The Ricochet Podcast - Button Pushers Everywhere!

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

There’s a lot to gab about this week, so it’s a good thing our hosts had some extra time. Among other things, the trio delve into the moral scolds who think it’d be a great idea to bowdlerize our favorite children’s stories; and they’re glad to hear how Vivek Ramaswamy will shake things up as the newest Republican candidate for 2024. Then Eli Lake, who spoke with the hosts the day after the... Source

Well, obviously I'm using old-style wired stuff today, like Battlestar Galactica. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new action. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. My lips. No new taxes. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. I mean, the trip that President Biden took to Kiev, as many of you reported on, was historic.

It was brave. Many of you talked about how we heard the sirens wailing in the background as the president was on the ground. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex, and our guest eventually is Eli Lake, and we'll talk about Ukraine. Before that, lots of stuff. So let's have ourselves a podcast. We never get bored.

It's the Ricochet Podcast. Of course it is. Why wouldn't it be? It's number 631. How do we get this far, this many podcasts? Well, because of people like you, as they say on National Public Radio. People like you who joined Ricochet at Ricochet.com and discovered the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. Haven't gone there yet? Ah, what's stopping you? We'll talk about that a little bit later in excruciating detail, but for the moment, hello, welcome. Peter Robinson in California, which is not sunny, and Rob Long, peripatetic as he is, possibly in Gotham.

I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, which somehow survived the epic storm that did not exactly turn out to be as epic as we wished, and oh, how disappointed we are for that. Gentlemen, welcome. How's your day going? I am in Santa Barbara, which 365 days a year, nine years out of a decade is the most beautiful place on the planet. I happen to be here the one day, two days, maybe in a decade. It's flood warning. I went to five, three. They're calling what's happening up in the mountains a blizzard. Our friend, the Blue Yeti was planning to drive over from ohio but is socked in in ohio and um honestly i'm loving it i'm in a hotel just a block from actually not even across the street

is the pacific ocean and it makes me feel nostalgic for the east coast because for the first time since i've lived in california the pacific looks atlantic there are some rollers coming in it's that deep m mottled, slightly threatening green instead of the usual sapphire-y blue of the Pacific on a sunny day out here. So, I suppose most of the people who came to Santa Barbara this weekend aren't getting their money's worth, but I'm loving it. It was like that when I was there a while ago, too. Really? Yeah, I mean was the sea was choppy it was angry that morning my friends uh but what interested me more was finding the original

sambo's restaurant which is on the street right the ocean um it's not sambo's anymore but it's where the chain began and that's a little piece of childhood nostalgia that i can't can't ever give up rob you are on the other side of the continental United States. I am. But speaking, I mean, I remember when they changed the name

of that restaurant. Well, they really changed it to Sam's. Well, it's a complicated story and no one understands it but it's a woman but yeah they had a problem because sambo's was a contraction of the two owners names put together um yeah but that's not what it's sound no well rob it's called s-a-m-b-e-a-u-x yeah right the french version um but even in the decor of the place itself they did not reference S-A-M-B-E-A-U-X. Yeah, right. The French version.

But even in the decor of the place itself, they did not reference the little black Sambo story that a lot of people grew up with. He was Indian. No, that's right. And he had a turban, and he was up against a Bengal tiger, and the rest of it, and there were various pictures that showed him. And he turned into butter, right? He turned the tiger into butter.

Right, right. But so they turned him into ghee. But yeah, but eventually they just couldn't get past the name and the whole thing fell apart. And a lot of them got rebranded as Denny's. And if you're a fan of commercial archaeology, you can spot an old Sambo's restaurant to this day by the shape of the sign or the particular Googie-style California. And that was the great thing, was when they built Sambo's in Fargo, North Dakota or Cleveland or anywhere, they imported to these places embassies of California, futuristic, 60s, optimistic architecture that was fun. And I drive around now and i look at what the you know the fast food restaurants look like and they're all black boxes taco bell is a black box mcdonald's

is a sober black box steak and shake and whatever is a black box there's no fun and whimsy in these places anymore but that's just me so yes there is a place uh let me send you i'm gonna send come here in la um james there is a place as you me send you. I'm going to send it. Come here in L.A., James. There is a place as you're leaving a quick kind of way to the airport on the west side called Dinah's. D-I-N-A-H. Okay. And Dinah's still has that kind of architecture. Dinah's still has like fried chicken.

It still has this gigantic, snaky S-shaped counter that goes all around. Dinah's is still pretty much the last one. There was a place in LA called LA was like the headquarters of these places called Ships. Ships was famous because the owner of Ships decided, I think in 1952, that

everyone wanted their toast done a certain way and they wanted it hot. There's no way to get hot toast the way you want it to your table so he's he put a toaster on every table so the corner of olympic and the la cienega and they tore it down and there was a minor protest i think now there wouldn't be a lot of territory and uh and i don't even i don't know what they put up it's like a gas station now well what's the famous what's the name of the famous burger place over on pico that's still sort of old-timey or at least it was five or six years ago last time

oh the apple pan yeah yes yes yes good yeah good right and that's still there right yeah it's still there that apple pan's still there yeah there was ships there was googie which gave the name to the style of architecture there was coffee dans there's a whole bunch of these and there was one architect who did most of them who had this vision sort of of the Morris Lapidus of the West Coast of what the future restaurant should look like. And it spread nationwide. Eventually, it just defined a particular tail fin, optimistic jet age, space age aesthetic that I just absolutely adore. And it wasn't it wasn't valued for many years, and hence most of them were torn down and replaced with gas stations

or in and out or something like that. So, tis a pity. Well, should we get to the news of the world before we get to our guest? Speaking of changing Sambos to Sams. Yes. Roald Dahl, the author beloved by many of James and the Peach and the Fox

and all the rest of it, and the big monster guy, and got bowdlerized by the usual immoral scolds. Apparently, I didn't know this, there are actually companies that you can hire to pour over your work to ensure that no harm, no violence, is given by the text. And these people went through and removed a variety of things from Dahl's work, most of which had to do with taking out the word fat and replacing it with something that wasn't as judgmental and fatphobic and the rest of it. So, surprisingly, there was pushback by people who said, I'm sorry, that's literally Orwellian. You're changing the texts. And as it turns out, the company, and the reason this happened

