The Ricochet Podcast - Can We Wake The President?

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

This week, we start in California, which is the subject of two piece published by The Founders in the current issue of National Review. Then, all the way from South Africa, COVID sceptic Nick Hudson, CEO of PANDA, a collective of leading scientists, actuaries, economists, data scientists, statisticians, medical professionals, lawyers, engineers and businesspeople working as a collective to replace... Source

I'm going to say something. I'm going to say something and toss it to Peter. And now we bring you something different. I have a dream. This nation will rise up. Live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.

This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. I mean, this is gigantic. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lalex.

Today we talk to Nick Hudson about lockdowns and Teddy Troy about infrastructure. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 538. This is the flagship podcast of Ricochet.com, as we proudly say. Join us, by the way. Join Ricochet.com. Be part of the most stimulating conversations and community you'll find on the web. And speaking of stimulating, we've got Peter Robinson in sunny

California, Rob Long in sunny Florida. I'm James Lallix here in Minneapolis, which I have not left because the adamantine kryptonite-like bonds covet have kept me here i'm waiting for my exit vaccine so i can burst the chains and fly somewhere like florida or california gentlemen welcome our thing is in the place where there's warmth and sun well like i'm right now i'm in palm beach florida and it's lovely um but all of this stuff when i was in new york and you read in the paper oh florida's crazy people in Florida, they're just running around with that. Everyone here has got a mask on. This seems perfectly everybody in the country is doing it right.

That's my takeaway. We're all doing it right. And the media and the experts are doing it wrong. Death Santas has led Florida to its perilous state. From what we hear, the streets are heaped with the dead iraq idol is walking around with a cart telling people to bring out the corpses just to keep you out away that's what he's trying to do here's what i want to know has desantis uh foregone state mandates simply because the social pressures are working in effect to achieve

the same effect is everybody wearing a mask every hotel require you to wear a mask in other words are is the mask mandate in effect but being placed in effect by by by social pressure it is it is it is very clearly a sign that civilization is working people are wearing that you're supposed to wear a mask in the hotel not everyone is says the hotel says the hotel everyone under 25 is not wearing a mask okay because that's stupid everyone over 60 is wearing one you know a lot and then in between people are kind of kind of doing kind of but no one is our no no one is, everyone has worked it out. We worked it out on our own.

It's like when you go to the dog park, the dog's working out. It's the owners that are the problem. The playground, it's the parents that are the problem. We have a bunch of nanny bureaucrats who are the problem. So it feels different from New York? You feel freer? You feel more relaxed? What's that?

New York is feeling good, too. Oh, it is? Yeah. Here in Minnesota, we have a spike. And our resident epidemiologist, Mike Osterholm, is saying that the hurricane is coming. The hurricane or the nightmare, the crisis, whatever bad term you want to use, is about to visit us because we're spiking. And so is Michiganigan and this could be anything from variance to season to season ability or the rest of it but of course it's

being portrayed as people are getting lazy and sloppy right they're not masking up all they're not triple masking all the time it's it's it's the if they're acting in an immoral fashion and we should castigate them for it because if you get covid you are a bad person that's the way it's spread by the end it's uh become by the i i think this is very in a very instructive moment i really do because it also instructs us as to what where where government fails i mean not where it fails but where government is an inefficient actor uh you walk around new york city and i think you walk around, I did a little walk yesterday around Florida. What you see, you see a lot of places for COVID testing.

It's like vans for COVID testing, and there's little storefronts for COVID testing. I mean, there's COVID testing. We can test now, which is completely, utterly irrelevant. Every one of those testing facilities should be a bunch of guys in there with an igloo chest full of jabs, and whatever arm presents itself for a vaccine but government has creaked into place

exactly 12 months too late and that that is a perfect that's perfectly emblematic all you need to know is to look around look at how much effort and time and money government sponsored has been spent on testing in the past three or four months and then ask yourself if the biden infrastructure plan is going to work it's well speaking speaking of sclerotic unresponsive one-party government uh you gentlemen had dueling pieces about california yes peter in national review peter wrote notes from a once golden state. Rob wrote, California comes back. It's crazy and broken, but dang, it's fantastic. And people like me, you know, see California not as an entity, as a monolithic entity, but a bunch of hippie granola

weirdos in the North and madness down in the South. And then in between a lot of farmers and vegetables and guns, the rest of it. So let's talk about these. Who wants to go first? Peter, you're the voice of doom. Notes from a once golden state. I would certainly never have agreed to write a piece if I'd known that Rob was also going to be included in the issue. I do not want to go, never in my life would I want to go up in a prose shoot-off with Rob Long. Everything he writes is so, it moves. It's so alive.

However, and yet, and yet, and yet, such a great, I, I, I looked at Rob's piece and I thought,

ah, yes, yes, yes. This is the law I have discovered. This is the law of California exiles, the optimism and, and cheerfulness and even romantic attachment

with which they write about the state is directly proportional to their new distance from it. And of course, we all know that if Rob moved even a few blocks farther away, he'd topple over into the Hudson River. So when I wrote my piece, I'll say just this much more. I thought to myself, well, I'll do a little reporting. I'll call some people who are friends and whose ideas I'd like to hear in any event. I'll call Pete Wilson, who was governor of California from 1991 to 1999. In some ways, the last Republican governor. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted a recall after Pete left office, but Arnold Schwarzenegger was only a Republican for about 18 months. He ran into trouble.

He gave up. He hired as his new chief of staff, a Democratic operative. Okay. So Pete, in some ways, the last honest and thoroughgoing Republican governor. And I interviewed him about what went wrong, and he was able to give me chapter and verse on what went wrong. Then I called my friend Harmeet Dhillon, who you may know her from Fox News. Harmeet is a former editor of the Dartmouth Review. She's tough. She's smart. She runs a law firm in San Francisco. She doesn't have time to waste. And yet she's a Republican

National Committee woman. So I thought Harmeet will be able to tell me the bright news about the future. She's not the kind of person who would be wasting her time on a lost cause. And Harmeet said, in effect, sorry, sorry. It's going to take a generation to turn this state around. The California Republican Party is a regional party now, and the forces in place are just monolithic. Okay. I closed with, I don't know. I just, all these years watching things slide in the wrong direction,

I'd consoled myself that at least the politics couldn't touch the natural beauties of the place, which are just staggering. I grew up in the Northeast. Today's another day when I look outside and I think to myself, wait a minute, are we allowed to have such beauty? Are we allowed to have this much nice weather? And I just thought back to the wildfires of last summer, when for days on end, the state was swathed in smoke. And the politics of the place that even because the state agencies had introduced new supposed land management, new Ecolot, Politics had even screwed up the California environment.

