The Ricochet Podcast - Elegy For Billy

Episode Date: April 21, 2017

We’ve got Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance here to talk about investing in startups in the midwest. We’ve got The Factor on permanent hiatus. We’ve got terrorists in France trying their best to influence an election. And we’ve got some unlikely dinner guests in the White House. What have you got? Are you a podcast listener who’s not a Ricochet member? We’ve got a special offer for you — join... Source

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. Do it live! I'll write it and we'll do it live! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lyleks. Today, our guest is the hillbillyologist J.D. Vance.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 349. If it was 350, it'd be 100 more than 250, and that's a number you're going to learn about in just a second. It's a crucial, important number. But first of all, I've got to tell you, we are brought to you by the fine people at Casper. For an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price, visit casper.com slash ricochet and use the coupon code ricochet to get a deal.

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Exciting new development always sounds so like we had a big meeting or we got news. Somebody rode quickly on a horse over the horizon. No, listen, if you are listening to Ricochet.com to do this podcast, you are already a fan of this podcast. If you're a member of Ricochet.com, we thank thank you we are pleased and honored to be members along with you if you are not a member of ricochet um i mean i've said it a million times we really need you to do it and so we're trying to do something different this is what is this is what james is referring to um uh we understand that podcast listeners are always members. So this is for you.

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one of those special guys. Wow. So good. Do that, folks, and help us go on. Gentlemen, do we have to talk about Bill O'Reilly? if you wish. So good. Do that, folks, and help us go on. Gentlemen, do we have to talk about Bill O'Reilly? No. No, we don't have to.

Alright, check that box. Rob, television guy that he is, wants to talk about Bill O'Reilly. I yield the floor. Wait, so... I'm also interested in why we don't want to talk about it. That's also interesting to me. You know what?

Hold that thought, everybody. I want everybody in the audience to collect their feelings about the future of Fox News Channel, whether or not they care about it or whether they think it's going to be how it's morphing. And we're going to get to that after we get to J.D. Vance. But other breaking news that was breaking yesterday, attack in Paris. Is that going to have an effect on the election? If you've been reading the Ricochet, you know that we have a correspondent in Paris, the estimable Claire Berlinski. And Trump says it's going to have an impact. He said the people of France will not take much more of this, will have a big effect on the presidential election. How so? How would he know? That's a very good question.

What effect is it going to have? Look, there are four candidates, each of whom might win into the second round, right? So the French, 48 hours from now, begin voting for the first round when they will narrow it down to two candidates. A couple of weeks after that, they vote on those two. Of the four candidates, everyone says could easily become the final two, three of them. It's not just Marine Le Pen and the Front National. I'm showing off, James. Your French brother-in-law isn't the only one who can say Front National. Marine Le Pen is not the only one who's called for stronger defense against terrorists. So has Fillon, the Gaullist, the center-right candidate, and so has Macron, the leftist candidate. Excuse me, the center-left candidate. There's a hard-left candidate,

a kind of Bernie Sanders and then some, who has not called for getting harder on terrorism. But so I have the feeling that Donald Trump feels that there's a certain kinship between him and Marine Le Pen. But look, if you if this rattles French people and I'm sure that every single attack rattles them, they're only human. Three of the four candidates have already committed themselves to getting much stronger on terrorism, giving the anti-terrorist police more resources and so forth. So, yeah, sure, of course it will have an effect. They're human beings. They've just had yet another shocking incident.

But can you predict which of the candidates is likely to benefit? No, I don't think you can. I agree with Peter. I also feel like this is the first time in French presidential politics when an actual conservative or close to a conservative or the version of French first conservative is is running feels is is pretty close. I mean, in the French context anyway, and it's highly likely that Marine Le Pen will come in second. I mean it will certainly be part of the runoff. That's happened before. That's not news. In terms of being tough on terrorism, the French are really tough on terrorism.

I mean they are tough. The French do not have any of our civil liberty structures they don't have any of our uh any of our traditional things that were that that conservatives rail about the united states about the the rights of the accused that's right they do not have that um they they their police and military fast right their police and military this is strange we think we tend to think of france as frankly in some ways one of the most decadent of the Western European countries and all the Europeans tend to strike us as decadent. But there's this strange contradiction that the French military is really tough, small but really tough, and the French paramilitary forces, the police, the interior are just as tough. When Britain gave up its African colonies,

the British presence evaporated. The French gave up their African colonies. The French are still in Africa. I can recall visiting Africa with then Vice President George H.W. Bush, and there in Dakar, which had an independence for what, three decades? There was one big ship in the harbor in Dakar and it was a French warship there. They still take seriously a military presence. And yeah, but you could use you could use more of them, I think, is the argument that all of the four can. Let's spendism movement in France and what Le Pen's great appeal is, is that it is an immigration problem. That's right. And it's a problem of who they're letting in, where those people are working and where they're living. And the ring around Paris of the Bonne You, which are almost entirely Muslim, all sorts of there are are all sorts of social issues that rise up. The difference between the French, I think, and the Americans in many ways, I mean, and in this way I admire them, is that they have a, they may be fanciful and decadent and have all sorts of delusions

