The Ricochet Podcast - Dilbert Speaks

Episode Date: August 10, 2017

In our continuing effort to bring as much ideological balance to the flagship podcast, today we bring you Bill Bennett, host of The Bill Bennett Show (conveniently available right on this site) sitting in the Long Chair®. You’d think that would be enough, that we wouldn’t need to go even further in our quest to feature all sides of the movement. But no! We go even further with this week’s guest... Source

I am. I have four hours of sleep and two pots of coffee in me. Pray for me. Three, two, one. We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. We could obviously throw North Korea with our arsenals. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Rob's not here,

but we've got Bill Bennett in his stead, and Scott Adams from Dilbert is our guest. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 364. It's brought to you by the fine people at Casper Mattresses. You can try Casper for 100 nights risk-free in your own home. If you don't like it, they'll pick it up and refund you everything, but you won't want to give it away. Go to casper.com slash ricochet and use ricochet as your own home. If you don't like it, they'll pick it up and refund you everything, but you won't want to give it away.

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you're listening to this podcast but you're not a member you're only getting half the ricochet experience there's the member feed there's all sorts of wonderful stuff there who cares about contributors like me writing stuff on the front page no the real interesting stuff is from the members and there's also a special podcast listener tier for half the price that'll get you interested in commenting. You might think you never want to, but you know what? Once you jump in and you find that you're among like-minded people, a diversity of opinion, and a code of conduct that keeps things from devolving into the morass of junk that is YouTube comment pages, you'll realize that Ricochet is an invaluable place on the internet and you'll want to keep it around. So Ricochet.com, go there, sign up, toss a few shekels our way. Well, we welcome this week, of course, Bob Long. Bob Long. I'm going to

call him that from now on. Bob Long, who has abandoned us for work. I guess he's got some television show that he has to do. But who cares? We've got Bill Bennett. Bill Bennett is the former Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, the first drug czar under President George H.W. Bush. He's written and co-authored more than 25 books, including two New York Times number one bestsellers, one of them being The Book of Virtues,

one of the most successful books of the 90s. His latest book is Tried by Fire, the story of Christianity's first thousand years, and it's also become a bestseller. His three-volume set on the history of the United States, entitled America, The Last Best Hope, has been widely praised and adopted for use in schools around the country. The New York Times previously named Dr. Bennett the leading spokesman of the traditional values wing of the Republican Party. And you might know some of that or all of that because you listen to Bill on the radio or on his podcast, but it just bears mentioning again all the accomplishments he has.

And we thank him for joining us here on the Flagship Podcast. Hey, Bill. Hey, how are you guys? Good to be with you. And Peter, of course. Peter, hello, Peter. Welcome back. Hello, hello, Peter. Welcome back. Hello, hello. My old friend Bill Bennett, in 1984, as Ronald Reagan was preparing to run for re-election, the polls showed that all of a sudden, since inflation was under control, the economy was growing again, the economy was dropping down the polls in importance, and education was rising.

And I got the job of writing an education speech. So I got in touch with the Secretary of Education, who was not Bill Bennett yet, and the Secretary of Education sent over a draft he had dictated that was only semi-literate at best. And I then scurried around the administration for somebody who actually knew something about education and was literate, and that led me to Bill Bennett. And we had a couple of breakfasts and a few long phone calls, and I got that speech through just fine thanks to my friend Bill. Pleasure to be working again, Bill, three generations later. Thank you.

So it was breakfast, food, coffee? It wasn't scotch or something else? No, no. Fine. Inspiration? Falsehood? Exactly. It's great to be with you again, too. Those were good days. Good days, my goodness. Inspiration. Exactly. It's great to be with you again, too.

Those were good days. Good days, my goodness. They were. Bill? Yeah. Okay, so your books have been overwhelmingly about domestic policy, about under civic virtue, about virtue itself, the Book of Virtues. Let me change the subject completely. How worried do you reckon we should be about North Korea?

There's a fat little lunatic in North Korea running the country. And then Donald Trump has plenty of people here mighty unnerved after apparently ad-libbing the other day that if North Korea threatened us anymore, we would respond with fire and fury unlike any the world has ever seen. Are you nervous? No, I'm not particularly. I'm sleeping as well as apparently they're sleeping in Guam. I heard the governor and the national security guy over there saying, everybody's still at the beach, we don't have a gas shortage, and the supermarkets are as usual.

Maybe this is because people don't think this guy can actually hit it right that's a you know that's a small target in the big ocean right but i but i don't mean to be you know uh sarcastic about this so overly skeptical we got to take it seriously um and as uh donald trump said in 1999 i on Fox last night, they were playing this tape. You know, keep kicking the can down the road with this guy. So I found the statements consistent. I know that a lot of the cable media is playing up the difference between Tillerson and Trump. You know, one was a subjunctive, if then, you know. And he said, then you'll be met with this.

