The Ricochet Podcast - Destiny, Demos and Graphics

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

It's a trip around the world on this week's Ricochet Podcast. Our guide is AEI's Nick Eberstadt. He keeps up with all the little details that are often overlooked by prognosticating pundits. How do China's age distribution and Russia's health profile for young men hinder their ambitions? Are we in a position to sway India to the West? What other friend prospects are out there? He has answers to all the questions most of us have never thought to ask. And optimism, too! The guys also talk about the Dutch and their farms and the French and their grèves. Plus, just when you thought we could all agree that TikTok is the worst, our hosts find some finer points to quibble about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's important to know these things, I guess, or so I keep telling myself. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new action. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. Even if they've never been on TikTok, your trackers are embedded in sites across the web.

TikTok surveils us all. And the Chinese Communist Party is able to use this as a tool to manipulate America as a whole. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks, and today we talk to Nick Eberstadt about demographics, Russia, China. What's next? Let's have ourselves a podcast. We never get bored! Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 635. Why don't you join us at Ricochet.com?

Go there now. Take a look, and you're going to find the site you've been waiting for all your life. It's been there for decades, two decades, stretching into the mists of history and hopefully going on into the years to come because people like you will join. And also joining me now, me being James Lallix here in Minneapolis, Rob Long in New York, I presume, and Peter Robinson in California. Gentlemen, welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Here we are coming to the end of the month, close to it. April spring beckons and the glorious site of a bipartisanship agreement on TikTok. On TikTok. On TikTok. Of all things, the CEO appeared on Thursday before the House Energy, well, Energy and Commerce Committee,

to perhaps fend off a regulatory crackdown, however that may take form, shape. They may have to spin it off into the Texas project, I think it's called. They may have to be more transparent about whether or not they're actually in cahoots with the people who are putting Uyghurs in camps. If you saw any of that, gentlemen, what did you think of it and are you heartened or dismayed i know rob doesn't think that tiktok should be banned at all he thinks that's a bridge too far so well i mean i well i guess what i what i feel like is that it's um it's a lot of theater i'm not sure i know what it's supposed to do i'm not not sure that TikTok collects any information about Americans that Amazon and Google and Facebook and all those things don't. I mean, before you go any far, can you tell me one critical difference between TikTok and those companies you just

mentioned? Well, yeah, I mean, TikTok is, you know, TikTok reports to the Communist Party of China. Right. It's also a huge american hedge fund zone giant pieces of it depending on how you look at it the data is the date where the data is kept is look look i think that being more careful about where our data is is probably a good idea but the idea that it that amongst all the threats that are a threat in america and american sovereignty today that we should be i think wasting our time with the trivial triviality of tiktok is kind of silly tiktok is dangerous to american children because social media is dangerous to american children american iqs are going down not up for the first time ever and um so but i i wouldn't i wouldn't say tiktok is uniquely more dangerous than instagram

or uh or snapchat um or twitter for that matter i mean as somebody who i mean i'm familiar with all of them i'm not a big fan of them i guess instagram i like because i'm old but uh the the actual you i mean to be quite honest the the the supervision on tiktok is better than the supervision on twitter twitter is a pornography delivery device that's what it does now it's porn you don't see porn on tiktok um there are words you can't say on TikTok. So, we have to be careful about, I mean, look, I hate the Chinese too, but be careful. My answer to Brother Rob is this, nice try. The distinction is that TikTok reports by means that are difficult to outline because the Chinese want them to be difficult. It reports to China. It's owned in one way or another, the ultimate authority is China, and the ultimate authority in China is the Chinese Communist Party. And fools that they are,

they proved it by announcing just before the hearings were to begin, I believe the day before the hearings were to begin, that they, the Chinese Communist Party, would oppose a forced sale of TikTok, meaning they feel it's theirs. Okay. I found yesterday heartening. You can say, and you are right, that there are worse problems addressing the country, facing the country, but it's a sloppy democracy. Democracy is always sloppy. One of the rare areas of agreement, one of the real bipartisan places of agreement is that everybody now recognizes that China is a threat. Cold War II has now begun in Ukraine. It's an old-fashioned proxy war in one way. Ukraine is our proxy. Russia is now China's proxy. This has gotten

serious. Nancy Pelosi, I will give you a long list of charges against Nancy Pelosi, but she is opposed to China. She visited Taiwan to put a thumb in the eye of the Chinese. And Nancy Pelosi's Democratic Party recuses TikTok as a danger. And because there's a lot of theater, of course, it's half ignorant and so forth. But because there is a bipartisan consensus on this dan crenshaw thanked the ceo of tiktok for bringing congress together legislation of some kind is very likely to come out of this i think so uh china's bad it's really dangerous and if the way of standing up to china

involves a great deal of silliness so be it okay i agree with most of that except that my concern is that it it doesn't it doesn't go beyond the silly and the window dressing our entanglements with china are so deep and so complicated and so dangerous and i agree with you about the danger that to focus on a social media application which by the way doesn't have that much data that's useful to the chinese isn't right now a purchasing platform unlike instagram um seems like we're gonna exhaust ourselves the way people in congress often do with a trivial matter and not get into the deeper stuff like the the continuing number of american businesses that do business in china the continuing dependence on chinese capital the continuing dependence on chinese electronics and component manufacturing or the hearing that was taking place at almost the same

