The Ricochet Podcast - Bathtub of Damocles

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

We start this week easy as one of our hosts reports from wonderfully peculiar city of New Orleans. Then Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) joins to discuss the coming cyberwars and he and James exchange words about football. Then Zachary Karabell joins to talk about his newest book: Inside Money: Brown Brother’s Harriman and the American Way of Power, a history of the legendary private investment... Source

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Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security

to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters growing your business whether it's communications or security innovate has you covered visit innovate today innovate the it solutions people his theory is that you know everybody needs to calm down. I'm always happy to hear that. I have a dream.

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. By and large, it was all peaceful protest. With all due 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 peter robinson and. I'm James Lileks. Today we talk to Representative Mike Gallagher about the future of cybersecurity

and Zachary Carabelle about the past of money. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 545. I'm James Lileks in Minneapolis. I know. I know.

It's the flagship podcast. That chuckle you hear is Rob Long, who is steeped in the humid wonders of New Orleans. Peter Robinson is in California. And before we get to the important stuff, Rob, your peripatetic journeys around the country are always of absolute fascination to everybody. What took you to New Orleans? Well, I've always wanted. I've always loved New Orleans forever, but I've always, I've been here a lot, but I've not been here long enough to be, to even be able to fantasize about being a local, which I used to do at other places and go.

And you think, oh, you know, I could, if I live here for a month, I could, I bet you I could live here forever. That's what I'm sort of trying it out and seeing. It's a great city. It's got lots going on. And I have some friends here i had dinner with some friends last night and um not even really just one friend of mine and who has a regular uh because it's a very new orleans thing a regular weekly uh red beans and rice dinner with his grandmother's recipe on his grandmother's

dining table uh he's from some you know he says like you know basically you drive until you you're in the jungle that's the tiny town that he's from in in louisiana and uh and usually people come to dinner 95% of people he doesn't know and that was sort of the case last night which is great it's the right new orleans thing and then of a one of what a young couple arrived they had just got the text from the bank that said they were approved or the, or for someone they had just bought a ramshackle broken down old bar about, you know, about me five blocks from where I am sitting right now in the Maroney that has been closed for a while and they're buying it.

And he, the young guy remembers like growing up, that was the bar that we'd go to. And so it's, it was a very new Orleans dinner party where we talked about bars and your favorite bars and why they work and how they plan to be stewards of this one. I mean, you just don't have that kind of conversation in any other city. No, I imagine not. To me, the city is haunted by humid history that never goes away.

And then there's the other side. And Peter, I'm sure that you have memories standing on a balcony, lifting up your sweater for beads, which is the other vision that people have, or perhaps not. Rob, how different does it feel? I'm searching my memory as best I can recall.

Louisiana is one of the few States now that I have never visited, but for example, yeah, when I go to the most Catholic example, when I go to Texas. My God, it's the most Catholic state. Yeah. When I go to Texas, you can really feel that it's its own entity. You could really feel that Texas is its own country.

Does New Orleans feel like that? Oh, New Orleans doesn't even feel like America. I mean, it feels like its own country. Yeah. It doesn't feel like anything that anything and i think about the the people who live here the the sort of old you know it's kind of new orleans new orleans they have something that or they don't have something that other people tend to have in other cities which is a kind of a FOMO like a fear of missing out or a kind of a um always an undercurrent of comparison to sort of new york or chicago

people in chicago always complain complain comparing themselves to new york even when they're ostentatiously not comparing themselves to new york you know they still are um and people in new orleans just don't even it doesn't occur to them that that they they just don't care they it isn't it's they've opted out and in a lot of ways that's really charming in some ways it's sort of infuriating um but it's definitely the the the vibe here is always just but you just opted out of the of the of this game that you're playing okay now let me ask sort of a blunt question here honestly does it feel like southern decay that the economy of the united states has passed

them by or is there enough economic activity i mean i remember reading at the time of katrina new orleans will never recover except as a tourist attraction does it feel as though there are reasons to live in new orleans other than your great great grandfather moved there it's hard to know because of course covid has sort of of put a big blanket on everything, so there's lots of things to do with COVID. I don't think that New Orleans did not recover from Katrina. I think that Katrina just kind of brought the problems to the surface, amplified problems. You're talking about a city that was essentially the bankers to the sugar industry and the bankers to sort of a lot of the oil industry bankers to

agriculture uh and then bankers to um uh the port you know the river and the river economy um and you know the river economy never recovered from the railroad so i mean new orleans has been in a state of decay since its founding and mostly it's because it's you know it's but it's literally already below seawater i mean you know the the the lake ponchar trains gigantic lakes lake sits above new orleans like the like the bathtub of damocles you know and at any point it's just, and I think people here have a kind of an attitude about that. I suspect that what New Orleans has, which, which, which I think other cities should, which I think Austin is doing,

is it has this attitude of like, well, what, how cool can we be and still be able, you can still live here on a budget. And, and that just attracts a lot of young people and a lot of young people who are sort of entrepreneurial and that's what's happened in austin and i think that's what's happening louisiana louisiana's problem of course is that it's not texas which is a state that kind of for you know i mean despite all of its conservative bona fides the state of texas the actual government entity is pretty efficient and uh and and and the state that state provides services to its citizens louisiana not so much so

you know louisiana the streets in louisiana kind of all messed up a lot of it's because it's you know rains here all the time and it floods and the trees are old and they dig up the sidewalk we're not going to fix it um that's the aesthetic but uh but i i've met a lot of people young i mean i have a little workspace around the corner from where i'm staying it's filled with young people look like workspaces in palo alto or new york city and and they're doing stuff that they do in palo alto new york city so um you know we may be looking at a very interesting thing happened in america which is that people get to choose where they want to live based on their

style and their taste then, you know, like, well, I kind of want crazy. So I'm going to go to new Orleans or hip. I want to go to Austin and it doesn't really matter where you live. You can still work. And, uh, and then when you get older, you want to go to Florida. That is literally too true. I have two of my kids have been told that their jobs would remain, will remain remote

for at least another year and so they literally are calling their friends saying where should we live where do you want to live well let's get let's get a group of us together and and rent a place in xyz it is literally true that there's a whole generation that's used to the idea now of we go work where we want to. Entirely new. New to me anyway. So if I get you right, Rob, then a city with a heavy French influence

has a sluggish and unresponsive bureaucracy? Yeah. That seems to be about the long and short of it, yes. That's the great thing about America is that you can cast your eyes around the continent and find every single colonial culture that you want. The Spanish, the British, the French, the rest of it, and each have left their own indelible stamp. Speaking of colonialism, there's the Israeli-Palestinian situation, which seems to have come to a conclusion for all time.

It's done. It's settled. There's a ceasefire that was put in place. Interesting this week that my own representative, Omar, voted against the Capitol security bill. I think they're going to spend $1.6 billion to fortify the Capitol so they don't have another insurrection, so they don't have another, you know, the invasion that almost toppled the country. And she, one of the reasons that she opposed it was that the bill did not address the real problem that we face, which is white supremacy. And I'm thinking about that as I'm seeing these videos from New York City and elsewhere of people throwing stuff at the Jews because they're Jews. And it would seem to me that if you really had a

big white supremacy problem in the sense that you had Nazis going around, you'd see guys in black uniforms with armbands and the rest of it beating up the jews because that's what supposedly they do uh instead we seem to have imported uh the culture the problems of the middle east right to america right down to the uh to the the old ancestral in the blood jew hatred that's surprising but it shouldn't be because it's happened before but it makes me i mean i was looking at footage from the diamond district where apparently some miscreants went through incendiary devices and you know wanted to wanted to beat the jews because of what was going on on the other side of the globe so now it's done uh supposedly there's a ceasefire what was accomplished what was uh what was done it seems obvious to me that what was accomplished was a whole lot of hamas headquarters turned into rubble um and a lot of people made aware of the fact that israel's got a pretty good

defense system aside from that nothing changed in anybody's mind and the arguments it seems to be the same narrative as before a illegitimate colonial power that is uh taking palestinian land and and performing genocidal apartheid which of course is not the case but but anyway that's what what's been discovered so as far as i can tell here's what's been discovered as a military matter the iranians and hamas and hezbollah all these people who've been watching now understand the capabilities of the iron dome they understand they understand how many rockets it takes fired and how much and what kind of tight bursts to overwhelm the iron dome so that 10 12 get through they understand that um only a dozen people in israel have been killed but

israel is the kind of place where if you kill a dozen people you shock the entire nation. They've discovered that in the Democratic Party, the anti-Israel pro-Palestinian forces, including your representative, Ilan Omar, are powerful enough to force the Democratic president of the United States to lean on the prime minister of Israel when his country is under rocket attack to knock it off, to engage in a ceasefire. What the Israelis have been able to do is, as the term goes, degrade the offensive capabilities of Hamas. But those rockets, as best I know, there are experts. There are people who actually know this stuff.