But Tillerson said, sleep well. I mean, I have total confidence in the U.S. capability. The worry isn't the heart of the worry or the obstacle or the problem is that this is a hostage situation and South Korea is the hostage. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I think so. So, Bill, as I said a moment ago, you and I have known each other for a good long time now. We have friends.

I'll name Bill Kristol. I'll name George Will, who have become hard, never Trumpers. And what do you say to them? Well, I used to be a – I won't name all the people, but I used to be a part of a group called the Pariah Lunch Club. A certain group of conservatives regarded as pariahs. I was thrown out of the Pariah Lunch Club. What happens when you're thrown out of the Pariah Lunch Club? What are you?

This is like degrees of alienation. Get out your camu. But, you know, I don't know. I've had this discussion with Bill, and then we sort of gave it up. I've had to thin out my Rolodex. I don't I don't know what got what got into people. But, boy, they are dead set against ever changing their mind. There is no datum that can occur, no action the president can take, no speech he can give, including Poland, that will turn anybody. And so

I just kind of shrug my shoulders, shake my head. I don't get it. I really just don't get it. And you still live in Washington most of the time, don't you? Yeah, we are official legal residents of North Carolina, but we hear a lot. I'm on the road a fair amount, too. Okay. So what I wanted to ask, i was chatting with our again an old friend of both of ours haley barber not too long ago yeah and haley said he'd spent most of his professional life aside from eight years as governor in washington for the last four decades and i've been in california for a good long time now so i've missed this i just wanted to check my what i saw and i

was visiting washington and i said haley i i've only been here three days, but I've never seen anything like this. That is to say, two-thirds of the town hates Donald Trump from the left, and about a third of the town hates him from the right. Yeah. No, it's extraordinary. You're right, Peter. I have not seen anything like this either. It's intense. People will stop you on the street. I mean, this doesn't happen a lot, but someone stopped me on the street. I was walking back from the fitness center and said, I just want to tell you, I don't ever want to talk to you again.

I said, have we ever talked before? He said, no. But I don't ever want to talk to you. I just think that your support of Trump is just totally offensive, and I just want nothing to do with you. It's gratuitous and impolite and all those other things, but it's very intense. That's the way it is.

A good friend, a famous guy, I won't say his name, wrote to me and said, and this is somebody whose work is very controversial. I've defended him on many occasions. He wrote to me and said, I appreciate your defense of me in the past, but I think it's best that we not communicate for four years or, God forbid, eight years. Let's just put the friendship on hold. What the heck is that all about? See, the worrisome thing bill is that

you've written some very thick books and when people start to throw them at you you know it's not you know if you'd written pamphlets it would be easier no they're heavy they're heavy like i actually the book of course the book of virtues which you mentioned people say how could you you know you're the author of this book how could you defend this guy i said because i want to save the country i think he's got a much better shot saving the country than hillary clinton for sure you know the thing is it's i mean i have friends who are trump supporters and i was not a trump uh guy and we're still friends because we don't make this a binary manichean thing where you have to cast out the other person and i i wonder if eventually i I mean,

I don't think that a lot of minds were changed by the sight of an inflatable duck with a Trump haircut staring down the White House, okay? I think that kind of shenanigans probably doesn't do a lot. But eventually there's an exhaustion that sets in. The more energy that you devote to hating Donald Trump and to castigating the people who support him for whatever reason, the more it takes out of you. I mean, some people may find personal validation and be energized by it,

but the eventual cost of carrying around that coal of misery in your heart does not make for a happy society. Yeah, it was Oscar Wilde, wasn't it, who said cynicism corrodes. I think that kind of intense hatred corrodes too. It eats up your energy for sure. Who's got time for it? Who's got room for it? Bill, the question about the book of virtues

is a reasonable question. So let me just, it's been a long time since we had a chance to chat. Let me just ask you a few of these questions. I'm sure you've answered. I know you've answered them. But the book of virtues, a virtue is fidelity a virtuous fidelity in

marriage donald trump has been married repeatedly and brags about his his affairs outside marriage a virtuous self-discipline the man seems to surrender to impulse after impulse after impulse in other words he doesn't nobody's saying he has to be have Augustan Reserve of George Washington, but this really, the personal virtues seem almost non-existent. How do you cope with that argument? Well, there are some virtues. There's certainly perseverance. There's tenacity. There's a certain ability to go with the long run.

I mean, I think the guy's indefatigable, works very hard. No, I mean, he shows up low on the virtue scale, but so do we all. You know, one of the worst misunderstandings of that book was people said, oh, you think you're virtuous, that's why you wrote the book. No, no, no, I didn't write it out of excess. I wrote it out of need, you know, for aspiring sinful creature myself. Of course, I prefer sins right out there where i can see him you know rather than requiring a criminal inquiry and grand juries are all over the place uh and with trump's they're sure they're sure out there but you know so what i mean

what is uh what is said of antony and antony cleop, his taints and virtues waged equal with him. You know, maybe on some of the personal virtues that outweighs or the vices outweigh the virtues. My choice was binary, use your word. Right. And it was an easy, very easy choice for me. And look, let's, you know, let's talk about issues. Let's talk about the issues that, you know, animated his campaign, the border and ISIS and jobs and employment. Not so bad on those three fronts right now, I'd say. Illegal immigration is down some 70%.