time in a different hearing room on the defense budget which is clearly inadequate the defense budget is the usual little increment over this over well you spent last year's vast sums and uh there sat the secretary of defense and the chairman of the chief saying no no no no this is plenty for china for standing up to china no problem that's serious i agree that's serious and it wasn't being taken seriously well and that's just defense i what i mean are the the commercial entanglements that American business and American commerce has right now. And it seems to me that, you know, there's a certain amount of that. That's why I don't I'm not arguing that TikTok is not a threat in any way. I actually feel like TikTok is more of a threat as it's because it's part of a social media tendency, which has been dangerous and has been, you you know kind of cretinizing a lot of

americans but i'm more concerned with what with how we get financial um large financial institutions including insurance companies electronics component manufacturing um um uh virus and medical research facilities and how we disentangle commercially from china i don't see a path to standing up to china to um to holding it back from its ambition to be the regional hegemon as they say i don't see a path to do that as long as we are this enmeshed with them economically. That is the difference between Cold War I and Cold War II. You have hearings like this in order to sort of set the stage for introducing more people to the idea of unmeshing. There's already a lot of people who post-pandemic were thinking about, wait a minute, okay, I've been coasting along on this nice, gauzy, warm,

humid breeze for all of these years, thinking that we get involved with China, they liberalize, they get rich, they're not commies anymore. I mean, they're really not commies anymore. They call themselves commies, but come on, with all that commerce and all that money and all those skyscrapers, it can't be commies. And eventually everybody's going to get along because they need us and we need them and we got some cheap goods and that's great and they're getting richer and all. Well, it doesn't work anymore for a variety of reasons, as I think we're going to get along because they need us and we need them and we got some cheap goods and that's great. And they're getting richer and all. Well, it doesn't work anymore for a variety of reasons, as I think we're going to hear in the rest of this show. So a lot of people post pandemic all of a sudden had a twig snap in their brain and say, wait a minute, this is not working out for us. All of a sudden, they were the guys who sent this thing here, whether inadvertently or not.

I think it was inadvertently. They're the guys who lied about it. They're the guys who made it probably with funding from our enmeshment here. They're the guys who bought up all the PPP. They're the guy. Oh, wait a minute. Can we maybe not? Can we maybe start making some stuff ourselves? And that's no longer a small little crazy atom floating around in the body politic. I think a lot of people are looking to reshore or to reposition. People are happy when we find that, oh, they're building in India, they're building in Vietnam. That's

good. Let's have some more of that because China is not our friend. So what do you do then to amplify that idea amongst the people who pay a lot of attention? Maybe you show them exactly what this little thing in their hands is doing. And I agree with Rob. The problem is not TikTok as much as it is the cretinization, great word, of what social media has done. Every time that you see a mob of youth in a McDonald's or a Target or a shopping mall start to attack somebody, half the people are landing the blows and the other half have their cameras up, black mirror style, holding it to get it, to put it on WorldStar, to put it on TikTok, to immortalize this great moment of mob violence in order to get it to put it on world star to put it on tiktok to to

immortalize this great moment of mob violence in order to get themselves clicks right the these people are lost that generation that part that that element of society is lost so i don't think you can train them to think that this is all until they grow up and realize that maybe this isn't a way that you behave. But something that says this device in your hand is doing something to you. Snapchat. Yeah, I don't know you, Snapchat. Twitter. Porn delivery devices.

It depends who you follow. It doesn't pop up in my feed. I get mostly news and the rest of it. No, no. I'm just talking about the aggregate media delivery on Twitter. But TikTok is different in the sense that, is there a TikTok in China? No, there isn't. They have a completely different separate app for that, and it has different algorithms, and it has different instructional purposes.

It glorifies people who go to school and learn their lessons and learn math and the rest of it and stills into them, you know, Middle Kingdom superiority. The one that they got for us seems to have an algorithm in it that services the craziest stuff. And so we keep having this feedback loop of insanity that keeps amplifying until the more and more you get jaded more and more and more and more with this little destructive device that preaches nothing essentially but pranking and antisocial behavior. And I mean, yes, there's all the other things that people use TikTok for, but is it a societal destabilization device at its worst? Yeah. And if you'd gone back 40 years and said, I predict a future in which a communist nation will put into the hands of our youths a glowing glass rectangle that will break down their social ability and will be powerless to stop it. It would have been paranoid, cold-wearing nonsense. But now we kind of shrug and say, eh, what are you going to do? And besides, we have

bigger problems. We can walk and chew gum. We can separate TikTok from its Chinese elements, do something about what it amplifies in the name of providing an alternative to people that isn't this bread and circuses in the palm of their hand nonsense that is cretinized that's not going to happen if we get rid of tiktok right i mean bread and circuses is snapchat i mean snapchat's an american company and it's just as just just as addictive and just as weird and just as all those things they're they're a little friendlier they don't have an entanglement with the chai comms and i understand that is an issue but um and i and i'm not even arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about it i'm just we should arguing that there are other there are other the device that you're looking at this software on is the to me is a bigger wait let

me finish is a bigger problem than the software that you're using. The device is manufactured in China, in Chinese factories. That is, to me, a higher priority. How do we get phones in our hands that don't rely on economic dealings with the Chinese? That's a very difficult problem. Scott Cooke is working on that problem. Yes. He's working on that problem because he knows that sentiment in this country...