We had Elliott Abrams on last week. As best I can tell, those rockets are cheap. They now have proven Gaza is patrolled by Egypt, one land route patrolled by the Israelis themselves on its border with Israel, and there's a UN-sanctioned embargo by sea. And for all of that, the Iranians have been able to smuggle in thousands of rockets or the parts for thousands of rockets that Hamas was able to assemble in Gaza. So Iran has proven that it can throw its weight around and that it can smuggle weapons in. So discoveries have been made and not all discoveries in Israel's favor. The big one, I believe, is the ferocity and intensity of the pro-Palestinian wing of the Democratic Party in this country. Rob, do you think that the rest of the Gulf states taking a different tack this time

is because they realize that Iran is the threat and they do not want to encourage an emboldened Iran for them? There's a certain amount of realism, which has always been evident there. I mean, not always a priority. The realism is this, that for the foreseeable future, for the lifetime of at least the people on this podcast, it will not be possible to beat Israel militarily. That it is just not possible. Now, maybe,

you know, in the fullness of time that that could be rearranged. But when you look at this, you just look at the conflict, Hamas buys or gets for free missiles or missile building capability, because apparently they build them there from Iran. And the iron dome missiles are about 20x the price so you know they throw stones and the israelis shoot laser guided missiles and they and which that's an asymmetry that won't work and they're doing it to an economy to a

country with an economy that grows and actually has exports and has industry. And the trouble, I think, for the sort of anti-Israel wing in the Democratic Party is they're operating under the theory that our friend Israel needs us desperate. They absolutely must have us. So we have leverage. And it is unclear to me right if you look at the the what what the actual uh winds on the field right between you know the west say capital wf including israel and iran it's unclear to me that america was much more than a bystander those were those were israeli missions to destroy iranian reactors and iran Iranian missile capability and Iranian nuclear research facilities.

Those were Israeli bombs, Israeli computer bugs, Israeli cyber warfare. You know, the Israelis are, as you'd imagine, are absolutely 100 percent dedicated to the existence of their country, which makes sense. They have the most skin in the game. And what I think what we're seeing for the first time ever is a kind of a Kabuki theater in American politics. Because I think that if, you know, I mean, it's good to have friends, but if, if... Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambition. With over 450 partner organisations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitisation and gain valuable

insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. The Democratic Party decided not to support Israel. I don't think Israel

would be in that much trouble. Israel seems to be handling it themselves. If you care about peace and you care about, you know, what we have to accept is that whatever happens isn't going to happen on the battlefield because we let it happen on the battlefield. Israel would kill everybody and we win. If it's going to be a negotiated settlement, you have to have some kind of credibility. And if a country, country A in the United States, decides politically that it doesn't want Israel to exist, Israel will simply say, then we understand. Why should we come to Camp David for another

conversation? Why come to any peace talks that the Americans sponsor if we understand that politically you are in favor of the destruction of our country and they have every right to say that um you know that that's always the argument i would say the ilan omars of the world it's like do you think israel cares yeah it's because they don't it's a big deal that israel is no longer a supplicant. I can close this out by I asked a friend a question I often ask Israelis. How can you live there under such intense

hostility? And the answer was, well, bombings in the streets were a problem. We put up a wall. We stopped it. Then they were tunneling under the wall. And you know, we have sensors. A worm can't turn. A worm can't twist in the earth without our people knowing about it. And then they started shooting rockets at us, and we developed the Iron Dome.

You know, it's a pretty good record of being able to defend ourselves. Well, that's something. If you had to buy a computer that was made in Iran or a computer made in Israel. Please. It's funny. Right. The question answers itself. Yeah.

Well, the thing is, is that there are people in America who would buy that computer from Iran. One of the things I found interesting this week was the was the incessant politicization of nonpolitical sites demanding that something be done about Palestine. Apple employees sent a letter to Tim Cook saying, Apple has to take a stand on this. Apple has to come out for the Palestinians. And this was on the heels of all of these gaming sites, gaming sites, which consist of telling adults, grown people, how to best play this game where you're running through an imaginary cyberpunk landscape, shooting people, telling them how to think play this game where you're running through an imaginary cyberpunk landscape shooting people, telling them how to think about this issue. And once one of them did it, Kotaku and then GameSpot, everybody had to do it. Everybody had to all of a sudden stand up and

say this, because if you didn't, silence was death. Silence was seen as complicity. So it's funny when you look at the search functions for these people who just came out in favor of, here's how you can help the Palestinians. Do a search function on Uyghurs. Odd. Nothing comes up. So now I think it's fair to hold all of them accountable for every single social issue, if that's what they're going to do. This is not a world that I particularly enjoy, because it means that everybody has to have the proper position and has to publicly claim the proper position, even though they have nothing to do with it. It's like Oreos and vanilla and Nilla wafers coming out on transgender issues when absolutely nobody cares

what their particular issue is, but everybody's got to have a stance on the right issue or they are seen as being the wrong kind of person. It makes you want to go to sleep, which I did this week. I got to say one of the things that I did, I had a big huge dental thing that was going to take half a day. And so I opted for sedation. I took the pills. I was out. It's just wonderful. You just go, you have no fear of your own. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. You're right. Unless of course something happened while I was doing, while I was in the chair.

Well, I mean, it would be impossible. it is not because the sheets are so uncomfortable that's true it is not the little it's not that french sense but it was wonderful it was just this fading off into nothingness until you are brought back around and you know one of the reasons i did it is perhaps i hadn't flossed as much as i should have well yes there's the gum that's part of your mouth and then there's the gum that's in your mouth, the stuff you chew. Gum, to most people, is a way to relieve stress, to curb your appetite, and to freshen your breath. But many people don't realize that gum can also be a critical part of a healthy oral care routine. It was only a few short years ago that Quip reinvented the toothbrush for the modern age. They've done it again, this time

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If you go to getquip.com slash ricochet now at this very moment now, you can get a free plastic dispenser with any refill plan. That's a free dispenser at getquip.com slash ricochet. That's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash ricochet. You can also find the Quip electric toothbrush, refillable floss, and more at the oral care aisle at your local Walmart. Quip, the good habits company. And we thank Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now we welcome to the podcast, Mike Gallagher. Mike represents Wisconsin's 8th district in the U.S. House of Representatives

and serves in the House Homeland Security Committee and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee. Those are germane into what's going on. He joined the United States Marine Corps and served for seven years in active duty, rising to the rank of captain. And while earning his bachelor's degree from Princeton University, Mike went on to earn a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown, a second in strategic intelligence from the National Intelligence University, and his Ph.D. in international relations from Georgetown. Given all those accomplishments, you'd think that he'd be about 65 years old. He's not. He's disgustingly young.

And apparently he also represents Lambeau Field and is a Minnesota Vikings guy. It's all I can do to keep from just bolting through the screen here, but we're going to get along. We're going to agree on things that are important to everybody. We can argue about football later. Mike, so the pipeline gets taken down, and it appears it was not some devious Bulgarian hackers who typed very quickly, as they do in the movies, and said, we're in, and then did their devious work. It turns out it may have been something as simple as a phishing attack using a booby picture.

