The Ricochet Podcast - Big Sky Country

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

UPDATE: Some listeners have had issues with the sound on the original posted recording. We’ve adjusted the levels and re-uploaded. If you’ve already downloaded the show and are having difficulty hearing, all you need to do is delete it and re-download for the adjusted recording. (Or try here.) Enjoy! With Peter up in the air, we needed a guest to lift our grounding in the Metaverse. Source

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I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Law. Peter Robinson is off this week i'm james lilacs and we talk to walter kern novelist and sage of montana so let's have ourselves a podcast welcome everybody it's the ricochet podcast number 579 you can join us at ricochet.com and and rob's already laughing. That's a good augur.

Every time you say the number, the number is so high. It's crazy. 579. Yet nothing that we have done has made any old aging septuagenarian rock star from a previous era demand that we be taken off

whatever platform that we're on because of the misinformation and the hate, frankly, that we spread be taken off whatever platform that we're on because of the misinformation and the hate, frankly, that we spread, right? Well, that's Rob Long there, of course, spreading hate. And where are you, Rob? You are not in New York. We know that Peter is somewhere in the wind. No idea. I'm not in New York. A couple of days. So, which I feel, I feel, I actually feel happy about. And I shouldn't, I can say this, but he's not here. I'm happy that he is having weather related difficulties because I'm tired of hearing all about how beautiful the weather is in Palo Alto. So now he has to bring it.

California, right. Good for him. Yes. But I am, the question you asked. Yeah. I was, I'm in New Orleans where it you know where it is rainy and for them very cold although it's only 46 degrees swampy and haunted by history good for you just like me um yeah i'm dealing i'm dealing with a dusting of snow the most irritating kind of snow there is

because it falls in a powdery fashion it's not enough to snow blow it's hardly enough to shovel what you want to do is get out there with a you know can of compressed air like you used to clean your computer keyboard and just do the sidewalk that way but no i'm going to have to get out there with a can of compressed air like you use to clean your computer keyboard and just do the sidewalk that way. But no, I'm going to have to get out there and get the snow off. So the people, three people walking their dog in the four below weather have a smooth path. Well, news. Oh, news. We have it. There's the news about the national debt passing the three point trillion mark or 30. I'm sorry. Oh, for the days. Oh, for the hellsion days of three trillion. No, 30 trillion. But, you know, three trillion, 30 trillion,

pretty soon you're talking real money there doesn't mean anything to anybody, anything. I remember that national debt clock in New York that would. And for those of us who sort of want the nation to be on a firm financial footing, that thing was sort of the monetary equivalent of the doomsday clock that those scientists put together. Except this one was always moving every single second. And as the numbers would accumulate and flash by in this incredible, incomprehensibly rapid stream of debt, your heart sank. And I think everybody who walked around the national debt clock learned to ignore it to laugh at it to just sort of yeah scientists imagine it was like a compendium of how many angels we've now determined can dance on the head of a pin but in in a way i mean think about the national debt which i think

is so so so becomes so troublesome first of all yeah we passed 30 trillion dollars that's a quarter of a million dollars for the taxpayer. And I think I don't, was that like on the front page of the New York times or the front page of any paper? I mean, or maybe just a little box like, Hey, Hey friends, you know, you know, a notable things that happened today. And I think it's because if you're on the left, your argument is a little consistent. I mean, it is consistent in a sense that it doesn't matter

because it doesn't. Because if you're on the left, you're like, well, we could simply raise taxes and it'd be fine. We could raise taxes. We can simply print more money. Yeah. Or that, right? But the bottom, sort of the philosophical position that the left has about the national debt is it's not really, it's all an accounting error because all we need to do is to raise taxes on everybody um and then it's paid off presto change show and they're not actually wrong about that um the problem of course is you raise taxes and the economy tanks and then the great engine of american ingenuity and american capitalism progress fails but that's not something that keeps them awake it's something that keeps people on the right awake because we sort of know that the more money you keep in circulation for people

to do creative things with the better the world is um i think that but all this is like tomorrow right yeah but it was like 50 20 years from now right so it's like it's easy to it's easy to forget about it i mean i wish i wish the people on the left were as terrified about the disaster of the american debt bomb as they were about the fanciful climate change disasters that they invented ahead yeah well the thing that's almost heartwarming and touching to me about what you just said is that the left believes that we could just raise taxes to pay off the national debt and we could but the idea that they would say we're so worried about this debt we're going to raise taxes and pay that

debt off as opposed to saying we're going to raise all these taxes and spend them on a huge new kaleidoscopic panoply yeah that's that too programs oh yeah they can yeah given the opportunity yeah given the opportunity to raise to to to uh raise taxes make us eat our spinach, no, I don't think so. Well, there is a philosophical economic position that the left has, which is that if you raise taxes and prove that you can raise taxes, right, because our debt holders are always wondering, well, could they do that? And if you prove that you can, you've bought yourself another 25 years of, you know, genuine, positive, goodwill feeling from the people who hold the paper. So the theory is like, well, we'll raise taxes and we'll spend it on, you know, whatever they spend it on.

They always manage to convince themselves that actually we just spent $3 trillion. And they use that phrase. They always use, and it's paid for. Remember when they passed? It's paid for. Remember when they passed? It's paid for, James. It's paid for. It's an investment. It's an investment.

