The Ricochet Podcast - Catch a Wave
Episode Date: February 18, 2016We’re all over the galaxy this week with our guests The Federalist’s Ben Domenech and Ricochet’s own Saturday Night Science guy himself, the always awesome anonymous. Ben stops by to discuss the... unpredictable election cycle and throw some shade The Donald (you comment, we listen). Then, we get our wonk on with anonymous who explains gravitation waves (we were told there’d be no math on this... Source
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Hello, everyone.
I'm not going to get,
I don't know what's
going to happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to get, I don't know what's going to happen here.
I don't have any information on that.
They don't understand what you're talking about.
And that's going to prove to be disastrous.
And what it means is that the people don't want socialism.
They want more conservatism.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson.
I'm James Lalix, and today, Ben Domenick on the political scene and John Walker on things scientific.
Let's have ourselves a podcast.
There you go again.
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And Rob, I sort of meandered into your territory.
I'm glad you did.
You're the guy who – you tell the people with your own founder's voice.
My own halting, desperate, chilling, and begging.
You said something very interesting about two minutes ago, James.
You said it is Ricochet Podcast number 292 approaching 300.
Inexorably.
We've done 300 of these, and we do them every week.
I think we take a couple weeks off around Labor Day and around Christmas time.
We do it every week.
We get guests.
We get great conversation.
We're on top of whatever the current events are.
We are breaking the mold of talk radio.
Someone said to me, well, what do you really want to do here, Jason?
I just want to bust up talk radio basically.
I want to be the conversation place where it's democratic and people can join and they pay a little money.
What you're paying for is civility.
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peter you two are on your knees with your hands clasped in supplication i am i am i'm not so sure
civility is what people i i may disagree they don don't want to hear the truth, for goodness sake.
They come here to hear us.
The horrible truth, even if it hurts them.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Truth and a little fun.
Civility is sort of – that's just in our nature.
This is as uncivil to Rob as I ever get.
That's true.
No, I accept that.
I accept your rewriting.
Well, here we are between debates,
between the primaries and the like.
And it's been apparent in the last week
that virtually nothing anybody,
anything that Trump says
or his supporters say
can derail the man.
And I'm trying to think of
what was the latest.
What comes to mind,
gentlemen, Peter, I'll ask you first, what was the latest Trump thing that got in your gums like a
popcorn hole and had to be worked out as you worried about the fate of the republic?
Well, the last debate, when he said that, first of all, he attacked former President Bush,
George W. Bush for for going into Iraq.
You can have different views about Iraq.
But then he took it one step further and he made the claim, which is a claim that belongs to the deranged left.
Even reasonable Democrats don't make this claim.
And no Republicans make this claim that George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq war, that he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction
and lied to us to get us into the Iraq war. Not only is there no evidence for that, but that's
been gone into by commission after commission. It's been thoroughly disproven. And that is a
completely deranged claim. I have been anti-anti-Trump no more. That guy does not deserve any serious attention from serious people
full or simply people of goodwill full stop on the campaign trail since the debate. You could say,
well, maybe he got carried away in the heat of the moment. Not at all. He's sticking with that line
on the campaign trail in South Carolina. Beyond that, he's – in that debate, it became very, very contentious. There's been some advertising by several of the candidates that shades the. And he's sounding he's sounding juvenile.
So I have that's more than sticking in my craw. I just that that's it. I'm done with Donald Trump.
Rob, you're friends with somebody who is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.
I am. As a matter of fact, distinguishing herself in tweets and accusing Nikki Haley essentially of not being a real American, being one of them ferners.
Is this an example of where people just stop talking about something in order to preserve a personal relationship or –
Yeah, well, I think you have to be really careful if you're anti-Trump because the pro-Trumpers – I mean not Ann obviously but a lot of people I know who are pro-Trump really resent being told they're stupid.
That's true. I mean that's the argument all yahoos and morons right that's what the anti-trump crowd says right but it to me it's getting but it's mutual but it's mutual
no it's mutual they think they think we're stupid as well no they think we're establishment hacks
who uh want you know uh cheap lawn care right um our city is comfortable they don't think we're stupid as well. No, they think we're establishment hacks who want cheap lawn care, right?
Our state is comfortable.
They don't think we're stupid.
They think we're comfortable, too comfortable.
I think that's partly true, OK?
These arguments are partly true. or in some way irrelevant to the national discourse, I will say, which I think a lot of the pro-Trump pundits are, either by design or by accident or they've made themselves irrelevant to the public discourse.
My problem with people who are in favor of Trump who are smart is if you see him – I understand you want to build a wall. I understand you believe that illegal immigration is a big issue. I get all that.
But if you believe that this man is going to do anything about it, then you are too credulous. This is a guy who has whipsawed, flip-flopped more times than John Kerry, and we rightly took John Terry to task. If somebody keeps doing that and the fact that he's so emphatic about it, yeah, he's emphatic about everything.
Aside from the fact that I feel like four years of President Trump is going to exhaust us all. He's an exhausting, needy figure. He needs us to love him, and my fear is that there's a whole portion of Trump supporters for whom there is not really nothing he can say that's outrageous.
There's nothing he can say that's liberal that will change their mind.
I believe that there are a bunch of people who believe that Donald Trump is going to build a wall that on day 10 of his administration when he says, no, it's going to be E-Verify, and I'm also going to do comprehensive reform at the same time.
They're going to say, good.
Only Trump could have done that, whereas in fact that's going to be slightly looser than the George W. Bush immigration plan, which everybody freaked out about a few years ago.
And they're going to look at it and they're so part of the cult that they don't care.
And if they do care, they by themselves do care, what are they going to do?
What are they going to do, vote him out?
He's in there for four years.
And he's going to, by the way,
for two-thirds of his
agenda, he will get Democrat support
because it's all about no entitlement
reform and lots of other
liberal goodies.
If you wanted, he's just
a rude, loud
Nelson Rockefeller.
And if that's what you want, go right ahead.
But don't tell me he's conservative or
he speaks the truth, because that is
just demonstrably false.
But
I think, Rob, you're a little too
harsh there. I think even Donald
Trump's greatest critics would
probably admit that the man for
most of his life has been a student of the Constitution
like Cruz and can probably memorize, just quote you you verbatim the most obscure little codicils
over which the scholars you have to like i like i i don't i don't even think you need to i mean look
ronald reagan was not a constitutional scholar he was a brilliant president but really waver a
couple big things maybe over the years maybe but didn't didn't really waver. And I also didn't feel like Ronald Reagan was so desperate.
