley. There's a whole bunch of guys who were working in the Prairie School and the Sullivan School who farmed out over the Midwest and made a whole bunch of little banks. Not a lot, but enough so that you are surprised when you find one or you make a trip to go see one. And they are gorgeous. They're square. They have none of the classical ornamentation. They're broadly new in an American way. They have this organic style of decoration that nobody had done before that Sullivan came up with, which is appropriately called Sullivanesque. And what it says is this is a progressive place. This looks forward.

This place has been an utter clean break from the past. Now, whether or not that actually sends the message you want to send, I don't know. Because if you're the farmer coming into town, do you want the one with the pillars? Because the pillars are Roman and they go back 2,000 years. All the big banks in New York have the pillars. Or do you want the one that looks like this efflorescence of new ideas? What are they doing in there? Who are they giving my money to? So while we love them for their aesthetic appeal, I just wonder whether not a lot of farmers have said, that's the craziest, ugliest-looking thing I ever saw.

I'm putting my money in this place over here. What got the pillars and the Corinthian leaves at the top? So that's that. I think the farmers like the Louis Sullivan Bank. That's what I think. It could have been because it was organic. It could have been because a lot of the farmers were progressive in the sense that they joined movements that had co-ops and the know then the rest of it the idea that they're all high-bound folks ain't so but we can in closing in closing we can agree i don't know whether it's every third town that still needed these

up fine i take that point that's an interesting point but in closing we can agree that we'd rather have the community banker in a louis sullivan bank if there are only half of those a dozen of them needed anymore in north dakota we'd rather have that than have farmers have to deal with jp morgan chase yes and have the the local rep in north dakota always looking over his shoulder to manhattan we really don't want that do we and right and i'll tell you something else and at least in those days you could go down to the bank. You got out your bank book, your little passport, your little passbook savings. You dealt with somebody at the teller cage that you may know. When you sat down with the banker and he opened up the stuff and you wrote down some numbers, you weren't looking over your shoulder

because you thought somebody was going to steal all your information and take and drain your account, which is what it feels like sometimes when you're banking online. I got to huddle around my laptop and throw up all kinds of walls in case nobody gets me and sees my precious numbers. Oh, no. That's why you don't want to be exposed. Your information doesn't want to be exposed. And sometimes it feels like using the internet is just like leaving your laptop exposed and open at a coffee table. Am I right? Fantastic. Yes. Great. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. you wouldn't leave your laptop open at the coffee shop i mean most of the time you know you got to go to the can could you watch my computer you'll be fine you'll be fine but what if you come out one day from the bathroom and your laptop's gone

well every time you connect to an unencrypted network it's cafes and hotels and airports any hacker on the same network can gain access to your personal data like your passwords financial details and so forth. I might amaze you how easy it can be for a half-intelligent crook to hack you. They just need some cheap hardware and an unsuspecting netizen who does not have ExpressVPN. Well, ExpressVPN creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. And with that simple tap to turn it on, now that hacker needs a supercomputer and a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. And they don't have that, and that's not going to happen. So it works on all your devices, which is great. Turning it on is as easy as firing up the

app with one tap. That's what I love about it. No matter what device I have, I just, you know, why am I standing out here naked in the public square? Turn on my ExpressVPN, hit the button, there we go, got that tunnel, we're encrypted, we're fine. I can relax. And you can relax too. You can secure your online data today by using expressvpn.com slash ricochet. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash ricochet. And you can get an extra three months for free on us, on them at expressvpn.com slash ricochet. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Walker Stewart, editor of the Stanford Review and member of the university's College Republicans. And you're thinking, oh, was he there? Was he there, Charlotte? Walker, thanks for joining us today. Of course,

everybody's talking about what happened at Stanford Law law appalling as it was bring us up to date you know tell us what happened and then bring us up to date sure yeah thank you for having me on so uh last week on the fifth circuit court of appeals i was scheduled the federal society invited him to give a talk on covid guns and twitter you know all together kind of innocuous topics like important but, but not exactly. It's a great Warren's of on this point. And basically the, like some campus activists didn't like that. I think he didn't give proper deference to transgender ideology in one of his opinions last year.

And the activists at Stanford law school did not like that and decided basically to, and we can discuss this more, collude with administration to shut down Judge Duncan's talk. And so last Thursday, he was like, he came to give his talk, he was being heckled and shouted at, and then the diversity and inclusion dean of the law school came up and gave a pre-prepared speech, after which the event was completely shut down. And so that kind of gets you updated on what happened last Thursday, but it was a complete violation of any sort of university norms surrounding free speech, and yet nobody's been punished and nobody's been disciplined eight days later.