So I tried hard to find a note of cheer, and I just couldn't find it. But that's okay, because we had Rob in the same issue. I will say this to our listeners. If you only have time to read one piece and you want to learn something you got to read peter's piece i i i didn't make any phone calls i didn't do any i don't report i just think sit in my house and think what do i really think what what are some funny things and then i just tell a story so i would say the the most interesting thing about california we talked about this before maybe we talked about it too much who knows is that as a as it is a cautionary tale yes it is for the

republican party nationally it is not hard to find yourself the number three party after the democrats and the greens become the republicans it's not. There's no inevitability to a two-party system that necessarily includes the Republican Party. It's hard. It's about coalition building. It's about a whole bunch of things. It's about all the stuff that people hate about politics. Unfortunately, that's called politics. And the California Republican Party didn't do a very good job of it and got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And the city and the cities got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And they lost the cities. And my pet theory, which I have, by the way, I have zero evidence for. But I know I'm right. It is when you lose California.

The California cities should be places that have republican party majorities and they don't um there are a lot of asians there i mean it's a lot of um you know hispanic small businesses that kind of thing and they don't and i can't speak for the hispanic population but i think the asian population goes this way if you're a small business person in los angeles or san francisco or san diego or i mean i mean right now that other cities are growing really fast too. And, and excerpts are growing really fast too. And you have to give money to a party. You will give money to the party in charge. You're not going to, you're not going to waste your time with a bunch of like ideological or fantasy utopian ideas. Your city

councilman is a Democrat. He's there. He wants a thousand dollars. You give him a thousand dollars. And, um, and you just kind of shrug and say, that's the way it's done. Um, and until we're Republicans figure out how to win in the cities and it's going to take, you're going to fail a lot, but you're gonna have to fail a lot. And, and, and, but, but you're gonna have to continually improve your message to those people. They will not reclaim California. It's true, but what you just described as fantasy utopian ideas are actually the basic foundational American ideas. Thank you for that. The fantasy and utopian ideas seem to be in those people who believe that they can build this post-capitalist wonderful green energy society um but at the same time have shown their hand and and revealed that their power is

predicated entirely on tribal identity with increasing fragmentation that they can play off each other so i i mean i i get that i i understand here's what i bluntly mean california is a rhino state that's what that's who's going to win oh i see what you mean rhinos sure rhinos uh rhinos are just are loathed and despised, especially on the pages of Ricochet. I know. I read. I know exactly what you think of me. But if you want to reclaim California, the biggest

state, and with a still huge economy, you're going to have to make peace with the rhinos. So you put in the rhinos as a Trojan horse. You get somebody up there who says, we're going to raise corporate taxes and we're going to use that money and distribute it to the people in order to correct historical inequities. And then once you're in,

you secretly drop the corporate tax a little bit and you don't redistribute as much as you said. And then over the years, you're saying that this rhino Trojan horse will get us back to a point of more individuality and local control and the rest of it. I mean, I'm asking, is that what you're saying? You kind of have to buy the whole democratic raft of precepts. All right. All right. So if they're right, if they're right. No, you don't. You don't. You don't have to do that right now. The choice for the choice for moderate though I'm not this is not me, but I know enough California Republicans, even though I care about the environment and I want environmental protection and I want this and I want that. All those things. They can't vote for the Republican Party in California because it got too pure. Yeah. Pete Wilson, Pete Wilson never stressed the social issues and the man never lost his general election.

There is a future. And by the way, so we'll see whether Rob, I'm not even going to argue with Rob. Actually, I think probably he's at least 80% right. Of course, it pains me to make these concessions to Rob. But we're now running, we're about to have an experiment. It looks as though there will be a recall. And for sure, one of the people who's going to be on the ballot is Kevin Faulconer, who's the former mayor of San Diego, and who's doing exactly what you're saying. He's saying social issues, I'm not even going to talk about them. If people ask me, I'll be totally laissez faire. What I'm going to be talking about here is getting taxes under control, restoring law and order to the streets, improving our schools, and so forth. If I had two more days to do this story, to work on my piece on California, I'd have done

one more piece of reporting. I'd have called Michelle Steele, or I'd have called Mike Garcia, because you're certainly correct about the cities. I'm also convinced that the Republican Party, the way out of this conundrum for the Republican Party of California, is to find members of the new minorities, Michelle Steele, who's also convinced that the republican party the way out of this conundrum for the republican party of california is to find members of the new minorities michelle steel who's korean mike garcia whose father immigrated from mexico who are minorities who embrace the lilacs package of american values yes exactly ah the lilacs well i get get that. Ah, the lilacs packet.

I don't know if I can afford the lilacs packet. The Democrat Party has gone, imposes its own purity tests as well. It's more pure in so many respects than the Republicans have been when it comes to social issues. And it's demanding ideological compliance with a bunch of things that people do not agree with, but yet feel compelled to nod their head and go along because that's what it is. So last question, if this rhino party is to, and I agree, I get what you're saying, that you can't go with the pure, you have to work your way in, but what does the rhino party believe in? Well, in California, the rhino party should believe, I mean, this is my prescription for the rhino party. The rhino party should believe in uh you know a little wishy-washy environmentalism you know of uh completely agnostic on social issues um powerful powerful argument for law

and order powerful powerful argument for uh tax relief and empowerment zones about reaching out to the cities and and to people in the cities and with a message of inclusion and that includes a lot of weasel wording on immigration i mean look like that that's how you that's how you win right now right right now whatever the republican party is doing in california right now it should do the opposite right they should be having dinner for breakfast they should be doing everything upside down because whatever every single thing they're doing almost is wrong and has led them to this disaster. So if you want to win, the question is, how are you going to win in California? Now, obviously it's different if

you want to run and win in Utah or you want to run and win in Florida. I totally get it. But if you were, if you were a Republican or even a free marketeer or even an investor or even a small business person, and you're in California, you got to be thinking to yourself, what's going to happen if, when more, when more people leave next year and go to Texas or Florida? The mayor of Miami is a dynamic. Yes, he is. Smart Cuban, Cuban Republican. And he he doesn't sleep. This guy is leading a charm offensive at giant piles of capital and capital control in san francisco and silicon valley in los angeles he is there telling you how great miami is and he's got a bunch of people

coming to miami and doing word of the mouth advertising better better word of the mouth advertising than any podcast could ever imagine 10 years ago here in silicon valley friends of mine entrepreneurs would say oh i met with with the Singaporeans today. Singapore was regularly sending representatives over to say, ah, Mr. Entrepreneur, let me tell you about your taxes in Singapore. Let me tell you about the workforce in Singapore. All of which got a lot of people's attention. Singapore, Asia is now unpopular in Silicon Valley for the obvious reasons. Guess who's making the tours of Silicon Valley? Francisco Suarez, the mayor, el jefe de Miami. When Francisco Suarez decides that he's going to run for president,