Any time that they're spending, it's an investment, as though you're sitting down with somebody with green eye shades, and he's telling you exactly how this $3 trillion you're going to spend will return in the future. Yeah, it's good. It's great. Well, in something a little bit more germane to what uh people may have in their lives the debt of course is bare amount really when you think about it but there's the cnn issue and you

may think oh good lord this is just nothing but succession style new york media politics but it really isn't is it for those people who pay a lot of attention to who tells you what through the screens the cnn story is illustrative of what corruption nepotism yes some rot at the heart of the enterprise that actually should make everybody turn away all mass from the channel and shun it for good or is this just going to blow over and there will be the usual chattering class belief that cnn is somehow an objective gold standard up there with the new york times the scribes who put down the bones of history for the future to recall those of us who tuned out of cnn a long time ago and have been looking at the people who've been arrested or cast off for the

rest of it just sort of see this as indicative of the whole media culture in new york rob you're there in new york of course with your you know yeah attuned i'm just yeah you know my antenna or uh yeah who knows what happened. I mean, I don't really know what happened, but this has all the earmarks to me of this corporate entry. And you have a longstanding media executive in Jeff Zucker, who has, I'm trying to be diplomatic here in, depending on where you are in the Pantheon or the spectrum of the,

of the entertainment business. And I've sort of been on both sides. I'm not really, I'm not really in the news business, right. But kind of, you know, like I'm in the chit chat business, I guess this is what this is, but having been in the entertainment side, I do remember him and when he was running NBC and I do remember when he ran, was kicked upstairs to NBC Universal, and I do remember he went over to CNN. And at no point did the organizations that he touched improve.

They didn't actually get better. Either the decline, either he stemmed some kind of predicted decline, or it got worse. I mean, I am very proud of the work we do, James, here on our podcast. I think we do a really good podcast. I think if you're listening to this podcast and you are a member of Ricochet, we thank you and we're pleased that you're members with us. If you're not, we want to give you all sorts of reasons in a minute to join. But we often have more listeners than certain

day parts of the cnn ratings and so you're so you just kind of this is an example i think of what happens in a company when one one guy is really good at playing a president of a company without actually being good at being president of the company and then eventually he's kicked out of for weird triviality that it's impossible for me to parse that half of people think there's something else there's something darker and the other half think oh you know what this is the guy that he had just been promoted over taking him out with ammunition provided by the guy he fired chris cuomo which is highly possible but i think it's this is more of a story of um corporate uh sharks uh killing each other uh and therefore fun i think therefore joy i really am enjoying every twist in it than i've been a larger question about the

media i don't think there's anything that we're you and i or anybody's going to be surprised about when it comes out but oh i think a girlfriend worked worked for Andrew Cuomo, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's going to be less than that. It's the Cuomo nexus that dovetails with a pandemic and the treatment of it by the governor, lorded and lionized for his treatment as the sexy, the way a thousand Cuomo-sexuals bloomed across the nation in rapturous regard for the way he thousand Cuomo-sexuals bloomed across the nation in rapturous regard for the way he

handled this. I mean, in any normal society, you're going to have scandals like this. But when you twin it with a pandemic, it makes it somehow much more fascinating to realize how much of the national narrative was shaped for some by this concatenation of Cuomos and Zuckers and the rest of it and then you see that cnn which had gone all in on trumpism has fallen by what 90 or anti-trumpism has fallen by 90 i believe it is their ratings of i mean just catastrophic loss of people of people which which leads you to believe that perhaps the route they took was not the route to you know continued success so do you think that that the people who are looking

at the bottom line, which is all that really matters, I mean, they're there to make a profit, they're not a philanthropic organization, are going to look at this and say, what if we try to restore the brand by showing up our reputation and becoming the most down-the-middle, objective, empirically-based news organization that exists in this country. Because I think that there actually is a niche for people who want it straight up, who don't want it tinged by what they perceive to be the biases. I mean, because as you know, when you listen to NPR and the rest of these things, you hear people talking in a way that tells you that they don't understand

they have no belly feel to use, you know, new speak-ins. For the other side, they can't intellectually apprehend what it's like to inhabit the ideas of the right. So they live in this bubble, and you find that in the right as well. But wouldn't it be refreshing to just have somebody be truly for the first time in decades just say here's the truth

maybe but like like zucker i mean you know cnn um during this this 2016 campaign and the primary season gave donald trump a lot of free what they call earned media he was on a lot they were because he was great tv right and i think they felt the same way about andrew cuomo that with his daily press conferences now the you know the press conference really ludicrous and i but i think of course i think the same thing of some of those rallies that trump did um but it was good tv so they did it what they're interested in is good tv now whatever you think about fox news i mean fox news has two distinct they they think they have two distinct halves, right? They've got this sort of commentary part, which is extremely popular in the prime time. And I

think early, early, um, the morning show that Fox and friends is sort of is, is definitely commentary. And then during the day, they have a very, very good, um, news organization. Of course, the Brett Baer show is a really, really excellent news hour. But they make a lot of money on Tucker and Laura and Sean and that, right? They make a lot of money on that. And the thing, I think it's attractive to think that the reason that those things are popular is because they are right wing or pro-Trump, which is really what they were. But on the other hand, I think it diminishes the talent involved. I disagree with Tucker on a lot of things.

I disagree with Laura on a lot of things, but they are really good at what they do. They're good broadcasters. There's a reason why their numbers for Sean and Laura and Tucker are so high. And there's no reason why you couldn't find great broadcasters on the left. Traditionally, we've had them. They've been in TV and radio for a hundred years, right? It's just that the ones that they have on CNN are so bad. So the, you know, I like Jake Tapper a lot. I think he's pretty fair. He's sort of brett bayer over there um but all they need to do if they want to if they want to do that kind of um full-throated opinion editorial commentary programming like fox does so successfully they just need better people and that's a management

problem uh and now they have the they've lost their manager and you could tell that there was a problem cnn because the people who stood up the loudest for Jeff Zucker were the on-air personalities. And then the great – there's a press conference. They had a conference call, I mean, a couple days ago that was leaked. And people who loved him the most were the people on the air who are not performing in the ratings. Now, if you have a low-rated talent talking about how much they love the ceo then you understand there's a management problem they're not supposed to they should be terrified of him they should be thrilled that he's gone because they should believe that the new guy then whatever it is they should have

been fired they're looking at the ratings too they they know what number 77 is so um i can't help but think of this in terms of the media and the business and the ratings. And, you know, if I were the new guy, if I had been Zucker, I would have made a clean sweep of their nightly talkers and found stars. I mean, they are there. Just find them. I mean, that's I mean, nobody thought that the people who are stars now on Fox were stars 10 years ago, not at this level. You just have to find them. You just have to be good at it.