Just to review the central points, it's Judge Kyle Duncan, federal judge, big deal if you're a law school student to hear a federal judge speak, Fourth Circuit. And it's not as if he said something controversial during his talk. It's that he wrote an opinion that certain law school students found controversial. They never even permitted him to start his talk. Is that correct? Yes. He was heckled the entire time.

He was trying to speak to the point that he asked for an administrator to, you know, speak to the students, try to calm things down. That administrator was, ended up being Dean Steinbeck, who basically just shut down the talk after. Okay.

The other thing about which I want to be very clear is that, and which I'm not clear, you said student activists. So these were students who came from outside the law school, Stanford students, but they came from outside the law school, or these were students at, they were law school students who heckled him. So my understanding is that it was primarily law school students that were the ones heckling Judge Duncan. There could have been, you know, an undergrad or business school student slipped in there, but, you know, generally it was undergrad or excuse me, it was law students. Okay. And what's happened since? Then there was an apology. Tell us about that. Yeah. So Stanford released an apology where it basically said what happened was inconsistent with our policies, and we're taking steps to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again. What steps they've actually taken.

And that letter was signed, the letter was signed by the president of the university and the dean of the law school, correct? Yes, sir. Yes, that's correct. Okay. And then what, and the response to that letter has been? So on Monday, so the dean of the law school, every week she teaches a 60-person seminar on Mondays. And this past Monday, 50 out of the 60 students in her seminar wore black masks in protest of her apology letter. And so what that's saying is that, you know, 83% of, you know,

the people in this Dean Martinez's class were in support of shutting down Kyle Duncan's talk, which is truly remarkable. And they thought the outrage was not that a federal judge had been refused the opportunity to speak at stanford law school the outrage was that the dean of the law school had apologized to the federal judge that he had not been permitted to speak correct all right yeah their their movement was on you know where is his apology referring to an incident last year where my understanding was that there was a law student that was trying to dox members of the Federalist Society and ended up getting in trouble with the administration. And that was one

of their, like these activists rallying cries after was, you know, oh, the university apologized to Judge Duncan, but they didn't to the student who was behaving badly last year. I have one last question before I remand you to Rob and James, who are going to ask you about what it all means. I will be listening intently. And the last question is this. In Stanford Law School, we are discussing an institution which regularly, I mean, year in and year out, ranks among the top five law schools in the country.

Is that correct? Yeah, it's typically ranked number three in the world. The third best law school in the country is that correct yeah it's typically right number three in the world the third best law school dale harvard chicago stanford all there it's it's a group right at the tippy top year after year all right right um judge duncan i mean when i read it the first i i was in between cycles so i read the thing that had the news after the disastrous appearance and before the apology. Part of what their argument was, was that he was a jerk. Right? That he was a jerk to the students who were protesting. I mean, the protesters argued.

It was like we were protesting and disrupting his speech. And he was a jerk to us and told us to shut up. Some version of that. He was rude. And that is true, right? I mean, that is kind of true. He was sort of rude and kind of a jerk. And later when they called him on it, some reporter, he said, yeah, they were trying to shut him.

Yeah, I don't apologize for telling people that are talking over me to shut up. They're stupid. I'm just looking just watching the goalpost move right so it starts with he is no he should not be allowed to speak here and then the official stanford position is well he is allowed to speak here and you're also allowed to protest his his appearance outside the the hall wherever he was speaking and then the protest then the goalpost moved to and he's not allowed to be a jerk if you interrupt him he's got to be meek and polite and shut his mouth and take it and then the goalpost moves a third time to and the dean of the law school can't

make a statement in which he reaffirms the basic, you know, I would think the most anodyne, boilerplate law school belief, which is that speech should be protected and everyone has a right to be heard. So the goalpost now has moved from he's a jerk because he's conservative to he's a jerk because he was rude to the kids who were screaming at him to the dean of the law school has got to be removed so my question to you is this they can't remove the federal judge but they can probably get rid of her right they can probably get rid of can they i mean my guess what are her like if you were like putting a bullseye in her back how big is that bullseye like how much, how much trouble is she in? There are two deans in question here, Rob. One is—

I don't mean the DEI dean. I mean the dean of law. I mean, I think she probably—D. Martinez is probably fine. I think that really with—we've seen with the university president, the provost especially, where really what these activists want isn't necessarily to get the person fired, but they want the person to be scared and to take their side again the next time. And that's really actually, if you read the piece that one of our writers put out in the Stanford Review two days ago, about how Dean Steinbeck actually in January, she was moderating a panel with, um, about free speech with a, in a sort of judge that the Federalist Society had invited. And a lot of these student activists

were very dissatisfied with her for being too accommodating to that conservative right-leaning speech. And that is really what, uh, we think motivated Dean Steinbeck to end up behaving so poorly last week, was that she needed to sort of get back in the good graces of the law school activists at Stanford. Hey, Walker, the Stanford Review is online. Listeners can read about this online. Yes, they can. This is our most recent article about how the entire event last Thursday was premeditated. The dean knew about it.