Like there's no dignity to this man.
He sits up at night tweeting.
He responds to every little tit for tat.
It's like really?
This is like not only not presidential.
It's just exhaustingly emotionally damaged.
This is a sick person.
I really believe that.
I mean we watched last week or some of us did Kanye West freaking out on Twitter over and over again, and all I could think of was
my God, that's Donald Trump. He is not emotionally stable.
Yes, but he commands such attention with people that even you,
Rob, couldn't see that that was a segue. You were so
obsessed with Trump at the
moment that you lost the point.
I lost the point.
I lost the whole point of our act.
I can't believe it.
I owe you an apology.
Stunning.
Anyway, my point was.
To make it up for you, James, I make you this pledge.
I will never, ever let you make a segue again that I don't interrupt.
That's my pledge to you.
Okay.
Well, let us hope it is like other pledges and that once the RNC disappoints you and changes the rules.
Segue away, James, but I want dibs to come back for 30 seconds on something that Rob said about Reagan that I think is relevant to the race today.
Segue away.
As so you shall, and then we'll get to Ben.
Thank you. think is relevant to the race today. As so you shall, and then we'll get to that. The segue that I was saying, using about the Constitution was meant to inform you and remind
you and give you this wonderful, glorious news.
If you're like many Americans, you know the importance of the Constitution, its rights,
its liberties, but you're not sure on the particulars exactly when people are quoting
articles and the rest, you may sort of nod and say, because it's perhaps been a while.
Maybe you're, maybe all you've done is walk in front of it at the National Archives
and seen the document under the glass and the gas.
Well, Hillsdale is here to help you.
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Peter, Constitution of Reagan scholar, go. The dibs here, Rob correctly said that Reagan
changed his position on a few. But I just want to draw a distinction because I do think it's
important and frankly useful to bear in mind as we watch this debate unfold.
There's a difference to my mind between changing your position, changing your mind and flip-flopping.
With Reagan, the prime example used over and over and over again, Donald Trump is saying he's changed his mind the way Reagan changed his mind, was abortion.
Where Reagan signed into law as governor a relatively liberal – not by the standards of today, but by the standards of those days, a relatively liberal abortion law and almost
immediately regretted it. Now, Reagan explained, this is the important point. He explained over
and over again, this, you can find it on YouTube as a sitting president. He wrote a pamphlet. He
wrote a 63 page book called abortion and thecience of a Nation. He explained his thinking. He told his fellow citizens why he believed he had been wrong and why he had changed his mind. That's not a flip-flop. That's being fair with your fellow citizens and explaining your thinking. Flip-flops is Trump saying, I was A yesterday, I'm B today, I can change to C tomorrow. Go ahead, sue me. Frankly, flip-flop is also Mitt Romney going from being pro-choice to pro-life and not having a very good explanation. example completely fair for a can't we are we all change our minds as we think things through as we mature as facts change but you have to my mind for it's legitimate for a politician and it's
only legitimate if he can stand and look his fellow citizens in the eye and explain why and he
said what he did not say was no i didn't wait you signed the liberal abortion law in California. No, I didn't.
Correct.
It's a mental breakdown.
It seems very, it's, anyway.
The clock resets
every time he speaks.
The clock, however, is telling us that we should bring
on Ben, and why wouldn't we
want to bring him on as soon as possible anyway? Ben Dominick
is the publisher of The Federalist, host of The Federalist
Radio Hour, and writes The Transom.
It's a daily subscription newsletter for political insiders.
He speaks regularly on cable news and CBS's Face the Nation, and we welcome him back to the podcast.
Hey, Ben.
Good to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
We've been talking about that Trumpish fellow.
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Evenings are getting brighter, weather is getting better and Decathlon is here to get you moving with over 70 sports on offer.
So get up, get out and get ready to play. Spring into our Ballymun store or check out decathlon.ie.
Spring is here and so are the new season ranges at Decathlon with more products and value than ever before. Evenings are getting brighter,
weather is getting better,
and Decathlon is here to get you moving
with over 70 sports on offer.
So get up, get out, and get ready to play.
Spring into our O'Connell Street store
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Might expect he's come to dominate
something of the debate.
Tell us what you thought about his introduction, his injection of 9-11 trutherism
into the mainstream of Republican dialogue in the last, and perhaps some speculation on
what you think he'll do next. You know, that was an interesting moment for a number of reasons. He
has tapped into, you know, a number of different people's views on 9-11 and on the Bush presidency
from a perspective that I think
is pretty disingenuous on his part. There's actually very little evidence that Trump opposed
the Iraq war. In fact, there's some evidence that he supported it in terms of his initial comments
that were printed in his books at the time. And yet he's really played this game on this issue
where he's kind of played to the skepticism that people have of elites
across every different subject area. So that's on immigration, that's on trade, that's on, you know,
doing bad deals with other countries, that's on foreign policy. And within that space,
he's basically been critical of just everything that's happened for the past 15 years.
And by doing so, that speaks to, you know, the concerns of a lot of different people.
And so even though it's certainly not a Republican attitude on his part to be so critical of George
W. Bush, you know, sounding like a leftist in terms of the way that he's framing that decision,
it's something that plays to, you know, let's say a larger portion of the American, you know,
populist disgusted with the elites sort of portion of the populist,
which is a significant portion of the electorate in South Carolina.
And I think that that's one of the reasons why he's doing as well as he is.
But do you think people in South Carolina want to believe that they have been lying to themselves
and everyone else for the last 15 years when it comes to – because that's what it is.
What he's telling everybody is that everyone who's defended the Iraq operation at the time or subsequently and defended George W. Bush is defending a liar, somebody who knowingly misled everybody.
Well, see, that's the thing about Trump. You know, when he when he calls somebody a liararok against someone and then just sort of lean back and say, well, yeah, but he's a nice guy.
I agree.
That poison once injected, he can take it back off his own self and say I didn't really say that.
But once that's injected into the mainstream of the right, then you have a breaking of faith that I think is a lot more permanent.
Oh, you do.
You do.
Absolutely. Right. Then you have a breaking of faith that I think is a lot more permanent. were motivated by different things. It's interesting because the party establishment knows what to do when it's confronted by an
ideologue, when it's confronted by people who have very strong ideological beliefs.
But when you come across someone who basically has no beliefs other than tell the people
what they want to hear the moment they want to hear it, then you're dealing with something
that's a very different animal.