Tim. I beg your pardon. Yeah. Tim Cook is working on that problem because he knows that sentiment in this country has shifted, and he will have had the television on in his office in the background yesterday, and he'll be thinking to himself, well, maybe we better move out of China a little faster. By the way, my favorite summary statement on all this, Professor Jennifer Lind at Dartmouth tweeted, proving that a brilliant professor can use

Twitter. It's on TikTok, Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth. it's a tough issue to be sure. On the one hand, TikTok shares user data with an AI superpower rival. And on the other hand, it wrecks kids' brains. It's both. I wanted to agree with Rob when he was going off. I wasn't trying to cut in to disagree. I was cutting in to agree because yes, the problem is the device in our hands. But actually, I wasn't thinking of it as being where it's from and where the materials come from and who builds it. I'm thinking about the actual existential nature, the device itself. I love my phone. I love being connected to every single piece of information in human history. I love getting all of my music.

I love my movies. I love the way it tells me how I can get home and whether or not there's traffic. Everything about it, I love the way it tells me how I can get home and whether or not there's traffic. Everything about it, I love. But the fact is, is that it is a portal also to madness and sociopathy and disconnecting from all of the traditional elements of society that have bound us together for many millennia. The problem is that people want what is coming through it. If there is a channel, if there's an app that shows nothing but disembowelings and decapitations, I don't want to watch that. I'm not going to watch that.

I'm just not. In the same sense that if you put a pile of guns and drugs in the middle of an Amish community, they're not going to start killing each other and getting high. The culture that people bring to the thing is the problem. And we have a culture that has the guardrails peeled off, that had the stop sticks removed, the speed bumps shaved down, and now there is an absolute complete race to the bottom that everybody's enjoying for likes and lulls and clicks. And that's the problem. The problem is the culture of the people who come to this device in the first place.

Not the device itself, not where it's made, not the app. The problem is the culture in the people who are making things worse. Oh man, do I feel old, but I don't actually, I don't feel old. You know, and the thing is I've been working out. I've been watching my diet. I feel pretty good. But the question is, you know, you do all these things to extend your lifespan. What's the point if you feel old? Well, the point is, is that it is possible, you might say, to extend the lifespan and feel younger. Can you do that? Well, according to a Harvard scientist, the Nobel Prize winning breakthrough, absolutely it's possible. How?

Well, by lengthening your telomeres. Your telomeres. They protect your DNA and they play a critical role in the aging process. But many of us struggle with shortening telomeres thanks to stress and unhealthy food and obesity and more. That's why we recommend Youth Switch. Youth Switch is an all-natural, doctor-approved, and manufactured right here in America. It contains a potent blend of adaptogens that promote healthier telomeres and longer lifespans, boosts energy, and can support regeneration of healthy organ systems as well. You can try Youth Switch for yourself risk-free today.

And you will also receive a free bottle of Ageless Brain as a bonus. It's a great product to help you improve your focus and your memory and your mood. You'll also receive four bonus e-books to boost every aspect of your health and longevity. Go to YouthSwitchMD.com slash ricochet to claim your supply of youth switch and all five bonus gifts. That's youthswitchmd.com slash ricochet to order youth switch today. And we thank youth switch for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Nicholas Eberstadt. He holds the Henry Wendt chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He's the author of Russia's peacetime demographic crisis and the book Men Without Work, America's Invisible Crisis. And he's

written extensively on demographics and economic development throughout the world. Welcome, Nick. Well, we had Xi and Putin meet today. Each country faces their own demographic crisis for different reasons. China's suffering and war will suffer, some say, the catastrophic fallout of the one-child policy, while Russia has got a lot of men who get drunk and don't reproduce, and they're slaughtering huge numbers of their future generation in a pointless war. So pick one of those, whichever you wish to discuss first, and tell us what the situation really is demographically for the other countries we seem to be facing and squaring off against. The older's choice. It's a no-limits alliance with a lot of demographic limits, right? So in Russia, the biggest problem is the paradox of high education, low human capital. They've got a Europe-style education profile, lots of time trapped in classrooms, but they've got a health profile for young men that looks kind of like the

country of Haiti. It's not even third world. It would be unfair to say it's a third world profile because a third world would object. And that's apart from the casualties they're suffering in ukraine apart from the casualties they they have casualties do not improve the they've they've figured out that you don't need to have uh starvation and communicable disease to die prematurely they do it through injury and through vodka, cardiovascular disease. So they're punching way below their weight economically because they've got this kleptocracy which smothers the value of human resources. And part of, I think, what's been going on for the last two decades with the Kremlin, with Putin's Kremlin, is trying to engage in increasingly risky behavior, getting away with it to compensate for this down-glide path. And, you know, it works until it doesn't. And now we're kind of seeing what happens when it may not work anymore.