Other administrators knew about it. The students knew about it. They were all working together in cahoots to shut Judge Duncan down. Just Google on Stanford Review and it'll pop up? Yes. Got it. Okay. Sorry, Rob.

I know James wants to say anything. I got one more. So my usual posture, right, when I hear about stuff like this, of course we hear about stuff like this every couple of weeks, is to sort of shrug and say, look, you know what's probably, you know, I mean, yes, it's terrible. It's terrible. But

in all these schools, it's like, you know, 20 loudmouth pains in the ass, and everybody else has got their heads down and just wants to go to class and get the law degree and then go work at a, you know, Sullivan and Cromwell and make a billion dollars. Most people are just kind of like,

yeah, whatever, man, just keep it down. I got to do some reading. And that's what I, that, that is a lullaby.

I think I'm telling myself, but then you tell me, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, 80% of her class showed up wearing masks and whatever, like blindfolds or something. This is not a few troublemaking loudmouths, little babies, little emotional babies at Stanford Law law this is the student body of the stanford law school so am i full of it when

i like say oh come on you're absolutely not i mean it's or when you say come on like it's only a couple people like these are like 50 of the students in our class it wasn't like a passive action they took they actively went out they got their masks they got their like little signs there are people protesting outside of the class this is me mind you like a seminar on some legal topic i think it was like property law or something kind of obscure that people these students made an active choice to protest the other thing i'll note is that these are not like you know 19 year old immature little kids these people are 24 25 years old behaving this way and that's what i think is most remarkable and not to say that they can't protest but the fact that they're choosing to do

so i can still say is absurd it's odd that they think that somehow manifesting this behavior is not going to affect their employment in the future that when somebody does a little google search on them or whatever looks for their face it looks what they do say oh this is a person who causes an awful lot of trouble i don't want this person bringing this set of values to our office because they're just going to be difficult. And there are other people to bring. But it makes me wonder, is there a code of conduct that students are required to sign? We know that it's like the license agreement on your iPhone or any software. You simply scroll to the bottom and tap, I agree. But is there anything that says thou shalt not exercise the heckler's veto? I mean, of course, I wouldn't say that.

But is there anything that says we expect you to behave? So I would say there is, but it's about as valuable as the Cuban Constitution in that it's not worth the paper that it's printed on because it's not at all enforced. And so there's all sorts of great promises that we make as students and the university makes to us. But when push comes to shove, there's zero enforcement. And so, you know, yeah, we sign saying we're going to behave well and the university says they make their promises to us, but it doesn't actually in practice mean

anything. The great thing about the Cuban Constitution and what it's printed on is a very low quality paper that makes for a good bathroom tissue. It's not that stiff vellum. It does at least have some use. Yes, it does. So, Walker, what about, this is to pursue Rob's question. Presumably, Judge Duncan is done looking for clerks from Stanford Law School. So, I guess I have the big firms that recruit from top law schools. Are they alert to this?

Or is it just going to be half a dozen federal judges who came up through the Federalist Society who say, actually, if you send me a resume from Stanford Law School or from Yale Law School, you have a burden to overcome in demonstrating why I should consider you for my chambers. Well, I can see that. It seems as though Judge Duncan is going to, I've heard that he's writing a piece in which he's going to explain himself, and he may say something like that. But that's a handful of federal judges. Now, Clarence Thomas may be one of them. I mean, there may be serious figures in the judiciary who say, that's it, we've had enough. But is that enough to make any difference? Does the institution have to worry about its reputation? Will the big firm still just go right on hiring? What do you think? Unfortunately, I mean, the answer I think we've

seen over the past five or six years is things on college campuses have gotten crazier and crazier, and it hasn't been the firms. Like, it used to be, you know, you'd say, oh, you know, people get or kind of go crazy in college, but, you know, once you get to the real world, you know, then you kind of calm down. But now I've noticed two things. The first is that kids arrive on campus already, you know, totally ingrained in this like leftist, you know, anti-speech philosophy. Like last year, the two leaders, when Mike Pence came to speak on campus, the two leaders of like the shutdown Mike pence protest were both freshmen in college these weren't kids that you know came from their good family and they came to college and you know they went crazy this was these were kids that were already you know fully like