You'd like to think that we're hardened against every single one of these things in critical infrastructure. structure. But no, we have companies that are absolutely vital to the national security that seem to have cybersecurity people who are not up to the threat, don't believe the threat is going to hit them, or are we just simply outclassed and outmatched by the legions of hackers out there from China to Bulgaria to Russia to Iran? Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. I think most Americans agree that the Vikings suck, so that's really the foundation for national unity at this point. Although, oh, did we lose Mike? Did we lose Mike? Sorry, we'll have to get him back next week. The Packers are a mess right now.

Those are polarizing and divisive remarks. Yeah, I know the Packers are a mess. Listen, national security can wait. Listen, I have to know. Green Bay Packers. Aaron Rodgers looks like the guy who's sitting in the back of the car dealership looking at your loan application. Okay, okay, okay.

Vince Lombardi was my father's hero. That's how far back the Packers go in this family. The Packers are distinct in this regard, in a number of regards, but in this regard, instead of being owned by some billionaire family, the Green Bay Packers are owned by the fans. Lots of people have shares in the Green Bay Packers. Do you? My wife does. And my wife's family also has a few season tickets and I'm not saying that's why I married her, but it was,

it was certainly a variable that was considered in the whole process. My dad is actually, he's one of five siblings. And I think he's the only one that did not put his kids up in the pipeline for, for season tickets. So we have to, we have to sort of renew the cycle and make sure we have a 10 so you had an abusive father i'm so sorry yeah that's right yeah you know it's funny my dad my so my dad was a physician but he he uh started a pizza place in green bay that still exists to this day when you guys come to do a live podcast in green bay you can eat at

gallagher's pizza italian food irish spirit is a tagline. So when I was young, I got to deliver pizza to the Packer locker room. So as a kid and Favre was still the quarterback and Favre was my hero. And so I got to deliver pizza to Brett Favre in the locker room. And one time, and this is my greatest accomplishment, Brett Favre asked me for salad dressing. He was getting a salad with his pizza, and he said, hey, can you get me some French dressing? I said, sure, Mr. Favre. And I ran over there and ran back and gave him salad dressing. So that's my claim to fame.

From there, Gallagher, it's all down. No, as a Minnesota, it's pure jealousy. It's absolute jealousy, and I can't hide it because you guys play outside. You play the way the Vikings should play with the flakes coming down on the the grass and the wonderfulness of a small town like green bay having their own football team is like fargo north dakota my hometown having a space program i mean it's just like how did you why does this town have this but it's marvelous that you do and yeah the rivalry is great and you're our yancey street gang and um i hope you deserve a game next season as much as i admire your town and it's fine yeah

enough nice okay listen National Security but on the way to National Security we've got Lambeau Field checked off you're the chairman of a very important committee I beg your pardon the ranking member if unless I've got this completely messed up but you're the ranking member of a very important committee which means that the the leadership of the house and your colleagues in the republican caucus think highly of you and yet you're a princeton man would you just just explain how dare you how dare you sir no you're young how did you get to how did you get how did you get such a big big shot position let's put it that way well i have to correct a record james said i was on the homeland security committee i was in my freshman year i am no longer i'm on armed services and tni and then i

am co-chair of this thing called the cyberspace solarium commission so basically we created this special outside commission to examine u.s cyber policy and i was the co-chair along with an independent center from maine named angus king And we had two other legislators on it, some outside experts. And just last week, I became ranking member of the military personnel subcommittee on the Armed Services Committee. So I think I think they're just running out of people at this point. We've got so many people that are running for Senate and governor and this and that or, you know, who are getting booted out of office that I'm, I'm failing upward as it were, but I would say to connect it to James, your initial question, um, that was, it was one of the most rewarding things I've done since, um, coming to Congress

in 2016 or 2017, more accurately, um, after the 2016 election, this outside commission, there's, there's actually like a very robust, like robust set of literature about the nature of national security commissions and this question of whether they actually make a difference or whether they're just a way for Congress or president to pretend like they're doing something. We actually spent a lot of time at the beginning studying that literature, studying past commissions, and figuring out how we could actually make an impact. And after a year's worth of work, after publishing our report in March of last year, we were actually able to get 25 pieces of legislation passed in the National Defense Authorization Act. It was the biggest cyber legislation in American history. And it was a really rewarding experience. But I fear we're

at the beginning of this new domain of geopolitical competition. We're just starting to scratch the surface. And the answer to your question, James, is the fundamental problem is that 80% of the critical infrastructure in cyber is owned by the private sector. So the question is, how do you incentivize the private sector to really take cyber seriously? How do you get the C-suite in all of these companies, particularly public utility companies, to really prioritize cyber? And that's something we spent a lot of time thinking about. I'm not saying we came up with 100% answer, but we came up with a few ideas. Is that what the bills did? I mean, what did those bills do, the 25 bills? So I'll just hone in on a few things. One, if you look back, so we've had Colonial Pipeline, we had Microsoft Exchange, and then we had the SolarWinds hack,

right, at the end of the Trump administration going into the Biden administration. One of the things we think would have helped with all three, but particularly with SolarWinds, was it would be giving CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and DHS, the authority to do something called threat hunting on dot gov networks. Basically giving them the authority to proactively probe all of our networks for intrusions and vulnerabilities in a way that certain military organizations, cybercrime, have that authority in the.mil space. Because CISA is really the entity that is supposed to be the connection to the private sector, particularly connection to private sector companies that operate with critical infrastructure. So that's one thing, basically empowering all the cyber nerds at CISA to be on offense, looking for intrusions into our network, but also funding.

They have these things in CISA called the Hunt and Incidence Response Teams, which do a lot of this work. We actually need more of them. They need a few more resources. And this is bound up in a bigger thing we tried to do in the commission, which is really elevate and empower CISA so that it is a, how do I say this? I don't know. Maybe this is, I'm not allowed to say this depending on the rating of this podcast, a sexier place to work, right? In the way where NSA and Cyber Command can compete with some private sector companies, even though their pay sucks comparatively, because the mission is so cool, because people want to be part of that mission. We need the same thing to be true of CISA. And then the final thing I'd draw attention to,

and this was a contentious debate, is we created something called the National Cyber Director. The Biden administration actually just nominated one of our commissioners, Chris Inglis, used to be the deputy at NSA. He's a great guy. And really, we want someone kind of modeled after the U.S. trade representative situated within the White House, who is also proactively reaching out to the private sector and bringing some form of coherence to all the different agencies or sub-agencies that are doing cybersecurity and cyber work. Mike, Rob wants to come in. But before I let him at you, what happened to the Colonial Pipeline and why? You said a moment ago, the problem is that 80% of the cyber infrastructure is in the hands of the private sector. The CEO of Colonial Pipeline,

as best I can tell, has just gone through a catastrophic experience, the humiliation of having to pay off hack. Why isn't all of America, all of the private sector America that owns bits and pieces of the cyber infrastructure looking at that and saying, fine, we just got our incentive. But what happened? Yeah, it was hit with a ransomware attack. And my understanding, based purely on what's, I have to be a little bit careful here, because we get classified briefings, and then we get open source. And so sometimes members of Congress forget which is which. an employee clicking on something that they shouldn't click on, that infects a server, that infects a variety of electronic systems. And then all of a sudden, you have an outside entity, in this case, a Russian entity, who has the ability to sort of shut down your whole system and hold it hostage until you pay them money, right, at the most basic level.

And I think part of what makes this challenging, and this was an open testimony and conversation I had with General Nakasone last week, is I asked him about sort of the connection between Russian criminal groups and cyber criminal groups and actual Russian state entities, FSB, you know, and other Russian entities. And at times, these connections are so opaque that it's hard for us to know how to respond. And Russia exploits the opacity in order to make it difficult for us to respond. And I've kind of been down the rabbit hole on this. I've seen it in sort of the exquisite, highly classified side. I've seen it in the open source side. And I'll tell you, there are some times where we just don't know where a Russian criminal group begins and the FSB ends or vice versa, right? And part of the reason and part of the challenge we

have too, and this goes back to SolarWinds. After the SolarWinds hack, basically, if you follow CyberWire or if you follow some of these cyber podcasts, if you're all interested in cyber and you were following this thing, basically a day later, everyone was talking about the fact that it was the Russians. It was either cozy bear or fancy bear, which are these ways we describe different Russian entities. The federal government took much longer to attribute the attack and much, much longer to actually getting around to sanctioning certain Russian individuals. And that just doesn't work. We need a faster OODA loop in order to have some semblance of deterrence in cyber where we are willing to quickly attribute and quickly respond. And I get that there has to be an interagency process. And I get that sometimes your response won't be a pure cyber response. And so you've got to clear it with Treasury if you're sanctioning somebody or commerce.