And China, Nick, your piece in the Wall Street Journal, I've lost track now, about 10 days or so ago, in which you argued that, of course, you repeated the figures on China, the demographic collapse in China, not collapse, but the shrinking of the Chinese population. But you argued in a way I had never seen before, that it poses a particular problem for China because of the traditional Chinese family. Could you draw that out? Sure. Well, I mean, the current circumstance with the birth drop, and you could call it a collapse over the last six years, because I think that tells us that there's something really snaky going on there. But that's for a moment or two from now. I've done some homework with a friend and colleague of mine at Penn State, a really good

demographer named Ashton Verdery. And we've kind of, we've projected out, we've modeled out what happens to the Chinese family in the decades immediately ahead. And the reason that you haven't seen anything on this before, Peter, is because, you know, demographers like economists are like dogs with a dog dish, right? If there aren't any data, they don't play with the data. And no government in the world collects information on family structure. You know, censuses were started in, you know, the Mediterranean and in East Asia to mobilize military manpower and to tax people. So it's all headcounts and households. We went through and simulated what had actually happened with families in China over the past century and where things

look like they're going. And it makes all of the headcount stuff look a lot more acute and makes it look a lot more pessimistic. There's a collapse of extended family, and you can say collapse. It's like a roller coaster ride down, and there's no way to stop it. And it's also a tilt towards taking care of old people. There'll be more parents to look after for middle-aged people than children. And China, if I understand the argument, I'm going to bring my ignorance to bear on your genius, Nick, here. I'm going to try to layer my own questioning, your piece with my attempt to understand it. In Chinese society, historically, it's a little bit like Italy in the sense that you have centuries in which the government is never really to have been trusted.

And so the family, networks of family, extended families, this has been the network of trust that has permitted economic activity to take place. Your great uncle knows somebody's grandfather. You're in Shanghai, but the great uncle's in Singapore. Therefore, we can do business together. And China is particularly dependent as compared with Northern Europe and the United States where we have a different structure, different, more trustworthy government historically. China is particularly dependent for its economic vitality on the extended family. Have I got that roughly correct? Not roughly, you put it perfectly. I mean, that's absolutely perfect. Did you hear that, James?

Well, it's near perfect. It's been the social safety net since before the time of Confucius. It's also been the economic springboard during good times because you can borrow money or get help from your extended family. And if you don't have an extended family, who are you going to call? And I'm sorry, one more question, if I may, and over to Rob and James. I'm feeling greedy with you here, Nick, but the dramatic economic growth in China of the last three, three and a half decades in which we've seen figures vary, but some hundreds of millions of people lifted out of really dire poverty.

And that took place, this is a multiple choice question with only two choices, that took place, A, because the Communist Party of China discovered a new form of government that would prompt and encourage and foster economic growth, and the communists did it. Or, B, because the Communist Party of China had the wit to get out of the way and permit the traditional Chinese extended families to get to work making use of 20th, then 20th, and early 21st century technology. The government did it or the government got out of the way? That's a tough one. How long do we have? Until Rob can't stand it and wants to jump in. There's a trick. That was a trick question because they got the benefit of something that they had no right to profit from,

which was an explosion in kin that happened unbeknownst to anybody, thanks to improvements in health before the one-child policy kicked in and, you know, generations got smaller. China had a kin explosion after the death of Mao. Between, like, basically the death of Mao in about 2010, there was a proliferation of cousins, uncles, aunts, sibs, and this is because infant mortality stopped. It's because mortality and survival improved. So they'd been born in the past, but now they got to live to, you know, youth, middle age, old age. And one of the, I think, hugely important, we haven't seen this, we stumbled on this ourselves doing this homework. But in retrospect, it looks like one of the really important things, not just in China, but in the rest of East Asia, in the so-called

economic miracles, was the explosion of family ties. You know, there's just a lot more family to rely on. And that's been overlooked by almost all economists and sociologists who've looked at this fantastic economic rise. Hey, Nick, thanks for joining us. So if I could just talk about America for a minute, because it seems to me, this is how old I am, that I remember a certain optimism, despite the fact that, you know, a bajillion, gajillion years, China has been a place where people buy things and not sell things. In fact, that's been the conflict with China since the beginning, right? They wouldn't buy anything we had, so we made them buy opium. And then with Russia, we thought when the soviet union collapsed you thought well they've tried

everything else so maybe they'll actually have a democracy it'll be wobbly one but they'll have one well we we learned the lesson there and the the two kind of optimistic american maybe now naive seeming naive theories were one trade engagement economic engagement is gonna solve china's problems like china's they're gonna figure there they want to make money they're gonna they're gonna figure it out they're not going to be a trouble in our they're friendly this is the friendly despot right i mean you know we even created panda you know the whole panda we people thought of china as an interesting place the way they would never have thought, they would never have said going to, you know, some kind of despotic dictatorship

had the same kind of benign benefit. And people sort of expected that Russia, having tried everything else, would kind of like settle into a European groove of some kind of, you know, messy parliamentary whatever. But it'd be all great you know this is incredibly crude caricature but the end of history right that we could see the future and the future was going to be pretty good so now we have at this crossroads we have we have the very strange thing where the china and russia uh agreeing not agreeing so much was the president she goes to moscow he kind of fleeces putin who needs him desperately putin gives away the store including an enormous amount of uh of chinese autonomy in a region that the chinese and russians have been

fighting about for a thousand years which is you know the the far eastern part of russia um but it looks like they're making um they're making separate deals and they kind of think the two of us can make a go of this so what are we left with as americans are we are we to say well you what? Turns out capitalism isn't such a great solution after all. Free trade isn't such a great solution after all. Maybe a little economic isolationism would be useful. I mean, what do we do now that the old shibboleths are i think disproved well well rob first of all what we're left with is we're left with all of the good parts of the world i mean this is like this is like losers club and uh you know i i know which team i want to be on boy if i take a look at the if i take a look at the human resources there uh i mean the the idea that this is going to displace the U.S. or the West is kind of a laugh riot.