Right. Stock market is up. The economy grew in the second quarter about 100% more than it grew in the first quarter. We went from one point something or other to two point something or other. Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court. There you go. He is? Okay.

That was enough for me. Yeah, that's enough. And don't forget the other one because General Mattis says, Secretary Mattis says, annihilate. That's the verb he uses before using ISIS. That's correct. At the end of Barack Obama's term of office, ISIS still held thousands of square miles of territory. They were the ones who wanted to caliphate. They were the ones who insisted on territory.

The amount of territory that ISIS holds now, zero. When Mosul fell, that was the end of it. The single best thing he's done, though? You're asking me the single best thing he's done? Yes, please. Pest up the White House Correspondents Dinner. I just think that is the greatest thing. That is, you talk about, you should have been in Washington for that. They were reeling. They just couldn't stop talking about it. I think the word went out in the newsrooms, stop talking about it on TV.ica doesn't know what the hell you're talking about

but their feelings were hurt so badly i just thought it was great i got better things to do what's the line from uh from uh uh uh not titus and acoria lanus uh there's a world elsewhere there's a better place i can go. And that's where he went. Better place. Off of Melania somewhere, I think. That's bound to be a better place. Bill, on this show, you should feel free to attribute everything to Hamlet.

And you can skate by on that. No problem at all. I'm not making this up. So one more... So one more question. I think we have a guest... You guys used to call me. Peggy Noonan used to call me and say think we have a guest. You guys used to call me. Peggy Noonan used to call me and say, we need a quote.

We need something out of somewhere like 14th century. You're our guy. I said, I'm not that old. So, okay. So Trump has certain virtues, certain virtues. Sure. But we just went through the list. He's been effective he's got this under

this administration a number of important things have changed his ratings are 33 percent 33 34 percent why is that what i don't know you get i don't know i don't know because people want more done because uh you know i i because all they're hearing is this negative stuff. I watched most of it. Most of my day, I have a TV on all the time, most times on Fox, but I go all over MSNBC and CNN. All they could do all day was just psychoanalyze him on Fire and Fury and just play it over and over and over again

so that just by repetition, if you weren't scandalized by the words, by seeing it so many times, you think, my God, this is a madman. He keeps repeating this over and over again while they keep running the spool, rewinding the spool and running it over and over again. So, you know, there's some of that. But that doesn't mean a darn thing. Peter, you know better than I.

Before George Bush's second run, what was his favorability six months before? Eighty-seven percent, was it? That's right. Actually, it crossed 90 percent. It crossed 90 percent. Yeah. And it may be how they answer the question. It may be what the question is exactly.

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Casper.com slash ricochet. And we thank them for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and by the way i only had four hours of sleep because i had to get up very early and do something i didn't want to do um and i will be going back to that bed as soon as possible this is something that should wake me up and you too talk about a guest scott adams creator writer artist behind dilbert the long-running cartoon strip appearing in 2,000 newspapers around the world and one of my longtime favorites. Prior to that, he worked in a bank, and he worked at Pac Bell.

He's also a best-selling author, and his blogs and Periscope videos have become the go-to content if you want to understand the Trump era. Sort of reinvented himself in a curious fashion in front of all of us, and it was a delight and interesting thing to see. Welcome, Scott Adams. Scott, James Lallix here in Minneapolis. fashion in front of all of us and it was a delight and interesting thing to see welcome scott adams scott james lalix here in minneapolis uh you know some republicans and conservatives have trouble with trump bill crystal george will rob long myself uh we weren't persuaded by the master persuader so my question for you is twofold one why weren't we persuaded and two what is your

advice to such people well one of the signs of what I call a master persuader, someone who is unusually persuasive, is that that person creates deep enemies as well as deep allies. So it's common for people who are persuasive to have a lot of enemies. And part of the reason is that if that persuasion triggers somebody's cognitive dissonance, they're going to have to justify a reason for being on the other side. And sometimes that reason is, my God, this person is a monster.

He's Hitler. He's crazy on the inside, even though we don't see much on the outside. So it is normal and expected and completely predictable that someone who is extra persuasive would also be extra hated. Now, the game with politics is you've got to move, let's say, maybe 5% of the public. And if you're running for president, you've got two years to do that. So moving 5% of the public is going to make you president.

So persuasion is not about getting everybody. It's about getting enough i understand that working for the democrats who believe that he was hitler slash musolini slash every worst thing in the world you can imagine but a lot of people who were not on his side and formed their opinion of him during the primaries or for that matter for watching the guy for 30 years it wasn't a matter of demonizing him. It was finding very specific sets of his character and his behavior that they found not completely outside of the norm, but just objectionable enough in the American political stream. So are these people malleable?