and he is going to decide to run for president, I will, I think he will, I don't even know what I'll say, because I'll probably be 90 years old, but I would absolutely give him – I will give him the – whatever the smallest amount I can give and still get on the mailing list. I mean I'm not going to give him that. He's still a politician, but he's – this is a dynamic and very smart leader, and all San Francisco needs is a Mayor Suarez. That's all – and all L.A. needs is a Mayor Suarez. That's all and all la needs is a mayor suarez that's all they need well well what you'll probably get is somebody who says a what we're going to do to bring california back is to put an x we're going to have a levy on anybody uses a credit card to buy a rent a u-haul

and then the rhino stands will be ridiculous actually we're going to we you know we agree with the idea but we're going to drop that to a 10% fee as opposed to the crazy out there 25% tax. But if you have a lot of credit cards, for example. But no one's going to change that because there's no way. Once you've got a credit card with those multiple balances, it's impossible to track, and then you're just done. You're just done. You've got to throw up your hands and surrender. There's no solution to it.

Throwing up one's hands and surrendering is something that occurs to me once a week about three times during the podcast. But in this instance, I will not do so. I will just push right ahead. Rob's absolutely correct. Multiple credit cards can be a problem. If you got them, you know, the tracking your multiple balances, your due dates and your website logins. Oh, don't you hate that? Oh, what did I call it? What is my password again? Oh man, it's stressful and it's meaninglessly so. Upstart. Upstart makes things simple with one monthly payment in one place. Upstart is the fast and easy way to get a personal loan to pay off your debt all online. Whether it's paying off credit cards, consolidating high interest debt, or funding personal expenses, over half a million

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based on your credit, income, and certain other information provided in your loan application. And we thank Upstart for sponsoring this, the ricochet. Two, one. And now something different because we've been doing it the same way for so many years. We thought we'd just shake it up. Why not have Peter Robinson introduce somebody? Peter Robinson, I'm introducing you to introduce our next guest. I'm introducing Nick Hudson, whom I'm meeting on this podcast for the first time. Nick is a friend of our friend, Dr. J, J Bhattacharya. Here's what I know about Nick from Jay. Nick is a serious person. He has a lot of experience in international finance. In other words, numbers, reality, facts. Nobody puts money into anything without looking it over very, very carefully first.

Nick has founded an organization. All you're going to need to remember is the acronym, but let me give you the full name. Pandemics, Data, and Analytics. Here's the acronym, PANDA, to examine all the falsehoods, all the nonsense taking place as we, and particularly as governments and experts, talk about COVID-19. Nick, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Let's begin by asking you why you got a piece bounced off the internet the other day. You've been censored. Welcome to the club. It's a good club to be in these days. It means you're saying something that's correct. So what was it that you said? Tell us that story. Sure. I was invited to do a presentation, a keynote presentation at a very, you know, noteworthy conference here in South Africa about a week ago. And we decided it was a good opportunity to go and do a really compressed 25-minute flyby of all of the madness of COVID.

And we put a lot of effort into the presentation, making sure that everything was footnoted and sourced correctly. We went through it with our advisory board, and you know the people on that, really top-notch scientists of international standing. And the presentation was received with unbelievable emotional response. It was a live event, so I actually got to see my audience instead of speaking into the void. And it went up onto YouTube and very quickly racked up half a million views with a ratio of likes to dislikes of about 100 to 1, no criticisms

at all of the veracity of the content, and then boom, gone. And did you receive any explanation from YouTube? The usual woolly violation of community standards. Bastards. That's exactly what happened to me when I did an interview with Scott Atlas. All right. So as I understand it from Ajay, Panda, your organization, you're paying special attention to the costs of the lockdown. You are engaging in the kind of cost-benefit analysis that every government on the planet should have engaged in from the get-go,

but that no government on the planet that I can name at least actually did engage in. What kinds of things are you, I don't know, look, this is a podcast, give us something that's especially striking or arresting that you've discovered? What costs are we incurring that nobody's talking about? Well, I mean, you know, our initial estimate of the indirect impact of the economic decline on public health and mortality was quite arresting. That was a very early analysis dating back to May of last year. And it's pretty robust across countries. We estimated that the effect of the economic decline on years of life lost would be at least 30 times that of the epidemic. And that was quite a striking finding. We had taken conservatism at every angle in that calculation.

So a best estimate is more likely in the range of 100 to 1. And I've always thought that that was just a very striking finding. And what we now see is a much more painful kind of analysis to do because you begin to see that outcome in individual causes of mortality and morbidity. And Jay has spoken extensively. I've listened to all your interviews of him, so I won't cover that ground again. But you see it in the missed cancer screenings and in the developing world, which is where lockdowns are particularly lunatic contrivances. You see it in the very harsh realities of starvation and mass joblessness. Hey, Nick, it's Rob Long in Florida. Thank you for joining us. Hi, Rob.

So we don't know how it started, but's just you just go with me for a minute and let's just indulge me in my deep-seated and ignorant belief nonetheless that um a bio lab somewhere in china essentially had its own chernobyl or its own bhopal and the rest of the world got COVID and the very authorities that allowed that to happen and have covered it up then enacted lockdown procedures. And those same authorities, when you question the lockdown procedures, either turn off your microphone or they shout you down. You're now trying to tell the truth. How do you get people who have made such catastrophic errors, institutional errors, errors that would at the

very least require them to look for other work? How do you get those people to listen? I think it's past the point where they can really back down. Everybody was hoping that maybe the vaccine would be the sort of time to dial back the malarkey a little bit and stop with all this nonsense of the double masking and the social distancing and the perspex and restaurants and so on. But that doesn't seem to have been the case. And my sense is that as the resistance to these measures builds, there will be a tendency to begin throwing people under the bus. And some of the foot soldiers, the useful idiots, will be the first to go and they will begin to squeal in various ways.

And there may also be law cases. I'm following with great interest the work of Rainer Fulmich at the Stiftung Corona Anschutz in Austria. Oh, of course. Oh, yeah. Me too too i'm following that so any one of those cases could blow something up you know trace back to an instruction that was given that should never have been followed because it there is this there is this strangeness in it all up until mid-march late march people are saying the right things they're kind of talking consistently with all the guidelines that are in place. And then in the space of very few days, everybody reverses

and goes full tilt malarkey. And I think there must be a story behind that. Why? Do some wild guessing with me, if you would. Why? Why was it so hard to say, well, you know, when a virus reaches a certain R0 number, when it gets to a certain number, it's kind of done. We're not actually going to stop it. I mean, that's what pretty much epidemiologists said in December of 2019 before they changed their mind. What made them move to crazy town and drag us all with them? Well, I always say that I think the best way to try and solve these problems is actually not to be too wild, to go back to the first principles of economics. What do people do? They follow incentives. And there are lots of things in the mix. There was very clearly a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the CCP. There's no mistaking that.