when it comes to food and wine and, you know, extramarital affairs. They are shockingly blunt when it comes to their society and what happens in it and how to keep order in it. They don't, there aren't that many French euphemisms for immigration trouble. They don't have the spectacular language that we have created. You know, English is the richest language in the world. It's the best language that we have created you know english is the richest language in the world it's the best language but it also leads us to be able to say and think things and come up with brand new ways to describe things that are that are bananas right and the french the french language

is not that plastic the french people don't think that way i mean the French people just they find us insufferably pious and politically correct. Even French progressives find Americans politically correct because of our ability to sort of change the language around and get really mad if you use the wrong pronoun. And they get really bad. The idea that you'd have this strange pronoun problem in French is for the trans issues. It's just inconceivable because French genders, language genders, are just baked into the cake, whereas in English we don't have those. So it's all sorts of things. I can't wait until they have the same debate and people accuse, how dare you gender that chair?

Robbie, when you said that they are decadent and romantic in the central ways or was that peter you're absolutely correct but they're also there may be a certain sort of intellectual decadence when it comes to national identity and economies and economics one of claire's posts was talking about somebody who was not by any means a communist but he was listening to the i think it was macron which sounds like the name of the last boss in a Quake video game. And he found his soul to be stirred by the passionate Marseillaise-like rhetoric, and the soul of the French idea was burning in this man's words. And I'm thinking, this is nonsense. This is letting your emotions be carried away by an appeal to a concept

that itself has manifested in the last 50 years is not exactly made france this place that that vibrantly can even invent all kinds of jobs for the people who are coming along i mean you might might you find that you find that strange you find that um uh you can't relate to it you don't think that happened here um no i mean we had a certain degree of it too but there is a i mean the american identity as such is not as as as nation and uh the difference you both may know i'm agreeing with james and elaborating a little bit if i may i think this is an elaboration but it could just be all wrong so i put it to the two of you one difference

between us and them is that we have a constant debate between big government, small government, markets that are controlled and markets that are deregulated and free. In France, going back centuries, but the current Fifth Republic begins with de Gaulle, dirigisme, I think is the way they pronounce it, the notion of the strong state is absolutely wrapped up in French identity.

The notion of control of the economy, of the culture, that there are central authorities, that's just part of what it means to be French. So trying to break away from that, they don't talk about free markets in the same way we do. They talk about the Anglo-Saxon system. To them, it's not free markets. It's a foreign approach to the economy. That's a serious problem. That's a serious problem because what they certainly need is to free up their labor market, free up their markets of all kinds. And yet, that's especially hard for them. The Germans were able to do it after the Second World War.

The French have never really been able to do it. Sarkozy made a good run at it. And of course, the French took to the streets, the farmers shut down the free, right, with tractor protests. This is a very hard problem for them. The modern world, economic growth relies on free markets, and the French identity relies on a strong state. Right, and it's also wrapped up in a romantic notion of egalitarianism, even though it's a rather structured society with clear paths to power, depending on what institution you went to. And it also has a bygone notion of french power influence and and the the glory of their ideals i mean there's you ask any frenchman and i'm sure i can't blame them but they're still on the back of their mind a 19th century conception of themselves when they were the technological leaders of the world they were brilliant in math and science and literature and architecture and everything else it's hard not to live in paris and walk around and see those

past monuments and not feel as though that's something that you're still personally a part of, even though they haven't been able to build anything like that in 50 years. Rob, are you going to say? Well, I was going to just stand up for French a little bit. I mean, the de regisme of the system of France has been incredibly successful for a long time. I mean, they are facing a struggle that Americans have been facing in waves for two centuries, which is that new people coming do not have the same idea of what it means to be French as the French people who were there.

And the heart of the current French social disorder is in an inability and an unwillingness in the French part, because the French can be snobbish and closed off, to... They can? Yes, to translate the idea of what it means to be a Frenchman, what it means to be a French national, to people who were not born in France, and from whom French is not their first language. Is that possible? I mean, is that America?

It is because we're Procrustean. We're syncretic. We gather all and we make them into Americans because it's an idea. It's a creed. I'm not sure that that's possible. It seems to me that the 20th century, Europe has had this delusion

that they can turn people from other countries into Germans and French people and, you know, Dutch. When it seems to me contrary to the evidence in front of your face. Well, you know, those places are so much smaller. What we had was we had an ability to take huge numbers of populations, people from Europe, and and they would go somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Right. They would go to the Midwest when there was nothing in the Midwest, or they would go somewhere else. If you read Albion Seeds, a great book about that. And they kind of spent time developing their own weird little folkways that didn't really impinge on the nation because the nation was so big and spread out.