pre-crazed for your convenience yes exactly they're pre-crazed and the other thing is that on the other side of things that these law firms these companies these corporations that they're hiring all these students coming out of colleges and it's not that the students are changing, it's the companies that are changing. And you can see that in the various statements that come out, you know, anytime there's some sort of social issue that, you know, every company feels the need to comment on, you know, how bad things are, you know, how much they support X group or Y group. So that's why- Well, my next national review column is about an, talking. My next national review column is about an Iowa grocery store convenience chain that felt compelled to speak out about the Iowa trans bill

because everybody needs to know where the gas station stands on that issue. Hey, Walker, before you go, what's your major? I'm majoring in computer science. Oh, good. Something useful. Absolutely. All right. Great.

Fantastic. Learn to code. You're. Absolutely. All right. Great. Fantastic. Learn to code. You're a learn to coder. Yeah. And Stanford code has got to be the most rarefied special kind of code you can possibly imagine. So that's like, that's cool. Walker, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, James. I've been stepping in with one last question because I just can't resist. You have just demonstrated that you think about the world, the issues of the day. You have demonstrated that you're very articulate. There is an argument that a young man such as yourself 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, would have gravitated toward classics or an English degree or political science or history. And instead instead you're moving right into the technical stuff is that because well why is that just why well i think that it's unreal it's quite unfortunate

that you know the liberal arts have been completely hollowed out and especially at stanford the class there's a few good classics courses a few good history courses i've taken them and have taken them but there's just it's kind of few and far between unfortunately there's uh you can look up on the stanford course catalog if you look at the word queer you'll find 150 you know different classes about you know various queer topics meanwhile you look up bible you look up like christ and there's maybe 15 and so that's really what's happened to the universities. It's kind of subtle, you know, taking out the courses that are meaningful and inserting pure ideology, basically. And five of those classes on Christ are going to be deconstructing the heteronormative relationship between the disciples,

queering John the Baptist— I mean, even those 15 aren't completely safe. Walker, thanks for joining us today. Good luck, and when you get a job, make sure to go back to your alma mater and spread the gospel about practicality. Of course, yeah. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Walker. Now, go tell everybody at the Stanford Review to join Ricochet. Yes, absolutely. There we go. We'll do a little cross-marketing, Walker. Now, go tell everybody at the Stanford Review to join Ricochet. Yes, absolutely. There we go. We'll do a little cross-marketing, Walker. Yeah, right. Take care.

Thank you. Capitalism. I should talk. I was an English major, so what have I actually provided that's of tangible use to the world? But when I look back in college, even when I went to the college, the college in the late 70s, early 80s, and I was there for a long time, it still had the feeling of we are passing along to you Western civilization. And I like that. And I look now at the purpose, which seems to be to deconstruct it and to replace it with all of these brave and bold and wonderful new ideas that are so much better than the archaic, colonialist, imperialist, etc. stuff we had before. I feel old and out of place, and my world is gone. But the question is, is it possible to feel older, as we all do, to be older, but to actually feel younger?

The answer, according to a Harvard scientist and Nobel Prize winning breakthrough, the answer is absolutely you can extend lifespan and feel younger. Oh, wait a minute. How, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. You got to lengthen your telomeres. Right. Your telomeres.

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That's YouthSwitchMD.com slash Ricochet to order a Youth Switch today. And we thank Youth Switch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now in the background, I don't know if you guys can hear it, but there's a siren, which is nice. It indicates that there's actually some life downtown. I was walking in the background, I don't know if you guys can hear it, but there's a siren, which is nice. It indicates that there's actually some life downtown.

I was walking in the lobby today, and I heard this high-pitched whine sound that I could not place. Now, this is a big building. It's a 50-story office structure. And there's nobody in the lobby. There's nobody up in the Skyway level. And there was just this whining sound that seemed to echo and fill the lobby. Couldn't figure out what it was. I thought, I'm going to have to ask my buddy Colt Luger about this. He's a maintenance guy. He goes

out for a smoke. I go out for a cigar sometimes. We bump into each other and I talk about, you know, how's the building doing? He always says, well, if you see me running, run with me. He tells me what's broken, what's fixed. It's always, you learn something about where you are by talking to the guys who are responsible for keeping it up. And I thought, I'm going to have to ask him what that wine is. And when I got upstairs, I realized what it was. It was one of the maintenance people, janitorial people, vacuuming the floor. There was so little life in this building, so few people, that the sound of one person just pushing an electric vacuum back and forth was the only dominant, which just echoed throughout the whole thing