Attorney Michael Singer has documented that in exquisite detail. And I don't know how much of that was thought through and planned or how much of it was a reaction to the criticism that China was beginning to receive in the media owing to its very draconian practices. The soldering of people into their apartments and that kind of thing and starving people. I know Peter wants to jump in, but let me give you analogies to tell me if you think this makes sense. Before the pandemic, a few American basketball players criticized China. And the National Basketball Association punished them because China is too important to criticize. criticize did the world's epidemiologists and health organizations and health bureaucrats perform the way the nba performed in that regard well they missed all their hoops that's for sure good but but uh it it i mean that's that's possible but there's there's more to it than

just uh chinese propaganda there there was there There's also this astonishing power that has been concentrated in the hands of a few people, notably the World Health Organisation and the Gates Foundation, and their roles are becoming clearer and clearer as you scratch. And behind every draconian little tart, there's a story of funding and grant money from the Gates Foundation or Gavi. And I think that's a big part of the story. It will definitely turn out to be the case that the influence was much bigger than anybody had understood. Influence at the World Health Organization and even down to the level of quite microscopic organizations in far-flung countries.

I mean, we've uncovered ridiculous things. You know, a small little actuarial consulting firm that got a big contract from government. And guess what? It's the only actuarial consulting firm in the country that benefits from Gates grant money. So, you know, and that's in South Africa. You know, so these very powerful people, you know, it's the old story. If you centralise power too much, you totally destroy the mechanisms

of error correction and that censorship by YouTube yesterday, astonishing censorship. Where does that come from? Well, YouTube has an agreement with the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization can tell YouTube when to take something down. And we were delivering some very strong criticism. I mean, I'd urge all your listeners to go and find the replacement videos, which are now up on every platform on the internet. But it's so clear that this is a dynamic that's playing out. Nick, Peter here one more time.

I'm starting to feel the frustration I feel when we've got a really wonderful guest, and yet it's a podcast. We have to move along to another guest and wrap it up and start our weekend. All right. The organization, PANDA, the acronym is all anybody needs to

remember. You're in South Africa, but you've got Jay Bhattacharya about a half a mile away from me here in California. I understand from Jay that the headquarters, I may be mistaken about this, but I seem to recall Jay saying that the headquarters will be in London. Well, you know, in this day and age of remote work, the headquarters is a bit of a nebulous concept. We'll probably register a corporation in the United States quite soon. But, you know, it's a very diverse international organization. Now a minority of our members are the South African founders, really, of the organization. We internationalized when we realized that the problem wasn't a local one. know this was a completely international story right what i love about this is that you are creating

if i'm not mistaken you are creating an international ngo the world health organization turns out to be incompetent and corrupt and lo and behold a man man seated in South Africa founds his own counter organization. Last, is that fair-ish? Or am I getting carried away? Except maybe just maybe too much attribution to me, because I think what's happened and the reason this has become possible is that a great many scientists have found that their institutions are not comfortable places for them to speak. So we provide a platform and we have these weekly meetings where all the scientists get together and have the debates they would normally love to be having in their universities about instead of fighting with each other over whether

or not cloth masks work, they discuss why they don't or what the mechanisms might be. And so it's enjoyable and resonates with their values. Last question for me, and then over to James Lilux. The last question for me runs as follows. You said earlier that they're past they, the experts, the people who got us into this fix, are past any point where they could back down gracefully or back down gracelessly. They just won't back down at this stage. So as I understand it, Panda is talking past them to ordinary people, which I read as essentially placing a bet on the democracies.

Is that correct? That's a very good analysis. I'm actually going to turn that into our strategy document. Perfect. Well, if you do happen to turn into a for-profit entity, 10% of that would be a fair payment, I think. Nick, thank you. Over to James Lilacs. James Lilacs here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Minnesota, we are experiencing a surge of the UK variant. They're actually calling it the UK variant, which explains why there have been so many attacks on the streets on men with dodgy dentition and walking sticks and bowler hats and the rest of it.

But at least we're not talking about a lockdown. When I go to Reddit, where there's a big, long, anguished subreddit called Lockdown Skepticism, there are voices from France of just quiet despair at what's coming. There are voices of Canada of just hopelessness and futility with the lockdown that they're discovering. If this was widespread, if most of the people felt that the lockdown was injurious to society and their mental health, it might be hard to do so. But hasn't this whole process revealed that there's a large cohort of people who feel somehow emotionally and psychologically invested

in crisis? And this is sort of a strange thing to see in Western civilization, how many people willingly subjected themselves to this and turned stodgy. but there are people who really derive a certain amount of satisfaction from this ongoing, rolling, never-ending series of lockdowns and crises. Am I right? I find it very disturbing. You're spot on. And I think you're locating it in the right place. This kind of environment of creeping safety culture and of, you know, the Offense Olympics, the one who needs to stand up on the soapbox and, you know, extol the virtue. All of these things are now, you know, there might have been irritations in the past.

They have now become really crucial problems and I do see a civilisational decline aspect to it. I'm an optimist, so not an irreversible decline, but something has gone wrong in our educational institutions that is decades old to produce people who think like this on such a scale. And you're absolutely right. They seem to enjoy the crisis and the panic.

It's almost as if they don't really take the virus seriously, but they love the theatrics. So perhaps these were people who just regarded Western civilization with disdain. They were, they were tired of it. They have been bored and lulled by prosperity and abundance into hating the thing that brought them to this point. So is it possible that if you can think

of our previous civilization as a pitcher of water that was sitting on the table, COVID and the lockdowns knocked it off. And the response was not to piece that vessel back together, but to put a whole bunch of other glasses on the table of intersectionality and safetyism and the rest of it, that coincident with these people becoming tired with Western civilization, there's a very motivated group of people who are ready with alternatives they want to use to shape the post-pandemic situation, even though it doesn't even seem as though they want it to be post at all. They want it to be part of a new mindset going forward where we're all looking for the well mark on the building, where we're all keen to the next variant.

Well, I mean, look no further than the WEF. They present to the world this very strange melange of, I call it the three M's, Malthusianism, Marxism, and postmodernism. And they dress it all up in words that don't sound like their original antecedents, sustainability, and what's their other favorite, inclusive growth, you know. They never really explain what these things mean, but it does have a feeling of wanting to try an entirely different system. And we've seen how that movie works out.