was because the Dahl estate had sold rights to Netflix and apparently Netflix wanted to prevent itself from pickets by the blue hairs and the nose rings. The company that was doing this has announced that readers will actually now be able to choose between the original and the edited versions of doll's work which is again one more time red america has one set of books and blue america has another yes that's right i mean it's better i

suppose than extirpating all future references to his original text, but I still don't like it. This is... I don't know. I want to say this is serious, but I mean, we stand in a kind of torrent of this kind of thing. My immediate thought was

this is... if Raoul Dahl heard of this, he would rise up and smite down yet i mean it would just admit but it also undermines the part of what's going on with doll in my view i was thinking back to reading him and i came to him late he didn't penetrate upstate new york my little town until i was i think early teens in event, part of the pleasure was that you and Dahl were in on it together, that other books might be saccharine, but Dahl knew the way the world really was. And the world wasn't always nice. It wasn't always saccharine. There was a dark little

underside, and Dahl knew that, and he was letting you in on it the world was horribly anti-semitic uh well as was he yeah that is yes yes you said if ralph doll was alive today if ralph doll was alive today to hear this he blamed the jews yes i mean he was not a nice guy um there's also stories of him like you know when he was married to but the actress patricia neal and she had a stroke and he was um uh and she was in the hospital recovering from a stroke and he would come in um and this is the the legend jew he would come in and kind of yell at her say get up get up come on and he bullied her but he sort of people were kind of trying to restrain him my god let her recover but even she says he bullied me into recovery. He was a tough guy.

The good news here is that there's enormous amount of pushback on this from not from the usual suspects, from people who are sort of generally kind of left wing and but also like people at Penn and places like that. That is really that's good news. The weird news is like, I don't know. I don't know how you begin to fix a book like the, you know, the, what is it? Charlie and I forget the name of the actual book, not the movie. It's like the Charlie and the chocolate factory. I don't know how you actually fix it.

If you're trying to boulderize it or update it, it is in fact mean it's in the merriest it's in the marrow of the work oh my god it's so deeply embedded and these children are so awful and their punishments are so just and some of them you just get a sense that they're not they're they're they're not gonna they're not alive anymore um and it is an interesting thing it's the the idea that you have to shield children from this is so weird because they're gonna do it anyway it's like if you ever go on one of those kids soccer games where they're not supposed to keep score you know we're all just playing soccer and then you ask any kid any kid what's the score and they will tell you the score is four to zero we're killing them right if you ask any parent what the score is oh you know well i don't know just everyone's having

fun they're just playing the game but kids like there's one there's one group of of human beings alive today that no matter how hard you try you will will not woke-ify. And that is a child. You will never get a child to not notice a fat person, to not notice a stupid person, to not notice a glutton, to not notice people's infirmities even embarrassingly. Like to not notice the guy in the wheelchair, the person with a funny lip. You'll never accomplish that. And the idea that you're going to try is so ridiculous. No, you can't, but they don't want to. It's not that they don't want them to notice. They want to internalize from the very possible earliest point in their lives

that certain things are not to be said and these certain things should not be thought. I mean, you can think it, but you can't think it aloud in your head. And so you have everybody internalizing all of these things that must not be said. Right. And you have people who are compliant. I mean, when we say literally Orwellian, by that I mean, you know, the fellow who's talking with Winston Smith in the cafeteria. And it's a wonderful thing, the destruction of language. Remove the words, and you remove the ability to conceive

the ideas behind them. And so the whole thing about taking out the fat seems to be like the revenge of people who themselves might be a tad on the XXXS, Abu Dhabi side, and are part of the whole fat acceptance, body healthy, all the rest of it, which is amusing because we've gone from the President's Council on Physical Fitness, where JFK wanted everybody to be out there doing jumping jacks to chicken fat, and to now to the point where we're encouraging people to applaud as stunning and brave the people who show up in fashion shots as grossly morbidly obese. So it's an odd turn of events. But you're right, Rodney. Before we Alvarez Before we leave Raoul Dahl and the popularization of language, it's not just Dahl. It's happening in a more insidious way.

And I will tell you a story, but I cannot name names, and I'd better keep it pretty general. But I know a, let us just say that there is a major academic figure who has written a textbook. And this textbook is the basic textbook and has been for over a decade in its subject. And it turns out that now the publisher is submitting this textbook to the little ants who go through and take out anything that's politically incorrect. And the major academic is stunned by this but he calls around and finds out oh yes that happens to all textbooks that's just the way it is these days and it's breathtaking so this is it's just this kind of it's like the tide coming in and effacing it is making us stupider yeah i also can i just go one more um one more

spin in it and probably this is one spin too far uh one of the things we're doing um in our you know ricochet enterprise is we're doing so we're putting together some longer form uh podcasts uh series right and one of the ones i'm working on now is about really just a tiktok of covid you know what we knew when and how it happened ones i'm working on now is about really just a tiktok of covid you know what we knew when and how it happened and i have a couple uh controlling you know metaphors i'm working on trying to like figure out how to describe this one is sort of like a general countrywide panic attack and the other is forgetting things we know right yes the other one i'm just thinking of now is the idea that once you say, especially fat, right? Once you say that, once you remove those words and the power

of those words, and you kind of sand off the edges, you end up looking at COVID. I mean, I'm going too far, but I'm not going that much too far. You end up looking at COVID and the people who are going to get COVID and going to die from covid and you can't describe them because it's you're not allowed to say obese people and old people you have to come up with well senior citizens our nation's seniors you have to come up with all these euphemisms that i mean i guess they're nice in a social setting and they might you know you might want to kind of like make a a hilarious acid children's book into some pablum i mean i suppose there's there's some

damage cultural damage there and that's bad and i'm against it as somebody who writes for living i'm really against it but on the other hand there's also like this sort of dangerous other side of it which is like i do need to be able to describe the people who do not who should not be getting covid who should protect themselves from covid and i need to be able to describe them in a specific and and as uh even alarming way i can and if i can't do that if that's allowed, then we're all in big trouble, right? Old people, people who do, people who lack chronological privilege, is the way that you might want to put it. Right, right. You know, and I, you know, you think about this and you say, well, do I want to be old? You know,