And I think that that's the reason that Trumpism has been able to have such success. It is a cult of personality driven by belief and trust in the man and not a belief and
trust in ideas. And therefore, it doesn't matter what he thinks or what he thought or what he used
to believe or what he used to say 10, 15 years ago. It only matters what he's saying now and
that I like what I hear. Hey, Ben, Peter Robinson here. In the last 48 hours, very puzzling national polls.
We've had a Reuters poll that showed Trump soaring to his highest support yet among Republicans.
This is not South Carolina.
This is nationally up to 39 percent.
Incredible.
Everybody's – the first thing everybody said was he'll never win, though know he'll
wash out by New Hampshire.
And then it became, well, at least his ceiling is only 30 percent.
It's now he's at 39 percent.
And then we have the Wall Street Journal poll coming out saying that Trump's support has sunk so much that now Ted Cruz is two points in the lead among Republicans nationally.
Cruz at 28, Trump at 26.
Is Trump sinking or rising? What on earth
is going on? You know, I think it's very difficult to say. You know, Peter, in this cycle, there's
just so few things that we could have predicted in terms of how this is all played out. It does
seem to me that Ted Cruz of late has done, you know, a little bit better. He's been, you know,
sort of getting a little bit more of a coalescing around him, a few people sort of stripping away from Ben Carson as he dips.
But I also think that Trump is, is someone who is very difficult to poll around. His,
his name ID is just so much ahead of everybody else. And so it almost depends on, on who you
think makes up the Republican electorate. So I think that's what you're seeing going on there
in these divergent polls, that the Wall Street Journal's sort of metric of assessing whether you're a Republican
or a Republican leaner, perhaps being a little bit more severe than some of these other national
polls that have, you know, others sort of participating in it. But Peter, it's an amazing
thing to see play out in the sense that you had kind of this belief all along that the Republican
coalition was motivated by these principles,
by a belief in constitutionalism. You saw kind of the tri-corner hat crowd going to Ted Cruz in the
wake of the Tea Party. And yet you see right now a group of people who are kind of – who assess
themselves as more economically moderate, who believe that they are kind of more of an anti-Hillary
kind of bent than anything else. And they're all lining up to
support Donald Trump in a way that prevents other candidates from being able to coalesce support.
The real point where I feel like we're going to know whether Trump is going to be the nominee or
not is a month from now. On March 16th, we're going to know what happened in Ohio, what happened
in Florida, those winner-take-all elections. And if Trump takes both of those states, then it's almost impossible to stop him when it comes to the nomination.
Rob? Yeah. Hey, Ben. I'm going to ignore that last. Let me ask you just a more broader question.
We have, I mean, I don't, we, not me, I've been saying this since 2012. So I excuse myself from
this. But a lot of conservatives on this
podcast have been saying things like, or are used to saying things like, well, you know,
America's basically a conservative country, America's this, America's that, basically
center-right.
You could argue that the three most sort of vote-getting politicians in America right
now who have the greatest shot at getting into the White House,
or at least have the most claim on the national conversation, are Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump,
and Hillary Clinton. None of those is center-right. None of those could be legitimately
called a conservative. None of those believed in middle-class entitlement reform or any of the sort of nuts and bolts of conservatism that we all green-eye-shade conservatives get together at bars and talk about.
This country is too conservative.
The reality, of course, is that Paul Ryan's ticket actually overperformed among seniors compared to previous ones.
And that, you know, we've seen sort of Republicans in this, you know, putting Paul Ryan at kind of the center of the of the of the idea of this is what a conservative looks like,
you know, a pro-life, you know, fiscally conservative Midwesterner with, you know,
a priority of entitlement reform. Certainly none of the candidates appeal to that. You have a
socialist, you have a corporatist, and you have an economic nationalist, you know, none of which,
you know, sort of looks like classical liberalism or fiscal conservatism in the traditional sense.
The thing is, Rob, in the big scheme of things, that's kind of – we're kind of an outlier in the West.
You could point maybe to Canada.
But really most of the Western nations, they don't have a right that looks like this.
They have kind of a center-left coalition where –
I was just going to say, most Western nations, the conservative leader looks
exactly like Hillary Clinton. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that's, and that's honestly,
that's literally so in the case of Germany, Angela Merkel. Yes. And apologies to Angela,
but it's the sort of thing where it's the thing that you sort of see is this this technocratic party that that sort of runs things and is an adult and this kind of rump using it as a vehicle for himself, that America is sort of shifting into looking more like that.
Nate Silver was at the Mercanus Institute at George Mason the other day and I went to an interview that he had with Tyler Cowen.
He was asked about the future and about being an optimist or a pessimist.
And he was very pessimistic because feeling that he was wrong about Trump, that he was wrong about kind of the country and that it was moving more in that
European direction. And, you know, say what you will about silver or what you think of him. But
if he's saying it too, then I think it's, it's kind of an indication that this is starting to
take hold as a view. So, so rear guard conservatives with a little magazine or what are our little
newsletters or whatever it is, our, our little websites, what do we do?
I mean it does look to me like we are getting squeezed on – I don't think the right, but from above or from below by economic nationalists, right?
By a – not even a UKIP party.
UKIP at least is a free market.
And even in France, the granddaughter Le Pen is a free market conservative.
But we are getting squeezed, and then we have this corporate centrist.
She's going to run to the center and do a pretty good job of it when she gets the nomination.
She's not a bad campaigner really.
She's been – she's going to be OK.
Where do we go? Where do free market conservatives who like the constitution and stuff and low elected, a very smart, ideologically consistent, solid people over the course of the past couple of cycles in the House and in the Senate.
And basically you have to have the attitude of whoever becomes president, we're going to have to use these people who actually believe in things to balance against them and to fight against them in a lot of different ways.
You're not a Nate Silver. You disagree with Nate.
I'm a little more optimistic than Nate because I basically believe like you've seen this thing come in ebbs and starts.
And one of the things that I think is comparable to this experience is actually what you saw
at the end of the 19th century when you had the Bourbon Democrats, Grover Cleveland, gold
standard, free trading kind of people who would all be writing for the Wall Street Journal editorial page if they were around today. And that's meant to be
a compliment. No, I know. I can't wait to tell Paul as you go that you said he's the successor
to Grover Cleveland. Hey, Cleveland is underrated. So but but then seriously, you had you had people
like that in charge of the Democratic Party. And then you had this this populist outbreak
from from the farmers and from the silver movement.
And William Jennings Bryan came along and he took over the Democratic Party with a speech.