Can they be brought on board, is what I'm asking. I'm one of those guys who's waiting to be persuaded if the evidence is sufficient well if i understand the criticisms from the people who are trying to be rational and they're doing a good job of it and they're saying to themselves you know look at this full picture of president trump and i find when i look at this full picture a whole bunch of problems things which i wish were not the case, things which every reasonable person would agree are not optimal. Now, the problem is we didn't really get a choice of a President Trump with all the good stuff without the bad stuff.

Nobody offered that option to us. So we had a choice of somebody who is good and outweighed his negatives versus the other options, you know, Hillary Clinton, for example. And I would say that time will tell you whether his persuasion and his intentions for the country, his big-picture intentions, are the right ones. I mean, in a year or so, we'll have a pretty good idea

how this is starting to shape up. And if, for example, he has some progress on North Korea, which I predict he will, and if, let's say, by June of next year, there's something that looks like improvement in health care, and then we're talking about maybe some tax breaks for business, suddenly it's going to look like he was unusually effective, even when you thought he wasn't. Because remember, there's this big fog of war still, and the anti-Trumpers are creating just a lot of smoke that is telling you, my God, with all this smoke,

something's got to be on fire. But if the smoke clears and all you have is better health care and you're a little safer in terms of North Korea, maybe a couple of other things, you're going to say in terms of north korea maybe a couple other things you're going to say to yourself oh i guess i i guess i overreacted he was effective hey scott peter robinson here pleasure to be speaking again something like 40 hours ago the president of the united states apparently speaking extemporaneously said that if korea threatened the united states again or more quote they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen, close quote. And as Bill Bennett remarked, Bill Bennett, who's on the line, remarked just a moment ago,

that was all the cable news networks played all day, have been playing for the 40 hours since. That loop over and over and over again. And he sounds deranged. The general take is that's the kind of overheated, threatening, bellicose rhetoric you'd expect from the North Koreans, not from the President of the United States. All I know about Scott Adams is that he's about to give us a take that's completely different from that. Your take, Scott? Well, first of all, keep in mind that I often describe what we're seeing as

two movies that are playing on one screen. We're all sitting in the same theater, but we're watching different movies. And that's especially clear in this case. Because it turns out that what would look like a crazy person saying irresponsible things is almost identical to what a really good negotiator would be doing in this case.

Because the unpredictability, the threatening nature of it is useful for getting people to the negotiating table. So if North Korea believes that it's just more talk and we say stuff like, we reserve all of our options. All options are on the table. That's not very scary, and it doesn't get you to the negotiating table. But if you say, hey, North Korea, why don't you imagine fury, which suggests we're not entirely rational, and fire, which you can actually physically imagine that you can visualize it. You can actually feel the heat on your body. So when somebody talks in terms of visual persuasion like that, that is, first of all, not an accident. He does that intentionally and consistently.

And now North Korea is thinking to themselves, we have a president that we can't predict, and he's making us think about burning to death and fire. That is qualitatively different than what you've seen before. At the same time, if you were a master negotiator, and that's my thesis here, you would see a good cop, bad cop thing developing. And you would see, for example, Rex Tillerson saying diplomatic things that sound completely reasonable and like we want to talk. That would give North Korea the contrast, because in persuasion, you want to set the biggest contrast you can between what's good and what's bad,

because you want them to choose what's good. And now they can understand, well, there's a Tillerson option where talking looks like it could be productive, at least if we get that guy involved. And then there's a Trump option, which is if we make him mad enough, bad things are going to happen. Now, consider also that a big part of persuasion is doing this thing called pacing and leading, which is essentially matching the person you negotiated with in some obvious way. In this case, President Trump has matched them in terms of the way they talk about this. This is actually deeply important for persuasion because he's becoming them so he's becoming them so that they kind of get him and understand him a little bit.

Cause their, their deal is acting irrational when in fact they're rational, I believe. And so he's now matched them on that. And he's also done something I think is terribly important. If you, if you look at the blank space here, if you look at the canvas and don't,

don't just look at the painting, but look at the part that the artist decided to leave blank. President Trump is the most famous and prolific personal insulter of all time. There's nobody in the profession of comedians who have ever been more known for insulting people who are on their wrong side. He has chosen, in this case, not to do that. He is treating them as a legitimate, military, important, respectable foe. This is also terribly important to bring them to the negotiating table, because they'd like to go as a peer.

And in the past, I think the pacing has has always been, or that the position has always been, you know, we're a monster, you're a bug, come to the table so we can squash you. He's saying, we've got two big militaries, nobody's doubting ours is bigger, but we fully respect your military, let's come to the table. That's a whole different proposition. So I think what you're seeing in all of this is exactly what it should look like prior to both sides deciding we better talk before we all go up in a fireball. Scott, let me bring in our friend Bill Bennett. Bill, you've spent four decades mostly in Washington, D.C. now.