and filled the emptiness with this empty wine. And I thought, that's apt, now that we are practically at the three-year anniversary of the hammer coming down, of the lockdown coming down. I wrote about this on Ricochet, where people can go and read it if they wish, and then join Ricochet, please, thank you. The three-year anniversary about how much came back to life and how much was just broken for good, snapped for good. And I want to ask you guys, two weeks, we kind of figured, all right, we're going to do this thing for two weeks. We're going to bunker, we're going to hunker, we can do it. And I actually kind

of enjoyed it aside from the terrifying prospect of going outside, which was at first, because nobody knew, of coming downtown, of crossing the street when you saw somebody, going to the grocery store and saying, oh, lots of produce. That's great. Oh, there's no flour. There's no pot. It's a weird time.

But I was home. My daughter was home. We had our exchange student. And it was an interesting time. And we all bunkered and bunkered and bonded. But when they said another two weeks, that's when something was sundered. That's when something was broken. And I don't think we've ever stitched it back.

Did you guys feel the same way? Did you feel when we went from two weeks to, well, we got to keep going and everything kept piling on. And the news just came to the ventilators and the this and the ivermectin at the bleach and the press conferences and the rest of it um what did you think three years ago yeah it kind of was three years ago right yeah it was three it's the anniversary of fauci coming out and making a speech grinning practically ear to ear about all the things that they have to do right trump sitting there with his chest puffed out grinning as well smiling about what the you know the lockdowns at the closing of this and that burks and oh god right well i'm kind of studying this now so i'm kind of um it's interesting that there's a bunch of we have a bunch of pivot points

that we chose as a culture you know and en masse to have a panic attack uh and one of them was i mean was when we found out i think maybe i already talked about this but like the most uh interesting place um for me in this isn't you know washington or the cdc or sweden or italy it's santa clara county and in santa clara county our own jay batacharia uh was did a study, among other people, and he looked at simply how many people are infected with COVID and what the rate of COVID infection was. And it was enormously high, which sounded like bad news, but it was good news because the rate of hospitalization and illness and people suffering was enormously low, much lower than we expected. And his conclusion was, okay, panic over. Tidal wave's coming.

We now know we're all going to get wet. But we're not all going to drown. Most of us aren't. A lot of us aren't. And we know the people who we need to protect, and we should be protecting them. And that is when either you follow along in that, you follow that path, and you say, okay, we have all the information we need now to run an effective focus protection plan for the country. Or you say, the study's rigged. It's no good. The data's not real it's not science

it's even a little bit corrupt because a guy who runs an airline gave five thousand dollars to it so he must have some you know secret plan to get the planes flying again um which is what you do when you're having a panic attack you freak out and you ignore the evidence in front of you. And then there was one county. So one county, a study of one county, had all the answers we really needed. And you know what county had the most draconian COVID restrictions and still does in many places? Santa Clara County.

It bookends the entire entire nationwide freak out the answer was right in santa clara county and they were so unwilling to see it in santa clara county that they i don't think they i think they they closed churches for they they find churches tens of thousands of dollars would be in santa clara county uh and they were thought of during the during the crisis capital c crisis as being a model county for how restrictive they were um i mean you know you if you look if you wrote this we'd say come on two on the nose two this is too perfect too symmetrical it can't be that but that is exactly what happened i think the problem with jay and his cohorts was that they issued their statement from the location of great barrington which made it sound as though their barrington declaration was itself

great here is our great terrific great but, if they've issued it from the county of hide and panic, if they said this is the hide and panic declaration, the freak out. The freak out people would have loved it because they thought here are more reasons to hide and to panic. And they would have taken all of the advice and say, well, then we have to do this. Too many people. I think my wife watched Contagion, the movie while we were in Mexico. She'd never seen it before. And she's stunned to see exactly how the movie presciently, seemingly, predicted what would happen.

But the fact is, is that so many people had seen the movie Contagion when they started to hear about COVID coming their way in December or January. They looked at the movie and behaved as though that was the actual template, as though Lawrence Fishburne was driving this frickin' thing

instead of the... Anyway, Peter, you were going to say. Well, just first of the, anyway, Peter, you're going to say, well, just first of all, listeners should know why, why is, why is Rob going into this in some details? Because Rob is working on what I'm sure is going to be a brilliant long form, long form,

a series, a podcast series on this very subject. And so I can't wait for Rob to do that. As far as I can recall, Rob, now you've talked to Jay and you have the details, you have the facts in the front of your mind. They're no longer in the front of my mind. But as I recall, when Jay did that study, I think it's called the seroprevalence study. Yes, seroprevalence study in Santa Clara. Okay. So the public health authorities back in Washington were already announcing,