And right now they're just trying to do, they're trying to get the people that see that MSNBC doesn't want. And that is not a recipe for success. No. The question is, are the people that they would get on the left, have the same sort of appeal to their audiences as Tucker and Laura and the rest of them. In other

words, the guy, you're right. I mean, Stelter and Maddow are not an attractive bunch of people to listen to and not particularly intelligent. Joy Reid is not the most blinding tungsten bulb that you can find at the Home Depot. But I think they have a problem, and I'm sure the problem probably exists in some extent to the right as well, he says, with the obligatory both sides-ism, that the dialogue, the discourse on the left now is becoming increasingly constricted by a series of ideas that prescribe certain ideas. swinging and didn't care what you know what uh you know higher gren greenwald who i'm sure people now regard as a tool of the right because he's on tucker's even though the guys are from way back when he was on the left uh matt taby uh from rolling stone i never pronounce his name correctly he's also a guy who's on the left but he's quite quite um out of sync with the way his side is moving because he stands with free enterprise

and is suspicious of the government and this sort of lockstep right yeah i mean yeah matt i don't think is a particularly compelling television personality but who knows he could flower like a hothouse orchid so i mean i don't know who they have exactly that they could do. And yes, they could double down on it and just be better at it. But really, isn't there something to be said for some place to which we all can turn and say, well, here are the... Because as I keep saying, to use that clunky phrase that we'll never catch on, non-contiguous information streams means that people have their own sets and their own facts and their own precepts and they don't intertwine the streams don't cross ghostbuster style uh so we all have our own little places in which we live with increasingly no center thing from which i mean i quoted the wash i cited a

washington times piece in a post i did on ricochet it got people angry because it was the washington post which was immediately seen as disqualifying. Well, I'm sorry, they're talking facts. They talk to people. They have quotes. We're going to have to go with that. We have to agree that there are places that we may not like because of Covington or that editorial or the rest of it. But if the Washington Post says that six inches of snow fell and I'm in Washington and six inches of snow fell, and I'm in Washington, and six inches of snow fell. I feel I can quote their weather page. We don't have that anymore, right? Yeah, that's right.

Well, they ruined it. Fractured places. Who ruined it? They ruined it. The left ruined it. I mean, they took over. But I'm just talking about sheer entertainment. I mean, you're right. It would be great if we had that.

That would be great. Sorry, Rob. I'm going to interrupt. If I was CNN, I'd have some. No. If I was CNN, I'd have some... No, if I was Fox, I'd have some gong sound. There'd be this swooshing, sweeping graphic

that would say breaking news and everybody would have to pay attention. That's the way they get us, right? They keep fracturing our attention span and making us say, shiny object, look at this,

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Novelist, literary critic, essayist. His novels included She Needed Me, Mission to America, and most notably Up in the Air, made into, of course, that acclaimed motion picture starring George Clooney. Great film, great book. More recently, he's published memoirs Lost in the Merit into of course that acclaimed motion picture starring george clooney great film great book more recently he's published memoirs lost in the meritocracy and blood will out i

believe you're in montana at present is that correct welcome to the podcast how are you doing i am way out in western montana livingston montana population 7 000 um and uh everything's good here. We've been back to normal for a year and a half. I keep taking side trips out of Montana, like I saw Rob in New York a week and a half ago. And everyone else is still taking seriously something that, to my mind now now looks like mime or something like who are those mimes going down the street with their masks and you know distanced and so uh so montana is not just a state right now it's the past basically we basically didn't go into the Great Reset.

We jumped back after a short time. And everything that I experience here seems totally irrelevant to the rest of the country now. And you're from there, right? I mean, you grew up close to where you are, right? I'm from Minnesota, another M state, often used with Montana. Yeah. Yeah, I've been... often used. It's Montana. Yeah. Yeah, I've been... Two Minnesotans here.

I've been out here since 1990. Moved here from New York City. Basically for simple financial reasons. Couldn't afford New York. New York was in one of its downturns in about 1990. And came out here, bought a house for $60,000, started writing, you know, novels. Stopped worrying about, you know, whatever, what my Ivy League classmates were doing that year. All the track keeping that you did in the city seems to disappear into Montana.

You lose sight of what average incomes are. When I go back to New York and I see people making decisions and I see what the co-ops cost and the super tall, sort of empty real estate monoliths and i go my god it it really is like babylon compared to you know the midwest you're singing james's tune here they exacerbated all differences that they could with COVID. Every difference that sort of roughly aligned with a right-left or establishment, anti-establishment set of issues was exacerbated with COVID. They've got people yelling at each other, calling the cops on each

other, putting passive-adversive signs in their windows warning people what to do we've turned into like a sort of neurotic uh monkey in the zoo that's eating itself and posting rules and becoming more and more you know obsessive meanwhile patches of the country look on going they're just choosing that They don't have to do that. Like if they drive 100 miles, they'll see that that's like totally unnecessary and weird. And so now travel within the United States for me is like one of the most disorienting things

because I basically go to two different kingdoms quite regularly. So Montana weirdly didn't used to be as different as it is now due to COVID. We simply couldn't buy into this thing. So when you don't buy the package, you can't really buy any of it. And so now we look on at the rest of the world

having the greatest breakdown of all time. Totally not evident from anywhere that I ever go, even though I read the New York Times and find out that the place I am is apparently a center of contagion. I would never know, but I've actually now been told that I'm wrong about my like hundred foot periphery and the New York Times is right as far as coronavirus um Montana has become one of the uh scapegoat states where the virus apparently recedes to a sort of mountaintop kingdom waits and comes back like uh like a dragon yeah like a dragon you know that's kind of my what Montana does to certain people from Cambridge, Massachusetts, think Montana're performing this little mask of the Red Death, looking down at all the peasants. But they're locked in their own castle while they believe that the peasants are dying en masse.