do I want, I'm going to go to the gym after this, for example. And the study said that people who went to the gym had a much better chance of not having a bad COVID reaction and have a much better chance of not being hospitalized for stuff because, frankly, they move around and it's good for you to move around. But then you think, I'm going to add 10 years to my life and they're going to be those 10 years where I'm sitting doddering around, walking around with a walker. Well, you know, what if it was possible to extend your lifespan and to feel younger at the same time? Well, according to a Harvard scientist and a Nobel Prize winning breakthrough, it is absolutely possible. How, you say? Come on, how? By lengthening your telomeres. Hmm, heard of those? Your telomeres protect your DNA and they play a critical role in the aging process. But many of

us, you know, you struggle with shorting telomeres, little tiny, not as long as they should be, thanks to stress and unhealthy food and obesity. There I said the word and more. That's why we recommend Youth Switch. Just came in the mail the other day, and I'm just keen to try it. Youth Switch is an all-natural, doctor-approved, and manufactured right here in America. Contains a potent blend of adaptogens that promote healthier telomeres and longer lifespans. It boosts your energy and it can support regeneration of healthy organ systems as well. You can try Youth Switch for yourself today, risk-free. How? Well, we're going to tell you. And by the way, you will receive a free bottle of Ageless Brain as a bonus. It's a great product to help you improve your focus and your memory and your mood. Oh, your mood. You'll have a better mood. You'll also have a greater attention span to read the four bonus eBooks that boost every

aspect of your health and longevity as well. So how do you get this package? You go to youthswitchmd.com slash ricochet, and you can claim your supply of Youth Switch and all the five bonus gifts. That's youthswitchmd.com slash ricochet to order the Youth Switch package today. And we thank Youth Switch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. We thank Rob Long for giving me the most effortless segue ever. Well, before our guest shows up and we talk about the other side of the world, we should stay close at home and look at East Palestine. The story maintains but a judge finally showed up did i pronounce his name right i uh did he did he do what the secretary of transportation such things is expected to do and i say that because i've never known the secretary of transportation to show up and do something like

this he was pushed into it wasn't he i mean three-week politics of well trump made him do it yeah yeah yeah right it is a you know it is the sign that you you um it's one of those stories that takes on a greater symbolic importance politically than it may may in its details and its details it looks like a disaster looks like a uh a combination of sort of regulatory and, I don't know, not malfeasance, but sort of incompetence, that kind of thing. And everyone's trying to assign blame to it and trying to assign blame to sort of lax regulations that were eased during the most recent Republican administration, which is sort of something we heard before um but it does it also represents it crystallizes in a way i think would be on uh is on unfortunate for people on the left that we are obsessed currently with things happening many many many many thousands of miles away from us from economies that are happening that are thousands of years a thousand miles away and we are ignoring a thing that's happening right here it's like almost if you were writing

a novel about it and you said it's going to happen in a town called east palestine um you know your editor would say something like come on five more minutes on the name of that town it's a little too on the nose but you know sometimes the world and truth is on the nose so um it suggests two things one it suggests that the the regulatory environment is something that um democrats can run on and republicans can run on too because once you start marching through east palestine and saying what look what happened here you're going to find it probably you're making an argument for a more stringent regulatory state. Good or bad, I think that's going to happen politically. But you're also making the argument when you walk through here that, what are you focusing on? Where is your attention? And I was just noticing even today,

just I sometimes do this while I'm reading the paper, looking, trying to find a thing that doesn't have anything to do with the climate and trying to see how the climate is described in it. So the selection of the new head of the World Bank, about two paragraphs in, I mean, it's sort of an interesting character. He's a Sikh. He was born in India. And you find it. Now we're talking about the World Bank. Now we're talking about climate change as part of its mission. So if you just add up all the words the people have spent, certainly Biden cabinet officials talked about climate change and how it should be part of your, the Secretary of Treasury is talking about it.

And then you go to East Palestine, you say, what's your biggest concern? They're not going to say, well, my really biggest concern is the 0.001% chance that the temperature is going to rise in the next six years. It's going to be my biggest concern is a train derailing in my neighborhood and toxifying my home. Climate change and DEI have to be applied to absolutely everything, regardless as to whether or not it has anything to do with our mission. Right. But then you have a giant train exploding in chemical fire and you think yourself please just for 10 seconds let's not talk about the climate and i feel like that is a that is something i think the conservatives on the people on the right should be reminding us

is that we have been concerned with trivial things instead of the actual nuts and bolts the potholes as it were of life in america today and that what do you consider the true what do you think is the trivial thing climate change the diversity no i what the republicans are i thought you said that the republicans were concerned with with trivial things no no i think it's a culture we have and our policymakers have you know obsessing on these sort of like rich people's like tiny little we used to call them like high class problems to have you know um uh and we sort of you know like what's one of the every debate we have now the education establishment is diversity and what we're going to teach and blah blah blah all that stuff none of it has to do with mastery of english the language that we speak and mastery of

complicated mathematics which is going to be even more important and mastery of the science science it can be even more important going forward it has to do with mastery or rigor it also has to do with sort of this weird massaging of your social whatever your social uh concerns are at that moment we have a gigantic environmental disaster in east palestine it is an environmental disaster and if you ask anybody 20 minutes before that train derailed to describe an environmental disaster they would say something like, well, you know, the climate. Well, no, if you're leaving East Palestine, the climate is the least of your troubles. So, Rob and James, now that Rob is saying, in effect, although Rob is,

of course, he's saying it in a much more elegant way, but what he's saying, in effect, is, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. And you know what? I had that moment. My first thought was, who does this kid think he is? And my second thought was, oh, and that, and I'm referring now to the declaration that he is running for president of the United States by Vivek, and I'm not even sure I can pronounce his last name, Vivek Ramaswamy, as I recall. Forgive me, Mr. President, if I mispronounced it. So what has he got? He's a 37-year-old son of immigrants. He went to Harvard undergrad, Yale Law School. Both of those are counts against him, but he seems to have spent the rest of his life repenting. He's founded a company. He's now founded a fund so that you can invest in

non-DEI companies. And now he has come out swinging, just swinging. Let's see, what have we got here? The Supreme Court looks as though it may overturn affirmative action. As President of the United States, I will issue executive orders eliminating affirmative action. president of the united states i will issue executive orders as stories eliminating affirmative action the next time bureaucrats such as anthony fauci overreach the limits of their job i will do what a president is entitled to do fire them it's so i don't know that he he doesn't know a thing about politics because he hasn't run for blah blah blah blah but it is refreshing isn't it to hear somebody just say it say it all he wants to shut down the department of education which is all i mean which which is viewed by many progressives as proof that the republicans want stupid workers to