I mean, my friend and colleague at American Enterprise Institute, the always prescient Derek Scissors, China economy expert, about 15 years ago did a very detailed calculation to figure out the exact date when China surpasses the United States economy. And the date is never, right? So we're now seeing kind of what peak China and declining Russia look like. They can be very, very, very unpleasant and dangerous, even though they're not going to surpass us. I have a sick fascination with North Korea, whose GNP is zero. But North Korea can cause a lot of trouble with a zero GNP. So countries with real GNPs, if they're revisionist states can be a lot of trouble. What we ought to have learned during the, in retrospect, embarrassing post-Cold War era, this kind of sleepwalker, dreamland, three lost decades of strategic thinking, is that our bet on China, which was not unreasonable in the 70s and early 80s, didn't pan out. We thought that really we could not just enrich China, but liberalize the CCP and get a friend. And we've been way too slow to wake up to this, in part

because we've got a new threat that we didn't have from the Soviet Union, which is all of the vulnerabilities that have been created by economic integration into our economy with a power run by the, with the economy run by the CCP. So the CCP can attempt to manipulate the United States from inside in a way that the Soaps never could have done because they were a nothing burger in international trade. So what you mean is TikTok? TikToks, look at the NBA. Look at Disney. This is just in the cultural candy part of the discussion. Groveling to the CCP about this stuff. Complaining about Governor DeSantis, but at the same time doing whatever president she tells them to do. That is exactly the posture.

And preemptively negotiating against themselves to try to curry favor. I mean, it's called kowtowing yeah okay so speaking of kowtowing which i believe is uh is it a i think it's a hindu word or maybe that brings me to another so put on our kissinger hat you know big strategy big thing right um so often wrong but it's i i'm given to it but never less than interesting never less than interesting it feels to me like there is one big giant country that's an economic engine a total mess the world's most populous quasi-democracy india and it is once again a race to see who what side they're going to be on because if they decide you know what actually you know our traditional allegiance you know

the traditional certainly since independence to the to their neighbor to the north in russia um how important is it now for us to say all right it's the west and the democracies plus india are they should we be looking at that i guess is what i'm trying to say is that would that be the kissinger strategy oh i think absolutely we want to find as much as much friendship with India as we can get away with hey Nick I'm the one who asked the good questions we don't don't give him don't give him a school star you know it's like what do they say there's something about silver and gold the new ones keep the old yeah exactly really are old I mean they're kind of like declining and, you know, declining in terms of headcount and getting very old. They need more from us than

they did in the past because of that. We should be on the, I mean, America's Got Talent should also be in international relations, right? We should be looking for new friends, Vietnam, India. I have the crazy idea that after the current unpleasantness in Tehran, we may have an alliance with Iran in the future. What? Say that again? Just repeat those very same words. What? I have this funny idea that after we get over the temporary unpleasantness with Tehran that we've had since 79, that we may have a beautiful friendship in the future with Iran. When they get a new government. Yeah. Right.

Oh, okay. Not until change. They need a tiny change in management first. Well, brick-wise, we're casting about for others. What about Brazil? Often touted, as the saying, we're casting it out for others. What about Brazil? As the saying goes, the greatest country that never was. Always on the edge of its potential, never reaching it. But there's hope, isn't there? Brazil could be a helpful friend. Even more than Brazil, I've got a kind of a fixation with Mexico, and I know this

is unfashionable, but I do the arithmetic. You have never been held back by fashion, Nick. Never in your long and glorious career. Go ahead. Let's hear it. Okay. If you do the numbers on Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. of A. In terms of talent, you know, Mexico's got a lot of political mess to clean up. Maybe it never will. But in terms of the raw talent, there's more educated, skilled workforce in, let's call it, NAFTA land than there is in Europe, than there is in China, than there is in China, than there is in India, any other part of the world. And our, let's not call it Fortress America, but our North American thing could turn out to be the best thing that we've ever had.

Wow. This is so fantastically counterintuitive, i like but i guess what i i'm more i mean here's my concern yeah that all sounds kind of fine it all sounds like going to work out and i can remember going to conference i can remember i think i gave a speech once i wrote something once about how everybody's right the brick BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, are going to drive innovation and prosperity and productivity in the early 21st century. And all those four countries are going to have this wonderful flourishing. And none of that happened.

I mean, even in India, which is you know a lot more the most stable of those countries it's still kind of a yeah it's a it's a it's it's got some trouble yeah right so um make make a note of that everybody by the way the moment rob formally announces a worldwide trend it evaporates oh my god it's i i'm the worst the jim my concern is that um is that uh here's my concern my concern is that there's an american attitude or i should say my attitude which is that there's a a natural law that states that things will kind of get better and that they'll get better with you, economic exchange and slow incremental movements to democracy. Not perfect, but it's going to get better.