But we just got to be faster. Right. And we're just not fast enough right now, in part because the bureaucracy is so fragmented. And then in this case, you know, the federal government was sitting there trying to work with Colonial Pipeline. But my understanding is the CEO just just pulled the trigger and paid the ransom, in part because the economic pain that so many Americans were feeling. He paid it in Dogecoin, which is the way that makes sense. By the way, it's interesting to me, my staff had sent me like a rundown of what we're going to be talking about. And it's all about like the debt in Congress. And I didn't know we're going to be talking about cyber, but that's better. I mean, this is interesting. Well, I mean, since you brought up the debt and Congress, we're going to spend, I don't know, $900,000 trillion on infrastructure.

How much of that $900,000 billion that we're going to spend are going to solve this problem? This is cyber infrastructure. That's the first two words in SISA. I mean, a year from now, are we going to say, hey, listen, we threw some money out. Yeah, I think there's going to be certain money invested. So for example, the national cyber director I mentioned, we're going to have to invest some money to empower that person with a staff that can be effective.

Every big private sector company is having to spend a lot more money on cybersecurity. But I think what makes this really challenging and why throwing more money at it is ultimately a futile strategy is that the attack surface in cyber just continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, what have we done for the last year, right? We've all spent all our time on Zoom and everyone's working from home. And so we just like, you know, 10x the attack surface and cyber. So I just think resources, particularly those filtered through the federal government are just never going to be adequate to keep up with that. Technology. Yeah, go ahead. On the other side of it. So the other other side of it there's the sort of the law

enforcement side which you could describe as sort of you know slow um how do you tighten that loop i mean it seems to me that what as long as the ultimate actor or as long as the trail of you know clues goes back to moscow that's going to complicate everything. If it's a pirate living somewhere off the coast of Ethiopia, you can figure that out. But if it's a state-sponsored cyber attack, how do you get a president and an administration and a national security apparatus to respond quickly to that,

let alone anything even worse. One of the things that we tried to build off of, basically the Trump administration, the Department of Defense came up with this concept for cyber, which is called defend forward. And in many ways, it parallels sort of a pillar of old school deterrence, you know, as we think about it in a Cold War context, which is you need to be forward deployed, engaged in concert with our allies in order to respond to small problems before they devolve into major crises, right? And the same is true in cyber, even though we're talking about something that doesn't fall neatly along geographic lines. But in some cases, yes, you physically need to be forward, working in concert with our closest allies, some of whom are the victims of Russian cyber hacking or CCP cyber hacking and attacks every single day in order to coordinate a very quick response. to say have done a really good job of trying to enhance those partnerships, do a better job of

sharing intelligence with our allies, particularly our Five Eyes allies. But it's very difficult. It's very difficult. One of the things we advocate for in the final report is a clearer declaratory policy, sort of clarifying the threshold of what constitutes use of force, sub-use of force, and laying out how we might respond while giving the executive branch some freedom to maneuver depending on the specific attack. But in my mind, the parallel with conventional deterrence, certainly strategic nuclear deterrence in the old Cold War is a very imperfect one. Some fundamentals obtain, which is deterrence is really, there's sort of two elements of it, right? Punishment and denial. So punishment is still important in a cyber context. You have to be willing to hit back every time someone hacks your network or attacks you, particularly if that results in physical destruction. robust set of punishing responses because, you know, really colonial pipeline gets at the edge

of physical destruction, right? We've seen some cyber attack leading to physical destruction and death in Ukraine, but not necessarily in the American context and thankfully no loss of life. But once we start to see that people are going to get pissed and demand a more robust set of punishment, but we got to start quickly responding now but the bigger part is denial how do you take that massive attack surface and make it very hard for our adversaries to mess with us and that ends up becoming you know how do i describe this i'm sorry to go on um uh no no i was going to say that the the the difference is that a foreign sponsored terrorist entity blows up buildings in new york and pentagon and we all have to take off our shoes and put our little bottles of shampoo in a plastic bag for the next 20 years. A foreign sponsored terrorist entity essentially blows up a pipeline.

Nobody got hurt and there was no explosion, but it blew up a pipeline, important pipeline for the Eastern Seaboard. And I don't know who And I don't know who, and I don't know who the Osama bin Laden is here. And is it because we, because that, that information is known and it's not public, or is it because there's this kind of, which I think it feels like, if you were watching this on the news, it feels like this kind of shrugging, well, you know, gosh, I hope it doesn't happen again. Even though there, you know, I mean, look, I drove from, to full disclosure,

I went from New York city down to new Orleans, but new Orleans now I drove, I did it on Saturday and Sunday. A few days after the pipeline was, was, was running again. And I had no trouble getting gas. There was plenty of gas. There was plenty of regular, there wasn't that much, you know, high, you know, high test, but it seems to me like. One of the ways you deter people is you, you. The word Rob is looking for is you kill them.

Yes, that's right. Well, Rob, I mean, that's the part that's part of the punishment here, isn't it? I mean, you can forward deploy all kinds of assets and embed all little kinds of things. You can maybe slip through a back door and trigger them if they do something stupid. But the other part of it is, you know, if Russia is behind this and, you know, as you just said, that there's going to be that that those opaque connections between the government and the hackers is you send in Delta Force to take these guys out. Because if you have two or three teams of hackers that hit American infrastructure and they all end up dead, there's a message sent there. And I know that I can't ask you to speak to what our special forces are doing in this respect, but it seems like that's got to be part of your whole robust package of options there.

Or even worse, you take them from some training camp in Siberia and bring them to Viking Stadium and force them to suffer through that. Oh, well, that's cruel. That's Abu Ghraib stuff. Also, Rob, you won't need gas. You won't need gas when we give you an electric vehicle in this infrastructure package. That's right. Right. The 77 trillion dollars. I guess I would say just go get political for a minute. I mean, I mean, we spent four years saying that the Russians, you know, messed with an election which they didn't do and now we were pretty sure they messed with an actual pipeline and our response for the first was this insane breakdown of american politics and our response to the second is to kind of like oh nothing to see here let's move along an economic slap on the wrist, followed by, and I link these things in my mind, allowing the Nord Stream 2 deal to go with Germany, right?

So I think this gets to the problem, right? Whether it's Russia cyber malfeasance or Chinese Communist Party cyber malfeasance, they all get subordinated to the broader policy goals. Right. And so with Russia, it's too early to tell. But I think it's fair to say, at least in the early stages, the Biden administration is taking a very I'm not going to say accommodationist approach to Russia, but not yet prepared to push back aggressively. And the irony of the Trump administration's approach after four years of the media hyperventilating about how Trump was a Russian asset was if you actually examine the policy and perhaps try and separate some of the Trump himself rhetorical flourishes with Putin, it was actually quite tough, right? And we started to identify Russian cyber intrusion and hit back. You know, there's a bunch of Marines that are going to drink for free for the rest of their lives because they killed a bunch of Russian guys in eastern Syria.