And that really helped. That helped get people to create – to be able to hold on to their cultural identity from europe you know so that people still wear clogs in certain places and the amish run around and there's german towns in louisville and places like that but they also became over time american the problem in france is that you have um you have a huge appetite for and a huge willingness, thanks to their post-colonial positions, to let Central Africans or Muslim from northern Sahara, Muslim Africans into France. And if you don't have a robust economy, what you have is you have people coming in and essentially not doing anything. That's right. We have a robust economy. What you have is you have people coming in and essentially not doing anything. That's right.

We have a robust economy. I don't know whether it's the chicken or the egg, but the robust economy that we have had in the past has been – I mean that is the reason why we have the illegal immigration problem that we have had in the past is because we are a growing economy and we just bring in all sorts of labor. If there's something for them to do, you can skate for 20 years as we did. When that stops being the case, bad things happen. I mean, these are not unusual problems, and they're not unlike the problems we're having, too. Exactly. I mean, you can import problems, so to speak,

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We welcome to the podcast now J.D. Vance, the author of the now indispensable autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. He grew up in the Rust Belt City of Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky. Enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and served in Iraq. A graduate of the Ohio State University and Yale Law School, he's contributed to the National Review and the New York Times. He's currently in the midst of founding his own venture capital firm to invest in startups in his native Midwest. J.D., welcome. You've got two coastal elites here. I'm James Laddickson of America, so I understand exactly, of course, where you're coming from. How are you today?

I'm good. How are you guys doing? First, we were wondering about an update about the people depicted in your book. How are they feeling about Trump right now after 100 days? Well, the sense I get from a lot of folks is that it's too early to pass any significant judgments. Some people are happy. Some people are a little frustrated. But, you know, I haven't seen nearly the swings in public opinion back home that I've seen, of course, on the public airwaves and the so-called coastal media. And I think that just goes to show that when you're not paying attention to politics minute by minute, but you're more

concerned about it week to week and month to month, the first hundred days don't seem nearly as significant. Well, let's go to the book and the foundation. You were talking about a way of making some of these small towns live and breathe again. who drives, as I know Rob does, drives through America on the small back roads will find cities that seemingly are in no position ever to return because the decay is too long, the main street habits are gone, the people have drifted away. So obviously we've got to focus. What is this foundation going to do? How is it going to target? What sort of towns is it going to target? And what do you hope to accomplish? Well, you know, my focus is not so much on fixing the problem of every single small town in the country, because I just think that would be impossible. What I do think that we can do is solve some of the most significant crises that exist in some of these areas. And so the nonprofit that I founded is heavily focused on the opioid crisis, which of course is ravaging the industrial Midwest and the Southeast.

But, you know, on the private sector side, I do think that there's a real business opportunity in the fact that you have really significant differences in regional growth curves. And when you think about, for example, that 80 percent of the venture capital goes to California, Massachusetts and New York, I don't necessarily think that 80 percent of the good business ideas are in those three states. So I think there's both an opportunity to do some good, but there's also a market arbitrage opportunity in that in that really heavy, heavy capital focus in certain regions of the country. Hey, J.D., it's Rob Long calling from California of all places. Just to drill down on what you just said, and we've got a bunch of other things I want

to talk about, but before you say that, it's true that the venture capital offices and venture capital pools are located in those places. But when you say that venture capital goes to California, it doesn't necessarily go to Californians. It goes to people who've moved to California. It doesn't necessarily go to Californians. It goes to people who've moved to California. It goes to people – California is a place where most people aren't from, aren't natives. They moved there for opportunity, which is something that Americans have been doing since the beginning of America. Sure. argument to people in slower places in the country where the economy is growing more slowly or the

economy has been based on an industry that no longer is relevant? Get up and move. Well, I think you can make that argument, but there's a mistake in treating it as an either-or proposition. So you either have to completely discourage all geographic mobility or you have to completely give up on these towns. And I don't think that either one is entirely true. Now, in some ways, the story of my life is how geographic mobility brought me in contact with a lot of good opportunities. And that's, of course, something that I'm grateful for. And I do think that we should be worried as citizens, as policymakers and so forth, we should be thinking about the fact that we have much lower rates of geographic mobility. And that's happening at a time when we have really significant regional disparities in the employment and unemployment rates. completely forgetful of the fact that though the economy, let's say, in Ohio may not be as high

powered as the economy in Silicon Valley, that there are still a lot of really good business opportunities. And so I don't think that the disparity that you see in venture capital allotment is totally justified. And the last point that I'll make about this, about this, not taking an either or approach to this problem, is if you talk to businesses, if you talk to entrepreneurs, even venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, they recognize that there may be a point of diminishing returns that we're reaching with certain areas of the country. You cannot pay a computer programmer a reasonable salary in Silicon Valley and enable that person to start a family, to buy a house. The cost of living is just so high. And so I do think that there's some broad recognition that it's not just a pure matter of numbers,

but there's actually a reason to think that you can have a better quality of life in certain areas of the country. J.D., Peter here. Peter Robinson here. Hi, Peter. I am deeply skeptical. And what that means is that I represent a marvelous opportunity for you to deploy both your skills as a businessman and your skills as a lawyer. Argue me out of it. So, J.D., come on, man. You've just spent the last couple of years of your life in venture capital in San Francisco, and you understand the ecology of venture that exists in northern california to some extent in boston to a small

extent in new york and to a smaller extent in austin and almost nowhere else that is to say law firms that understand how to do papers of incorporation very quickly and easily and they'll take a little bit of equity the the cap The VCs who understand how to help kids with business plans. The idea that you're going to go to Southern Ohio or Western Kentucky and find that and be able to create it or recreate it. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I guess, so I'm skeptical. And the question here, but I'm not skeptical if you say, well, okay, but computer programmers are just as smart in southern Ohio as they are in Silicon Valley. Fine.