So, yes, I think that is the real problem, that we have basically a peaceful revolution underway in certain quarters. And it's not only at the universities. This is inside the major corporations of our countries. And you can see the politicians all signing up for this. It happened last week, you know, Macron and Trudeau and Tedros and our president here in South Africa, Ramaphosa, along with Merkel,

I think, signed up to a letter, you know, talking about this wonderful great reset that's going to replace the capitalist tyranny, you know, under which the world has prospered. So, yes, I think you're in the right direction there. And that's part of the problem set here is we're not solving a problem that's about an epidemic or a virus and the right things to do, the right PPE to wear. There's a political aspect to this which goes quite deep and is quite a challenge. You know, it just occurred to me, it's not a reset. It's not a

reboot. It's a replace. When I reset the little notch on my power outlet, the power comes back exactly as it was before. When I reboot my computer, it comes up with the same operating system and the same programs. This is a replace. This is a clear the decks and institute the new ideas that they want. Unless anybody, I mean, I've got a million more questions, I'm sure Rob and Peter as well, but we thank you very much for your time. And believe me, Nick, shoot us a text when you've got another video coming up on YouTube so we can all catch it in that brief interstitial moment between posting and deletion. Shoot us a link

or two where we can find the now censored video. Yeah, I'll send you the links for the show notes. And yeah, it's 25 minutes. People love it. There's also a part two with a Q&A, which people are enjoying as well. But the 25 minutes, I think,

gives a really good, quick, compressed summary of the madness of where we've come to. Right. Well, we'll put that on the show notes. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you can leave the room and it has not been welded shut while you've been sitting here talking to us. Thank you, gentlemen. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Nick. Well, perhaps you can put it up on some video service on the other side of the country, but you may be wondering, how do I get to that?

What if somebody is noting the fact that I'm going to a video that's got talk about the lockdowns. It isn't approved. How do I get around that? Rob, this is where you come in and say there's no way to get around that. If you're listening. Well, I'm not a trained monkey, James. I need to interrupt what I feel. It's improv. Right. You can't

train me for seven years to expect this and then just sit and lean back there. Literally, I was thinking here's what, I was literally thinking to myself, you know what's funny is that I should be doing this spot because I am using a VPN. Then go right ahead.

I don't want to, but I think, wow, I'm actually using, I'm using a product and I love it. It's like want to exist with you but i am i think wow i'm actually using i'm using the product i love it it's like it's uh especially when you go to hotel well good then we'll have a little moment here we're just wait for the moment where we have host inserts personal endorsement we'll get to rob so so stay on your toes here rob because we talk about a vpns there's only one you really need to talk about and that's express vpn listen social media and big tech are trying to curb your rights and freedoms by attempting to de-platform speech they don't agree with. We just heard an example about that. Well, you could, sure, deactivate all your social

media accounts, step away, but that would be giving the left exactly what they wanted in the first place. You're not paying attention. You're not participating. No, instead of letting big tech sites try to control your speech, why not revoke their right to your data? That's why we choose to protect our online data by using ExpressVPN. Ever wondered how free to access social media companies make all their money? They're not charging anything. Well, you're the product. They track your searches, your video history, everything you click on, frankly, and then they make money by selling your valuable data to other people, other companies. When you use ExpressVPN, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address. That makes your activity much more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers. What's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from

eavesdroppers on your network. And the ExpressVPN app couldn't be easier to set up right rob as he leans forward quickly and says yes i yes right and it's great especially when you're traveling and you're using some wi-fi you've never seen or heard from and everything you have is on your phone it's always that's right right now at this very moment in a hotel rob is using in a vpn to do complex financial data, right? You're going to the bank, you're trading stocks. I'm trading. Well, maybe not.

But you know what? The feeling that you get at home or on the road is better when you're using a VPN. And the ExpressVPN app, like you said, it's just really easy to use. Tap one button on your phone or computer and you are protected. So it's finally time to say no to censorship and take back your online privacy with the VPN we trust at expressvpn.com slash ricochet. By visiting that link, by the way, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. Again, that's expressvpn.com slash ricochet. Expressvpn.com slash ricochet to protect your data today. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this.

And now as part of our desire to just shake up the format, make you wonder what's coming next, I'm going to introduce Rob Long, who's going to introduce our next guest. Rob. Yes. Ricochet listeners already know Tevi Troy. Tevi is a presidential historian,

former White House aide, ex-deputy secretary of health and human services, and he has been a ricochet podcast super fan and ricochet podcast super guest since the inception he's the author of shall we wake the president two centuries of disaster management from the oval office which is just incredibly juicy and filled with like great stories and most recently fight house rivalries in the white house from truman to trump you can follow him on twitter at tevi troy t-e tevi we're thrilled to have you here let's can we first of all um happy pesach thank you well well pronounced hug hug hug hug hug to me sounds like something i do when i

uh has had too many cigars the night before. I wake up and the first thing I say is Chag Sameach. But all right. I like the joke about the guy who goes to the Jewish restaurant and the waiter says, hi, my name is Chag. Or I think it was Jonah Goldberg told me the how he would he wants to come up with a trade plan a trade program between hawaii and israel hawaii will export its vowels and israel will export its consonants why hawaii needs more more consonants and uh hebrew needs more vowels um all right so jokes over uh uh two point some uh 2.17 zillion trillion for an infrastructure bill, of which I think $50 is going to actually go to infrastructure.

And as much as I hate, I was just reading about today, this seems like exactly the smart move for a President Biden to make right right now i don't agree with it but i think it's probably smart politics do you think it's smart politics well it's smart politics in terms of appealing to his base and getting things for his base that they want i was listening to the new york times podcast this morning i listened to a lot of podcasts said the again the new york times reporter and the host were talking about the infrastructure bill. And the New York Times reporter who covers the subject said, you know, a lot of the things in this bill are not what you would traditionally call infrastructure. So it's getting out there. I mean, it's not just people in on the ricochet type podcast

who are saying, hey, only a very small percentage of this is actually about infrastructure. This is a lot of goodies to a lot of different democratic constituencies. So it's smart politics for Biden in that sense. But you start to question the politics if the word gets out there in the larger community that this really is an infrastructure bill, but it's a let's take care of unions and big urban machine bill. I mean, there's also the electric car problem. One of the richest men in the world, maybe I think, depending on the market, he is the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has a for-profit company that seems to be thriving making electric cars. What is it about the electric car business that needs government support? Well, it does raise

the question that there have been government subsidies that helped get Tesla going. But it is true that Tesla has now engineered what seems to be a better electric car than anything we've had before. And I don't think long term you're going to need subsidies to keep electric cars going because it seems to be the direction in which the space is going. So if you're trying to agitate against this gigantic, it's almost like we've been softened up for a trillion here, a trillion there for COVID over the past year. We've kind of forgotten what a trillion is. Why not throw a trillion at this or that? How do you remind people? I mean, my faith in the great middle America, I mean the middle politically america non-partisan essentially

common sense people who don't think government spending is the answer to every problem how do you how do you convince them to reactivate that sense that just doesn't seem like we have that anymore so i remember in the bush administration there was concern about spending but uh we didn't take enough steps to address it. And then I remember President Bush once telling me that now after 26, we're really going to go more seriously after spending. And then obviously the Democrats won both houses. So it has to do in part with taking care of the issue when you can take care of the issue. And I think the fact that Republicans have not been great on the debt issue hurts the argument.