Did you ever think you would hear such cogent analysis from a professional cartoonist in Northern California? Yeah, no, but I'm kind of used to it because I read Scott. And, yeah, a couple things. Why the 5%? Why did you say 5%? Only I need to persuade 5%. Well, I'm just saying that no matter who's running on the Democrat or Republican side, they're going to get about half the country.

These people just vote their party. Oh, I got you. It's that 5% in the middle. I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Michael. That's all that matters.

Remember that piece, Michael Barone's piece way back when, but it still stands the 47% nation. Remember, it's 47 here, 47 there, and there's your six or your five in the middle. I was saying, you talked about other things, Scott. I was saying before you came on that, and then I want to end this with a question, that the things I picked up in the campaign were the border, destroy ISIS, and improve the economy. And there's a pretty good record on that already, but not that that gets reported. How much does it help him that, you know, MSNBC, CNN, these guys just won't give him credit for anything. If he says good morning, they'll say he's crazy. How much does that help him, the piling on? Well, I'll tell you, they've trapped themselves in a corner

because they've created this situation where they've lowered the expectations to such a degree that if he gets just a couple of notable wins, it's going to look like a pattern. And I don't think they see the trap that they've set for themselves. You know, I noticed this. I don't know if you guys noticed this. After the speech in Poland, the immediate reaction was, that was a really great speech. Holy smokes.

How did he do that? And then the next day they had time to analyze it. They said, no, really, it was a bad speech. Well, Peter, you're the speech guy it really was a bad speech well it was peter you're the you're the speech guy that was a great speech right oh they they they criticized him for defending western civilization which of course was a not a dog whistle but a megaphone shout out to every alt-right maniac out there about white people and what they've done to the world that's what they were when we were working for reagan did we do anything but argue that time

exactly that's exactly in fact that i i heard that thing and i immediately thought reagan s what what did you do what did you do there the central question of our time is whether the west has the will to defend itself one kidding one that's a very powerful formulation two it's true it's true suddenly donald unambiguously stood for something big and powerful and important right scott let's scott let me ask you a question about that go on no i was just going to say that uh in terms of persuasion there there are few things that are more powerful than clarity and simplicity and even even President Trump's biggest critics will give him that, except they attribute it to his low intellect.

Whereas there's some amount of this doing the right thing over a long period of time in terms of persuasion, doing the right kind of framing and such, that it's just going to be too hard to ignore eventually. Can I ask, Scott? Go ahead. No, I just wanted to ask, Scott, because you said something earlier, Peter. Do people exhaust themselves on beating up on Trump and finally just resign or give up?

It gets quieter. Or can this go on for four years or eight? Oh, I think it can go on for four years. And I think that the line of attack will keep changing. So what I predicted, let's see, I guess it was back at the end of last year or so before inauguration, I said that the story arc we're about to watch

is that on inauguration day, the anti-Trumpers will think that they had elected literally somebody who has Hitler-like qualities, like actual dictator Hitler kind of stuff. And that with a lack of supporting evidence, after a few months, people

would say, okay, okay, we might have been a little excited about this Hitler thing. It's not a Hitler, but he's not doing it right. He's incompetent. And we saw that transformation from Hitler, Hitler, dancing in the streets in protest. Well, we're worried he's not quite as competent and smart as we hoped he was. So now he's chaotic and all that.

And then I had predicted that by end of summer, and of course you have to allow that he's new on the job, right? So it's not going to be smooth the first few months, nor did anybody elect him with that expectation. We expected somebody to go in and break some stuff and demolition is the first phase. So now that he's got General Kelly in as chief of staff, I think you're going to see the turn to something that looks effective, even if the other side doesn't like

the things he's doing. So I think that's the next phase is, oh my god, he is getting a lot done, he is effective, but we don't always agree with the choices. Let's talk about inadvertent adverse persuasion. Donald Trump, you know what he says. He says it fairly plainly and a lot of people react poorly because they don't like the tonality they don't like the words that he uses and sometimes a lot of his tweets are borderline yeah but the left seems unaware of how hectoring and lecturing and condescending it becomes. I was listening to National Public Radio today, and however many guests they have, the men all talk and have uptalk, all of them.

They all sound insecure and very smart and from D.C. and always asking for approval. And then when the women come on, they all have a fry in their voice, and they all have the uptick as well. And you get this – you have a very clear picture of the milieu in which these people from which these people were were produced they don't seem to get that by constantly putting out articles telling us that you know the the moral history of air conditioning and why it's bad your hamburger is killing the planet you shouldn't have cats and dogs you shouldn't have more than one child all of this stuff comes to this scolding betterment project that they have for us, which pushes, I think, a lot of people over to somebody like Trump,

who they may not agree with, but are pretty sure that there's a shared pool of values there that are more tied to the American exceptionalist tradition. Does the left know that its tone is inadvertently adverse persuading? I think that they probably are not aware of it because people can't really see themselves as others see them. But if we're being fair, I think a lot of Trump supporters just scare the pants off of these people. And that's real, too.