I mean, you can the list goes on and on and on. And then similarly with China, I think the Biden administration has this tension between there are certainly some people in the administration that have a realistic view of the Chinese Communist Party and recognize that we're not going back to the status quo ante of, you know, we can all get along and we can integrate them into the global economy and say kumbaya. But then there's the climate change camp led by John Kerry, who very much believes that we have to cooperate with the CCP because of climate change. And those two things don't add up. And if that camp is ascendant, I think naturally there'll be this tendency to shrug off Chinese cyber hacking. And then you go back to 2015 when we all learned that the CCP hacked the OPM system. You know, Obama brought Xi to the White House and had a 21 gun salute and a fancy dinner. And they claim to have made this sort of cyber pact but the it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and the chinese have violated every day since mike could i just

ask ask a closing question sort of wraps up the point you're making there set aside the current administration set aside the politics of it you you began by saying it's difficult for us to know where criminal organizations in Russia end and where the FSB begins. Suppose I said to you, who cares? Let Vladimir Putin figure it out. He's responsible for the rule of law in his country. So the question is simply this, if we had an administration that said, that's your problem, and we are placing sanctions on you and your top guys right now, we're reinstating the Trump sanctions and we're going to up the ante. You figure it out. Would that work? I think it would work better than what we're doing now, which is a whole lot of nothing. I mean, I think the costs that need to be imposed are on Putin and his cronies. That's what it comes down to, right? They're in charge. In my opinion, and I'm not a Russia specialist, I'm a recovering Arabist who

knows very little about the rest of the world. But I don't know. I think, Peter, I actually, before we started recording, I fanboyed out on you because I'm a big fan of uncommon knowledge. And, yeah. Turn off Rob's microphone. We all got to run now. You had my good friend, Matt Pottinger, who I served in the Marine Corps with. And I took over his team in 2007 in Western Iraq. He probably had a lot of remedial work to do.

Yeah, exactly. At the time, I was sort of laughing at him because I had studied Arabic in the Middle East. I'm like, why did you waste your time on Mandarin in China? No one cares about that. The Middle East is where it's at. He was right. I was wrong. And then I worked for H.R. McMaster, and you had them both on together.

And I think you referenced the Kennan quote at the end of it that i've been i tasked my staff with finding because i kennon's a wisconsinite by the way is from milwaukee so we won the cold war wisconsin won the cold war um but uh if i remind me what it was because what i took away from it was you know this this is a huge challenge but in some ways it's like a test of american privilege because we should all we have a chance to rise to this challenge. And for whatever reason, we are now faced with an existential threat that should have this sort of galvanizing effect and unifying effect on America. But right now, that's not happening. And I'm struggling to understand why.

Right. Was that a question? Because we asked the questions here. Yep. I have some working hypotheses, but I have three very smart people here. I'd be curious what you think. Listen, James is about to wrap it up because your staff is the problem here. Your staff told us we could have you for only so and so many minutes.

I'm happy to go a little bit longer. I just want you to know that I sleep well at night knowing that your co-chairman, Angus King, is a Dartmouth man. Well, his claim to fame is that he's married to a Packers fan. So you know he has good judgment. That's staggering. James, I'm sorry. I'm done. So I just want to ask, so Congressman,

if we're watching or reading the news how will we know i mean to the extent or what will be our signs that as a country as a government sort of as a national security apparatus we're starting to take this more seriously that is a great great question um you know my i think my my my view is that you really have to think about what's different in cyber, which, as I going to be your company, medium, small size manufacturing company in Northeast Wisconsin is really as a cultural matter, starting to prioritize this simple things, right? Like two factor authentication and basic cyber hygiene. When it permeates down to the level of as a daily habit, you know, we're all, we're all doing cyber hygiene.

That's when I think we're starting to get on the right track. If that makes sense. Okay. That makes sense. Smoke starts to emerge from like Putin's Dacha somewhere. That would be good. And, and James's wish will have been fulfilled.

Right. It will. I can't wait for the satellite. Or if I disappear, please promise me you'll investigate my disappearance and won't accept the official explanation. No, no, no. I know exactly where to find you. We'll find you in the West District of Minneapolis, Minnesota,

gazing up at the beautiful tall towers and saying, why haven't I been here before? I even embrace the beauty of their stadium, the climate, the culture, the people, the sophistication. I never want to eat cheese again unless it's from these wonderful stores that I have here at Lunds and Byerly's. Yeah, we'll know when you guys, when it's done, when we don't hear anything, when there's no colonial pipeline, when there's no electrical grid that goes down, when everything, in other

words, when everything runs as we expect it to do, we will know that you guys are on the case. And, you know, I feel a lot better about going forward having talked to you about this too. Just do not pass any sort of mandatory screensaver act, which is, you know, something that everybody's required to have the don't click on that dodgy letter, you know, that has a little fish hook with it, some little graphic that says you're being set up.

As long as we don't have a national standard for warning screensavers like we have at the office, that'll be great. I'll play defense on that. Unlike the Vikings, I will play defense on that. One last kick in the shin before he goes, and we'll still

have him back as early as possible. I can't wait to see you on Uncommon Knowledge, which I'm sure is coming up soon. Never got invited. Never got invited. This audition was a little rough, I have to say. This is the dress rehearsal. Mike Gallagher, Representative Mike Gallagher. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Congressman. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of things that keep me up at night, and cybersecurity is not one of them. Except when I see stories like this, I wonder exactly what is coming down the virtual pipeline aimed at us. I've known all sorts of people in various companies who have been hit, and they never thought they would be. My next door neighbor turns out to be a guy who's in medical IT, and he says, hospitals,

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podcast uh our next guest is an old friend of mine zachary carabel uh zach is an author commentator investor he was educated brace yourself peter col Columbia, Oxford, and Harvard. I know, shocking, right? Where he received his PhD in I don't know what. I've known him Brothers Harriman, and the American Way of Power, which is a fascinating sort of deep dive into the story of one bank, but also the story of sort of the American economy. Hey, Zach, welcome. Thank you for joining the Ricochet podcast. Thank you. And congratulations on the placement of your excerpt in the Wall Street Journal Weekend edition. That was a big deal. Okay, so let me, you start the book with a,

well not so early, with an observation by Alexis Tok. I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts. First of all, that seems like a criticism. As you know, when American authors want to validate an observation that they're not comfortable making themselves, they find a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville that magically, you know, gives them the cred for making the observation you know it's funny i don't think the toqueville was being particularly critical i think for him it was literally an

observation relatively neutral um and for me as well it is an observation that's relatively neutral and it's more about like like, one thing I learned in writing this book that I really hadn't had the touch-level sensitivity to beforehand was just how much money makes America in the 19th century. And by money, I really mean, like, the ability to get cash. Because if you think about human history, right, most capital is illiquid. It's in human beings, either just labor or slaves or serfs or just people farming. It's in land or it's in gold and silver. And that created some really finite limitations to what human beings could literally unlock in terms of potential. And it's when you create this abstract thing and paper promises,

I mean, there've been paper for a while, but when that becomes at the center of those systems, you do unlock incredible potential. And the United States is so far ahead of that particular arc in the 19th century, which I think people know and some really arcane academics have studied, but just how much that was true

is fascinating and I think is one of many explanations, but an under-understood one about why the United States really does take off the way it does comparatively. Okay, so it's a, there's a story of a bank, right? So it's a private bank. It's an old line, preppy, private bank. The Bushes were part of it. Avril Harriman was part of it. These are people who travel in their own little railroad cars for years. It seems like 19th century royalty that they're all about to get lined up in a daca somewhere and shot by bolsheviks yeah but your argument is not that this is a your argument this is sort of a golden era

i would push back on the the golden era part i mean i know that i have been lauding a certain culture that they embodied as an as a needed element and maybe a corrective to some of the excesses of the present. But not for one minute do I think going back would be a good thing, or that the worlds they occupied and the establishment of which they were the center is a world we should replicate, right? I mean, first of all... Well, I think that's where you and i differ yeah maybe but i would never have had a seat at that particular table right um i can live with that yeah well i admit that in a deeply self-interested way yeah so the difference between if i'm you know if i'm making a larger sort of expansive argument

about uh great american liquid capital and the ability to sort of extend credit to people and to sort of build in weird places a million miles away. I'm arguing for a big bank that has access to lots of capital and is backstopped by essentially the Federal Reserve, which is essentially you and me and everybody listening to this podcast, the American tax paper. That is not how Brown Brothers Harriman works. Correct. And I think one thing I try to bring out in the book is that, first of all, culture matters, and culture can't be mandated, and culture can't be regulated, and culture can't be legislated. And the idea that you bear personal risk for decisions that impact the collective,

which structurally was just true for a partnership and a partnership bank. And all these financial institutions were partnerships until the 1970s and 80s, when Goldman and Morgan and Lehman Brothers all start going public. And then they're like, wow, I get free money. You know, I get other people's money. And I am by far not the only person to observe this. It's simply a reality of once you have free money and you don't have to worry, like if I do this deal and it goes sour, what's the worst thing that happens? The worst thing that happens is your dick fold from Lehman Brothers. You know, your reputation is shot. And then you set up your own family office in a $30 million home in Florida.