And I would not, you know, compare Donald Trump to William Jennings Bryan in terms of an orator,
but perhaps he's an orator in the same sense, in the sense that he fits the conversation of
our times, which has a movement within 140 characters and not much more. And so I think
that that's kind of the way to think about it.
And what happened to Brian?
You know, he ran the party basically for three consecutive cycles.
He lost every time.
And then he cut a deal with Woodrow Wilson and the progressives took over.
And so I think that this is kind of a – it's a dangerous time.
It's a weak time for the party leadership.
And you're going to see a lot of candidates, I think, have to wrestle with the idea of, you know,
do I run with Trump or do I run against him, depending on my state?
And I think that that's something that a lot of different senators in particular will have to
wrestle with over the course of the next several months if Trump becomes the nominee.
Incidentally, Peter here, I will be sitting down this very Sunday to interview for
an episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Karl Rove, whose new book is The Triumph
of William McKinley, Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters. And of course, it was McKinley
who defeated William Jennings Bryan for the first time. You and Karl, you're now in Karl Rove
territory, dropping the election of 1896 into conversation. Listen, quick question. Charles
Krauthammer said something on the Fox
News panel last night that is obvious, but at the same time, to me, at least, had a bracing effect.
It's one of those obvious things that needs to be reasserted every so often. This is really simple.
If the non-Trump vote consolidates, Trump will lose. And if it remains split, he will win. So the questions there
are quite clear. Really, you've got a three-man race, as best I can tell. It's Donald Trump,
Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and everybody else just isn't going to cut it. Isn't it as simple as that
already? You know, Peter, if you could stand in the room and look at Ted and look
at Marco and say, all right, let's flip a coin. Who wants to be what? And basically and basically
just go from there. I think that that would have an effect of consolidating sort of the anti-Trump
movement to a degree that would be that would change the election. The problem is that right
now, you know, I think that the the number of Republicans who are who are capable of recognizing that Ted, you know, could could be acceptable as a nominee in Washington and in New York is very, very small.
They do not like him.
They do not approve of him.
And yet the base likes him or seems to like him more than they like Marco to this point.
Also, Ben, you have an eye for the
nuts and bolts of campaigning. Isn't not true that Ted Cruz is actually running a very good
campaign on the ground? He really is the money. He's got the organization. This is an intelligent,
well-informed, well-funded, serious operation, correct? Absolutely. And that's one of the
reasons that he has performed so well to this point. It's, you know, as disliked as he is in Washington, Cruz has proven to be a very capable campaigner.
And and he's actually, you know, established himself as a lot more likable within these states than people sort of expected.
Marco Rubio, on the other hand, has been running kind of a campaign that's a little bit more insidery.
It cares a little bit more about the meta narrative of, you knowarrative of his finishes and where they are.
Third in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire has somehow led him to a point where he's getting the endorsements of all the top people in South Carolina,
and it will be considered a failure on his part, frankly,
if he's anything less than second.
Yet Cruz is the one who has the ground operation in South Carolina
and has worked so hard to build up support within that evangelical community.
It is sort of a situation here, though, where you have two of the best young talents who've
come along in a while for the Republican Party, and yet they're beating each other up while
Donald Trump is able to just sort of stand there at 35 percent.
So what's the TikTok? What happens now? Does somebody from the Bush campaign call somebody from the Rubio? Obviously, these three guys have to cut a deal, right? We're looking at Bush, Rubio, four. Bush, Rubio, Kasich, Cruz. Those four guys have got to start talking probably early Sunday morning, right? Or it's the money guys who get together in New York and have a breakfast on Sunday and say, we got to shut you down. You know, it's weird in the sense that, you know,
Bush performed well enough in New Hampshire that he sort of felt like he needed to go on to South
Carolina. South Carolina has been very good to the Bushes. I think that if he underperforms there,
that he actually will consider getting out. And I think that there's already been a couple of
little signs that sort of indicate that. I think the danger would be that he knows what his legacy would look like if he carried on into Florida a few weeks from now and was continuing to split the vote, not giving Rubio a chance to compete with Trump there.
But that's something that I think really won't happen until the next morning.
Kasich, I think, is not likely to get out. He, despite sort of having not a lot
of money and not a lot of support outside of the Midwest, I think he's very sort of stubbornly
staying and going to stay in even if he underperforms in South Carolina. And I think
that, you know, one of the other questions is just sort of, you know, Ben Carson is still there with,
you know, four or five percent, depending on how you measure it, which actually matters in a race.
Sure does. So we'll see what happens. I honestly think that the real question is sort of how soon do they
consolidate? Because the later they consolidate, the more likely Trump is the nominee, the more
likely that he's able to go into the convention with the most delegates. And I think that if he
does that, he will be the nominee. I don't I don't really buy any of this of this, you know,
after action.
It's always interesting for political nerds to sort of consider the possibility of brokered conventions and and Paul Lyons going up against Elizabeth Warren in 2016, that kind of thing.
It's not going to happen. And I think that I think, though, that that if that does happen,
it's going to create a very difficult degree of tension within the Republican Party for all sorts of different people and all sorts of do we do we not have within sight within sight a ticket that would
prove wonderfully compelling and open out the Republican Party as the party of the future
might not this all end up just beautifully isn't Trump Rubio or Rubio I beg your pardon isn't Trump Rubio or Rubio – I beg your pardon. Isn't Cruz Rubio or Rubio Cruz?
One combo or the other.
There you've got – between them, you've got this wonderful, wonderfully appealing candidate in Rubio,
tremendously determined, intelligent and devoted to the constitution in Ted Cruz.
And both of them of course are Cuban.
One speaks Spanish better than
the other. But and I know it's different. I know that Mexicans don't look at Cubans the same. I
know there are distinctions within the Hispanic world. Nevertheless, two guys who come from Cuba,
one of whom is completely fluent in Spanish, the other of whom has tried all his life to be better
at it. I mean, that's a really impressive ticket.
This could all end up beautifully, right?
It could.
Out of the chaos could come beauty, Peter.
And certainly that's what I think a lot of people hope.
The challenge really is, though, I think the challenge for Rubio is when are you going to start winning?
And the challenge for Cruz is...
You know what I just did?
This is long training.
This is what comes of knowing Rob Long for 25 years.
You feel the instinct toward the end of an interview to come out.
Let's end on a high note.
Let's sweeten up a conversation that's had a few sour points.
So I give you this thing.
You say, yeah, yeah, it could end beautifully.
But go ahead, Ben.
Shoot it down.
Well, but here's the thing. I would actually feel pretty optimistic about conservatism generally in the sense that, you know, Trump is a very unique phenomenon.