go slouching off to factories like the workers in the underground world of metropolis um and that they want to fund all religious private schools that they want the government to put everybody into religious private charter schools etc etc which is not not even close to at all but but defunding the the department of education is just to them you can't do that because it does such necessary work and i'm keen to know precisely what it does how many students i want this is years ago i once had breakfast with bill bennett not long after he'd become secretary of education and i said how is it and he said well the secretary's office is on, I think it was the eighth floor of the building. And he said, I get on the elevator and on the way from the ground floor to my office, I pass floor after floor after floor of people who are doing nothing but writing checks,

sending other people's money to other people. That's what the Department of Education does, said Bill Bennett. It just sends out money. And on the top floor, there's a bully pulpit. And I, Bill Bennett, intend to use it. But all it is, is a system for transferring wealth to teachers, to the education bureaucracy across the country. Furthermore, since Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, can you name any way in which education inica has gotten better it was just the whole thing is ridiculous no he also wants to and we're talking about vivic here make political excuses from his tweet make political expression a civil right what do you think he means by that i thought it was but i thought it was

is he meaning is he meaning that people can bring civil suits if they're uh who knows he may be making a legal point i don't know it could be that that you have the right to speak what you want without consequences which you know we all like but the world doesn't work that way there are there are social consequences that are perfectly legal to that so but i but you you sense something in that that is that you know it's like you want to say do go on as opposed to really exactly he also wants to use our military to secure the border how do you feel about that that is a comment we want to secure the border for sure it's a complicated one i mean there's a constitutional issue but i'm not sure we need the military i mean the question

is whether the i i think that's a dumb a dumb way to put probably a smart idea and a dumb way to do what needs to be done you don't want the military under united states military commanders to be deployed domestically which would be by definition where it would be deployed you don't really want generals um commanding troops in the united states you you do want a robust and um fully funded and held to account border force to enforce the border that's what's supposed to do um so i think he's probably inartfully describing what he wants my guess is that's what he wants my guess is also i i really don't know my guess is also that this guy vivek ramaswamy also feels that we need to be strategic in our immigration policy uh you know a nation you know a national economic and cultural interest which i think is a completely legitimate way absolutely so there's nothing

there's nothing nativistic about it there's nothing there's nothing there's nothing phobic about it there's nothing xenophobic or immigrant hating about it it drives me crazy this is i mean look it's america inc right i mean partly what we have is a one gigantic fractious bumptious chaotic company that we're running america inc we all shareholders in it and uh in many ways the immigration arm should be two things one is border control meaning how you keep people out and how do you keep the order in and the other is hr like who do we want to hire who do we want to bring into our big we want to bring in to our big, bumptious company?

I like to bring in people probably like Vivek Ramaswamy. I want more people coming here, invent more things, make more businesses grow, do all sorts of good stuff. That's a good thing. And it's a good thing that somebody like that who's been extremely fortunate, I mean, I'm sure he's worked very very

hard but he's also been fortunate to be born and to live in a time and a place like the united states and this in the 21st century that rewards entrepreneurial risk taking and vision um i'm also kind of thrilled that he wants to sort of do this jump jump into this thing there's no way that bivik ramaswamy is going to come out of this process not bruised and battered that's what the political process is the fact that he's willing to do it is served that's great good for him talk more i'd say hold everybody else to account yes exactly the other part uh in my eyebrow went up spot like when it was if and affirmative action by executive action i hate executive actions and i hate that we get to the point where we're so impatient with the things that need to be changed that we applaud

somebody who says well with a stroke of a pen i'll make it so i right i don't like that uh the the way that this this huge waddling fat lint sticking ball of legislation every year rolls through without anybody actually reading it or interrogating the details this is the problem is ruling we don't seem to sit down and craft laws as we used to or as we should so i don't like that i'm always on the watch for caesarism mainly because everybody was saying when trump the year that trump was elected was well we need a caesar we're going to get a caesar no matter what so it should be one of our caesars right over to american greatness that was one of the points they were making go on yeah but in a way the president of the united states is a caesar of about two million

employees right he the the executive branch the federal government has about 2 million employees. He could do a lot by the stroke of a pen, just in the, just in the scope, in his scope of work, he could do that. I mean, not necessarily making a law for everybody else. That's, that has to beated i totally agree with you but as the as the the chief executive of the minister of branch he could do a lot about how we run how the federal government hires and fires and i think that you know i mean mostly it should be firing and not hiring uh you know what boys this whole thing vivic partly but i'll tell you another thing in a moment, has reversed my thinking about the presidential election. My thought maybe a week ago was, oh, jeepers, I really want DeSantis to win, everybody else stay out of the field, let it come down to Trump and DeSantis, and let,

I believe DeSantis can take him, we can move ahead. We can get past just those two. And now I think to myself, oh, now, is Vivek actually going to run, make a serious run for president? elicit such deep and immediate support from the Republican Party, that even if he doesn't become a serious candidate, even if he doesn't win a single primary, in every debate, reporters again and again, debate moderators are going to be taking vivid quotations and reading them back to Donald Trump and saying, excuse me, Mr. Former President. Or DeSantis, for that matter. Or excuse me, Governor of Florida, you say you're running as a conservative. It sounds to us as though Vivek Ramaswamy is to your right. What do you make of that? Just by running and running with such intelligence and forthrightness,

he will tone up the race and make it smarter. The second person I want in the race is Tim Scott. I have now come, I want all these guys in. Tim Scott, I didn't know much about him, but I've looked into him a little bit. He's smart. He's upbeat. He is an African-American who represents South Carolina. And so in his very being being he represents one of the thrilling one of the most thrilling chapters of renewal and reform uh in american history i want him in i want him i want to let them all speak have you ever heard him speak tim tim scott in person uh no i haven't heard him in person actually he's he is really good like you watch him and you see some people and you think oh know, I can see why that guy's there.

He's really good. He's got a lot of heart and a lot of story and a lot of religion. I mean, he feels like an old-timey American politician. And I don't mean that in a fake way. I mean that in a real way. Like, he can do the stem winder, he's got a story to tell. Right

when we feel like everything's lost, usually something comes and corrects it. The market kind of works that way. And it feels to me like there's a hunger, I mean, maybe I'm wishful thinking here, for sort of some kind of real. Yes. To be real. And to not be... one of the reasons people like

desantis so much i think one of the reasons why i feel like trump was that he just seemed fearless right you had this sort of string of presidents who were kind of cowed by the media and cowed by the tv camera and like trying to like weirdly parse what they said over and over again i remember this wonderful moment and man i i absolutely respected and in many ways was i still think it was an underrated great president george hw bush he is uh someone asked him like he's 18 shot down over the pacific and he's floating in shark infested waters waiting to get rescued not even sure if he's going to get rescued, clinging to some kind of debris for his life.