But the entrepreneurs, the founders, the people who are going to create the companies are still overwhelmingly in Silicon Valley. And if they start out in southern Ohio, the first thing they do is get on a plane and fly to Silicon Valley. So I'm with you that you can certainly get a company started and you can place engineers in Ohio, of course, but actually go to Ohio to find the entrepreneurs? Well, there are a couple of responses I'd make to that, Peter. So I don't know if I'll be able to persuade you. I don't know if I'll be able to persuade you, but I'll try. So you mentioned the sort of, you know, the startup ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin, Texas. Now, 10, 15 years ago, people weren't talking about Austin as the startup hub that they are now.

You could make the same argument about Denver, Colorado, about Boulder, Colorado, where there is an incredible startup ecosystem and startup community, a lot of really successful companies that are coming out of those areas. And I think that all across the country and a lot of these sort of middle tier cities, you see the beginnings of what you saw in Austin or in Denver that existed 15 or 20 years ago. You're starting to see the beginnings of those things exist. And like I said, in some of these middle tier cities. So I do think that there is reason to think that are you going to completely recreate Silicon Valley in Cincinnati or Columbus or Atlanta, Georgia? No, absolutely not. But is there an argument that there is good capital to be put to work, that there are good entrepreneurs to invest in in these areas where you can make a good return return but also create good businesses in the process? I think the answer is yes. So the question isn't can you recreate Silicon Valley in all of these cities?

The question is are these cities undercapitalized relative to what an optimal return would look like? And I really think the answer is yes. Well, I would push back on Peter a little bit and say this, that perhaps if you got out of Silicon Valley, you would get out of the mindset that throws huge amounts of money at stupid things. There's a bubble there that we're going to disrupt the juice industry. So we're going to make the Juiciero, which is a $400 device that squeezes fruit and gives you an expensive little drink of juice. Oh, it's fantastic. I'm sure that it is. I control them with my app.

There are only 10 companies a year that are worth investing, and the trouble is nobody knows at that time which 10 it is. That's the nature of the business. You throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall. That's absolutely right, but in some, that means that putting good capital to work and having that capital go as far as possible matters a whole lot more than just where you geographically place it. Because if you're investing the same amount of capital in San Francisco versus central Ohio, you can get two shots on goal with the same exact amount of money as you have to invest in San Francisco because the rents are so high, because cost of living is so high. Can I just ask one more question? Let's hope there are prospective investors listening to you.

So are you structuring this as the way VC funds typically get structured in Silicon Valley, same sort of pay for going rate, same sort of two and 20, 10-year return? Or are you going to be more modest in the returns you're offering, the expenses you're going to be charging, and maybe have a longer time threshold? Well, so I should be clear here. And I heard at the beginning, the introduction that I was starting my own venture capital fund. I should be clear that that is not something that we're doing right now, that what we're doing right now is really building on this rise of the rest argument that Steve Case has been making with his firm Revolution.

And it's really at this point, it's primarily, first of all, a personal investment vehicle for Steve Case. He has invested a lot personally in some of the businesses. J.D., okay, if you want to put Steve Case's money in southern Ohio, that's great. Good. No, no, no. What all I'm saying is that we haven't yet settled on any sort of traditional or non-traditional fund structure for how to invest in these communities. Right now, we're just trying to make a case that there are good investments to be made.

And where that goes from there, I think, is an open question. And of course, you know, if it ever gets to the point where we're raising a traditional fund structure, then we can't talk about active fundraising. You guys should know that as well as anybody. So I would say we're just in a, we're in a very, you know, we're at a point with this effort where there's a lot of exciting stuff going on, and we haven't quite decided exactly how we're going to pursue it. I've got one other question about – so the general – I love the book. The book is great, and it reminded me a lot, I think, for a lot of people too of coming apart of the book that Charles Murray wrote.

Charles Murray how is what is happening in the areas that you've described different from what is happening in inner city African American populations communities I mean it seems kind of like it's the same song maybe played you know in a country western of like it's the same song maybe played on a country western beat, but it's the same song, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously came out with his report on the black family in the 1960s. And unfortunately, a lot of the trends that existed back then you're starting to see pop up in primarily white areas in the 80s and the 90s and 2000s.