There are not a lot of people with the type of capability that he has. If Trump can be beaten, if Trump is beaten by someone as compelling as Cruz or as inspirational as Rubio, it will actually say something significant, I think, about the fact that the Republican Party is going to believe in something that is greater than just identity politics or economic nationalism.
I think it would be a good thing for that to happen for the party and for the thing. If Trump does succeed, if he does use the Republican Party as a vehicle to try to carry himself to the White House, I don't think that it actually is going to have a very lasting significance beyond Trump.
I think that it is not – there are not a host of Trump's waiting in the wings fellow billionaires with the kind of narrative that he has and the capability to manipulate the media the way that he has who are going to lead to some long, you know, stretch of Trumpism. The truth is that the party and the center of the party has become more conservative
in recent years, more ideological, smarter, younger.
There's a generational aspect here that I think people should feel hopeful about.
And so that's your that's your happy note, Peter, to end on.
Yes.
Well, well, stick around.
Stick around to the end of the podcast when Peter will sing The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow
in his best show tune voice.
You know, there is no Trumpism.
No, he'll end up like Jesse Ventura, probably the extent where he moves to Mexico at the
end of his term and, you know, does Alex Jones show while his beard is cinched with two little
different colored rubber bands.
Can't wait.
Last question for you, Ben, is this.
If Trump does get the nomination, there's usually a parade of people at the convention
who get up there and say, all right, hatchet's buried.
It's time to get behind the guy that we all now love so much.
Can you possibly imagine speeches like that at the convention aside from perhaps Ivanka?
Well, I would say maybe the hatchet bearing might come from someone like Mike Huckabee.
Basically everybody who wants to be in Trump's cabinet and knows that's their only hope.
But I think that what you're more likely to see is maybe something that looks a little bit more like the Miss Universe pageant.
In fact, he should do something just like that.
Just turn the convention into a pageant.
It will be the most glorious party ever.
It will make your head spin.
And so that's the sort of thing you should do.
Exactly. ever, it'll make your head spin. And so that's, that's the sort of thing you should do. It would make. What I exactly will use the recent model of the beauty pageant where everyone is singing and smiling and beaming at the winner. But then of course, out comes the host who realized he read
the wrong name. It wasn't Donald Trump who got the nomination. It was Marco Rubio and he walks down
and the crown is passed and the bouquet is given.
Thanks a lot for showing up. We'll talk to you again
as the season unfolds.
Everybody read the transom and follow
Ben wherever he may happen to be. Talk to you later.
Thank you so much.
You all remember that particular beauty convention,
don't you?
I do.
Excuse me, I'm coughing, but yes.
I actually feel like that's probably, that's not a bad
outcome. I'll take that one at this point.
I'm sorry, Casper Mattress.
I'm sorry to interrupt you there,
Rob, but I just have to talk about Casper.
Casper Mattresses, as we have been
telling you over and over and over.
He interrupted Rob to get in the segue.
Except I didn't know he was going to do it,
so I kind of stopped.
I didn't really have much to say.
I was throwing you off your game there because you were expecting me to make a convoluted little series of Segways that would lead to this.
And you would choose ever so expertly the point at which to puncture my balloon and thwart my momentum.
But it's not happening near.
Not this day.
I never interrupted your Segway.
You can't show me one time I've done that.
Never interrupted my Segway. interrupted your segue. You can't show me my segue. Rob Long, taking retroactive
rewritings of history lessons from a certain
presidential candidate, that will be
perhaps Trumpism, that there is no
moral center, no moral point,
no truth. It just simply is going to shift to whatever
happens to be said today. What was the
Alice in Wonderland quote? Words mean exactly
words mean what I want them to say.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Well, nothing more, nothing less than a great night's sleep is what you get with a Casper.
And let me tell you, I don't know who else tells you about these things.
You may see ads on the Internet, but I'm a guy who actually sleeps on one.
And sleep is the key word.
If you're tired, putting your corpus down on a mattress that just sinks, you sink into like a stone into syrup, or something that's just like a slab from Roman times
where they didn't always have the softest of beds.
Well, listen, Casper's perfect.
That's all I can say.
But it's not just perfect to sleep on.
It's nice to your wallet as well.
The mattress industry, as you well know if you bought one of these things,
has forced the consumers into paying high prices, notoriously high markups.
And Casper is revolutionizing that industry
by cutting the cost of dealing with the resellers and showrooms,
and, you know, there's no rent they've got to pay,
and passing the savings directly on to who?
To you.
It wouldn't matter, though, if it was cheap quality.
The quality isn't cheap.
The quality is extraordinary.
Casper mattress provides you this resilience
and long-lasting supportive comfort.
It's one of a kind, actually.
It's a new hybrid mattress that combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
Now, does that mean that it will, the next morning,
quote back to you everything that you muttered in your dreams?
No, it just holds your shape so much better than just the usual old cheap foam mattresses.
Cheap, well, it's not cheap in cost, but it shouldn't be, but it's so much less than regular mattresses. Cheap, well, it's not cheap in cost, but it shouldn't be,
but it's so much less than regular mattresses.
Now, mattresses can cost over $1,500, but a Casper costs between $500 for a twin,
$600 for a twin XL, $750 for a full, $850 for a queen,
$950 for a king-size mattress, and that's what I got.
They understand that buying a mattress online can have you wondering,
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Well, it's risk-free.
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Now, relying on a bed for four minutes in a showroom
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Trust me.
And now we move along to, you know, everybody's got questions about this election season.
Everybody's got problems. The other
day, though, I was just, I was worried about
whether or not there was
a vibration at a subatomic level
that would indicate the presence of a particle that we had
never experienced before that would explain the existence
of dark matter in a way that would prevent
heat death and would form universal cohesion
back into an infinite singularity.
And I thought, who can I ask that to?
Well, the great thing on Ricochet is
what I just said was just gibberish, by the way.
The great thing about Ricochet is that you can
post something about...
Hold on a second.
Hold on.
John, are you there?
I'm here, and I heard James, and then he went
away. I'm still here.
All right. John, Gravitational wave.
I know.
We lost that.
That was lost to the ether there.
Why don't you?
I'll try that whole segue again here.
Okay.
Three, two, one.
You know, there are so many questions that come to us in this election year vibration at the subatomic level might lead to the existence of a new quark, a new neutrino, some sort of subatomic particle that would explain so much about the missing mass of the universe.
And I thought, where can I ask that?
I'll go to my political site, Ricochet, because that's the great thing about Ricochet.