He's 18, 19, I don't know, 19, just graduated from high school. And someone says, what were you thinking? He goes, well, you know, you think about everything. You think about your family, he said. You think about your life. You think about God. And then he said, and separation of church and state like what you were not floating the pacific circled by sharks thinking about the separation

you just realized you said god and then you need to say i'm not not god like really like no and like and that that was emblematic of some of the ways certain and mostly these were like very confident guys who were not used to speaking in public or having or campaigning in any sense uh in any kind of wild way uh generationally they were not used to a camera everywhere uh and then you have some politicians you're like you know what i'm just gonna say it uh and i've thought about it and having thought about it is the most important thing. So, you know, we might have an elevated, really kind of interesting conversation going into like, which is right, right on time about what America is going to be in 2020, 2030 and beyond. What, what, what we need to invest in, what we need to stop investing in, what we need more of, what we need no more of.

My offer still stands for everybody, the education, all the woke education crafts, which is like, you can teach all the trans stuff you want. You could teach critical race theory all you want. That's going to be your reward for your students achieving and proving a level of rigorous mastery of the most important things for the future. Once you've accomplished the mission, then you can have your dessert with your cherry on top. And if that means that high school seniors all over America know about computer science and engineering and advanced math and they speak and write english and maybe even another language with proficiency if you want to make the senior year in high school

the groovy year where you learn all about the other stuff that you know what i'm i'm in go right ahead because they have achieved something no if i know i know james does not like that. the afternoon and you get to teach that to all the students whose parents want them to learn it but you don't get to hold anybody hostage and the parents who's who do not want their kids to learn it get voucher programs and they get charter schools and you get to teach okay i accept that to whoever shows up in your classroom. But I guess what I mean is that this is... Could you go for that one? I use this, yeah. I do, but I guess I'm just trying to tie to my general theory

that we have big problems on the front burner. Yes. And East Palestine is an example of that, right? We have trains running around with stuff going on, and we have kind of a rail system in the country that we haven't probably paid enough attention to or invested enough in and instead we invest in stupid things and what we need to do is like let's accomplish the mission first let's make sure that the environmental disaster of east palestine has been uh mitigated and has been now prevented in the

future and then once that's happening once everybody when once there's plenty of plenty of like uh industry happening and maybe once we don't have to worry so much about importing foreign oil and like we have nuclear power here whatever then i'm all ears let's talk about the climate change that you are so obsessed with because we'll have accomplished the mission now you and i both know i'm being disingenuous because we'll never really accomplish always going to, you know, we're not really going to do that.

But I, the, the obsession with the trivial is, uh, is what rich people do when they just so like, and they're just so bored and everything is so wonderful that they just, they can't, you know,

like I'm so bored. I'm going just they can't you know like i'm so bored i'm gonna uh you know make a caviar omelet or you know what i mean like it just feels decadent yes obsession with like these weird filigrees and the idea that turning those things into a crisis meanwhile there's a city called east palestine sort of like belching black fumes and toxifying itself and meanwhile the children are going through school and learning it's learning things that are irrelevant to their lives tomorrow to their earning potential but that's the new mission it's not accomplishing the mission per se it's re it's redefining what the mission is is the mission to move the entire nation to a point where we are energy poor

where we have no gas stoves and again that was a big conservative freak out except it's what they want to do yeah um and you know they ban the appliances new construction they i mean it's not a freak out at all where people are paying a huge percentage of their income income to keep their home at 68 degrees where they have to take shorter showers, where they have to... Their entire life is built around accomplishing the mission of moving us to a sustainable grid, which is a preposterous idea at this point, or is the mission to ensure that Americans are warm in their homes without having to pay all of this money, that American jobs are being created in the industry field, that the safety like East Palestine is guaranteed

because we don't have tanker trucks rolling around. We've got pipelines, which they would get. In other words, refocus. The mission is not to electrify and change everything about your world and go to this other standard. The mission is to keep doing what we were doing before this priesthood of fanatics and timorous souls started insisting that the world was going to end because of climate change. And it's not. It's just not.

And if that makes me a denier, that makes me a denier. That means, you know, Bjorn Lomberg, Those of us who say it's not a problem can work on the same page as Lomberg, who says that it is something to be concerned about. There is a coalition there to be done. But there's more virtue in public praising all of these wonderful and new initiatives because they're sustainable. And the joy and the thrill you get in your heart when you drive across the prairie and you see those silent turbine things spinning. To me, it's the dark satanic mills of the old song, but that's another point. The other mission is not in education, to let them have a year telling them that everything about their culture is important. I knew you'd hate that.

I knew you'd hate that. Of course I hate it. Right. I get what you're saying. Teach the basics first. But first of all, that assumes that even the basics that they are taught haven't already been infiltrated and tainted by the DEI and the CRT and all the rest of the little heritage that actually they do require to function in western society is indeed the math that they are learning actual true math or is it math that even in itself in its presentation has been infected by the way by by crt in the way these things are in the way the questions are posed you know johnny has six melons um did he get them through historical privilege you know i mean it's so i mean if you

want to say they have to be able to read and they know the culture in which they exist and yes they know the math and yes they got a basics on stem and the rest of it then you can spend the last year filling their head at their most intellectually precocious age with the worst sort of anti-American poison you can remember. No, I think that's an extremely bad idea. I mean, I understand what you're saying. I just think that when you have a large, a large big thing is the schools are failing. I don't think the schools are, I don't think they are effective in teaching woke ideology. I don't think they're effective at all. A kid that fails to pass a course on the 1619 project, and that's all the history he ever gets, has been sitting in the classroom listening to the 1619 project for the whole year.