So I do think there are a lot of similarities. The one big difference, and I think this is important to recognize, is that if you look at one of the biggest drivers of upper mobility in the United States, this is based on data by Raj Chetty at Stanford. One of the biggest drivers is the prevalence of concentrated poverty. And so in that sense, really concentrated ghettos of poverty are much worse for the prospects for poor children than sort of more spread out and more integrated poverty. And so I do think that's one difference between more rural or suburban style poverty versus the highly urban, highly concentrated. So there are differences. And of course, they're all sort of historical reasons for why one of those areas exists in the way that it does and other areas don't. And, you know, we can sort of rehash that. But I think everybody sort of appreciates that basic fact. But that said,

it is much more alike than it is different. And you're seeing so many of the same trends exist in the black community 30, 40 years ago, as you're seeing now in the white community. And I do think that it should lead us to have a really cautious approach to how we try to address these things through policy, because as we know, very many of the things that we tried in the 50s, 60s and 70s, they may have prevented material deprivation, which is, of course, an honorable and worthwhile goal. But they didn't necessarily help people get out of that cycle of multigenerational poverty. They weren't effective in that way. So do you feel a little haunted by those solutions? Because that seems to be our go-to set of solutions here.

A little bit more help, a little bit more federal aid, maybe a program or two, some kind of nonprofit, community investment act, all sorts of things. They kind of feel like we've been down this road before. And I guess what I'm concerned about is that we're going to go down it again. Well, I'm definitely haunted by it in the sense that, look, you can't look at what we've tried to do and not conclude that we've spent a lot of money and thrown a lot of money at different problems, but we haven't been nearly as successful as all of us would like. So I definitely take a certain sense of at least caution from that approach and from

the failures that we've had in the past. But I don't think the story is one of complete failure. I think that, for example, the Harlem Children's Zone, which is something that's been tried in New York City in recent in recent years, does look like the sort of program that could be especially effective. It has some early signs of success. There have been some small scale policies that seem to help the problem of complex multigengenerational poverty. I'll throw out Raj Shetty again. He did some really interesting work on the moving to opportunity study, which was done on a very small scale, but even at that small scale, looks like it had at least a decent positive impact. And the basic idea of that, for those listeners who may not be aware of the moving to opportunity study, is look, the government's already paying for housing, but instead of paying for housing in a way that collapses and cordons people off into these really intense ghettos,

let's pay for housing in a way that actually enables people to get out of those ghettos and live in different types of neighborhoods. That looks like it's had some success. So in other words, I think that we should be very cautious, but I don't think we should be totally hopeless when we start to ask ourselves, how do we solve some of these really difficult problems? J.D., Peter here. Do you realize what's happened to you? No. You've written this marvelous book. You've served in the Marine Corps. You're a graduate of Yale Law School. Ron Howard is now going to be directing a movie of hillbillyology. We'll have Rob to tell you how to handle Hollywood in a moment. But you realize, and now you and Steve Case are talking about using capitalism to do good back in hillbilly country.

And you realize you are now the man. I'm pretty sure this will last at least two decades and maybe for the rest of your life. You are the man to whom people like us are going to turn again and again and again and say, did that work? Did that work? Now tell us again who these people are. You are the great hillbilly whisperer. Yeah, that's actually I mean, ha ha ha. But at the same time, I do sort of think there's a burden on you.

You are the man who's emerged as the voice of 50 million Americans. Yeah, that's you know, you're right that it's a burden, especially in the sense that I don't think that any one person could possibly represent 50 million people and so you know to the extent that people look at me as the voice of hillbilly country or whatever you want to call it I do worry a little bit about that because I know the region very intimately and I know that it's a lot more complex in the same way that every region in the country is complex when you talk about getting 50 million people together and trying to draw broad conclusions from them but you know the way that I approach it is that I'm really interested in these problems. I'm really interested in how to actually solve them. And if the cost of having a platform and having an opportunity to try out some new things is that I have to be the spokesperson for Hillbilly Country, then i'm i'm going to try to do the best that i can with it yeah i i would be worried that if my life story was picked up by a big studio and ron howard that uh you know the way things change eventually is that you find out that it's actually

you're going to be played by chris pine and it's going to take place on mars and mama's going to here's what i've noticed though just as in the Reagan years, where all of a sudden when Ronald Reagan was president, Bruce Springsteen started singing about factory towns shutting down. Now we have this new focus again on the desiccated remains of the middle class in the small towns. And you're seeing in stories and newspapers, people are looking at what happened in the last election. We have to get out there and understand these people. So now we have these endless sociological depictions of small towns which all seem to kind of run together. And what I'm worried about is that when they're done with – when all of the newspapers have

sent out all the reporters to all of these towns and written these tales, they will regard somehow the movie that comes out as an apotheosis of the necessary amount of concern that has to be given to these people. And after this, there will be a Democrat and we'll forget about these people again for another eight years until. So how does one keep the focus on this? Or are these people going to demand the focus through their continual electoral decisions. Yeah, well, I think that people will definitely demand that some focus is placed. And so there's always, of course, a tendency to look at some of these issues as cyclical as we're seeing something now that we just saw 20 or 30 years ago. But I do think that the level of despair, the level of social problems, the mortality