And I'm not saying pejoratively about the $30 million home. I'm saying observationally, that's the worst thing that happens. If it's your money, the worst thing that happens is you lose your home. And so we should go back and just clarify what set Brown Brothers Harriman, it didn't set it apart then, but certainly sets it apart in the modern era is that it was a partnership bank. The partners are on the hook. So when the thing goes south, they don't call the Secretary of the Treasury and say, hey, help us. They just liquidate everything they own towards the settlement. And that's one reason why Brown Brothers becomes Brown Brothers Harriman in 1930, because as careful and cautious and smart as they were when the tide was about to inundate them and everybody, they turned to, you know, April Harriman, who inherits his dad's, E.H. Harriman's railroad equivalent to billions now.

And he essentially bails them out, although he needed some reputational help as well. that I do think is important today is it's a really good idea in a highly liquid world, even in a world where everybody's getting bailed out by the Federal Reserve, for the people at the apex of that system to have a healthy respect, not just for how much capital can unlock, but how much capital can destroy. And it's basically the same notion of if you're going to be a nuclear scientist or as george w would have said nuclear scientist um you should be mindful of the power that that's unlocked in the atom you know you shouldn't just be like dancing around because it's all good but isn't it all but i guess what i'm drilling down on how peter wants to jump in isn't it i mean if i'm the head of a giant bank in america today it is all good it's i essentially get to go to las vegas and put down

money and i can keep all the winnings and any of the losings the government comes it seems to me like after 2008 nobody believes that they are on the hook. Everyone in the financial industry, financial system knows that they're going to be backstopped. Isn't that something that we want to do away with? Isn't it better then to go back to the way Brown Brothers, to go to a more partnership model where value at risk means your value at risk? Sure. And it would be good to go back in that respect, but there is no going back. That genie is gone. It's out of the bottle and it's not being put back in. What could be reintegrated is the culture part. And the culture part isn't just, I am going to be personally liable if a deal goes wrong. It's that you cannot beggar the

collective endlessly and also thrive individually. And that is embedded in their particular culture, generation after generation. The idea of we need to attend to the public good, not because we're just altruistic, you know, they had their own Presbyterian altruism, but there was a genuine sense of self-interest pursued without any regard to the collective ultimately undermines your own self-interest. And so, like, in 1828, Alexander Brown helps fund the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. So partnerships actually don't preclude innovation and doesn't preclude capital risk. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, by the way, is the first passenger railroad drawn by steam engines ever.

I mean, there was a little line in northern England at the time. That was a big speculative venture. And it's done not so that the family can make money, but as a last gasp effort to have Baltimore be competitive with New York that had opened up the Erie Canal so that they could find a way to get goods back and forth across the mountains. And, you know, it was done because of a belief of if my community isn't thriving i won't thrive i know this stuff sounds like unbelievably utopian and idealistic in a cynical jaded age i get that but it happened and it happened and i don't really care like a little bit of you know idealism and utopianism in a cynical age is a pretty necessary ingredient to thinking about where

we go from here. Could I ask you to draw a contrast or to show us where the contrast is between people of the kind that you describe and laud? You have reservations about some of what they did, but fundamentally the account is admiring. Gabriel Harriman, he's born rich. He makes more money in Brown Brothers Harriman. And yet he's ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, serves as governor of New York. On and on. His public service is endless. Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush's father, who's a partner at BBH and serves as a senator. So, or even more recently, this is on

my mind because during my 18-month career in business, I spent a summer at Dylan Reed, long gone. But the guys at Dylan Reed, it had recently been a partnership. Nick Brady, Secretary of the Treasury. Dylan, I can't remember Dylan's first name, but... Douglas Dylan served as John Kennedy's Secretary of the Treasury. Okay, so those guys in the mold that you describe in your wonderful book, Inside Money. Now let's take more recent figures. This is in the post-partnership world of New York. Hank Paulson, Goldman guy, Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, I think Goldman as well, but I'm not sure. But in any event, Wall Street career, Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin,

advisor, and then I think Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, Steve Friedman, I think another Goldman guy. So you've got the, so there's still rich guys going to Washington to engage in public service. Why are they worse or how are they different? What's the contrast? Why is it that the world you describe produced a particularly admirable pattern? Just as a quick corrective, to be fair to Geithner, he actually had no career on Wall Street until after being secretary of state. And then he went to Warburg. Although that's an interesting question.

I withdraw him as a piece of the question. There's also that question of the revolving door, which is a 20th century phenomenon, not a really 19th century phenomenon. So there was a reason for a while that particularly on the left, the Goldman Sachs was called government sacks because you had all these partners going into government. And one of the knocks on Obama was, you know, the Larry Summers and the others of the world who seem to be exercising from the perspective of the left inordinate influence, which is why you don't really have that today in the Biden administration. I don't know that anything animated the Goldman Sachs partners of the 90s and aughts that was different than what animated the Brown Brothers partners the difference was Goldman Sachs ceasing to be a partnership meant that their relative wealth was incomparably greater than the relative wealth of most Brown

partners um not Averill but you know but remember Averill does make a lot of money at Brown Brothers but he makes the mega money from the railroads and weirdly enough Brown Brothers isn't that involved in the railroads because they recognize that first of all the only people made money on railroads were the ones who bought up the bonds from the people who funded the railroads initially and went bust including ea chairman they didn't build the railroads they bought the bonds that built the railroads and good american economy they most of the people who did that went bust and a few made a gazillion bucks. And like Brown Brothers, that risk reward wasn't worth it for them.

So, I mean, I supported and I think there are some, you know, admiral about the public service drive of Goldman Sachs partners starting, you know, the whole group that you including John Corzine, who has had a less illustrious post career, including Steve Mnuchin, frankly. I mean, these are all they all came out of the same cohort. And I get the fact that there is a huge portion of our populace that views that in totally venal, cynical terms. Like, they had money, then they wanted power. And then they used their power to make more money. And often that is true. Like, human beings are complicated animals and and the desire for purity and the desire for simplicity i think crowds out the fact as i try to indicate that you can you can simultaneously be self-serving and serve the public good you know you can be self-interested and interested in other selves that that you know those things yeah but i don't

even now have a culture that suggests that has suggested for a while that that you know use the words of dung xiao peng to get rich is glorious that that actually is a social good i guess what i'm what i'm asking is sort of a larger question which is i i understand that the elites and universities don't really care about america in many ways, they're not patriotic. If they are, it's just in the most sort of extremely weird, distorted way. But I'm starting to feel that way about the people in the financial industry who don't seem to be motivated by American greatness in any meaningful way. Whereas I do believe that the, that the boring old cautious partners of Brown brothers, and I may be, I may be fanciful, did think about, they were, I mean, you say public good, but I would just say they were patriots. And I'm not sure I see that in the financial system

or in the, in the Titans of the financial world they're they believe in a global financial world in a global financial system but i'm not sure they're all that motivated getting up in the morning like well how can i do something fund something invest in something um really amazing for america yeah and look i mean I, I think it's even worse with tech elites, um, today who seem completely missing in action when it comes to, you know, what, what is it that we are doing that impacts everyone and how can we do it in a way that both enhances, you know, the collective good of our country and, and the security and affluence of its people, of its citizens.

And I think, frankly, and I'm saying this very provincially, I live in New York City, I grew up in New York City, I think the kind of financial elite attitude toward, oh my God, the goddamn socialists are taking over City Hall, they're raising my taxes, I'm going to move to Florida. While there may be many legitimate issues in that statement uh the i'm going to move to florida part of it because it's easier and simpler and i don't have to deal with the crap that that that comes with you know i don't have to deal with the downsides that come with the upsides i find that too intensely venal

meaning it is intensely on you use patriotic in the kind of american sense there's also community patriotism right which means you don't like what's happening in your community you don't just get up and leave because you can you work to change it you work to you embed yourself in in the nitty-gritty and the difficulty and what you have now is a kind of mercenary capitalism amongst some people that basically says, hey, if you're not going to give me what I want to get, I'm out of here. And I do think, you know, remembering that there is only so much you can do that without the whole thing being undermined. Granted, they may never be undermined. You know, you move with your billions to Florida, you're going to be fine.