we're going to have to shut down, we're going to have to mask, we're going to have to close the entire American economy. And Jay said, well, wait a minute, let's see how bad this is. Let's see how many people are infected. Jay, our friend Jay, whose office is just 100 yards from mine where I sit right now. And as far as I am aware, Jay Bhattacharya, not the NIH, not NASID or whatever the letters are, none of those huge multi-billion dollar operations back in Washington. But Jay Bhattacharya conducted the first seroprevalence. He's the first one who said, well, let's just go look what the science is. Let's do an empirical study. And then he discovered, wait a minute, lots of people have already been infected. And that means two things.

One, it's not nearly as deadly as they're telling us back in Washington. Far more people have been infected and had not shown up in the hospital, had only minor symptoms or none at all. First of all, this thing isn't that dangerous, as dangerous as they're saying. And second second if this many people have been infected it's over the horse is out of the barn shutting down the economy wearing that it's going to ripple right the whole country anyway those two findings by little i say little jay paduchari he's not little but it was just his own enterprise not these massively funded operations operations back in Washington on which we rely. Do this kind of thing. They just went off on a power trip.

And Jay said, well, wait a minute here. I actually have done a study. I've actually sampled human beings. And not only was he ignored, he was denigrated, derided. Yeah. Just astounding. You know, the Santa Clara study was about April 2020. Wait a minute.

April? You're saying April 2020? April 2020. Okay. I just have to ask. In California, what's the weather like in April? Is it really getting spring? Because here, we think it's going to be spring, but it's not.

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when you use the promo code Ricochet at BowlinBranch.com. That's BollandBranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H.com. Promo code Ricochet. Exclusion supply. See the site for details. Now, we thank Bolland Branch for sponsoring this, our Ricochet podcast. Anyway, sorry, Rob, I interrupted you. No, I'm glad you did. Well and branch, they're fine advertisers. They've been supporters for a long time. So anyway, Santa Clara studies about April 2020. Great Barrington, just by the way, was October of that year.

So Great Barrington was quite late in the crisis. And the irony was that Great Barrington was seen as this radical weird thing, um, to say and way out there when in fact it was, you know, October of 2020 where we did have enough information to make those arguments. About a third of the things, roughly a third, I think, are the things that people criticized the, the Santa Clara study for study four uh were legitimate they were things that jay would you know say yeah well obviously it was april so we didn't have great testing kits we didn't have um we didn't have the technology that we had for testing that we did later um all that all that taken the numbers still point in the same direction it's directionally correct so the argument should be to the science community let's not try to let's not spend all of our time trying to poke holes in the santa clara study let's spend at least half of our time trying to prove it

correct because if it's correct that is good news in other words it is good try to try to repeat it try to replicate it do what's right just do it okay uh and that was not going to happen um so that that just just interesting the way you know the the systems work and and the problem really is that the the best news i mean i think i was saying this before but i mean i was saying prematurely that but covid this is good covid was good news for us it was a dry run i mean if it's covid is something more serious i mean but what's interesting about covid was that everyone who gets it doesn't go to the hospital you you can't really say that about Ebola or about, you know, the next thing

on the way. COVID was, in many ways, a perfect lesson. And the lesson shouldn't be we need to stockpile masks or we need to, you know, make sure we have hospital boats, although we probably should. The lesson should be we need to not panic and we need to not freak out and the people who are tasked with the non-panicking and the non-freaking out are supposed to be the ones in charge and it was a crazy reversal and i think this is a crazy reversal we're seeing everywhere in our lives now just to be broad, a 60,000-foot view, of the bureaucrats and the administrators and the scientists losing their marbles while ordinary people who don't know anything about infectious diseases or how respiratory viruses work or what the seropositive even means they somehow knew that this was a mistake what we were doing they somehow knew they somehow they knew because they were not seeing what they'd seen in the

chinese videos people dropping on the street twitching men walking down in white suits hosing down the streets with bleach which is is what you do if Ebola is abroad in the land. Now, the suffering and dying went on in the hospitals and the nursing homes out of sight. So it was limited to the people who were told what had happened because they couldn't go see them. But still, the fact that there was not this massive collapse of everything told everybody that this is not Ebola. This is not the thing in the omega man that makes everybody clutch their throat and drop to the ground um and once you had and it wasn't based on science necessarily it just was based on this sort of mutual just revelation everybody kind of agreed

oh because everybody at the start was thinking we're going to get this i don't want to get this it's going to be sick i'm going to be horrible but day after day, you would wake up and you weren't sick. Day after day, you would go to the store and see the guys who were working there, stocking the shelves and running the cash registers, who were still there. If this was that bad, this grocery store would not be open. This fiction of six feet apart. This idea of opening for an hour early to let the elderly in. All of these things, these walking around with yardsticks.