You can ask the most technical questions about physics and the like, and you will find an incredibly well-versed audience to answer your questions.
The recent discussion about gravitational waves brought out John Walker,
who was just laying down the science.
I mean, at one point he said something like,
well, and that's the ramifications of living in a three-dimensional,
spherical existence or something.
And I pictured him sitting there with his sunglasses on
and the words, deal with it, below him.
But, of course, he's so much more than just the guy who answers your scientific questions.
He's the author of the terrific Saturday Night Science series on Ricochet and one of our most prolific members.
In fact, he recently became a Ricochet contributor in Mazel Tov.
John, he joins us now from antiseptic clean Switzerland.
Hey, John.
Fine.
Thanks for having me on.
All right.
Now, when it gets to gravitational waves, what are they and why should
we care about them? And how the hell did Einstein figure this out with a pencil and a piece of paper
in his own head so many years ago? Gravitational waves were our consequence of Einstein's 1915
general theory of relativity. Although interestingly, although they're in the equations, he did not see them
at the time. And it was not until the following year, 1916, June, I believe, we're almost at the
centennial, when he first talked about gravitational waves in a subsequent paper. He actually went back
and forth. And it was only in 1918 that he definitively said, yes, they exist.
There's no question about it.
And from that point, you're able to calculate how strong the gravitational waves are from the motion of a given object.
Now, just to back up a little bit, if you take a charged particle and you wave it back and forth, it creates electromagnetic waves.
Electromagnetic waves are things like light, radio, X-rays.
If you wave a mass back and forth in general relativity, it creates a gravitational wave.
However, gravitation is about 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic force, which means that even with a very massive object moving very rapidly, the strength of the gravitational waves are minuscule.
And one way to think about this is that the Earth, as it orbits the sun, emits gravitational waves because it's moving, a massive object moving in a gravitational field.
And the total power emitted by the Earth in gravitational waves is 200 watts.
That's nothing on the cosmic scale.
So it was long believed that it would not be possible to ever detect gravitational waves because they're just so weak.
Then in the 1960s, astronomers began to discover that the universe was a lot more violent a place
than they thought it was. There were pulsars, there were neutron stars, there were perhaps
black holes. And the interactions of these objects, which are very massive and could conceivably move at high fractions of the speed of light, could emit gravitational waves, and it would be conceivable to detect them.
A scientist at the University of Maryland named Joseph Weber was the first to try in the 1960s. He used a massive aluminum bar, which was one meter by two meters in size with detectors on it,
which he thought would resonate if a gravitational wave passed.
He believed he had detected gravitational waves, but subsequently it was decided that his detector just wasn't sensitive enough. So in 1992, a project was launched called LIGO, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Observatory.
And the way that this works, when a gravitational wave passes, it actually causes space time, space, to be squeezed in one direction and stretched in another direction. So the LIGO instrument has two four-kilometer-long high vacuum
tubes, which have a laser at one end and a mirror at the other end. And as the gravitational wave
passes, one of, and these two tubes are arranged in an L shape. So as the wave passes, one will be very slightly compressed.
The other will be very slightly stretched.
And that will cause the light that's passing through these tubes to change in its interference and change the intensity.
And it's possible with extraordinarily precise instrumentation to detect this. Now, when I talk about squashing and stretching from this event
that was detected last September, which was just of stupendous energy release, the amount of
squashing and stretching is on the order of a thousandth the size of a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. So it's 10 to the minus 21 change in the length of the arms of
this interferometer. So it's just an extraordinary achievement that something like that can even be
measured with an instrument. John? Oh, this is Peter Robinson. I'm getting a little bit of an echo as we speak.
Ah, it's gone away. All right. Listen, you're dealing with something. Be patient with me. I'm
going to ask a sort of the most rudimentary question, but I want to make sure I understand
the notion of gravitational waves in the first place, in Newton, mass A would exert a gravitational pull on mass B, but it was just mass to mass attractions.
There would be nothing passing between the masses.
Isn't that sort of Newton? Whereas Einstein says, well, no, the way it operates is that both masses are embedded in this space-time continuum.
And it actually affects the space-time.
I beg your pardon.
The gravity actually affects the space-time continuum between object A and object B.
That's the big difference, right?
Yeah, as the physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it,
mass tells space-time how to bend
and space-time tells mass how to move.
But the key difference between Newton's theory
and Einstein's theory is that in Newton's theory,
gravitation propagated
infinitely fast. If you move something here, it would affect the gravitational force at a distance
instantaneously. In Einstein's theory, nothing propagates faster than the speed of light,
and therefore, gravitation propagates through space at the speed of light.
And if you look at the very deep consequences of that, that means you have to have gravitational
waves. Because if you move something here, the effect cannot get to the other particle that's
detecting it faster than the speed of light. I see. And then I have one more just dumb,
dumb question for you. And then I'm going more just dumb, dumb question for you. And
then I'm going to shut up and let the brighter boys here, Rob and James, ask their questions.
Over and over again, when this news got made, what, almost 10 days ago now, that these gravitational
waves had been detected, scientists said, we have an entirely new instrument now. We have a new way of looking at and understanding
the universe. It was almost as though something as useful as the fundamental technology of the
telescope had suddenly come into being as this layman understood it. I don't get any of that.
Why should the ability to detect these very tiny perturbations in the time-space continuum tell us anything about anything?
Why is that such an extremely useful new instrument?
And I will now fall silent.
Okay.
I describe the detection of gravitational waves.
Some people – a lot of people looked at it as this is confirmation of Einstein's theory,
the last unconfirmed part of Einstein's theory.
And it is.
And that's important.
But I think what's more important is the opening of what I call the third channel.
From antiquity, the only things we've been able to observe about the universe have been through the electromagnetic bandwidth.
Originally with our eyes in the optical spectrum, then with telescopes.
In the 1930s, we had radio astronomy came in.
Another part, still electromagnetic.
In the 1960s, with spacecraft, we have X-ray and gamma, still electromagnetic.
In the 1950s, a second channel opened up, and that was looking at particles emitted from the universe.
And originally, cosmic rays in the 1950s, and then since 1968, we've been able to look at neutrinos.
Neutrinos let us actually look inside the sun and see what's going on inside the sun. It lets us
look inside a supernova and find out what's happening with that. Those are the first two
channels. Last September, the third channel opened up, the gravitational channel. Why is it important? It's important for two reasons. The first of which
is that the universe is essentially transparent to gravitation.