So if you're talking about, gosh, why can't these people stop scolding and turning people off, that's a fair statement about some percentage of the people on that side. But it is fair to say there are plenty of Trump supporters who are just plain scary and that when you, the way I look at these things is everybody's trying to argue what's fair, what's good for the country, you know, what makes a better world. But it's all fake because these are power struggles trying to argue what's fair, what's good for the country, what makes a better world, but it's all fake because these are power struggles at the base. If I'm a woman, how do I make the world better for women?

Well, I'm going to say fairness. If I'm a white guy, how do I get some power back or gain power? And you say, well, it's unfair to me now. So the fairness argument, I often say fairness is an argument for children and idiots, because there's no sense of fair in the universe. There's no law of physics that says, this is now fair. These are purely emotional, subjective things, and they're about acquiring power and safety. And safety is a big thing, right?

Part of the reason you get power is to stay safe. And they're about acquiring power and safety. And safety is a big thing, right? Part of the reason you get power is to stay safe. And there are genuine, genuine scared people on both sides who are fighting for power. And they're using the language of politics and the language of fairness to accomplish it. But if we imagine that they're trying to have, you know, actual intellectual conversations about what is right or wrong. It's just frustrating because nobody's really in that game. We're all just pretending to be in that game. Scott, one more here from Peter Robinson.

Question runs as follows. Well, for me, the big surprise, I think I understood Trump reasonably well during the campaign, but the big surprise for me has been congress that the republicans in the house the conservatives blocked health care reform health care to repeal and replace then you get to the senate and it looks as though they're going to be able to pull it together and it all falls apart all over again this time it looks as though it may have been the more the moderates blocking john mccain gives it the okay is. Is there, does Donald Trump just work, ignore Congress? Does he work around them in some ways like the way the parallel to the way Barack Obama just worked around Congress? Lots of actions the chief executive can take without Congress. Or is there some way in which Republicans in the House and Senate learn how to deal with this guy. He learns how to deal with them. What can we expect? Continued dysfunction in Congress, or will they figure it out? Well, let me say that health care is unique, and you can't really compare that to anything else Congress is going to do. And the reason it's unique is that literally no one understands it.

There's no one in Congress, I believe, who understands it on any functional level. Not anybody. And moreover, if I were to say to you, as I did on an earlier Periscope today, I'd say, can you name for me an expert who actually understands the whole field from healthcare, doctoring, patients, insurance, and economics, the key part, and government, I suppose. Who is that person? And none of us can even come up with a name.

Right. You know, you can come up with a name of somebody who knows the doctor part. Somebody who knows economics. But nobody really knows this. Barack Obama, he knew the whole thing. He apprehended it from the majesty of his mountaintop vista. So I've suggested that Congress is, in this case, the wrong tool for the job. Because really they're just going to put forth whatever the lobbyists put together for them.

And whatever they think they can sell. Because these are all the wrong incentives. I started a hashtag, peoples with an S, peoples plan health. In which I'm trying to capture some of the good ideas on health care. Let's see if we can get some type of a people-generated consensus of what components we'd like to see in an improved health care or health insurance world. Because I think we elected this populist president, and we sent him unarmed into battle because he didn't have a plan to sell and nor is it reasonable to expect that president trump would become an expert on this thing that congress hasn't become experts on in seven years it's because it's too big it's not because people

aren't trying hard enough it's not because they're lazy it's not because they're dumb it's none of those things the topic is just too big. And once you realize that and break it into its manageable chunks, such as just the question, do we let insurance companies sell across state boundaries? If you break it into chunks and get some experts who can deal with those chunks, we might be able to put something together to take to our president and say, is this something you could sell? But I don't think Congress can get us there. It's just the wrong tool for the job.

Well, you are the right tool for this particular job of helping people to understand and have a unique perspective on the Trump era. And so we thank you. And let me just say, Scott Adams, that if the president puts forward your nomination as ambassador to Elbonia, I think that the nation will strongly back it. Right. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you, Scott. All right. And from what I understand, he suffered something of a career backlash from certain quarters, as happens when people uncloak and show themselves to not be constantly intravenously taking the leftist soil and green into their system all the time. He seems okay with it, which is remarkable. But I can also imagine he gets a bit lonely. What does that mean? Somebody dropped Dilbert? No, speeches have been canceled and the rest of it.

And I imagine that, as with you, Bill, that there have been colleagues who have decided that he's to be cast out of the body. And, you know, you used to have this network, and all of a sudden parts of your network drop away for the network drops you off. But you don't have that problem at your home if you've got an Aero system. No, no, no, no, no. Aero was created to build a Wi-Fi system, okay? This is the one, this is the system that we wish we all had in our homes from the beginning, all right? A fast, reliable connection in every single room, even out to your backyard, out to your garage.