You go outside of the city and it takes you about 20, 30 minutes before you're in a different culture completely. And I do this a lot to drive from Minneapolis to Fargo. And by the time you get to Fargo in North Dakota, you have a completely different culture than you have in Minnesota that you can actually see when you cross the border. Over here, lots of regulations and lots of taxes. Over here on the North Dakota side, prosperity and new buildings and new homes stretching into the potato fields as far as the eye can see. So, I mean, I absolutely get that. about what it's like out there. It's as though they think that I'm going into the world of the Morlocks, where you find this post-apocalyptic world of shambling features with shankered faces who are all diseased,

and that that disease is going to come back into our pure city. We're doing everything right. We are masked up in the grocery stores at this very moment. But the minute that we drop this, the people out there, the infection is going to swarm back in like a tsunami wave into our pure little enclave. But the thing is, is that, I mean, Walter, in Montana, in a town of 7,000, it's almost as if that was seen as the ideal in these 1970s post-apocalyptic hippie movies, where that was the true getting back to nature the true

spirit of what it was like to be alive and now that's regarded with horror and now that's regarded as this this this sort of nuclear inferno that inculcates everything wrong with the country and you've been writing a lot about the canada trucker strike on twitter give us your take on that because you know montana minnesota north dakota canada we're all kind of culturally connected here more than we are so in manhattan what do you see the response to that as as being indicated as a lesson for canada and a lesson for america well they've already won simply putting themselves in place and establishing themselves was the victory. Now, no matter what the government does with them, up to a, you know, overreach, crackdown, where, you know, there's chaos

and it looks like the government really, you know, freaked out. That could happen. But everything just sort of drifts away. That's not going to happen. These guys are in there. They've done it. They are very conscious of themselves as on the cutting edge of a, you know, sort of Western populist tide that they think is coming. They can't really wait much longer. They've been so demonized. Everybody, you know, who works with their hands

or lives in the middle of the country or didn't finish college or whatever it is, all of these negative resume items that put you on the racist insurrection, you know, troglodyte, anti-vax uh target space because those people now inhabited target space in culture their job is to be isolated and slowly picked off you know um anyway uh the freaky thing about COVID when it really comes down to it is that I find myself having to pretend I'm worried in all kinds of situations where I'm not. Right. Don't you think that's one of the problems is that we're discovering that we have to be characters in a play that we didn't write and aren't directing and have no stake in, but we still have to behave. That's very, that's very insightful. Thank you. They are hijacking. So here's what's happened.

Wait, just stop with that's insightful. I don't think you really need to hear any more from you. Every narrative. Yeah. They hijack. Wait, okay. Every narrative okay every every personal every family every community every political narrative they hijacked with covid 19 right and yet i gotta say like i i never when we we knew each other in la a little bit. I never thought of you as a, a, a crazy right wing nut.

And, um, I'm not, so tell me like, are you, what are you, are you, are you a crazy right wing nut now that you live in Montana and like, you know, whatever. I now have completely see, I see, I see how social media and the algorithms that mix our news and our interactions, I see how they work. And these algorithms have one real directive, which is go out into the world, get power from the people out there, and bring it back into the system. Get them to buy stuff. get them to do stuff get them to vote a certain way reach out and while these people think that they're idly regarding a list of you know quotable or sub-quotable sayings we're sucking out their power well okay but i mean you're and that's what even the best media is now doing right but you're but

you're um you're you're that is not right wing but if you i'm i'm reading your twitter feed it's still funny i mean you still write really i mean you still kind of have a smile on your face not right now because you're drinking coffee but in general how. Are you... Let me ask you the question this way. You wrote a great book that became a wonderful movie called Up in the Air, in which it's really about one guy and his strange need to travel. The fact that he loved the displacement of travel. And his currency of his life was airline miles, airline points. And we all pointed at that guy and said, said boy that's a shallow life he's living um and and that was kind of the the moral message of the movie

and the book but it was a hopeful message by the end do you are you have that i mean now you're kind of saying we all live up in the air well i mean we're going to be lucky to live up in the air soon at least the air is a physical element i mean at least it's got birds and clouds in it at least it's some something that we recognize from our millions of years of evolution on earth, at least it's not the meta frigging verse, whatever that is, where you are literally encased in a cartoon that slowly, you know,

using subsonic and all other sorts of tricks creates an all pervasive atmosphere in which your identity is dislocated from your body that's the whole point of the goggles of the sound of the site and when you are dislocated from your body what do they do with you they put you in some version of an amusement park mall horrible american space that like picks your pocket and is fake um the metaverse i'm so glad facebook is crashing i hope everybody sold out of it you know i hope that is the least attractive vision that was ever given for mankind since you know uh

everybody's broil same amount of money. Yeah. The problem with the metaverse as it stands now is that it just isn't very good and it's too uncomfortable. It's, it, it's not there yet when it is, that's when I start to worry, but I can see exactly how it would be appealing and seductive to people now. But right now it's a hot, heavy thing on your head. It's ridiculous to be in.

Everyone zips around with a torso with no legs. And at the end of it, when you come out of it, you feel the sense of shame that you've been there at all. One of the reasons I'm happy that Apple says they're not going to get into it, because if there's anybody who could perfect an all-persuasive, completely immersive environment, it might be them. I want to get back to what you were saying before about the algorithm, because you had this tweet that stuck out. I remember I saved it. It's from the 28th. You wrote, I just glanced at Twitter and saw, as if by lightning, the whole of its wriggling squid-like algorithm. In a flash, I saw it thinking, working.