rates, all of these statistics that we talk about have gone in such a negative direction that the frustrations aren't totally cyclical in the sense that we're not just seeing the same show that we've seen in the past. I do think that these people are going to continue to make their voices felt in good ways and bad ways, frankly, because often political frustration doesn't necessarily lead to the right outcome. And I think we're going to be sort of faced with this question of how do we make the American dream something that applies to a broader part of the population than it does right now? Because that is clear, right? In the 1940s, many more people could expect that

their children would live a better life than is true for the children who are born today. And I think that so long as that continues to be a problem, and I unfortunately suspect it will be a problem for the foreseeable future, we're going to continue to have the political frustrations of this particular population be a part of the conversation. J.D. Vance, thanks for coming by. I hope to talk to you after the movie comes out, and maybe when you're done revitalizing Ohio, wander on over to North Dakota, because it's a great state, it's doing fine, and I'd love to see Fargo be the Silicon Valley,

Fargo be the Akron of the upper reaches. Well, look, I appreciate you guys having me on, and I want to say, especially to Peter, the skeptic, the way that I would look at this is 10 years from now, are there a couple of more cities that are really participating in the startup economy? I think the answer is going to be definitely yes, and you're going to see that list of four cities that you gave me is going to continue to grow. And if it hasn't, I'll come back on in 10 years, and you can tell me how wrong I was. You'll outlast me. Listen, the only thing I hope is that the company you found celebrates every deal it closes by opening a good bottle of moonshine.

Well, I'll see what I can do about that. The dangerous things happen when I drink moonshine. Yeah, same here, same here. Good luck in Hollywood. JG, take care. Take moonshine. Yeah. Yeah. Same here. Same here. Good luck in Hollywood. Good luck in Hollywood. Take care. Take care guys. Bye.

Moonshine. Yeah. Peter, I can see you sitting on the, on the front stoop with a shooting iron across your lap and a ragged hat and your toe, you know, toes coming out of your boots and a jug with three X's on it.

It's the revenuers. Moonshine is moonshine is coming back in a lot of ways. Yes, I know. It's art. It's artisanal. Now I see it at the store all the time. You know, I was talking before about the sort of sociological porn that you get when people

go to the small towns. I'm glad that they're looking at these places, but it's there's one I was reading the other day in the examiner by a good writer who was talking about a place called Fort Heights, Illinois, which was an example of a predominantly black town, African-American town that was suffering what a lot of the places in Hillbillyology are talking about. And the author wrote, nobody ever really moves in here. Nobody ever comes here except to pass on by. You either escape, die. Okay. Well, the population, I looked up this city, right? Because I'm curious exactly what Fort Heights, Illinois looks like.

And it's right next to a big town with lots of factories. It's right next to a huge Ford stamping plant and a recycling center and the rest of it. And while, yes, it's very poor, it's cheek to jowl next to a place that is not deindustrialized. It's odd sometimes that there's a narrative now and people are catching up to find it. But if the end result of all of this attention is indeed Peter Robinson standing there in amazement at the airport as one after

the other, investing... Think about that luggage. Go ahead, Rob. Take it. It's like a jazz band. Take take it you created a word picture for me i'm already at the airport i'm just all i could think about is like it's all that luggage yeah no that was that was a segue spoiler of the old style before before you learned to ever to cozen your way into it to insinuate in your ruination when you would just sort of trot on it with a hobnailed boot.

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That's office speak. You guys say things like that in your offices? I'm going to circle back on this. Oh, yeah. We'll circle back on that. It's no longer touching base. We're circling back on that. Sometimes we stick a pin in something.

We'll put a pin in there. Do you ever put anything up the flagpole to see who salutes? No, we never do that anymore. We've lost those cliches of Madison Avenue 50s corporate talk when it used to be mercilessly ridiculed by everybody. I don't know. It's a fairly interesting, colorful,

vivid way of speaking. What do you put a pin in? You don't mean that literally, do you? No, you put a pin in like, I guess it means like to put just to put the pin back in something, I guess is what it comes from. Like put the pin in like i guess it means like to to put just to to put a put the pin back in something i guess is what it comes from like put the pin back at the grenade talk about something we have no solution just put a pin in that let's put a pin in i see i i thought you were talking

about using a pin to put into a balloon thereby puncturing the expectations of somebody in hollywood which would be much more well uh if Bill O'Reilly was indeed the puffed up gas bag that some people said he was, a pin has been put into him, a $25 million spike. And it leads some people to say, what's next? Are they trying to avert some other discussion? Is this just the end of it? Or is Sean Hannity going to go because he's too much of a cheerleader. What say you guys? Well, I mean, I can just say, I don't think this is an ideological issue here. I mean, I don't think Sean Hannity's next because of his content.