It happens automatically. But now I'm old enough to realize that nothing happens automatically. Things happen because. economic fortress which i like or we're going to create a kind of a global idea uh to fight the newly emerging unity between russia and and china which is like china's the big brother clearly the big brother clearly pulling the strings um what do we have to do like what do we get what do we do that's not going to be automatic that's not going to be reading in a an essay in foreign policy telling us it's going to happen automatically? Well, we have to start by waking up from our

post-Cold War era dream world. You'd have thought that the invasion of Ukraine would have been enough for that, but it apparently is only, you know, we want to stay asleep. We've had this extraordinary and completely aberrant generation when there was such a surfeit of American power that we could be feckless at home and feckless internationally. And it didn't seem to, we have so much wealth and so much power we could fritter it away and think, well, you know, that isn't going to last forever. And sooner or later, there's going to be a call for grown-ups. And, you know, it would be nice to have a couple of them around. You know, you take a look at people like the late, great George Schultz that you had out at Hoover. I mean, where's the next one of those

guys going to come from? We need them. We need grownups. Hey, Nick, here's my closing question for now. You have such a fascinating mind, however, that I intend to go after you again and again and again. Nick and I did a show, An Uncommon Knowledge, on what to anybody other than nick the open your opening position naturally enough would be the demographics is the biggest bore you could possibly imagine i did a show with nick on demographics which has been viewed something like four and a half million times because nick makes nick makes things interesting. Okay, here's what, I am responding to your tone and I want to make sure that I'm hearing it right. Here's the case for pessimism. The two leading candidates

for president of the United States, one is demented and the other is nuts and they're both old. The banking system, the Fed has injected so much liquidity into the economy since 2008. Let's be honest, they have no idea how to wind this down without risking bank failures, widespread systemic failures. Out here when SVB went down last week, I guess it was two weeks ago now you'd think silicon valley would be there's so much wealth you think they'd be insulated from that old-fashioned word panic people were really scared really scared okay polarization in congress decay of the american family test scores going down and now we look at at Ukraine and World Cold War II has begun.

Ukraine is our proxy. China is using Russia as its proxy. The Chinese are tough. They're smart. They're willing to use artificial intelligence to monitor their people in a way that the KGB could never even have dreamt of. Things are really looking bad. You mentioned Mexico. Oh, for goodness sakes, you've got AMLO, Lopez Obrador, the current president who is dismantling the one non-corrupt institution in Mexico, which was the election bureau. I've heard arguments that the Mexican Navy is also non-corrupt because it spends most of its time at sea, but there he is dismantling the one non-corrupt piece of Mexico. Things are terrible and we're losing.

And then Nick Eberstadt comes on and says, well, you know, I can't have a soft spot for Mexico. Well, you know, China, Russia, the idea that they could take us. Are you serious? You really are pretty cheerful about the prospects is that correct we can uh we can always screw it up I mean sometimes we're good at that but but we have so many cards in our hands we don't understand how much advantage we have some of our adversaries do I mean mean, we are living through a very curious

time. We've had three decades, a long spate of, I think, what in retrospect will be seen as subpar political leadership, both red and blue. I don't know why it's been so poor the last three decades. Somebody will explain it sometime. With a little bit of leadership in the United States, things would look real different, just the way they looked real different when we went from 1979 to 1983. This is just, I could kiss you. This is such a lovely way to go into the weekend, Nick. What I said is easy, right? We just need, you know, it's like being in a column. Assume good leadership, right?

Right, right. Assume a ladder. Yeah, Nick, you're right. You're absolutely right. A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a Mexican bar talking to a bunch. Yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a Mexican bar talking to a bunch of Canadians and within my range of vision

were 400 people from India, Indian immigrants who'd come to America and everybody was marinating in the same identical cultural broth with its own differences and having a great time.

So if it's possible in that Mexican resort, by God, we can make it happen on the international global stage. Or so I'd like to think. So much more to talk to you about, including the domestic ramifications of what our Labor Force Participation Act is. But that'll be the next time we talk to you, which we hope is soon.

Horseback. Thank Nick for force you. Well, then we're going to get you on the calendar right now because it's great to talk to you. And also, as Peter notes, heading into the weekend, the idea of carrying a kernel of optimism in one's breast as you flounced. It's been a long time. Madness. We love it. Nicholas Eberstadt, thank you for joining us for the book, Men Without Work and Russia's Peacetime Demographic Crisis. Buy them, read them, learn.

Talk to you again. And say hello to the other genius under your roof, Mrs. Mary Eberstadt. I'm planning to have lunch with her today. I'll pass on your good wishes. Please do. Please do. All the best. Thank you, guys. Have a good weekend. Thank you. Have a good weekend. And now it's Rob Long to tell you why Ricochet is not just some cyber thing, as they used to say. I love this. I bought a shirt on Amazon the other day, and the color was cyber lime, which was really bright.

I hadn't seen cyber as an exciting intensifier used since the 90s, when it was one of those words that they just sprinkled everywhere. You know that cyber cafe? George Foreman's cyber grill, because it had a little bondy blue plastic thing on it uh but cybernetically that is not the extent to which ricochet is confined no yes it operates in the real world right yeah we are telling you to get out of the matrix and uh come and and visit for real um the best one of the best parts about being a member of ricochet is that you can come to meetups and they are fun and we have some coming up.

So, just to let you know, I think less than a month from now, three weeks from now, maybe, three and a half weeks, New Orleans. New Orleans, it'll be the French Quarter Fest. It's April 14th through the 17th. Come

and say hi. Well, there's a schedule on the site. Go find it. If you're not a member, please join. And then come to New Orleans. French Quarter Fest is really lots of fun. New Orleans, this is a perfect, perfect time to come to visit New Orleans. It's warm.