However, there is a way, as Rob was saying, to take it back, which is to focus on what the long-term implications of this debt are. I wrote in that book, Shall We Wake the President, which Rob very kindly cited, that the single most predictable crisis we face in the future is an economic collapse based on unsustainable levels of debt. It's not going to happen tomorrow. I wouldn't sell my bonds this minute or anything like that. But down the road, you cannot keep this kind of spending without paying for it forever. And so I think we have to start making that case, but also when Republicans are in charge, take the tough steps to address it. Well, let me see if I can uh since i i can only think in analogies um world war ii enormous federal expenditure uh successful uh war in on two

theaters country came by country there was basically a small government and then it was a depression uh before that but basically a small government population, small government mandate, radically transformed by the Depression, by the New Deal, and by World War II, came back in the 50s and 60s. They believed that government was the answer, government solution. You know, I'm here from the government. I'm from the government here to help. There were highway programs. There's an enormous amount of urban renewal. The government, people believe that the government was the answer.

And it did, and it lasted, I think, really, until November 4th or whatever day that was, 1980, when Ronald Reagan's message of government is the problem, smaller government won. It feels to me like we're in a smaller version. COVID has been a sign that government regulation is a problem, that government overreach is a problem, that government guaranteeing pharmaceuticals, a purchase order, was a solution. What kind of hay can we as small government conservatives make post-COVID? Is there or can we? Oh, I think there's plenty of opportunities post-COVID. I think Operation Warp Speed only worked because the pharmaceutical companies, not the government, developed the vaccine. I think we have a lot of evidence that the red states have lower unemployment and comparable and certainly not worse numbers on COVID than the blue states. I think the COVID package actually makes it harder to make this case a little bit because the blue states are

going to be bailed out of their debts, but the blue states are in real trouble, especially Illinois, California, New York, New Jersey, and you're seeing streams of people moving to Florida and Texas and other red states. So I think people are voting with their feet. Hopefully they don't take some of their problematic voting tendencies with them, but people are voting with their feet and saying, I want to live in a state where I have more freedom, where there's more entrepreneurship and there's lower taxes and less government regulation. Debbie, you know, this half a million electric vehicle charging stations fascinates me. But a judge was talking about this the other day.

He said, we're going to electrify the federal fleet fleet is a good example. That's about 675,000 cars, which is equal to the number of cars in Nebraska. But GM is going to quit using gas engines supposedly by 2025. So we will need these things because right now people are hesitant to buy an electric car because they think I'm gonna run out of juice somewhere in the middle of the prairie so the government wants to put in a half a million charging stations that's biden's vision and i've frankly i see like i have a picture of a north dakota plane completely empty one charging station and it's riddled with rifle bullets because all the guys coming back from school or hunting just took potshots at it. But they haven't said what they're going to do with them. Are they going to put them

in gas stations, for example, or is their intention to put them elsewhere so that the old-style gas station infrastructure we have, which is huge in this country and vast and works and provides food and fuel and all sorts of things for people in small communities. Are they going to try to drive that out of business? Because it seems that's what they want to do. If they want to move us off fossil fuels, they want to completely destroy this economic infrastructure that we have pre-existing. That's the first question. We'll get to trains a second. So first, is that basically what this is about because climate? Because we just got to get everybody out of their gas car and we're going to use the power and force of the government to do so? Well, I think that may be the democratic impulse,

but there's a lot of regular people who want electric vehicles because there's advantages to having them. And the extent that we can make them, the fueling interoperable, meaning you can go with any type of electric car to a set location, like a gas station and get your car charged and also get them charged for longer periods. Then I think down the road, we could have a more electric fleet. I think that's the direction we're going. I would not want government mandates to reduce my ability to own a gas

vehicle. And I think there's a lot of people love their gas vehicles. So. So the other part of this, are they talking about where the juice is going to come from? Because it's not as though there's a windmill right outside that little charging station in North Dakota that there's no other charging station for 200 miles. It's got to be connected to a wire that goes to a plant that produces power. Is any of the

infrastructure bill talking about, oh, I don't know, what's that stuff with the atoms that go around nuclear, I think it's called, which some people have said really shows promise for the future? Well, look, this is a consistent problem with the environmental movement. They say that climate change is a crisis and we absolutely need to change things, but they're unwilling to even look at nuclear power because of the, I guess, the glory days of the protests past that have made it almost impossible to get nuclear plants back online or new ones developed. I remember, again, back in the Bush administration, we tried to figure out a way to make it easier to develop nuclear energy

in this country. And we found that there were only so many things you could do on the federal level, but all of the permitting problems at the local level and the potential for lawsuits, it just wasn't economically viable for the nuclear companies to develop the plants at that time. Now, I have heard there have been some new entrepreneurial efforts to try and get these going. It's not yet there, but I do think it's kind of a blind side in the environmental movement that they say, we want cheaper, cleaner energy, but they're unwilling to look at nuclear or make it easier to get them available. One more before we throw it to Peter here. All right, so let's talk about the Jews. If there are two movies that ruined America, it's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The China Syndrome. You're right, they both put in

the public mind these ideas of asylums and nuclear power that just seemed to influence the way we'd live for the next 50 years or so. But these trains that Biden talks about, when he gets up and says, imagine a future in which you and your family can go coast to coast smoothly. It's like he thinks that the interstate system right now is this rutted old Route 66 with nothing but potholes and a two-laner working its way through the blasting desert. We have a pretty good way to get coast to coast on a freeway, but he's talking about trains. And he wants, there's billions and billions, more for trains than there is for roads. So he wants a new muscular Amtrak to go everywhere.