That's also why it's so hard to detect. But it means that you can actually look,
you can receive signals from places like coalescing neutron stars or colliding black holes that you cannot access from the electromagnetic or the particle channel.
You can see phenomena that you've never been able to see before.
And every time we've opened up a new channel, it's not that we've learned more about the things that we already knew about.
It's that we started to see things that nobody imagined before.
And that's where you really get the discoveries.
And in all of the history of our species, we've only opened up three channels.
And the last one happened just a couple of months ago.
So this really is spectacular.
The potential is phenomenal. This is I mean, it's difficult to call a device with four kilometer arms, two sites in Louisiana and Hanford, Washington, that took 24 years to get to the present point and consume more than six hundred20 million, a first step, but that's what it is.
A detection verifies that the waves are there, that we can detect them,
and we can learn even from one detection a lot about the event that was detected.
And so now, for example, there is a new detector coming online in Italy.
There's a detector that it looks like has been approved to duplicate the LIGO detector in India.
And with four detectors online, we'll be able to get a much better sense for where in the sky things happen and better characterize the events that occur. There are also two other entirely different approaches to detecting gravitational
radiation. One by observing distant neutron stars called pulsars with radio telescopes, another
with a space-based observatory. And as it happens, the first what's called LISA Pathfinder just reached its operational orbit.
It's a project of the European Space Agency.
And it will not detect gravitational waves, but it is a technology-proving ground for an observatory that we hope to place in space around 2034, which will actually have now arms of LIGO are, again, as I said, four kilometers long.
This will have arms that are a million kilometers long, which will provide access to phenomena that are really entirely different than what you can see with Lego perhaps going back to right after the Big Bang.
Hey, John, it's Rob Long in New York.
I've got a larger question about physics.
It took a century to prove or to measure what Einstein theorized about.
But in that century, we kind of acted as if it were true, right?
I mean, physics went about their business assuming that Einstein's theories were correct.
Has there ever been such a lag in theory to prove the history of science?
I think you could look at the time between Democritus' proposed
atoms and the time that we were actually
able to confirm that atoms existed.
That's a pretty long gap.
That's a pretty long gap, right.
What makes
that kind of genius
work?
How do you
look at something you
can't measure and can't see
and believe that there are rules that govern the universe
and then come up with a rule or theory
that seems plausible and everybody accepts it
and then a century later we have the machines to measure it
and we say they're there, those atoms are there
those gravitational waves are there
is that just a special kind of genius or is there some kind of rigor?
I don't know if it's genius so much as simply the interaction between science and engineering.
Eric Drexler, one of the creators of nanotechnology, one of his favorite phrases is scientists do engineering in order to do science while engineers do science in order to do engineering.
And at the time that Einstein originally predicted gravitational waves, Any competent physicist who understood his theory could have sat down and calculated that if you could build something like LIGO, you could probably detect what LIGO did.
But lasers hadn't been invented.
Ultra-high vacuum systems hadn't been invented.
The electronics that are used to stabilize the mirrors hadn't been invented. The computing power that's used to pull the
signal out of the noise hadn't even been imagined at that point. And so it really wasn't until
the 1980s that people were saying, you know, technologically, we could probably build this
thing. And even then, when the project was launched, it was done in three phases because they knew that project started in 1992.
They knew that the technology would continue to advance in all of these fields and they would have to continually upgrade.
And they were confident that at some point, if the money didn't run out, they would get to the point that they'd be able to start detecting things.
That is an extraordinary thing.
I mean as someone who sort of is not science literate, I'm more innumerate than Peter Robinson even.
I find that to be an extraordinary act of sort of human intellectual capacity to say we're going to start this thing and we know –
or I'm going to imagine a machine that can't even really be built for the next 75 years.
Or I'm going to start on a project and I know that I'm going to leave X or Y or Z components of this project until later when I trust that innovation and technology and advancements will have made them possible.
I mean how can you look at that and not be optimistic?
Well, you can also look at things like the University of Southampton
has developed a new means of engraving data into quartz.
They can store 360 terabytes on a small, tiny little piece of what looks to be glass.
And I like that because you can put the entirety of human knowledge
in every single song ever recorded and pictures that we've all done
and shoot them out into space on some noisy little beacon,
guaranteeing that no matter what happens here on Earth,
if the sun expands or we do ourselves off
or Zika gets us all,
that there will be a record of humanity's accomplishments out there.
But they would have to be able to decipher it.
They would need a Rosetta Stone from their own technology
to figure out exactly what those bits and bytes and ones and zeros say. Or we could just put everything on
an Apple phone and throw that into space and hope that they could break that. But apparently,
Apple's encryption is so strong, the FBI can't do anything about it and wants Apple to give them
access to the terrorist's phone. John, do you think that that's something that Apple should do, or do you think this is a bad precedent to set? My view on it is as follows. I simply cannot,
it is not plausible to me that the FBI and or the NSA could not get the information off of that
phone. When you look at the things that they've done, like, for example, and this was disclosed as part of the Snowden revelations, arranging to physically intercept network gear that was about to be delivered by people they wanted to surveil and putting hardware backdoors in it.
And that's disclosed that that happened now, that NSA was doing that.
I simply can't believe that they can't do that. I don't know whether they have,
but I think what's going on here is that Apple has been the nail sticking up, standing up for
their customers' privacy. And this very high profile terrorism case is being used by the FBI to pound
down that nail. And I don't think it's about what's on that phone. I think it's about
essentially forcing Apple from a PR standpoint to have to bend to compromise their customer's
security. Well, as we always say, and this year we'll see how this plays out down the road.
John, thanks for being with us today.
And the next time there's a major breakthrough in science that actually changes the world
in ways we don't quite understand yet, we'll give you a call.
Great.
Thanks for having me.
John, thank you so much.
I think I actually understood about half of what you said, John.
Thank you.
Let's back this and make it a great courses little conversation here.
Yeah. Actually, I understood. Maybe I'm just flattering myself. John is so lucid. I actually
understood everything he said. For me, that was a thrilling experience.
It's our own Richard. Right. Before we go, gentlemen, there's a couple of things.
The president, this is from the member feed, by the way, which is always bubbling with interesting topics. The president is going to skip Scalia's funeral, which I think is a rather graceless thing. Not surprising, but really? He's going to go and pay his respects privately, but he's not going to go to the funeral. Why? And he's going to pay his respects while Antonin Scalia's body lies in state in the Supreme Court building tomorrow, Friday.
He's not going to be attending the funeral.
But there's no precedent at all for presidents of the United States to attend the funerals of Supreme Court justices.