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But off in my high school daughter's room things were pretty slow and my wife is now has a new laptop and she likes to sit at the dining room table and it was very slow so son who just graduated from college here's what you do well but if you if you're me this is what you watch him do unwrap the box download the app to his ip, plug in the router, put in the three pieces, three little boxes. One is an Eero router and the other two are booster boxes or whatever they're called. Beacons. Thank you very much.

You plug one of those in in the living room. You plug one of those in a bedroom that's halfway through the house. And this whole process takes about 20 or 25 minutes. And that's including watching the YouTube video, which makes it as easy to understand. Actually, I could have done it myself with no problem at all. And does it work? It just plain works. Every computer in the house now has just like that speed.

So it works. On top of that, this is actually a not insignificant point. It's not the central point, but it's not an insignificant point. The beacons, they're actually kind of attractive devices yes it's not some ugly electronic gunky looking thing that you've got on your wall it's actually it's actually very attractive you don't mind having it let's put it this way my wife doesn't mind having these in the house but you may you may be at home saying that's great james but i live in a place that's modeled after the Palais de Versailles. I've got a lot of room.

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before we wind up. I think let's talk about, since we're talking tech, there's that famous Google memo where this guy wrote about the company and wrote about, well, from what I can tell from the reports, he wrote about how much he hates women in tech and they're stupid and should go back to being barefoot

and making sandwiches, right? Isn't that what he said? Not quite. No, no. Go, Bill. You take this one. No, I didn't read the whole thing, and I'm not an expert on it, but I did find it of interest that someone pointed out that Google couldn't hire

or couldn't keep Pope Francis, given his views. Now, I wouldn't hire Francis either, frankly. I'm a Catholic, but I have other disagreements with him. But they're disagreements of principle, not because his views are different that I'd fire him. But it seemed to me, well, obviously Donald Trump couldn't work for Google. I mean, you can't walk around doing that stuff. Not a chance. Hey, Bill, Peter here. Could I indulge myself by asking,

I actually have about three decades worth of questions I've been thinking, you know, next time. Of course, wait a minute. Of course, it's peter here who else is it going to be i just to distinguish myself from you james i flatter myself that people might confuse my voice with yours so bill three three three objects here charles murray publishes coming apart and people like us learn about the middle of the country and how particularly americans without college degrees are just separate have been left out in so many ways then we get this new book new ish book dream land about the opioid crisis what an astonishing work of journalism i get to the extent that politics enters into it his politics aren't my politics but what a work of journalism no it's how heartbreaking

and then just last night my wife and i started we watched the first couple of episodes of a new documentary series called gone about six missing women in chillicothe ohio and of course it's all drugs but what i was so struck by is not as every one of these women was a mother everyone was being raised by her grandmother her children was in turn were being raised then by a great-grandmother no fathers in the picture let alone husbands in the picture and you just get this what used to be a picture of small town or medium-sized town america chillicothe ohio uh paper mill town good decent american and it's been ravaged by drugs and family breakdown i don't know that there's a way to get at that problem that's available to any unit of government you'd care to name, state, local, or federal.

I mean, Charles Murray identifies the problem. We see it rolling through in the opioid crisis. What do we do about that? I mean, aside from fasting and prayer, what do we do? Well, there is obviously the rehabilitation of the mediating institutions. Murray talks about it in the book. But I do think there are things that all units of government can do um people we we have we have this thing wrong by the way for the most part on in the media the reporting as if it's all these doctors

overdosing their patients that's not the problem now it might have started as that not the problem now. It might have started as that. But the problem now is fentanyl, carfentanil, heroin, and it's cheap, a couple of bucks, three bucks, four bucks. You can go online and order this stuff from China directly. It'll come in a package. You can buy insurance so that if customs intercepts it, you'll get your money back. That calls for government action. Do not despair uh people regard as an article of faith that there's nothing you can do about this problem they thought so about cocaine and crack and all that not true uh 1984 1992 we reduced the scope of that problem by 50 percent in this country that is 50 percent fewer users because it was an all-hands-on-deck thing.

You remember the advertisements, you know, jumping off a diving board into an empty swimming pool. This is your brain on drugs. Advertising. The media actually helped, believe it or not, even Hollywood. Sports figures. Government was helpful. Local government was helpful. And people were mad.

They were just mad about the carnage. And they can get mad again and they better get mad again. I was over at the White House and I'm telling you this and I talked to the vice president's office and the vice president and said, you know, one of the really sad things, which you were just talking about, Peter, is if you read Hillbilly Elegy, too, you know, Kentucky, Ohio, this is Trump country. This is Trump-Pence country. You know, you see the ravages, and then you see the signs, and these are Trump people. I said, Mr. Vice President, these are your people. These are people who supported you. We've got to help them.

We've got to get out there and help them. I think the president gets this one. I really do. He lost a brother to alcoholism. And I think he gets it. And we need to marshal everything we've got on this one. We can do it. We can get better.