Now, is this talking about working on the existing system that we have and making it a little bit more robust? Or is he talking about doing a California style 1 billion for every 6 inches type light rail system that goes from here to there? And if so, how does he intend to power that? Because right now we have a vast, efficient, workable rail system in this country, but it requires fossil fuels. I don't think he's thought about these issues in the depth that you're talking about, James. His name is Amtrak Joe. I think he has a sentimental attachment to amtrak and trains but i just don't think that trains are sufficiently economical and we consistently find with amtrak that the northeast corridor is the only one that has the potential to do well i mean

that works that's nice but uh if you go across this vast country trains are just not the most economical way for the private sector to invest in this. And so I'm very wary of the train effort. Now, I think there's an interesting similarity between the COVID package and the infrastructure slash stimulus package in that in both, there's a core of interesting and useful spending that's taking place that is inflated by a factor of probably four or five with other projects that are not necessary. Now, we all know there's some kind of write-off whenever you have a government program. Some of it's going to be waste. But the extent to which

only, let's say, 20 to 25 percent of these projects are on the named issue for which they are so-called devoted to, I think that is a problem. And that's the kind of thing that Rob was getting at, is how we can highlight the fact that the Biden spending is, it sounds good, but if you really look at the details, only a very small percentage is going to what they're saying it's going for. He's called Amtrak Joe, hey Tevi, he's called Amtrak Joe because he took the Amtrak up to Wilmington when he was in the Senate, as I can attest, having seen him on the train. That was a different Joe Biden. He was working his phone and opened his briefcase and worked on papers. Tevi, you are the author of a book called Shall We Wake the President? Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office. All right, now get a good picture in your mind of the current

Joe Biden at his press conference, reading from a book, cameras pick this up, in which he was calling on reporters that had been numbered by his staff, one, two, three, four, and answering questions in part by simply reading verbatim from the briefing book in front of him. Now, he got through it. He didn't misspeak. He did answer the questions. But I just want to know, does this 78, the current 78-year-old Joe Biden, in the thought of this Joe Biden in a crisis, does that give you pause? Of course it gives me pause. I mean, here's a guy who is not what he used to be in terms of his vigor and his ability to be articulate. But, you know, there's an interesting story in the New York Times that a Biden staffer was talking to a New York Times reporter and the Biden staffer was being asked about their strategy.

New York Times reporter said, who would have thought that this whole strategy of staying in a basement would be a successful approach? And the Biden staffer said, we did. They know what they have. They know that their guy is someone who really can't be out there too much. And to the extent they kind of keep him off the front pages, that's, that's beneficial. And then the extent they keep them in the basement or in the upper levels of the Oval Office is beneficial to them politically.

Rob, Rob wants another, we all want more questions from you, but I just, on that one, a follow-up. So the staff got him through the campaign. The staff got him through the press conference. Ron Klain, his chief of staff, by all accounts, is highly intelligent,

a very skillful Washington operative. So suppose I say to you, Tevi, relax. Honestly, the presidency isn't that hard. You make two or three decisions a day. Your staff can put them forward to you. Check this box, check that box, check that box. Relax. Even in a crisis, Ron Klain can handle it. Or do you say, no, no, no, there's something distinctive in our governmental system about that one figure of the president. And in a crisis, it's all going to come down to him no matter how good the staff is yeah

i'm in the latter camp i think the president is an essential figure this is why i've devoted my career to studying the presidency and working in the white house i think the president has the potential to be a hugely unifying figure i think the president can reassure the nation in times of crisis and i think if you have a president that you're just not sure of, that can be potentially problematic. So I am definitely in the camp of we can't just count on the staff. The other thing is Biden sells himself in the campaign as this kind of moderate Joe, you know me, I'm not one of the crazies. And then when it comes time to be president, he seems to be stepping back and allowing some pretty left-wing people, both in Congress and in the administration, to run the show. Hey, so Tevi, it's Rob again. Completely unfair question.

What do you think, I know it's early, but it's not that early, what do you think the title of your Biden book's going to be? It's a great question, but maybe something like, can we make the president as opposed to should we make the president? Okay. Oh, Mike. Truly, truly, I think that's very accurate.

Make a metal note, everybody. Never crossed heavy Troy. Do you think, I do you i mean i guess i want to answer and where we started um i part of me is thinking okay well i mean he's easy to mock and make fun of but you have to give joe biden credit he hasn't said or done anything truly bizarre or weird in two years he hasn't weirdly touched somebody he hasn't strung together words that don't seem to make any sense he hasn't he hasn't been joe biden the way joe biden has been joe biden for so long um is that because you think that he's just getting old and it's getting slow and the part of his brain that was working so hard to say crazy outlandish weird

things is no longer working or do you think it's that this is a this his slowness and his um guardedness and his weird boring way of speaking is message discipline i think there's two things going on and i think uh in a way you're right on both is that no i like that i think a biden has always wanted to be president and john putt horst tells this wonderful story about biden coming to the staff room when john was a journalist and they had a lunch i think it was at newsweek or time and joe biden sat down opened his mouth and did not stop talking for an entire hour and that is not the Joe Biden we see anymore. And I think there's two reasons. A, he wants to be president and maybe he listened

to his staff and said, you just can't be the same old Joe never shuts up Biden. You just have to be able to be quieter. But the second is now that he's older, it's not so easy for him to just talk for an hour. And we've seen that in multiple occasions. In that first debate with Trump, Trump was trying to get under his skin and fluster him. The thing Trump should have done instead of interrupting and dominating the time is he should have sat back and let Biden talk. And I think Biden would have gotten himself in more trouble if he had to speak for 45 out of the 90 minutes. So I think it's a combination of ambition and listening to the staff to some degree, but also age and lack of capacity to do the things that he used to do. Or he knows that he just can't do that anymore. So he's actually like Frank in blue velvet,

huffing Novocaine and Ativan from a face mask all the time to keep himself on the mark. It is a markable, it's the Biden of old and the Biden of now is quite something. But we'll let you go with this. A lot of people are saying, you know what, he's going to be out by December. They're going to 25th him or he's going to step aside. What are the chances of that? I mean, Biden having wanting to have been president forever, is it likely that he's going to say, all right, I've done my bit here. It's time for President Harris. I think it's extremely unlikely that he steps down. And I think that this whole idea where he met with this historian and said he

thinks he has a chance to be another FDR or LBJ, I think he believes he could be a really consequential president. And therefore therefore he may even run for a second term and look you know we all have older relatives they i mean the extent to which they get diminished over time it's not like there's an immediate snap off it's uh it slowly happens and i know plenty of people in their late 70s who could carry on a perfectly interesting conversation and i think biden is capable of doing that do i think he's completely up to the rigors of the job as other people have done that? Probably not. But I see no reason why he won't still be around at age 82, 83, 84, which he would be in a second term. So I think he's staying. I don't think he's giving it up to