It practices a kind of martial art, and its besieged opponent is the truth. No other rival is worthy of it. Finally, it is that truth. No other rival is worthy of it. Finally, it is that ambitious. And I thought, okay, this is the guy I want to write the next version of Revelations because that's, I'm waiting for the seven headed creatures to come out of this too. But you're right. The weird odd thing is that hardly anybody's on Twitter. And of the people who are on Twitter, hardly any people tweet. There's a certain small number of people who do, but yet it seems as if what happens on Twitter is the inflamed nerve that runs up and down the national spinal cord. Or am I wrong? How did that happen? How did something so out there

and confined seem to come to characterize the national conversations at just about every single issue. So post-war America has been obsessed with the question of statistical normalcy, with being average. As it became suddenly a mass society, it wanted to know figures and standards and benchmarks. It wanted wages standardized. It wanted the financial market sort of made Protestant and brought out to the people. and these tech companies and these metaverse makers try to englobe us in basically a new ad space or a new incentive space where they can manipulate us and do a kind of surveillance that's global of our being. to actually move into identifying with different avatars. So they're going to change our social DNA through social media. But you're right. It's only a minority of people who actually use it. And the press uses it because the press always has some surrogate for actual reporting. The press always has something like Twitter or the Gallup poll or,

you know, a stringer in every city like we used to do at time. They never really consult the people. They always find a surrogate. And Twitter is now the place where you go to measure public opinion and the zeitgeist and so on. But it's a constructed place that is already totally biased toward one vision of what's going on. And that kind of algorithmic capture of certain, you know, platforms that then imprint themselves on the mind on top of this move to censorship where like it's going to be the war of all against all i won't be on youtube if he'll if he doesn't leave he won't be on the like in the end it'll be like one person

with one person yelling at each other like molecules for the entire society won't be political parties or anything it'll just be pairs of people yelling at each other randomly scattered across the board um while some power that has yet to completely show its face strides into the arena and says i'll be running things now um because our situation from the technical to the way the media is structured to the fact that we dude i stopped reading the washington post so long ago like if you keep buying stocks from a guy who lied to you once you're probably stupid if you keep buying stocks from a guy who lied to you three times what you're doing is you're buying back into his lie you know i don't think anybody in the establishment can fathom what total unplugging, total abandonment, total revolution of credibility and credentials will look like. But it will happen.

Wait, I'm sorry. Let me be clear. What will happen? Will we finally unplug ourselves and just live our lives? Twitter or the arbiters of right or wrong opinion or thoughtful commentary and so on. They're all they've all failed. Really, they fail. Like they made up some big stories that turned out the biggest stories turned out not to be true. They've become like police who just hunt and censor other press organizations so let me let me ask you this okay so um and i want to ask you about your new your new book too

because we want this your writing is fantastic and i've always admired it not just because you're my friend if you were my friend i'd probably not like it so much because you know but it's good uh two questions one is like okay how I mean, you're a literary figure and you are a novelist and you screenwriter and you have, you know, you are, people mention you, you're on lists, you work on, you've worked on some television show. How many people in your, in that part of your life who are by definition, part of this establishment that you're pointing to are like, Hey man, Hey, you've gone crazy. Stop talking about this. I mean, has that happened yet? Or have you felt, I don't know,

have you felt a pushback or a sting or anything because you're, you're saying stuff that, um, that is easy to caricature, I guess I should say. The first effect is that my life has grown immeasurably more interesting. I moved into better friend circles, more interesting intellectual sort of arenas and, and started meeting more serious and more diverse people than I ever met rising through the sort of, you know, marble staircase of media in Manhattan. It's a much more exciting, effervescent, chaotic, confusing, but glorious time because

whether you still read the Washington Post or not, the reason you actually read it is to find out what the regime wants you to think. Like, you know, there's no way to really gauge the truth value of what they say, except by their bad record, which would suggest it's a toss up. So, you know, you might read the Washington Post to find out what the State Department or whatever is trying to tell the people that day but for some kind of like truth that was dug up in secret and inconvenience is the powerful like you really think they do that like they're just they are bad men they're i mean just move to the most extreme position on these uh on the credibility of these organs that you can because it doesn't matter if the individual reporters and journalists or columnists are

good-hearted souls or have integrity at some point decisions of a certain consistent fashion have been made over years now that have completely trumped any sort of journalistic claim to credibility russiagate being the main one i mean we were literally held on the edge of our seats by a phony thing and segue to this, you know, virus that's going to segue to God knows right now they're in tryouts. They're trying out different crises to sort of move in. Um, you know, uh, wait, I do have one more. Can I do one more? Hold on. I got to interrupt here. Just like in Montana, where they split a cord of wood with an ax and it's sharp, it's hard and it's final. I'm going to do that to this conversation because I got to tell you something about this. This year, Valentine's gifts are as easy as KISS, K-I-S-S.

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I get I just your work in general is optimistic. You don't sound that optimistic right now to me. Well, dude. OK, let's be optimistic. OK, no, I don't have to be. You can be as pessimistic as you're on the news to see the president there's a like non-trivial chance you might see the president die like or fall down or like become non-functional like right off the wings of the operation joe biden i don't know what's going on you know if there are nets

and like you know ambulances stacked up or whatever because the biggest lie in the country is like this is normal everything okay but but you're telling me that you don't believe it and people montana don't believe people who don't believe it so what would you say to them a lot of people in montana believe it i don't i i made it i made the sausage man i can tell you what they don't clean the kitchen to the standards that they tell you don't you know don't eat a hamburger okay very very provocative metaphor something you know go read the National Enquirer or something. Don't get drawn into the machinations of the elites by reading the foreign coverage of the Middle East. Well, where do they get their news then?

What are the sources for information in the town of 7,000 people? What do people cite? I got this from them. I heard this from them. The ones that we always have. the ones that until maybe 20 years ago were actually sufficient you get the news from your neighbors from walking down the street you get the weather from you know what temperature it is etc now when the news completely diverges, as it has, from the conditions that you see around you, I mean, we, you know, the country should be sort of homogenous. We all get the same cable news. We all go on Twitter and Facebook and they, you know, algorithmically select and suggest prestige things that, you know, tend to favor the consensus view anyway. But me being me being optimistic has nothing to do with which I am has nothing to do with my

absolute, like, ridiculous shock at what we've got going for a public narrative it's crazy man i mean we've got we've got the heads of states being viewed not you know at parties and sporting events not doing the the odious things that are shutting down their economy as they selfie out, like something like creepy is happening. Right. And it's actually going and we're like, and it's just zipping by the scroll and we're not remembering, oh my God, that guy, he was going to, he said he's going to put people in prison. They didn't wear a mask.