And as best I can tell, even people very close to the Scalia family.
I read a blog post by Ed Whelan who clerked for Justice Scalia and is close to the Scalia family. I read a blog post by Ed Whelan, who clerked for
Justice Scalia and is close to the family. I know this because Ed is a friend of mine.
He contributes often to National Review. And Ed Whelan wrote a piece saying,
there's no reason to blame President Obama for this. He's doing the right thing, paying his
respects. It's not as if he's trying to snub the memory or the body of work produced by Justice Scalia.
He is going to be paying his respects while the body's lying in state at the Supreme Court building.
So you know what?
For once, I'm sticking up for Barack.
Former president from NBC News, former President George W. Bush attended the funeral for Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Former President Bill Clinton attended the funerals for former Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice William Brennan.
Former Vice President Al Gore attended the funeral for Justice Thurgood Marshall.
I'm not – but when I say there's no precedent, I'm not saying presidents have never attended the funerals.
It's simply not a regular expectation.
There's no precedent.
He'd go to Castro's funeral.
He would do that. He would go to castro he'd go to castro's funeral he would he would he would maybe he might be going there we don't know he's he's heading off to cuba maybe he knows something
we don't we can only hope well okay so no no all right Rob, you'd be outraged. I just stuck up for Barack Obama. No, I'm not outraged by that. I'm really not. I mean, I i i could we'd exhaust ourselves if we had to list
all the things about brock obama we didn't like so i i'm i'm tending to pick my battles they have
to be sort of all the way into the end zone for me to um you're a racist you really are because
you're discounting the action because it's the action of an african-american if he was white
you'd care he's's just a racist.
But so apparently are we all.
Over at Breitbart, they're talking about how Pope Francis is railing against capitalism once again.
Great.
Thanks.
Now everybody's beating up on it because it really hasn't done much for humanity except cause nothing but horrible pits of misery into which people, oddly enough, continue to stream. What we were just talking about a little while ago here in our little private chat, that
Pope Francis is saying that Donald Trump can't be a real Christian because he wants a wall
and it is therefore a Christian obligation to open up the borders to anybody who wants
to come here.
Ricochet member Richard Fulmer says everything that needs to be said here.
Pope Francis is railing against the evils of capitalism.
At the same time, the Pope is demanding that America let in more immigrants desperately
trying to reach the capitalist hellhole that is the US and escape the workers' paradises
in the socialist South.
Listen, I'm a Catholic.
I hope I am faithful to the pope in – as he performs the duties of his office, bloviating on economics about which he himself has admitted he knows almost – he knows very little I think was the phrase he used, views on economics than he does to those of – to the Pope's views on plumbing or gravitational waves.
It's just not within the papal expertise, so to speak.
So I'm with Richard Fulmer.
Peter, I hate to do this but I have to ask –
The Episcopalian.
Now that I've stuck up for Barack Obama and attacked the pope, Rob's going to switch.
This is amazing.
Go ahead.
I'm enjoying this because I'm reading this from the Wall Street Journal.
It was updated about 10 minutes ago.
In Rome, Pope Francis said the use of contraception could be justified in regions hit by the Zika virus.
There will be a correction within 24 hours.
Okay.
All right.
This is another one of the cardinal in the press office is going to have to
clean up.
The Pope does it again.
There will be an official correction within 24 hours.
But do you believe that that's actually what he said?
It wouldn't surprise me if he did.
I don't think.
No.
Yes.
Okay.
Listen,
I'm not talking about Catholic He was contrary to Catholic doctrine,
so yes is probably what he said.
This is the middle of Lent,
and every question you ask
is getting me deep.
Rob Long just added 10,000 years
to my time in purgatory.
Thanks, Buster.
Well, what did you give up for Lent?
That was my question, yeah.
Common sense?
Yeah.
Oh, that was...
Oh!
I'm on the floor.
Okay.
All right, with that,
from the master of comedy, professionally speaking, we're going to have to.
What would you give up, Rob?
If you had to give up something, we'll leave you.
Well, listen, I'm Episcopalian.
I know.
I know.
But if you had to give up something, what would you give up?
I would give up.
Well, I'm giving up a cup.
I'm both giving up something and I'm trying to draw something near because you can do that in the Episcopalian faith.
You can say, oh, I want to draw something near, which is gratitude. I like to be more grateful as a person.
And what I'm giving up is – well, I'm not doing a very good job of it, but I'm trying to give up bread.
I was going to say that.
I knew you were going to say that.
Absolutely.
Because of your love of bread and your tortured relationship with it.
When you describe the croissants that you have sometimes in New York,
I can just tell it's a deep psychological attachment.
Shadow properly, and it's just weird that you pull them.
They're kind of pulley and taffy-like.
It's so delicious.
Exactly.
Well, I would give up what?
Hope for the future of the republic, I guess, because sometimes you just have to wallow
in despair before you climb out of your trench again and face the Gatling guns on the other side.
But of course, that's the rest of the season here. And Ben's point about the not being a
brokered convention is interesting because Hugh Hewitt is convinced that there will be a brokered
convention. And he's dying for it, as should we all, really,
just for the sheer political theater.
And what that means exactly, well, it's not in the convention.
It's not in the Constitution.
But there are lots of things that are.
And if you want to learn more about the Constitution
or just bring yourself up to speed or just start from ground zero,
the first words of it, go to the greatcourses,
greatcourses.com slash ricochet,
and you will find that I'm reading from last week's ad
copy what you actually want to do is go to hillsdale.edu and oh and yet he don't edit
don't edit that out just don't because that's on you pal anyway uh hillsdale.edu slash ricochet
i believe is where you'll learn about the Constitution, Constitution 101.
And, of course, casper.com, same coupon code, ricochet, will get you $50 off your first Casper,
and you will never regret a moment that you spend on the Casper from the first time you sink into it until the morning that you get up refreshed.
Thank you for listening to us, everybody.
It's been wide-ranging, scientific, fascinating.
Peter, Rob, it's been great, and we'll see everybody at the comments at Ricochet 2.0. Next week.
Next week, fellas.
Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world.
Don't be afraid
to try the greatest sport around.
Catch a wave.
Catch a wave.
Those who don't try
have to put it down. Catch away. Not just a bit, cause it's been going on so long
Catch away, catch away
They said it wouldn't last too long
They'll eat their words with a fork and spoon
And watch them, they'll hit the road
And I'll be surfing soon
And when they catch away
They'll be sitting on top of the world.
Ricochet.
Join the conversation. Thank you.