Kamala. And I also don't think that she has really warmed the cockles of either the Democratic Party or the American people as a whole, because I just think she's not a deft political performer. If the job made Obama gray after four years, four years of it is going to turn Biden into something they found in a crypt in the Egyptian desert. Yeah, well, I like the before and after pictures of many presidents, including Carter, lincoln obviously as you said obama but well i think we see now is the after and the senate biden is the before so great point debbie troy it's been a pleasure as ever thank you for joining us in the ricochet podcast and we'll talk to you again everybody follow him wait for his books read what he says and uh again it's been a pleasure have a good weekend thanks so much and a super and a super fan from ricochet podcast yes indeed well speaking of ricochet you are

and i am even before twitter reset the tone the internet struggled to live up to its initial promise right we all know that ah sure it's speedy and it's chock full of content but the real promise of the internet was a reinvigorated marketplace of ideas and it hasn't quite worked out that way common sections as you know usually turn out to be you know the moss eyes leah wretched hum of villainy and scum but what if there was a sliver of the internet set aside for sane civil conversation with center right thought there is There is. You're here. You're absolutely here already. Ricochet.com. That's right. I'm doing a spot for Ricochet because frankly, it's time that we toot our own little horn from time to time and tell you that

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I'm just kind of dreading it. I'm dreading the outcome. I'm dreading every, I'm just, it. I'm just kind of dreading it. I'm dreading the outcome. I'm dreading every, I'm just, it's more just this sort of suspended fear that this is. Yeah, that about covers it. You know, that, or the hope that this doesn't turn into a, you know, a Rodney King kind of situation where the verdict comes in and it makes people violently unhappy.

Peter, do you think uh that i mean people think and feel weird there's a there's a strange distinction here it's like i hope that nothing bad happens is it is the end result i hope that that at the end of this things don't break and burn that seems to be a driving factor in most people's predictions about how this is going to go. Yeah. I've been limiting myself to reading Andy McCarthy's daily summaries of what takes place in the trial. And of course, Andy's a fine lawyer and a deeply experienced prosecutor. And the case is, this will sound almost as though I'm making an intellectual game of it, or that Andy is. That's not the case at all. But it is more interesting than I expected it to be.

The idea that this is a slam-dunk murder charge doesn't look as though it's being borne out. There are inconsistencies in witness testimony. George Floyd was in such ill health at moments before this event that there's a question about what actually it might have been that killed him. Boy, do I hope this does not turn into another bad round for your glorious city, James. So what am I saying? I don't know what I'm saying. It's, it's absolutely fascinating. And at the same time, I'm watching this fascination with a sense of dread. I'm there every day.

I'm not in the courtroom, obviously, but I'm half a block away from it. We'll lock away because that's where my building is. Oh, is that literally? So there are no protests. You're on the same block. Yes. Yeah. Right there.

I go outside for a cigar and I'm staring eyeball to eyeball with the national guard across the street and all of the camera crews that have set up in our duly you know have the talking heads coming out and chattering once or twice every day it's it's interesting it's not as much of a media circus as i thought it would be it was the first day you had everybody there you had france 24 with their microphones but now it's dwindled down a bit. It'll pick up again. Sporadic demonstrations where guys feel entitled to block off the street and just bang on people's car hoods as they try to get through,

because no, this is our street, but very low key on the same time. They're going to be boarding up my building apparently next week because it's, it's a beautiful structure and it's all these acres of glass, just, just begging for a Bolshevik brick. I've always wondered why it hasn't been hit so far apparently the panes of glass cap cost ten thousand dollars a piece so there will be some prophylactic plywood come up

much of downtown is like that it's wretched it's horrible the downtown has been hit so hard by the economic contraction that for this it just takes a beautiful place and turns it even uglier. But we can hope that it will all go well and the summer will not see a repeat of what we saw before. But Peter's right. It's not a slam dunk. It has changed things, though. I was walking the other day and I saw a big sign up in the window and it was George Floyd's face superimposed on a stylistic American flag as a hero of sorts. And next to it was a long, elaborate quote about changing the things that needed to be quoted. And it was by Angela Davis, of course, the communist. And they were displayed

with pride in Minneapolis's beautiful new library. And I thought, Angela Davis, quote, up in the library. That to some people is a sign of goodness because Angela Davis is a sign of righteousness. And for just an America-loathing communist to be enshrined in the library is, well, that's what the sensible good people want to see. I don't necessarily. But it's not this year. It'll be next. next year when the businesses come back and downtown opens up again. And a lot of the wounds have healed and the, the burnt out buildings have been reconstructed. Minneapolis can start to find its footing again, but we're a long ways from that point. Alas, but this is what we have to go through as with COVID.

This is the long tunnel that we have to go through and i'm seeing light and you guys are as well i know i know rob is because he's in florida and he wants me to shut up so we can go outside and sit on the beach no i'm enjoying it you know what frank you know what rob wanted to get out and go to the beach but i've got about a 15 minute peroration here that i want rob to talk to answer so now you want me to interrupt. No, no, I want you. I want to thank you for your patience. And I want to thank all of you for listening, because if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't be here.

Express VPN as well. Upstart and Ricochet. Join all of them today and support them for supporting us. And when you support Ricochet, you're really, literally supporting us. Listen to the best of Ricochet radio show hosted by yours truly this weekend

on the Radio America Network. Check your local listings, as they say, to find out where it is. And please, as we always say, go to Apple Podcasts, leave us five stars, five stars. You can even add a little review or you enjoy how much you hear Rob Long interrupting me or Peter Robinson asking those wonderful questions that unfold and unfurled. In other words, tell the world why you love Ricochet, because you do, don't you? Yes. And I loved it. It's been great. Gentlemen, much fun. We'll see you next week. Happy Easter. Happy Easter. shrimp turned back in 1965 She had legs

that never ended I was half-wit paralyzed She was tall and cool and pretty and she dressed as black as coal If she asked me to out-murder her

I would gladly lose my soul Now I lie in bed and think of her Sometimes I even weep Then I dream of her behind the wall asleep Well, she held a bass guitar And she was playing in a band And she stood just like Bill Wyman

Now I am her biggest friend Now I know I'm one of many who would like to be your friend And I've got to find a way to let you know I'm not like them. Now I lie in bed and think of her. Sometimes I even weep. Then I dream of her behind a wall of sleep. Ricochet. Join the conversation. All right, boys.

Great. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Rob even got in his Hebrew. Yeah. It's Chag Sameach. I went to a Seder for the first time.