The terms of what they're failing at doesn't mean that they're not absorbing something. Speaking of absorbing something, that's what Russia has been trying to do with Ukraine. And now we have the anniversary of the invasion coming up. Wait a minute, are you doing an ad i don't know no i'm grinding the gears i'm grinding the gears to get to the guest who just showed up oh great you know we have limited time so yes yes yes we ought to uh with alacrity get to our guest eli lake uh and glad he's here contributing editor for commentary magazine host of the re-education podcast sounds familiar what we've been talking about. He was our guest the day after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Well, it's been a year, and we didn't really think it'd get to the point where it's now a bloody slog. But let's figure out exactly where we are. Eli, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. So, where do things stand uh in the war right now which one right yeah well no i mean i think that the um the answer to your question is far better than anybody had predicted a year ago from the perspective of you know western civilization and ukraine um it's pretty remarkable that that we've relearned the lesson

that I think, you know, sort of taking a big step back, that tyrannies and dictators are not 10 feet tall. That, you know, I think a year ago, most of the experts looked at this and they said russia had been a master of hybrid warfare that they looked at the experience of the last the first kind of ukraine war which wasn't really much of a war at all um they didn't give the ukrainians much of a chance and most importantly we still had the hangover of the chaotic and terrible withdrawal from afghanistan um where the elected president fled in the middle of the night and so withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the elected president fled in the middle of the night. And so, you know, looking back on the year, it's remarkable that not only does that Zelensky has survived,

but that, you know, the Ukrainian military, with our support, has proven capable of blunting, you know, the invasion of a much larger country that we thought you know would sort of walk through it okay so what next what do you mean by that well here's what i mean russia's still there and they're not backing out and putin doesn't seem to be now apparently sometime today maybe as we speak according to the news yesterday, the State Department said that they're expecting China to float some sort of peace plan this very day. the Russians have taken, including the Crimea. And you've got Vladimir Putin saying, excuse me, we have the Crimea, and we also have a good piece of eastern Ukraine. And not only are we not leaving, we're going to move on to Kiev. And people are getting killed every day. How does it end?

Well, I mean, it's not even how does it end? What next? What should we do next? What should Zelensky do next if you were advising him in the next month? Well, if I was advising Zelensky, I would say, I mean, continue to fight back against the invasion. I do think that there's something that we can't possibly know. And that is, what is the effect of a war where lots of people who are being sort of thrown into this meat grinder from the Russian side, you know, that they have families, they have, you know, people who care for them back home? And what is the effect on the legitimacy of Putin's regime at this point?

We can't see it because it is at this point, probably in terms of individual liberty back to almost Soviet times. But we know from the beginning of the war that there were lots of unusual voices that we'd heard, even from some oligarchs that were saying, wait a second, I don't know about this. And slowly but surely, you know, Europe has proven to be more resilient in this respect. The fact that the Europeans didn't cave over the winter, even though it was a mild winter for sure. So there are certain kind of questions that, you know, how long can this necessarily keep up? And, like, we'll see what happens to the Chinese, because the other report we heard about China was that they were going to start arming Russia in this, which would sort of enter them into

this conflict. They haven't done that yet. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet. So, we'll sort of see, but I mean, this was a, I think that it's a blunder, and I don't know that we know the full extent of how much of a blunder it was for Vladimir Putin. Hey, Eli, it's Rob Long, thanks for

joining us. Can I ask a question? Just because you mentioned China. Why are you surprised they haven't? It feels to me like if I were Chinese with my Chinese strategic hat on, I don't know if I want to throw my hat in the ring with Putin at this point. I might

want to sit this one out and just kind of be hey, listen, we've got nothing to do. And in the ring with Putin at this point. I might want to sit this one out and just kind of be, hey, listen, nothing, we're not, we got nothing to do. And in the meantime, make my quiet inroads when we're not paying attention in places like Africa and the border with India and go about my business. Well, what's in it for them? It's a good question. I mean, let me sort of explain why I'm surprised they haven't done it yet one we have at least a pageantry the diplomatic pageantry of summits between xi and putin and you know long uh i don't know what documents that claim that there are all these mutual cooperation between the two countries and that those have intent that that we had that on the eve of the war when it was clear that he was going to invade so that's the first part of it and the second part

of it is that i do think that to a certain extent china has already cast its lot with russia and iran and the kind of rogue uh tyrannies in the, because it's better, I think, from the Chinese leadership's perspective, to have a world where the international system kind of remains in their favor. And that, you know, a world where the United States and European countries are determining kind of the rules of the international system is ultimately not a world that the Chinese want to live in despite the fact that for the last i don't know almost 50 years if you want to count nixon's visit to china um you know the united states has has repeatedly sort of said please join you know the uh become become a great power and and and coexist with us so in that respect i kind of felt like well the

chinese have already cast their lots of why wouldn't they but then you're right um this looks like um a kind of incompetent move and and i mean who would have predicted how bad the russian military is i wish i would have remembered all of the lessons that we learned at the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was corrupt. There were all these reports that, you know, nobody was getting the serious information going up the chain. When they came in, I love this story. When the Russians first invaded, their secure communication system didn't work. So they were basically using cell phone towers, though when they were they were attacking the cell phone systems and so it was very easy for the ukrainians to pinpoint the locations of senior generals who were being killed at a high amateur hour well i mean so so i guess my question is like this feels to me like turkey coming in at the

end of world war one on the side of the kaiser no that's interesting um i mean we'll see what happens with the chinese whether they actually do it or not um you know but i don't i mean i think that there there are serious problems i mean what is the quality of russian forces now that they're what conscripts we've seen reports that they're being recruited from russian prisons is that how's that going to work out i mean america learned a painful lesson we never had to do anything like this in the vietnam war which is that at a certain point one of the problems was because we had conscription we had a draft the morale of everyday kind of soldiers on the front lines was so bad that there were these

incidents of known as fragging and things like that. That happens, you know, especially when it's kind of a hopeless fight like this, where, you know, where is the where, you know, who's how how would a Russian if you're fighting this in the day to day? How would you be motivated? Would you feel morally like you have a right to this war or anything like that? I can't. Right. So you can just stand it for a little bit to leave China for a second. It feels to me like the strategy is this, each person's strategy is, we're going to keep going because we have, if you were Putin and the Wagner group, and we have people and convicts and conscripts, and we can keep throwing them at trenches until the other side gets tired. And the other side is saying, well, listen, we have these rich friends and they've got, you know, leopard tanks and no planes yet. The planes might come and we can keep asking them to send stuff.