It's tropical. You feel like it's summer already. And I'll be there. I'm going to be there. And I think others will be there. I think Charlie Cook's going to be there. I'm going to be there and I think others will be there. I think Charlie Cook's going to be there. I don't know. I can't commit to that, but I think he's going to be there. He and I

are texting back and forth trying to figure out when I'm going to be there. 14th to the 17th, sign up. Get yourself there. Flickr is doing a meetup on April 22nd, so a few days later, in Stillwater minnesota which is um i don't know up there somewhere or um yeah it's it's and then it's to the to the left

of me at the moment to the left of you well everything's to the left of you james um and then of course uh in winston-salem and we're talking about one in mid-july so um come to those uh but it's also possible they they do not work for you in terms of location or timing here's the solution join ricochet and have one on just announce that you're going to have one and you will find ricochet members will be right there um ready to uh ready to meet. So one of the best things about the internet is that you get to meet people in real life. And that is one of the greatest parts of Ricochet as well.

Winston always reminds me of the jingle, you know, Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. And there was actually a debate, a national debate about the bad grammar. I'm trying to think of the last time we had a grammatical, you know, a grammar-related debate in this country about such things. It goes back to what I was saying before about how low we fall. But, you know, always hope. Always green shoots, all the rest.

Even if you have to look to other countries. The Dutch, of course, the Dutch Farmer Party, which does not want to have all their farms shut down for global warming, staged a remarkable electoral victory. That's good. Many have France. And we're not sure how exactly are we supposed to think about France, gentlemen, because as little as possible, a lot of people are saying, well, Macron has no choice. He's going to raise the retirement age. And those French who don't want to work in the first place are all getting upset about this and burning. Just repeat what's going on.

He's raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. Right. In a country where it's already illegal to work more than 40 hours a week. Right. And the result of this, Rob? Riots. Riots. Garbage strikes.

What they call manifestations up and down. It's like a national grève. Yeah, that's what a strike is, a grève, because you have a grief. I was in a shop once. This is a long time ago. This is kind of why I love the

French. They're so dramatic. Suddenly, there was a manifestation of students down the street down the boulevard and it was like loud and noisy and so we kind of went into the shop and kind of like just like what what them pass and they pass they're shouting things and everything and i couldn't really see the sign so i asked the lady like what are the uh well you know pourquoi le greve you know what's the reason and uh and she kind of shrugged that great gallop shrug and she's like you know the students she said the french students are protesting because of course the for the uncertainty of

the future well yeah well that's the literally definition of the future lady like i don't know what how could you possibly satisfy an angry mob when their argument is make the future more certain um the the the interesting thing about france is in in french politics is that um and macron may be wrong i mean he has passed this this is already the this is french law he can do that he did it um but his calculation is that france is still france and people like to um they like the screaming to happen after the change has occurred the screaming and the yelling is very important part of uh french politics so there was a study of a poll i i read as a while ago so it may have changed but the poll was basically you know 95 of all French people think, obviously we're going to have to raise the retirement age.

They're good at math there. The high school baccalaureate is actually very, very good at math. But not now. That was their argument. But not now. So 95% of people think we're going to have to raise the retirement age. 95% of people are like, but not now raise the the retirement age you know 95 people like but not now um and that cross figuring that you'll do it they'll protest they'll be garbage in the

streets of paris for the next you know week or two and then you know everybody will just yeah it's done now um it's a very un-American attitude, right? The Americans like to argue and fuss and fight and complain and bitterly debate before they actually enact legislation. In France, they do it, you know, because when they know something's inevitable, that doesn't mean they're going to be happy about it. So that's, again— There's this curious thing, too, that we hear all the time about the Arab street. We have to worry about the Arab street. We have to worry about the Arab street. When in fact, the only country in which politics really truly do take place in the street is France. Yeah, right. Since 1789, the street has actually mattered.

But also remember, I think very emotionally you know a hugely emotionally uh uh deep identification with farms and farming and even if it you kind of roll your eyes at it a little bit um it's really part of the national identity and they don't want these farms to go and it's yeah the france profondeur in the holland they don't they don't want these farms to go. And it's, yeah, the France Profonde are in Holland. They don't. All of that reclaimed land is where they grow the tulips and the potatoes and the stuff, right? It's really important. when you start to um outsource that to brussels to the eu um they're gonna there's gonna be trouble there really is gonna be trouble i mean all of the global warming all the climate change stuff is coming from brussels and um there's you know i mean they may meekly acquiesce but there is a shiny you know whatever happens in ukraine it be – we're hearing a lot about, well, the thing to do about Ukraine is make it a member of the EU. It will take years and years of negotiations before Ukraine is ever permitted to join the EU for precisely that reason.