No, if it was this bad, this would not be open. to let the elderly in. All of these things, these walking around with yardsticks so we don't... No, if it was this bad, this would not be open. None of this would. So everything that came to be safety theater, TSA's idea, TSA mindset applied to the entire world

struck us as BS because obviously this is not doing anything and it's not that bad. So, I mean, nobody knew by looking at Jay's study. Nobody knew by looking at a paper or something like that. There was just this, we intuited that this was not the end of the world, because we'd seen contagion.

And we did not have the armory down the street from where I work here filled with dead bodies, including Kate Winslet. No, no, that's absolutely true. You're absolutely right. I'm actually looking. There is a number. I saw it, and, that's absolutely true. You're absolutely right. I'm actually looking, there is a number, I saw it and I'm researching for it, that has the rate of, I mean, this is old news for people, but the rate of infection among the people who worked at, you know, grocery stores and drug stores, right? They were open, they were open for business, you know, necessary, whatever they call necessary workers um the rate

of infection for those people compared to everyone else that my initial research suggests that it is the same meaning that the santa clara studies vindicated it was a tidal wave we all got wet only some of us drowned. And had we spent a little bit more time trying to protect the people who were going to be drowned, we might have saved a few. It's not like Ebola. If Ebola comes here and they say, stay indoors, if you stay inside your house, you probably won't get Ebola. Right? But it's not going to have anything to do with your COVID chances. Anyway.

Any public health emergency that declares me to be an essential person has got something wrong. Yeah, that's quite true. Is all I can say. I had my paper so I could go downtown to the office and write made-up funny humor columns. Ha-ha. Rob, we know you've got to go. We're going to carry on for a few minutes bravely without you. I'll do all the meet-up stuff.

You don't have to worry about that. Off you go. New Orleans, mid-April. I'll be there. You will. Will you now? I will be there. Fantastic. Yeah, it doesn't come to Minnesota, but it goes to New Orleans. All right, Rob, we'll talk to you next week. Peter and I will soldier on. All you Rob Long fans, I know you're tuning us off right now, but we're going to

soldier on best as we can. Yeah, there aren't any. See you later. Bye-bye, Rob. Before we go, there's some obligation to talk about the Oscars, and I could not care less about the Oscars. What was Best Picture last year? Do you remember? I don't have a clue. That's right.

Neither do I. So we're the worst people to talk about the Oscars. So we won't. However, we are massively entitled and credentialed geopolitical experts. Not. So we can pick apart, perhaps, what DeSantis said.

I think, in a sense, you know, what DeSantis said about Ukraine, I like the guy. I think he may have. Do politics. We'll see. I'm not particularly upset that he ate pudding with his fingers.

Which apparently is the most important thing to a lot of people right now. I think Amy. Didn't Amy Klobuchar eat a salad with a comb or something like that? I don't know. Doesn't matter. But his statements on Ukraine. If you want to to say is this a matter of high national interest you can talk about well debt orders taking care of our people are necessarily more important because those are the priorities of the government then the government is here for us uh in an ancillary

sense though you know we live in a world and you got to deal with what's happening so i support pretty much what we're doing with ukraine so i'm not really worried about what he said i'm not sure he would have he would have acted differently than biden um if he were president he may have some things to learn about this but i'm i don't know i like the guy and i support ukraine and i just kind of shrugged this one off and kept walking. That seems to me to be the right reaction. He's a working politician. He doesn't know much about foreign policy yet. He's never been in a position in which he had to learn about foreign policy. Now he is. He's trying to thread the political needle, meaning he has to beat Trump for the nomination without driving away Donald Trump's supporters.

And that is going to be a trick and a half. That is what dominates his thinking, not Ukraine. At the same time, it was disappointing. And disappointing not even at the level of policy. Should we back them? He said a border dispute between Ukraine and Russia should not be a high American priority. It's not a border dispute. He knows it's not a border dispute.