And we have people and we are motivated to fight. I mean, the most interesting thing to me about the Ukrainian-Russia war is that the Ukrainians are motivated to fight. They are not giving in. And we can keep going until you're tired. And the real question we have to ask is the only thing, it seems to me, the only variable here is, are the Russians or the Russian leadership, are they tired of Putin? So my question is how bad is the information coming to that big table where Putin sits? Is it still as bad as it was a year ago or six months or a year and six months ago when he thought he could just like, kind of like waltz his way into Kiev or is it getting better and darker and better and darker and i guess what i mean is um you've seen the movie everything the movie downfall right yeah it's that moment the movie downfall where they come in and the furor

sitting there at his table and his hands are shaking and stuff and he goes well you look in the mac goes you know what steiner's counter-attack he says pointing to the map of berlin which is sort of encircled by the allies coming and the russians coming steiner's counter-attack is going to turn this all around and then someone's got to say my fuhrer i'm sorry to tell you that there's no steiner and there's no counter-attack and there's no there is his he's in command of nothing and then that's when the great you don't believe oh internet has exploded with memes of this but this seems like I'm doing a little shaking hands. I can see it. My glasses seem it's a great scene.

If you haven't seen this podcast, you have not seen the scene. Just it's fantastic. This seems like we are waiting for that moment to happen somewhere in the Kremlin. Is anyone in the Kremlin going to deliver that moment? I wonder if that moment is less determined by some military maneuver in Ukraine and more determined by the reaction in Europe. And what I mean by that is, look at, for example, every month, it seems, or few weeks, we have a Russian official who will say we might have to use our strategic arsenal, which is code word for nuclear weapons. We saw the big announcement, the takeaway from Putin's delusional speech this week to mark the one-year anniversary was, I am suspending participation in the remaining nuclear treaty

with the United States. So there are all these efforts to try to say, wait a second, you don't want this to get even worse, and they're counting on either Democratic administration or the Germans, you know, or the French, the British, to basically kind of say, uncle, and, you know, say, okay, we can't let it get this far. I am pleasantly surprised that the biden administration

and um the europeans you know it hasn't been perfect that i i would have liked for them to you know not had an open debate about sending tanks but they eventually land on the right square and that's great and i think that that's the thing that you're seeing where Putin can see all of that for himself because he's used to getting his way in other sorts of things. I mean, like, you know, there was a when he invaded Georgia and took up Qasr and North Ossetia in 2008, there was an election. Barack Obama came in and the first thing Obama does in foreign policy is announce a policy called the reset, which is where we're going to ignore what you just did and try to have a good relationship with you. Why? So we can have this treaty known as New START, which Putin just announced that he was no longer going to be complying with, which, by the way, he hadn't been complying with. So he's betting on the sort of old Europe, the old Democratic Party, to emerge and say, all right, all right, all right, all right, uncle.

All right, fine. It can't get too bad. The irony, of course, is that the Democrats have stood strong, much to my surprise in some ways. And it's this new Republican, the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, if you want to call it, the J.D. Vances. Those are the ones that are saying, let's stop throwing good money after bad in ukraine and it's none of our business okay so let's take on if i'm going to put an argument and the argument runs as follows zielinski wants to fight as rob noted as you noted one of the surprising things is that they are not tiring and zielinski says he wants to regain every inch of territory that includes the Crimea, that includes Sevastopol, which has been Russian, even if technically Ukrainian. Sevastopol has been Russian since 1783, five years before we ratified the Constitution.

Okay. So if, sorry, I'm putting an argument here. You can count on Zelensky to fight as long as we arm him. You can count on, as you've just established, you can count on the Europeans to be willing to fight as long as we give them cover, as long as we lead the way. So what Putin is counting on when you say he's counting on the other side to tire, he's counting on us to tire it all comes down to the united states all right now then let's take the art let's take the scenario under which we continue to arm zielinski we want to push push push because so far they keep they keep bluffing about nuclear weapons and now let's return to rob's moment in the bunker and imagine it this way. Mein Fuhrer,

I'm sorry, I have to tell you, there is no Steiner. There will be no conventional counterattack. But, Mein Fuhrer, you still have tactical nuclear weapons. That strikes me as something we are forced to take into account. We can't just dismiss it. Oh, they're bluffing, they're bluffing, they're bluffing. They keep saying that he's dropping out of a treaty. It seems to me that we need to take that into account, don't we? If J.D. Vance and David Sachs and other highly intelligent people say, wait a minute here, let's not get ourselves dragged into a nuclear exchange, they're not wrong about that are they well well okay a nobody wants a nuclear exchange obviously obviously and um i don't know that um i think it's it's a it's a

difficult proposition i disagree with david sacks i had a tweet the other night saying i don't understand how you can take russia's side of the war i wasn't talking about him i think there are plenty of people who can make principled arguments even though i disagree with them and i don't want to say that they're on russia's side and by the way it's as you know that's a nasty um an unfortunate development in our politics that yeah we can stipulate david david sacks and jd vance those two at least are highly intelligent good people who are also our friends we stipulate that but okay but i think they're wrong they're wrong in the final sense because even let's say that we sort of deter ourselves in this in this regard we say all right you know eventually they might use a tactical nuclear

weapon and they're right they might be bluffing you know the last 20 times but the 21st time they won't be bluffing and then it's a real problem um well then we've established a new world in which um you know nuclear powers that are autocrats get to basically blackmail their way to what they want and sooner or later we're going to have to confront them unless we're willing to give away a lot more than just ukraine so that's the first point which is that you don't want to establish that precedent that that's how you get to win the wars because you play the nuke card um but the second thing is this i don't know that it makes if you think that putin is rational uh and he's making decisions here that are in you know his country's best interest as he sees it uh that hurts him if he uses a nuclear weapon

like that i think it hurts him with china china has an interest um itself being a nuclear power of not having this you know they have to worry about india i mean there's a lot of things there where he's opening his own pandora's box if he does that where you know if china was to say really turn on russia because it's been economically supporting the russians in this period um well then putin probably really is finished you know so i don't know that it's that we we have to assume that he would use tactical nuclear weapons even though i am aware that it is part of this russian military doctrine that they would lose it if they were you know and that there are all these sorts of important distinctions that we have to understand that Russians believe that if they have to defend their own territory, now that they've declared the oblasts that they took over in the war as part of their territory, they could then use all of that.