Your kids are going to be fine. Your grandkids are going to be fine. But that doesn't mean that the doing of it is collectively. It does raise the question of what obligation people do have to stay and to be subject to a government that seems increasingly bent on removing them from their property. I mean, that's I mean, you could you could look at New York and say it's like saying after the 1917 revolution, people should not have left Moscow. They should have worked to overturn the Soviet power. But I get what you're saying. I haven't said anything here because I've been content to listen and not bring my own special brand of ignorance to the subject. But the one thing that I do find interesting is that I love studying these companies, not necessarily for the reasons

that you have, but I like the legacies they leave behind tangibly, the buildings. And Brown, their main skyscraper for a while, they built in 1929, I believe. It's now residential, like everything else is practically down on Wall Street. And I'm curious, because there were so many skyscrapers going up in 29. There was this race to just this bristling of cranes and scaffolding in, in, in, in New York. And we all know how poorly that ended. My question is, did they take it in the shorts when they built 37 stories, 36 stories at the, at the end of the jazz? They did not.

They did not 59 wall street ended up being a perfectly good building. They did not lose any particular money on that. They actually, you know, they lost some money because they were amongst the first, but by no means the last, who decided to invest in Argentine bonds at exactly the wrong time. You know, everybody always goes to Argentina and is like, wow, this is an amazing country. It's big. They've got great land, agriculture. It's the economy of tomorrow. And unlike Elliott Capital, they were unable to demand Peron to repay their bonds. But 59 Wall Street ended up being just fine. They ended up selling it about 20 years ago for a tidy sum when they no longer need the space and the property when it was basically at a top and their entrance gets inhabited by a thomas pink shirt maker store when pink was was trying to become a global brand much to its its dismay as

well so and the other building they built though which most people don't know um is union theological seminaries tower up in morningside heights which at the turn of the 19th century was actually one of the bigger buildings in manhattan um and stands there still as a kind of you know neo-gothic palace what were they doing that far north up in morningside that's where uts found its best land it was right next to columbia speculating and i mean that was their philanthropy oh you mean you mean you mean bbh lent lent the money to build that structure no no that was their philanthropy oh i see they gave they were the they were the most significant donor to to uts to union theological

if they'd been a little bit more philanthropic they would have to stew in the top of their building with a tad more ornamentation as it is it has the look of we're paying for this and not a penny more but it's still a beautiful structure and and and the musical instrument collection at the metropolitan museum you know that's right almost entirely well the knockoff effects and the ancillary things that they did is a subject for another book and another podcast and i hope to have you back at some time zachary caramel thanks very much for joining us in the show today thank you thank you thanks zach thanks zach it's a great book. I, I, I, I, I sort of raced through it and it's got a lot of great, I mean, James, you'll love it.

It's got a lot of great old New York color. I will. I will. Rob, really, don't you? And I wish that we had been born. I don't know, James, you may too. I don't know, but I, I'm pretty sure Rob and I feel the same way. Born 80 years earlier and gone straight to work for BBH.

Really? Isn't that pretty close to our ideal lives? Well, I mean, I think I told you this. I applied to work at Brown Brothers Harriman in 1987. Oh, no, I didn't. Yeah. I didn't. Oh, really?

Yeah. I thought, well, you know, it was the law. When you graduate college, you got to work at a bank. And I thought, well, you know, it was the law. When you graduate college, you've got to work at a bank. And I thought, well, it's the only bank that will ever have me. And even they were like, hey, we're old line, but we still got to be able to do basic math. I just thought you sort of sat at, I thought you just dressed up every day and sat at a partner desk. I mean, the interesting thing about Brown Brothers is that even then and even now, it's a partnership. So that you really are on the hook.

And I guess they're trying to get Zach to sort of say that being on the hook, I think, has some negatives. It focuses the mind. Yes. Yeah. No, I think it would have been interesting to be born in 1900 and go through all of the decades to be a young man in the 20s, to be working in the 30s, to be ineligible for the draft during World War II, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, watch the Soviet Union fall, watch the Berlin Wall come down and say, that's it, I'm checking out. As it is now, you know, born when I was,

next year is going to be the anniversary. Next year is the year in which Soylent Green is set, which is the future that I was assured was going to be mine when I was a kid eating a bunch of kelp. That's right. They told us it was kel to be mine when I was a kid, eating a bunch of kelp. That's right. They told us it was kelp when it was actually quite something else, which does bring us to, to I was tempted this week to actually nominate the entire member feed because

it's been so good. Everybody has just been on point. Everybody's been great. It's just a joy to read. And you should go there, too, at Ricochet.com and see if you can find a way to get into the site for free. Well, there is. Scott, can we give them that promo code? I'm just curious. You can cut this if you don't want.

That's right. If you use the promo code at Ricochet.com slash radio, you'll get three free months of the member feed. You'll see this deep, boundless, Marianas trench from which I'm dredging these things. Kelly D. Johnson has a point called brooding over cicadas. Just eat them. The UN says so.

Quote, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization recently published a report on edible insects. National Geographic magazine was downright glowing in its description, which is stink bugs have an apple flavor and red agave worms are spicy. A bite of tree worm apparently brings pork rinds to mind. This information will come handy for those of us following the latest recommendations from the UN. Consume more insects. It goes on a link to a bunch of stories that tell us that we got to eat bugs. We have to eat bugs. Great source of protein. It'll help the planet. We won't be eating meat and hamburgers and the rest of it. And when they say to you, eat this insect, it will remind you of pork rinds. Most people will say, no, thank you. We have easy, conspicuous access to pork rinds here as it is.

I'm going to go with that. It's this idea being told to us that we got to eat bugs, which seems sometimes like this memo goes out and everybody is obliged to write the story. It's not going to work. It's never going to work. You are never going to have people except for a few in some strange places where they will perhaps have roasted powdered cicada thoraxes for their, you know, for the, to put it in their shake. But no, I'm not going to eat bugs. We're not going to eat bugs. I'm an American. Damn it. I'm going to have a burger. Gentlemen, do you, uh, do you, are you looking forward to putting bugs on the menu? Well, I sort of agree with your, your larger cultural point, which is that it's like you, it, it, it never ends this sort of desperate desire on the part of liberals and progressives to sort of improve you, that what you're doing is wrong and bad.

And then this kind of weird sleight of hand where they act like this crazy thing is a trend everybody's doing. And if you haven't eaten an insect yet, it's like, well, I guess you just haven't heard. We're all doing it, which i think is hilarious on the other hand i mean who was it was dr johnson who said was it was a brave man who first ate an oyster and like the oyster is a weird thing i mean i love them but they're it's weird and then of course the french you know they eat their snails and i eat snails when i'm in france and they're delicious um but it's mostly a garlic butter yes delivery device to be fair um but like i there you know you ever seen a you know shrimps are gross and what's a lobster but a giant cockroach at the sea um i suspect that um i don't know maybe in the future i guess I guess what I find so objectionable about this tendency,

which is what I love that post so much, is that it implies that that is the problem. That the problem is that you're just eating the wrong thing. If you weren't eating a hamburger, if you weren't enjoying yourself, that everything would be better. That the reason we want you to eat a bug is because we kind of feel like that's too much. kind of feel like you sit there and you flush your toilet and you eat your hamburger.