And there he is with magic Johnson of all people. We forget things, but what we would remember, for example, if we found a bear in our house. Tell us about the bear in the house. So I have a book that's coming out, like a sort of miniature short story slash novella with Amazon that they commissioned for me. And the commission was open, but during the time I was thinking of writing it, my father died of ALS in his cabin in Montana, his retirement cabin. He'd been a patent lawyer, worked in Minnesota and retired out here. And it was my privilege at the very peak of COVID, which is one of the reasons I'm at odds with the COVID narrative in general, at the very sort of early peak in the spring of, you know the bear in my dreams must be my father. My father is represented by a bear. He always was. couple days after he died out in his cabin uh we put a uh alarm uh video camera up in the living room because we couldn't find the keys to the front door of the cabin and there was this

bear in the house walking around uh making itself at home it was an hour from me. Uh, so we had to drive out there. Um, and this bear had come through the window, um, over my father's, uh, chair at the dining room table, the one he always sat in somehow opened this, uh, window come down, um, and made himself at home. And's kind of a dreamlike story because at the same time I was, you know, dealing with this suddenly taking possession of this cabin out in the woods. In the main world, everything had fallen apart. And I came out like Rip Van Winkle. it was hard having just put my father, you know, into the next world to take seriously the level of neurosis and, um, just obsessiveness when I came out. So I drifted further and further from the narrative for biographical reasons. And this will be available as an e-book on Amazon, correct?

Yes. Owned by Jeff Bezos, who runs the Washington Post. So why should I trust anything, anything at all? I was about to say that. Don't I know it. Don't I know it. It's been a pleasure. It really has.

Everybody go buy Bear in the House and pick up Meritocracy and Blood Will Out. As a matter of fact, buy on a physical hard copy up in the air so that someday when the movie gets deplatformed for whatever reason, you'll have proof that it actually existed. Thank you for joining us. Love to do it again. Regards to Montana from your old ancestral home of Minnesota. And thank you, Walter.

Walter, nice to see you. And my real question at the end of this, I know we're saying goodbye, but where is your podcast? Let's do it. Are you saying this on the air right now? Yeah, I'm saying it on the air right now. I'm putting you on the record. It's about to emerge.

We'll talk after we get off. That's good. That's what I wanted to hear. Fantastic. Thanks, Walter. See you soon. See ya. Bye-bye. And when Walter does have his podcast, by the way, of course, we hope you'll be able to access it through Ricochet, and

you'll have to use the internet to get it. Now, the question is, when it comes to the internet, how secure are you? And you say, oh, I'm very secure. I have my passwords. I use incognito mode. Leave me alone. Don't tell me about a VPN. It makes me nervous. Listen, using the internet without using ExpressVPN is like checking your baggage at the airport without a lock on it. I have a lock. I like it. I like the fact that I can just put those numbers together and nobody's going to be poking through my stuff. You think your stuff

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devices. Anyone who uses your Wi-Fi can also be protected. With all that protection, you'd be amazed at how easy it is to use. Just fire up the app and click one button for unfailing protection. So I like it for a variety of reasons. The security is one, the quickness is the other, the ease. And it's also fun to use as a server places in other parts of the globes. You can see what Netflix shows them that doesn't show us. In other words, if you're not using a VPN, you're missing out on opportunities and you're exposing yourself to a lot of stuff you don't want to do. So why not choose one? And why not choose the best ExpressVPN? Secure your online activity by visiting expressvpn.com slash ricochet today. 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, free expressvpn.com slash ricochet.

And we thank expressvpn for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast. Hey, um, I know we, before we move on, can I just, um, um, I just want to make sure I get the same because you were talking, this is my segue. Um, one of the things we have always been concerned about in the past couple of years, especially coming up now is that sort of de-platforming of people who no one likes or de-platforms people who say the wrong thing, taking away their Twitter accounts, taking away their Facebook accounts,

taking away their sometimes taking away their internet service providers. And the, one of the original sort of, you know, OG de-platforming of course is when the, when the evil guys, evil Islamists would put a fatwa on somebody. And that is why I'm telling you, but we are all going to be able, all Ricochet members can be able to meet and ask questions of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is one of the bravest, most singular voices in the fight for women's rights in the Islamic world.

She is the original deplatformed. Deplatformed with a vengeance. They were going to try to kill her. They are probably still try to kill her. They are probably still trying to kill me. And she is going to be our guest on the next No Dumb Questions webcast, which I will be hosting because I am very good at asking questions that anyone else would think are too dumb to ask. I don't have any pride, James, so I'll ask those questions. So Ayaan is a former member of the Dutch parliament. She's authored many, many books. She's been a guest

here, I think, on a podcast once. And her most recent is Prey, Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights, which was published last year. And she's also, as people who are on the Ricochet Audio Network know, she's the host of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali podcast. So Thursday, February 10th, that's a week from yesterday, I guess, right? 2.30 p.m. ET, 11.30 a.m. PT. We will be talking to her, and I'll be asking questions, and you will be asking questions on Zoom. This is a Ricochet members-only webcast, okay?

So if you're a Ricochet member, please come. Put a note in your diary. I would love to see you and love to hear your questions, and she would love to answer them. That's what she's there for. If you're not a member of Rico, and she would love to answer them. That's what she's there for. If you're not a member of Ricochet and you are fascinated by this woman, as you should be, this is a perfect time to join. But even more importantly, if you're a member and you know anyone you think might enjoy it, you can encourage them to join Ricochet at ricochet.com slash join.

They'll get their first 30 days for free, and you'll get a free month if they join. So it's kind of a one month, one month situation. Send them an invitation at ricochet.com slash join. All the information is there. If you know somebody who, and if you know a student too, let them know because we have a new student deal, which is free. This is important. She's an important person.