But I understand that serious kind of criminologists will think about all that. I'm taking a step back, looking at it. I think that it's not entirely clear that he would do that. And there'd be huge, huge problems, not just from America, from the entire world, and I think including China, if he did. So I would not want to give into it. And to my surprise, even though Biden did have this lapse at a fundraiser a few months ago, I don't remember this, like in September, he said something along the lines of like, it'll be World War III, it'll be terrible. For the most part, the Biden administration has been really good in not being rattled by these threats, which is clearly part of the Russian strategy. Or as one gouty, jolly Russian general said the other day on Russian state television,

that at this point, they have to reduce Kiev to rubble and plant the flag on the top of it. So, you you know they just knew kiev and call it a day uh before we let you go eli there is now there are now reports that progozhin is being a persona non grata in the russian state media he they will no longer mention anything that he says unless it's a report of a victory because he went in this long diatribe about how the the wagner group is an ammunition famine, that they're not getting supplies, that they're not being supported. And apparently, this isn't going down very well with the guys up top.

Of course, he's replaceable. They all are. But when I read, as I have recently, that the group is actually having trouble recruiting in prison, then perhaps the manpower and the shell drought happens a little earlier than people expected? You know, I don't know what to make of that, because my history would teach us that Russia has a very huge supply of bodies, and it can if it wants to extend this war just because it's willing to accept far more casualties than a lot of other countries um but uh it's interesting to

see you know putin's important allies maybe breaking with him um that's always good to see and you know i thought i my hope, I don't think anybody really knows, but my hope is that the CIA and the FBI right now are using the current environment to go after other oligarchs that are close to Putin and sort of seeing who might want to hedge their bets. I mean, now is the time to do that. And so, you know, slowly but surely, and it's something I just would stress. I mean, this is not revelatory or anything we cannot know we cannot know what the real situation is

like in his inner circle and what what's happening inside that black box um inside the kremlin and his regime at this point um we can speculate it but we really just can't know but i just would say i mean let's i don't i do not assume that that everything is running smoothly and that everything is okay french warfare war in europe and putin shuttling back and forth in his private car on a on a railroad it's it's just like the last hundred years never happened except for the news eli thanks for joining us uh i hope we're not talking to you at the second anniversary of the war i hope you train for the hills yeah all right thank you so much and uh we'll talk to you later uh gentlemen before we go and we have been blathering on here

for a while we should probably mention as rob loves to do to remind people that ricochet is actually an enterprise that has a real world analog. It's not just one of those cyber things. That was a hint, Rob, to talk about. I was just agreeing with you and nodding. Yeah, it's right. I mean, look, there's, this is fun and all we love to have you listen to the podcast. We'd love to see you on site. We'd love to have conversations with you virtually on the the site but it's also fun to get together so we have meetups they really do happen and they're fun and we have a bunch coming up uh you can meet the actual king of stuff john

gabriel he will be in an event he's hosting in phoenix in mid-march a bunch of us are going to be in new orleans for french quarter fest and that's also i think it's in early april um uh and there's uh there's a member flicker has set april 22nd as a date for the stillwater minnesota meetup i hope i can make it if i'm not in barth yeah i if i'm not in barthelona as i have to say now um i hope to make it uh but look those are just what's coming up in the next i don't know eight weeks 10 weeks 12 weeks and if they're too far away or for whatever reason you can't make it and you want to, here's the solution. You just join. Join Ricochet. Put on a member fee that you want to have a meetup that's closer to you and on a date that works for you.

And guess what? Something, one will happen because people who are members of Ricochet like to travel, like to get together. It's always a good time details of everything i've just described quickly uh are more specifically uh illuminated uh at ricochet just go to ricochet.com slash events you can look at on the sidebar it's right there uh and if you want to come join and we will be happy to see you in fact if you join if you join because of this, James, think of a secret word. A secret word? Think of a word and then say it on the podcast? Is that what you're saying? Do you want me to just...

Okay, if you join, if you hear this and you join, and I see you in New Orleans when I'll be there at the French Quarterfest, if you say to me, James told me to tell you to buy me a drink, I will buy you a drink. If you're already a member, I'm not Mr. Moneybags here. Just if you join, say that secret code word, and

I'll buy you a drink. If you join Ricochet, I want you to tell Rob to buy you the 24 year old mcallen yeah that's not happening the hurricane out of the hurricane or the shark attack out of the freezer machine i mentioned a spanish city and you say i i i that's that's uh i right there we're gonna get complaints although it's actually not not a spanish city a catalonian city i suppose barthelona you know that that's what we have to say now i mean i was informed of that by a barcelonian but i guess

that's that's how it's pronounced uh well you know it depends that's actually kind of controversial james because people in who speak catalan they say barcelona they don't say barcelona the people who are not from barcelona say barcelona people from madrid say that so like when you're there you can say, but it depends on what your origin is. But the Catalans say Barcelona. This is my very Catalonian exchange student. My wife is seated right behind me at the moment, and she's shaking her head in disbelief at this conversation. Let me get a ruling on this from someone who actually knows Spain well.

How is Barcelona pronounced? My cousins who are from barcelona say barcelona barcelona from people what i tell you barcelona my wife well i've far be it for me to uh i will never contradict mrs robinson uh but however she does admit that that is the spanish right living in my house for five months, God bless her. So this, you know, I know from what I speak. She made me the paella. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

I always feel like I'm leaving out a couple of syllables. I'm from North Dakota where things are plain and simple. We don't have words like paella. No, but you do call it North Dakota. It could be right. North Dakota. North Dakota. North Dakota would be perfect. n-o-r-s-e dakota was just telling you i just googled it the correct pronunciation of barcelona in catalan

okay not spanish yes catalan is barcelona okay in spanish it's barcelona you may disagree but that's but take it up with Google. Well, then I got a job to do when I go there, informing each and every one of them that the Google informs them that they are all incorrect. Can't wait. However, I have to say that we're done. This podcast was brought to you by Youth Switch. Support them by supporting us and support us and support them, vice versa. Nice one-hand wash is the other thing. And we mentioned that you can indeed join Ricochet. Go there, find out why. And also, if you could just take a minute. No, I'm sorry.

If you could take 48 minutes to craft the perfect five-star review on Apple Podcasts, we'd really appreciate that. I'm not going to tell you that you should just dash something off in 10 seconds. I want you to give it a lot of thought. I want you to be like you're in Rob Long's senior year after everything has been fixed and you're writing an essay on something like that. And that's all I got. Peter, Rob, it's been great. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 for now.

Next week. Next week, boys. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.