Ukraine is an enormous agricultural country. If they let it inside the EU, it places pressure on French farmers. And the farmers are one of the most powerful interest groups in the European Union political structure. Anyway, just a little observation there. We've numbed James. It's interesting, though, how this appears domestically. I'm seeing a lot of people who are looking at what's going on in France on the right and saying, finally, the people are standing up to their WEF masters. I hear that a lot. And they're cheering them on as though they think that the end result of this is somehow Macron slumps out in shame and a new government of the people is installed, which worked out so well for France in 1789. And then you have the people on the left who are cheering this on because anything that sort of results in street fires and people protesting and the rest of it is automatically good if it happens in Europe by the right people. Now, if they were agitating for lesser government or for some social or

cultural or ethnic thing that the left did not approve. This would be fascism, of course, and we'd be very worried about it, but they're not. So what's funny is the idea somehow that the youth in France at the age of 2022, the ones that Rob was referring to, will go and burn things on behalf of 62-year-olds who might have to work a little bit more. I find that a remarkable piece of cross-generational solidarity. Or they just like the fun of destroying things. And I think it's probably the latter, of just getting out and starting the fires and participating in a long-standing French tradition.

Why? As Rob, I'm sure, knows, and Peter, too, it's interesting to walk in some old areas of Paris, and there's a bullet hole right there from 1848 that you can put your finger through because, you know, the commune got here and had a beef about this, etc., etc. So, yeah, Rob's right. It'll burn over, and the change will be made, and people will continue to. It's remarkable. I will end with this. If I were French, I'd be retired by now. I can't possibly imagine what I would do with my—well, I mean, I know what I by now. I can't possibly imagine what I would do with my, well, I mean, I know what I do. I would continue to write. I would continue to do what I do now. I just wouldn't be paid for it. I wouldn't have a place to go. It's bad to identify as your job

because then you end up at the end of your life stripped of your identity and you become a bit useless. My father lived to the age of 93 because he was still involved in the business that he built. And for some people, it's good to hang it up and do the things that you want to do. But the idea somehow that I would be lesser, my life would be less happy if I were retired, boggles the mind. And the people who in France, who want, you know, what are they doing? Are these people in the civil service who want to shuffle this off as quickly as possible so they can just sit in the cafe and smoke the galois and the rest of it? I don't know. But I'm happy that I'm permitted to do what I do for as long as I do. Right.

No, I think that's true. in our office is a monument to a columnist who died at about the age of a hundred and he was putting it out until the day now towards the end, when he had to do a radio interview, they would walk him downstairs. They take him around the corner. They turn him around and they'd give him a little push in the direction of the radio station. And there would be somebody the other end of the block who would lead him and find him to receive him, right. And there would be somebody at the other end of the block who would lead him and find him. To receive him? To receive him, right. And there would be somebody there to take him up and do the rest of it. Well, I mean, Peter, you remember Herb Cain, right?

Herb Cain. Herb Cain is that guy. Yes, Herb Cain is that guy. 90-something? Yes, he used to write about having his regular deliveries of vitamin V, vitamin V for vodka, deep into his 90s. And I remember Mark Stein once told me about an editorial meeting at The Telegraph in which they were talking about Princess Diana and the scandal. And at the far end of the table, Bill Deeds, then in his 90s, spoke up and said, well, that's not quite the way,

the approach we took during the abdication crisis. Right. So, James, when are you going to retire? Never? I never. I have absolutely no intention of retiring whatsoever. I'm already one of the longest running columnists in the paper. I don't want to start a long conversation because we've been on for an hour, but don't you guys, ancient as we are, don't you have the feeling that there are things that you're only just now figuring out?

That there are aspects of your ways of approaching certain writing? I know Rob is taking on a new project, podcasting project. I feel as though there's still more to learn. And that I'm only just now figuring certain things out. No? There's always more to learn. There's never a day where you can't find out something that you didn't know before. There's never a day that isn't benefited by taking one random fact or one picture from a newspaper

or one little clip that you got from a 1950 magazine and exploring it and looking at it and going on Wikipedia and linking and linking until you're spiraling down that rabbit hole and you dump out at the other end of it. And you realize, oh my gosh, the reason that the Burbank City Hall was designed by this guy who also did a series of other beautiful schools in California. And look at that one there. It's the Lou Hoover Elementary School. Who is Lou Hoover? Lou Hoover happened to be the wife of Herbert. And Lou Hoover was the one who made it possible for the wife of the first black congressman to come to a tea at the White House. And that was a big scandal. And look at this article here that was written about it in 1929 by who by james kilgallen kilgall james kilgallen is his wait a minute is his daughter dorothy his daughter

is dorothy let's type this on youtube oh my gosh there's a what's my line where they're all blindfolded and dorothy kilgallen is actually trying to figure out the identity of her father it's tremendous and there's bennett surf and my gosh, he says something, too. And what a wonderful thing I just learned. I didn't know any of this before. Wow. The architect, the meaning of the reliefs in the Burbank City Hall, the fact that the Priest-T scandal actually happened,

how newspapers responded to it in 1929, which is fascinating because the sort of institutional racism you might expect is not evident in a lot of Southern papers. All of these things took about an hour and enhanced my day. Now, when I write about them, I'll learn something new about the craft of writing because I'm a big deal this year about getting rid of semicolons, period. As Victor Borge would say, this podcast was brought to you by Youth Switch. Please support them for supporting us, and that's great. If you could leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, that would be great. Which is the exclamation point, I think, that Victor Borge did. That's right.

Reviews allow new listeners to discover us, and that helps keep this show going. If you're interested more in the T scandal, the DePriest scandal, James Kilgallen, and all that stuff, you will be able to find that next week at lilacs.com on Thursday. I'll see you there, but of course, we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 and I say 4.0 while I can. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas.

Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.