And you know what? You're going to have to eat bugs for a while because you're just a bad person. And I kind of like, I just think what makes me laugh about that is like, nobody's buying it. And also, by the way, nobody's stopping. I'm not stopping you you want to eat cicadas i say belly up to the bar like go to the cicada bar the the argument is never hey we should all eat more cicadas the argument is always you should eat more cicadas uh well that's probably that's always the issue anyway it's absolutely true um the only insect that i will consume would be

perhaps a gold bug and that would be because of course i had not actually eaten a bug that was made of gold but that i had wrapped my brain around the idea of owning gold which is kind of a cool thing when you think about it because maybe all the spending is going to result in inflation we might not be doing the weimar thing we're going to the bank to get a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy bread but hey hey, look, if you're watching what's happening in the world today, you've got a global pandemic. You've got U.S. debt piling up. You've got spiking inflation and the looming Biden tax plan. In the 2008 financial crisis, many Americans lost a large portion of their retirement savings. So you got to ask yourself,

what are you doing to protect your money? Well, many turn to GoldCo. That's the leading gold IRA company in the U.S. and a four-time INC 500 winning company. With an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and thousands of five-star customer reviews, you can trust the team at GoldCo to help you protect and grow your wealth. So go to goldco.com slash ricochet to request your free IRA guide that uncovers the secret that financial advisors won't tell you. No. So what are you waiting for? Don't delay. Don't fall victim to another stock market crash, inflation hike, or dollar decline. Go to goldcode.com slash ricochet to get your free IRA guide today. And if you use that link now, Goldco will, get this, give you up

to $10,000 in free silver when you open a qualifying account. Did I say that correctly? I did. $10,000 in free silver. Take a look at the site and check the details, goldco.com slash ricochet. And we thank Goldco for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. All right. As we leave off here, it appears that UFOs are real. I know that Peter is desperate to talk about this but 60 minutes which of course i now firmly believe everything 60 minutes does cbs is a trustworthy news source for me uh because they agreed with my priors they did the story about the pilots coming on talking about the transmedium craft the the report that's coming in june that new yorker story that actually legitimized the UFO hunters, as opposed

to saying that they're a bunch of Whitley Stryber, not cases. Rob, we know where Peter stands in this. Peter is our own Fox Mulder standing in the field, looking up at the sky. He wants to believe. Rob, do you think that this is a limited modified hangout that they're actually going to tell us we don't know what they are, but you shouldn't worry but you should i'm i'm not exactly sure if i should be worried because if this isn't aliens who are these guys i mean i think i'm more worried that this technology if it is this technology exists that this the chinese you know like i mean we got a better shot at martians i think um i what i find fascinating and I find fascinating, and look, I don't know. I mean, it seems crazy to me that this is possible just because of the giant distances involved.

But maybe there's something we're missing. There's always something we're missing. I guess what I find so amazing is that for years and years and years, the theory has been, and I think I've said this before. So the powerful people, the theory has been like, whatever you do, don't let the normal people think that there are UFOs. So all the UFO movies, part of the whole thing was the secret government force designed to keep this stuff quiet. Area 51. No one can know because if the people knew, they would freak out because the people are stupid and they freak out all the time. And I use this example when I talk about COVID because it seems to me that that is the COVID

mentality. Don't tell people what's really happening because if you tell them, they'll freak out and they'll buy too many masks. Or you tell them, they won't wear the masks. Or if you tell them, they'll want to go back to the restaurants or whatever it is they'll want to open the schools it's all this idea like that people can't be trusted with the information whereas there's zero evidence that the people in the world but certainly americans are all that exercised by the idea that there are ufos flying around they're perfectly willing to say all right well let's that's the next thing what i loved loved about the 60 Minutes piece was the fellow who worked on it for 10 years or something. In any event, it was typical U.S. government at work.

Clearly, part of what was going on was everybody in the Pentagon was saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. That doesn't go in my inbox. I don't get paid to worry about that problem. Go see Colonel so-and-so. And then Colonelel said no no that's an air force but no no that belongs with the no we didn't see nothing it's not as if the pentagon all knows and they're worried that the rest of us might suspect the pentagon has said all right i don't wildfire who cares so i mean typical your government where that

actually sort of got my attention and the other bit that got my attention was this report. Apparently, it's one incident in particular, which is now several years, maybe even a decade ago, but it was four different Navy flyers observing the same thing from two different aircraft. So that rules out any kind of temporary hallucination. Won't happen to four people at the same time. Rules out tricks of light because they're flying at different angles. And whatever it was that they saw got picked up on radar. So there was something objectively there. Four people saw it. It got picked up on radar.

We have a recording of it. Something was there that the United States Navy can't explain. And it was airborne and it moved fast. And it's their job to figure that stuff out. I am now interested, not in the UFO. I just want to say, come on, fellas, do your stinking job. Figure it out. Yeah.

I would say what I want to know is I want to know, is there an Elon Musk-like billionaire who's going to figure that out? Like, that's like, but I guess I guess i'd say that who's responsible for it maybe bill gates was flying his airborne go-kart i'd be thrilled if it was elon musk i i and then the second sort of more cynical analysis i think is that the reason this is all coming out now is because in the classic Pentagon or classic us government response, there's now a torrent of money, a cascade of money. And now all the people in the heading,

I'm like, it's not on my end, not in my inbox. Now we're saying, no, no, this is my index. This goes in my department.

This, we need to fund, this is a $2 billion federal program that I'm going to, we're going to do this. Right. So a lot of it has to do with the fact that there's this huge, huge sluice of money, this giant flood of it. And I want some of it. And if I have to go look for, you know, ET, I'll do it.

Like just hear the invoice. I think the, the lack of public panic. I mean, if all, if every single city was all of a sudden that there was a large craft that appeared over its park and out came these cricket creatures in spacesuits that started shoving small children into their abdomen or offices, there would be panic. But if the government says we don't know what they wore or the government a year later says, yeah, actually, they are extraterrestrial. There's not going to be a panic because we've been softened up by 50 60 70 years of science fiction i when somebody said you know if they if if we learn that there are actually other races and species out there it will completely shatter the our confidence in ourself and our idea of our place in the universe uh no thanks to star wars and star trek and the rest of it we've got a handy set of ideas in the

head about how the universe might look well what what I think is this, the reason that people are so blase about this is because of the show, The X-Files, which may have been a government plot, which I love to think about. The FBI was, or The X-Files was all about supposedly uncovering the plot. The actual plot was that the government created The X-Files to get us interested in the idea of aliens and UFOs and the rest of it, and then to bore us to tears with a series of incomprehensible plot twists that eventually made everybody give up on it. So now anybody who saw the X-Files with the government says, yeah, they're real. It's like, yeah, you know what?

I know how that turns out. You got big guys, shapeshifters running around with black oil roiling in their eyes and the rest of it. And there's vaccinations and there's bees and the rest of it. Yeah, whatever. So it may just be that, or it could be that our, our fictional imaginative conjurings of aliens and the rest of it is so much more interesting than the real thing until, until we see the real thing, until it lands, until

we get our eyeballs around it. It's still fuzzy pictures, a little dots going around on a screen that looks like a video game from 1979. That's about all we got, except to tell you, of course, that the podcast was brought to you by Quip, by Headspace, and Gold Co. Join today. Support them for supporting us. And you can listen to the best of Ricochet Radio Show, hosted by

some short guy from Minnesota every weekend on the Radio America Network. Check your local listings. And, of course, give us a five-star review at Apple Podcasts. Especially note how much you enjoyed Rob Long with his blank background. Oh, yeah. It's just a wall. Which is just perfect for Photoshopping him into anything.

EJ is going to love it. Your reviews allow new listeners to discover us, of course, which helps keep this show going, which we want to do. We're at 545 and counting. Can't wait to get to 600. Rob, Peter, it's great. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, fellas.

Next week. Dirty computer walking by If you look closer, you'll recognize I'm not that special I'm broken inside crashing slowly the bugs are in me

dirty computer breaking down picking my face up off the ground down picking my face up off the ground I'll love you in this space and time

cause baby all I'll ever be is your dirty computer dirty computer Searching for someone to fix my life Text message got up in the sky Oh, if you love me, won't you please reply?

Oh, can't you see that it's only me? You dirty computer. Dirty computer You dirty computer Dirty computer I love you in the space and time I love you in the space and time I love you in the space and time Ricochet! Join the conversation.

Nice to meet you. Hey, how are you? I'm a big Uncommon Knowledge fan. Wow, you're in the right spot. Yeah. I was in the green room and I'm like, I've heard that voice before. Whose dulcet tones am I listening

to right now? You fell into the right zone.