But the coming apart problems, how do people get religion back? How do they rediscover the family. Rediscover the value of family. You are right. All these women, all these women raising all these kids, these grandmothers raising all these kids, and where are these guys? Which, you know, somebody ought to reflect about in the light of that

Google article. Women are left holding the bag. That's one of the differences. Right, and if you

protest that societal breakdown, then you're demonizing single mothers. Then you

have to deal with a raft of essays saying my mom was single and she did

great, which may be the case, but the general point is that there are things

which are better for society than their paternities, and the general point is that there are things which are better for society than the alternatives. And intact nuclear families is one of them. My mother was a single mother, but she raised me and Bob Bennett. You've got to like one of us. You don't have to like both of us. She did have your bets there.

I never thought of it that way, but you're right. No, but Carl Zinsmeister got it right years ago. He said, yeah, you can raise children with a single-parent family. You can also raise a child in Lebanon. It's just a little harder. That's all. To deplore a general outcome is not to deplore the individuals who, blameless or not, may have been part of it.

But it's so frustrating. You have to get past that. So many of the arguments that we have today are like that. Back in the days of gay marriage, for example, when you're talking about that and whether or not adoption agencies should give primary... You had to argue about whether or not gay people could be good parents before you could even get to the other issue. And you never did because that was always the argument.

It's complex. You can't engage the argument if you can't tell the truth, if you can't speak the right terms. Can I say something about the Trump supporters? Because it made me laugh when Scott was talking because this was one of my breaks with one of my intellectual friends. You know this guy, too. I'm not going to tell you his name.

But I was saying at lunch, my my last lunch the pariah lunch group uh out of which i was thrown what happens when you're thrown out of the pariah lunch group i anyway um philosopher's puzzle um i said you're just mad because no one this guy makes his living by writing op-eds and books i said you're just mad because no one who has ever gone to a trump rally has ever read anything you've written wow oh i see why they threw you out and second i said you're just mad because no one who has ever gone to a trump rally has ever read anything you've written wow oh i see why they threw you out and second see why they threw you out i said second there is nobody who supports donald trump who you could take in a fair fight you look at those crowds and when i look at those crowds i think man these guys would be rough so these guys this is a person in in journalism because you you know what what our our official our official

motto which i think is now inscribed in some latin version on our crest of arms is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable which actually was not a motto of any journalist it came from some story and was a parody of what journalists thought. And I always argue with that with my co-workers and saying, why do we want to take people who've actually done well, got married, stayed together, worked hard, and they're comfortable? Why do they need to be afflicted exactly? Where do you go from there?

But comfortable is the word. Comfortable, if you say it three times, comfortable, comfortable, comfortable, you've just said the three most important words for getting a good night's sleep you have. And if you want the best okay if you want the best leave your life and you do you need to be comfortable and that's what the sleep you guys are smooth what's this what's this guy's plural here you don't need any sort of sort any sort of medication to get you to sleep.

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I understand you have to go. You got a busy slate. I had her you this Thursday and Peter, of course, is going to the beach for surfing, right? Still that time of the year. Of course,

never, not that time of year in California, James, are you crazy? Me surf. Well, we'd like to see you on the board with your sweater knotted around, you know,

I'm going to put on my P P H deplorable t-shirt. I've got six up. Well, we'd like to see you on the board with your sweater knotted around, you know. I'm going to put on my PhD plurable T-shirt. I've got six up. Well, when you're cast out of the pariahs, that's where you go. How many PhDs in philosophy supported Trump? I think I'm the only one. Oh, you've got to be the only one. I think so.

If there's another one with your broad listenership, if there's another one, I'd like to be in touch with you. I'm just going to say that there probably is a spate of them in the ricochet, and they ought to go right now. And if they're not members, go for that $2.50 a month tier where they can listen to the podcast and they can sign up and say, Bill Bennett, you are not alone. There are many of us. There's a multitude of you. Smooth as silk. God knows. I should have done this stuff.

I would have never gone off radio. Smooth as a bowl and branch sheet and as strong as an aero connection and as comfortable as a Casper mattress. We hope this podcast has been all those things for you. Please support those sponsors for supporting us. And, you know, give us a good review on iTunes. Help surface the show, as they say. Ben Shapiro had number two podcast after Oprah for a while. Come on. We can dethrone Ben. He's a great guy, but let's band together and knock him off. Figuratively. surface the show as they say ben shapiro at number two podcast after oprah for a while come on we can

dethrone ben he's a great guy but let's uh let's band together and knock him off uh figuratively see you in the comments bill it's been a joy peter thank you and uh we'll see you all at ricochet 3.0 thank you thank you my pleasure bye guys take care bye-bye bye Bye. Outro Music The world's of its own needs, listen to your heart, be a dummy with the retro and the reverend and the right, right. You patriotic, patriotic, slam-pipe, right, right, feeling pretty psyched. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.

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