I think it became difficult to keep O'Reilly around when this was going to be, you know, this is the first act of all this stuff. And they had created a culture, allowed a culture to be there that meant that the – I mean whatever you feel is the issue. Legally, the women had a case in court that they – that the atmosphere at Fox News was not – would not give them a fair hearing. If these women had marched down to HR, they could make a case in court that HR would have told them to buzz off or that O'Reilly did have the right and the ability to fire them or hurt their career. And the president and chairman of Fox News at the time was already compromised himself and had created an atmosphere where that could happen. So if you're if you're the lawyer way to look at this is to say, yeah, you have this is this is the only possible solution to protect the interests of the corporation.

It is a bold move. Because O'Reilly represents an enormously loyal audience. It is hard to imagine. I mean, there isn't another television personality right now that I can think of that has that kind of following, that kind of audience and that kind of loyalty. So to dump him at this point represents a gamble of sort of immense proportion. On the other hand, they've made a couple gambles this year at that company and that network, and those gambles have paid off. So there's another argument. If I was in that room, I would have said, yeah, it's a risk. But look, the only way to be the number four network is you first have to be the number one network, that there is a way that these networks, even at the top of their game and when they have the most – the biggest audience and the most loyal following that the decay and the rot sets in and your audience is turning away from you and you don't know it until it's too late. And so there's always the argument we have to refresh our content, refresh our host, refresh our look.

We don't want to refresh it too soon, but you can't fix it too late. And so I think if I was given that set of options, I would have – I would have done the same thing. Go ahead. So suppose – here's another way of looking at it. I put this to you, Rob, to hear – and to you, James, just to hear what you have to say about this. Really, there have always been two Fox Newses. One is down in Washington, and that's, but always well-spoken liberals. Mara Eliason appears on the panel, Juan Williams and so forth.

And then you've got the New York Fox News where it has been bombast from day one and Bill O'Reilly bomb bombastic, Sean Hannity, bombastic, but at the same time, a certain fearlessness about them, a certain spirit about them, and Fox News may be reconsidering, they may be shifting. It could be the Washington ethic or the Washington feel that's beginning to take over the whole channel, and that might be a loss of a kind robert well i think that would be a loss because i think the the you know the the the dessert always

pays for the meat and potatoes in television and o'reilly's dessert i I mean, no disrespect to Bill O'Reilly, but there was not that much information given out there. The talking points memo often was just him on a rant, and he made a lot of mistakes, and he wasn't exactly... He was essentially an entertainer, not a journalist. Yeah, and it was extremely entertaining, and he was a good interviewer, too. I mean, he was essentially an entertainer and it was extremely entertaining and he was a good interviewer too he was tough on Trump

tougher than anyone else has been so he's got certain skills and he's a great broadcaster and that's why his audience was so huge but you can't turn a giant money making network like Fox News into PBS and expect your shareholders not to freak out.

That's spun off this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash every year that that network did. And when I say free cash, I mean cash that they – after they gave everybody raises and after they had like upgraded the salad bar and after they had bought new cameras and all the stuff they still had money left over i mean it's hard to imagine a business that was that almost a billion and a half almost a billion and a half in money that sort of came and yes after you had like done everything you're going to do i mean you amortize the building you've done all this stuff right so it's a it's's hard to imagine a business that great, and then it's really hard to imagine that you ever want to change that business. That business has to be changed. They lost Greta von Sustern nine months ago, whatever it was, and they replaced her with Tucker Carlson, who is doing a terrific job. That's a great show.

Tucker is a star. And what they realized was something that a lot of television networks, even the ones that are just a scripted broadcast to television, learn. Oh, TV makes stars. So we have to have stars in our stable and we have to be constantly creating new stars and have a skunk works that's working. And we have to be looking for the next O'Reilly and we have to be looking for the next O'Reilly about three years after O'Reilly breaks. And there was a feeling over at Fox news. It was a conservative channel. It was run very conservatively. And I think, I think you could read too much into the ideology of it.

I suspect that whoever replaces Bill Riley will be a staunch conservative. But this is also what happens in network television where you constantly have to be giving the audience something new. Even if they say they don't want it they do and they will turn on you and they will turn away from you in a heartbeat it's hard to get them back there are viewers who are hoping that while they'll find somebody as entertaining as O'Reilly

they will also find somebody who's got some intellectual heft behind them David French wrote a piece at National Review online talking about the larger implications of the fall of O'Reilly and talking about how many people on our side applaud those who just fight. They fight. And it's not so much the person. Well, let me quote the piece.