She's a fascinating person. She's actually very funny and witty and interesting too. And I hope we'll be talking a little bit about that. This is kind of a fun thing that we're doing for members only. And so far we've had great, great response. And I think it's, you know, it's got membership has its privileges as they used to say. The only other thing I want to promote here. And again, it's one of those things that, you know, it's important. If you're a member, be a member. If you haven't dropped in yet,

Ricochet editor-in-chief, John Gabriel has a new show called The Nightcap. It is live at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, every Monday through Thursday. You can tune in to hear John's review of the day's big stories with his own, you know, he's, John's a very funny guy. And you can, of course, chime in with your thoughts. It's kind of a call-in. It's kind of a call-in radio show on the web. You've got to use the app Call-In, which is a new app and web platform created by a friend and run by a friend of Ricochet. So we're sort of pleased to support our friends. It's a great, great service. It lets you create and cultivate podcasts and audio communities on your own, including ours. You can subscribe to the Nightcap at callin.com, C-A-L-L-I-N.com, or you can download the app on your iPhone or iPad and search for the nightcap. And each episode is published on that webpage after it airs. And of course, here's the problem. Right now, because it's new, it's an Apple-only app right now, but they are working hard on the Android

version. um sorry about that but it's that's gonna that's gonna plan to change but we still want you guys to listen because gabriel is doing terrific stuff and we are kind of trying to reinvent or reinvigorate um the old fun of calling radio talk radio uh and then finally if you're a student we're offering full-time part-time uh u.s well we're offering to full-time and part-time U.S. college students and graduate students who are eligible a complimentary Ricochet membership. We want you to join. We want you to join the conversation. We want you to start some conversations.

All you need is a valid student.edu email address. And if you know any, please spread the word. Go to ricochet.com slash join. That is the end of my promotion. This entire 15-minute promotional segment, by the way, a transcript can be obtained by writing to Ricochet.com slash

transcript. Well, great. And Rob has just scratched the surface of all the things you can find at Ricochet.com. I'd go even farther. I'd talk about the typefaces and the wonderful shade of blue, but we should probably wrap it up here. But first, it's important stuff. You were talking before about funny people, and I think of course America's comic sweetheart has

got to be Whoopi Goldberg all these years. She got... I'm kidding. That used to be her thing. Funny, funny, funny, but now, lately, yikes. So we had the Holocaust thing. I'm not interested in parsing what she said it

seems obvious when you strain it through the filter of crt and the idea of races and who is and who isn't kind of obvious where she's coming from a dumb place i'm interested in the reaction to the to the punishment because there's two schools there's the school that says we must have grace and forgive the other side does nothing but cancel and castigate. It must be beholden upon us to show a better example. And then there are those who say, no, no, they started the game. We have to play it the way they want their rules. We're not going to do Calvin ball here. We're going to fight back by their terms, and then they will learn. And I'm of the opinion that that is tempting as it may be, correct as it may be, to not give up, to not walk out of that space. I don't think it's going to work.

I don't think there will ever be a moment when the left says, that's it. We've lost too many of our own to some sort of cancellation or timeout. We're going to stop and we're going to start to get along a little bit better and see if there's a different way to do these things without canceling everybody in sight. What do you think, Rob? Yeah, I mean, I think the punishment was stupid. I think it's stupid. All of this weird kind of booby trapping of conversations. You use the wrong noun to describe a thing and it's not this thing. And the executive at ABC, I think, is just reprehensibly stupid it is she

just wanted to write a press release where she could say big words um and you know and and you know beat her chest and act like a big shot uh in the diversity equity inclusion world um i clearly she was trying i think trying to buy future credit i mean the executive out will be trying to buy future credit in the in the what if something happens in the future and she's in trouble, she can point to this moment where, hey, I suspended Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks. I don't think it's going to ever be, I mean, look, I can't advocate for things that I think are stupid, even if I think they're hilariously biblically just right it's okay i think there's some justice to the fact that the left-wing establishment is eating itself and and policing itself and suspending itself and firing itself but i can't advocate for i can't say it's smart or good or i can't agree with it because it's stupid and they shouldn't be doing it um so is it you're right it's a kind of i mean

i'm enjoying it right in a very very evil way because i think it's funny and i think they should cut it out but i i can't i don't think it's i don't i think it's stupid and i think we'll be going to say anything wrong really she just maybe used the wrong the wrong word to describe the thing and then she clarified like the idea that we're we're policing speech on how exactly you're going to describe the holocaust is just kind of nuts to me and um and so i i think it's i think it would be probably more politically useful more socially useful for people who think it's nuts to say it's nuts no matter when they see it uh and instead of saying oh well i mean i mean i'm

between you and me and everybody i'm like yeah well you know listen this is the world you guys created but it's still stupid and uh whoopi goldberg who's not a person that i am i'm not you know i don't watch the view i'm not really interested in her whatever she should be back at work she should be back at work that's the suspension is stupid um and the and i think more and more people are realizing just the ludicrousness of our sort of current policing culture um including i guess our our friend walter kern who uh who has um i mean maybe had too many red pills uh but but that's kind of how i feel about it like you know i mean um that's kind of how I feel about it. Like, you know what I mean? That's kind of how I, every morning for breakfast.

He is not buying any milk and none of the soy milk either. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was tempting to just sort of enjoy it. Schoenfreude is like a good Sherry, but you know, after a couple of them, you don't do anything about it. So, right. When you say that it's, it's fun to watch, but you don't want it to happen. And I'm not sure exactly if it ever stops. I just don't. I mean, you come back to his image of just, you know, the eventual end of society or two people eternally yelling at each other. Some atomized heat death away spread out of the universe. I get that.

But it doesn't seem sustainable in the long run unless, you know, it is because the culture tends to reset its attention span every morning and come up with something new and come up with somebody new. I mean, somebody once said the objective of your life in this new world is not to be the person of the day on Twitter. There's always a person of the day on Twitter. And the whole point is to not be that guy. I fear Walter's going to be that guy someday. But if there's anybody who would take that with equanimity and not care, it probably would be him. But I have to say, though, if I can just share one thing, the downside of this, just to be super, I mean. There's all kinds of downsides to this.