So that, Ron DeSantis, Yale undergrad, Harvard Law School, two tours in navy intelligence knows better it's a false step when a smart guy sounds stupid and he did so it's a stumble it's not a fatal wound it's a stumble he's learning we're watching it we're watching him learn everybody gets one of those i remember trump blowing a question about the nuclear triad you know back in the day or right right he didn't even he had no idea what it was clear idea and i remember he would ask him a question about the nuclear triad you know back in the day or right right he didn't even he had no idea what it was clear idea and i remember he would ask him a question about the kud's forces and he was and he thought that he was talking the the iranian kud's forces he thought he was talking about uh the kurds and went off in another direction and was really angry when he corrected him on it like it was a got trick gotcha question it happens they're going to stumble from time to

time at the when they get out of the gate. What matters? And you're right. It goes to instincts. And in this case, instincts and knowledge, not that, you know, not not that heartening. But we got some time to go and some seasoning to do. Trump, I think when you talk about Trump supporters alienating them, it's true you can't. But I think a lot of what Trump is tweeting these days is alienating former Trump supporters. And by supporters, I mean people who voted for him once, probably with maybe, you know, not great enthusiasm. And then the second time voted for him with enthusiasm because they were trying to stick it to whoever had ginned up the Russia gate, everybody that was coming down on the response, the people who wanted to foist Biden upon him. So they went in and said, you know, you call me deplorable hell yeah i'm gonna vote for trump take that

or the people who were really enthusiastic the first time and a little less so the second because you know they got this and they got that i mean so there's all kinds of people who voted for him who would vote for him again if he were the not but the number of enthusiastic people i think has declined and a lot of the people just simply don't want him to run because the Trump that's coming out of these, you know, everyone says, well, at least no mean tweets. That's true. But man, the stuff that he posts on social can be just eye wateringly in name and just dumb name calling and weird and cranky. It's like I this is not the most intellectually vivacious opportunity, choice that we got out there. So, no.

And I've been saving a whole bunch of them up, and there's no reason to read them. But he was talking about ethanol in one of his recent Truth Social postings about the necessity of alpha. Ethanol is a huge boondoggle. It's an immense boondoggle for the agricultural industry. We don't need it. We don't want it.

We don't want that stuff in our gas tank. So the fact that DeSantis is against it is one of those, oh, I thought that's sort of kind of what big government does is it mandates things like ethanol and pours government money into it and forces people to buy it, so you're for that. Why exactly? And so forth, and so forth, and so forth. Anything else, Peter, in this week that you would like to discuss or should we just mercifully let the audience get on to going in the comments and telling us where we're wrong about this and wrong

about that yeah no i i i always read the reader comments and learn a lot what should we watch this weekend james we're we're out of i'm so desperate that uh my wife went off on a skiing trip with a couple of kids and here's what i found myself watching i called up tinker taylor soldier spy 1979 version right with alec guinness and it's available for free on youtube and the picture is a little bit grainy and you have to adjust to the pacing because boy did serial television move at a different pace in 1979 from the pace it moves at now but by the time you're 10 minutes into it you've settled into the pace and it's just an amazing thing to watch a great actor underplay every it was just an amazing thing but i thought, wow, we're supposed to be in the golden age of serial television, and I can't find anything.

So I'm going all the way back to 1979. That can't be right. What am I missing? You're missing nothing. It's all a matter of taste. There are shows that I've told people to watch that they come back and they put their hands gently around my neck and say, speak no more to me ever again about anything. Because they just hated it so much. And then there are shows that my daughter will recommend

that I will absolutely adore. And my wife will look at them and she'll roll her eyes so hard backwards that she falls over in a chair. So it's all a matter of taste. And I'm not going to recommend anything to anybody. I'm finishing up The Last of Us with diminishing enthusiasm.

I'm continuing to watch Hello Tomorrow, which is this wonderful retro vision, retro futuristic vision of where 1950s aesthetics and ideas pretty much got locked in place as we technologically progressed to computers and moonshots. And it's actually just a Willie Loman salesman story with incredible graphics that are so far up my alleyway that I just think that, you know, they were reading my mind before they made it.

And other than that, I have nothing to say except you listening should go to Ricochet and join because we're going to be here for a while. Yes, we are. And your membership will help us continue. And that's the only place, the only place on the entire internet, I'm telling you folks, where you're going to be able to find people like yourself who enjoy a civil conversation, which sometimes gets a little salty and spicy. Yeah, but that's what friends do when they talk. So when I say we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0, that suggests that we haven't gone off the dime and there's not revisions. No, what I'm going to say is this week,

we will see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. However, first of all, we got to thank Bolin Branch, Youth Switch, and ExpressVPN. Support them for supporting us. Give us that five-star review at Apple. And, you know, and ExpressVPN. Support them for supporting us. Give us that five-star review at Apple. And, you know, we'll see you in the comments. I said it, Ricochet, 4.0, but it won't be 4.0 for long. Tune in. Find out later. See you, Peter, next week. And on that note of intrigue, next week, James. Ricochet!

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