Yeah, but for me, I mean, to be super self-aware. Never mind society. I don't care about society. It's about me. We both write every issue for National Review. And you write more of a column meditation and the voice is James Lilacs. And I write sort of the

little cartoon version, the verbal cartoon. But they're both very funny, everybody, just so you know. They're both great. And every now and then, I'm mostly behind the paywall i don't know why but every now and then they release it and it goes out in the wild and every now and then i get just a tiny smattering a little blip of people excoriating me um for a whole bunch of reasons sometimes they

excoriate me because they believe that national view was uh establishment you know cuckservatives who were mean to trump and sometimes they excoriate me because national view were these far-right radical pro-trumpers um but mostly they excoriate me because i've said something that's offended them in some way and it's also most to be fair it's mostly on the left and i have found myself thinking when i'm writing them usually late at night when i finally have an idea and i'm going kind of letting it kind of go um am i going to get in trouble for this am i going to be the day that if this goes will i somehow be suddenly my head above the you know the the foxhole um and i i don't know i don't think

it has any effect on what i write but i the fact that i'm aware of it i think it's sort of a bad sign because i know that but i know that telling people no no you don't understand i'm i write the funny little verbal cartoon this is a a joke. I am making fun. We don't have that. That doesn't really exist anymore in the culture. We have a mechanism now that has empowered the humorless and the literal. And the people who, you're right. And given them the power that the great critics used to have in the past.

And it used to be, you'd send something out there, you would fear that the New York Times book reviewer or art reviewer would scowl upon your work. You would fear that Joan Didion would look at it and pronounce it to be meretricious. You would, your art, Clement,

all of these, you had these anointed places. And that you can make the argument that that was cultural gatekeeping and we need, and the democratization of it is great. But we have handed off the sort of you're no longer being criticized for your or evaluated for your art for the for the skill and the success with which you performed your art it's the fact that contained within this was a

series of phonemes that indicate wrong think and that's got to be dragged out and that has to be and you have to you have to pay for that. So you have the humorless, literal-minded people with nothing better to do than the police, the synapses of others, driving the conversation. And that's what I was saying to Walter, is you have the small percentage of people on Twitter. You have an even smaller percentage that do anything. But yet, so much of what we do and worry about is, I mean, I am fascinated by the people who are on Twitter to be always on Twitter. That is the entirety of their intellectual life, is parsing this fire hose of opinions that comes at them. And that's the thing, that's the baleful influence that I want to take out of all of this. That's why I want CNN to go back straight to the middle.

And that's why I want an EMP to take out all of the servers for the meta and Facebook and Twitter. And then we can get back to being in Montana, reading the newspaper that came off the press that the guy, you know, down the street, just like they did in Deadwood days. And then by God, we'll get back to firm American virtues. Like, like, and we'll all sleep well. We'll sleep well because we're on bowl and branch sheets,

and we'll walk around with pride because we're wearing Tommy John and ExpressVPN. Well, even in the future dystopian world, it'll be around, and you'll need it more than ever, because they're going to be looking at you more than ever. Don't be that guy on the internet, right? Join Ricochet today, by the way. I think, Rob, do you

have a 14-minute set piece you'd like to deliver right now about the reasons that people... Whoa, we've done that, right? Sorry. So join. Oh, yeah, that's right. Exactly right. No, I have a... I don't have... I did all the promos. Yes, and more. As you know, promos are sacred to me, James. I'm absolutely so sacrosanct. There's no way

you would even think to intrude on their holy nature. I will say this. If you join Ricochet, wait, I know. If you join Ricochet or you go to ricochet.com, we will post a picture that will explain where Peter Robinson

was today. And it's pretty impressive. Pretty impressive, I gotta say say that's fantastic well next week let's just do nothing but tell peter about the podcast he missed to make him feel as if he should have been here god knows he's not going to listen to it he's a busy man but you did and so thank you we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet by the way where members are free to hammer then bang the gong and tell us where we're wrong and hearty-har and give us kudos and all the rest of it. But only if you join.

So we'll see everyone in the comments at WC4.0. Rob, next week. Next week, everybody. I might be moving to Montana soon Just to raise me up a crop of dental floss Raising it up, waxing it down In a little white box that I can sell uptown By myself I wouldn't have no boss In a little white box that I can sell uptown

By myself I wouldn't have no boss But I'd be raising my lonely dental floss Raising my lonely dental floss Well, I just might grow me some beans But I'd leave the sweet stuff to somebody else But then on the other hand I would Keep the wax and melt it down Pluck some floss And swish it around

I'd have me a cry And it'd be on top That's why I'm moving to Montana Moving to Montana soon Gonna be a dentalopause Tycoon. Yes, I am. Moving to Montana soon, gonna be a Menopause Tycoon. Ricochet Join the conversation guitar solo I'm a-wantin' to be your man guitar solo I'm talking to you, I'm like a poor daddy boy And everybody's here to see the boy

He's a big, he's a big, he's a big, he's a big boy He can't get on anyway He's a big, he's a big, he's a big, he's a big boy He can't get on anyway Anyway I'm just a me a horse Just about this big And ride him all along the borderline With a pair of heavy-duty

Zircon-encrusted tweezers in my hand Every other wrangler would say I was mighty grand By myself I wouldn't have no balls But I'd be raising my lonely dental floss. Raising my lonely dental floss. Raising my lonely dental floss. Well, I might ride along the border

with my tweezers gleaming in the moonlighting night. And then I get just jump back on And ride like a cowboy into the dawn of Montana We can do Montana Keep your eye on the high end We can do Montana Keep your eye on the high end We can do Montana Keep your eye on the high end Keep me out of your tires Keep me out of your tires Keep me out of your tires

Keep me out of your tires Keep me out of your tires Move into my Tennessee Give me all your time Move into my Tennessee Give me all your time Move into my Tennessee Give me all your time Move into my Tennessee Give me all your time

Move into my Tennessee Give me all your time You'll be on your own You'll be on your own You'll be on your own You'll be on your own You'll be on your own You'll be on your own You'll be on your own You'll be on your own You'll be on your own