He said that, you know, time and again, the conservative public, French writes, has rallied around the people who fail to uphold the basic standards of morality or even decency. Time and again, the defense has proved unsustainable as the sheer weight of the facts buries the accused. And French writes, moreover, the pattern is repeating itself with the younger generation of conservative celebrities. The rise, the sharp rise and meteoric fall of both Tomi Lahren and Milo Yiannopoulos were driven by much of the same dynamic that sustained O'Reilly for years. He says Lahren and Yiannopoulos were driven by much of the same dynamic that sustained O'Reilly for years. He says, Laron and Yiannopoulos were fighters who tell it like it is. And O'Reilly was the master of the no-spin zone and seemed fearless in taking on his enemies, French writes. He calls this, David does, a toxic culture of conservative celebrity where the public

elevated personnel is more because of their pugnaciousness, he writes, than anything else. And I think he's got a point there. And there's a because of their pugnaciousness, he writes, than anything else. And I think he's got a point there. And there's a lot of people as you can find on Ricochet who will say no, frankly, is that acting like there are Marcus of Queensbury rules and keeping the gloves on and letting them on the other side get away with all the rhetorical excesses simply seeds the battlefield. I get that too, but I'm just not crazy about the right becoming known for the people who are plotted simply because they

I mean, our outrage at the left is another mirror version of the sort of spit you get from the John Olivers and the John Stuarts, isn't it? Well, I suspect, I mean, I like David very much, but I think that point's kind of wrong. I mean, Bill O'Reilly had been a broadcaster for decades before he was the O'Reilly factor. I was on Bill O'Reilly's first show on Fox News, and it was called The O'Reilly Report or something. I don't know what it was. And it was just an interview show. And he had no, but I'm sure he had politics. These are his politics, but they weren't part of his delivery and has enormous skills of being a broadcaster

that those other two young Lilliputian little nothings don't. Now, maybe they'll get there, but to compare a guy in his full career who can do this job and is really good at it and managed to get day in, day out millions and millions of viewers, and to compare him to two nobodies, two Twitter nobodies, does O'Reilly a big disservice. And I think it's where everyone wants to come up with the big idea here, like what's really happening? And, you know, it's a little awkward for us because we're sort of close in many ways to the impresario founder, entrepreneur, startup pirate

who created Fox News. And the tea leaves are being read is that this is Rupert Murdoch's sons, who are substantially less conservative than he is, taking over. And I think that's a mistake. I don't think that's what's happening. I think you can make a hard-nosed, difficult argument that O'Reilly had to go, that this was the beginning, the overture of what they were going to do to him. It was going to be a distraction.

And all those women had a case. And you could say, one of the lawyers at Paul Weiss, I would have said, this could be on a scale of one to Bill Cosby. This could be tenable for the network. And you can't have it and now the question is whether they right so rob you're saying you're saying you're saying two things one is was untenable because we have to roger ailes was old school that's the way you put it an old school is admirable in many ways but also a certain approach to work and to women in the workplace that just

isn't tenable they They were losing advertisers. So they were in an untenable position. But you're also saying that these guys are good at running the operation. Lord knows Rupert Murdoch has been in business for six decades, and he understands the difference between the star and the vehicle, which is always capable of creating new stars. And they've made a hard business decision. The immediate precipitating factor was a legal one. But it's time for Fox News to refresh itself. And this has nothing necessarily to do with ideology at all.

Well, no, I mean, I think they will replace, suddenly it's going to be some squish. They're not going to call me up and say, you want to do this job. They're going to find some full-throated conservative. But the problem in Hollywood, probably on all businesses, but especially in television is it's the hardest thing to know deep in your bones when you're making these decisions. But it's true. Everyone is replaceable right everyone there's no there's you if you do it right you could replace shelly long if you do

it right you could replace bill o'reilly if you do it right i mean if you do it wrong you choose unwisely that's bad but the audiences want they just want to be entertained they want stars they want somebody who's magnetic and they will forget their beloved bill o'reilly in 30 seconds if you give them somebody really good now that's the challenge right but not impossible are you are you trying to tell me something no are you kidding me because if i if i could if i could if i could james i would cook you dinner just that it's such a pain in the neck to cook dinner for people like yeah i was just gonna say i could step up my ad game but you you gave me the segue right there and uh about cooking dinner and you're you're rather clunky stripping all the gears on your way to it uh way of doing it

was yeah yeah pretty much. That was labor. You're right. You've got your mind focused. I'll do better next time. You have your mind focused on the industry in which you work, like a lot of people do, which is why when it comes to the end of the day,

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and think you're going to get $90 off. No, $35 off with the coupon code RICOSHAY35. You'll love us for suggesting this, and we thank HelloFresh for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, before we leave, the new book on the Hillary Clinton campaign, Shattered, which apparently is surprising everybody with its stories of the inside of the campaign. Turns out the problem was, what was it? It was Comey. It was patriarchy. It was – the latest I hear is that Hillary lost because the Washington establishment was against her. If only she could have found a way for Hillary to get into that Washington establishment at some point. It is funny that in the book they say this about – they said it about Trump too, but, oh, if only you had known – if only people knew the real Hillary.

If only they knew the Hillary that I know. Right, right, right. They say it over and over again. This is a woman who had been famous, world famous for a quarter of a century, 25, 30 years. She'd written, I don't know, six, seven, eight bestselling books. She'd been on TV almost nonstop. She had had interviews on 16 – this is a woman who somehow we didn't know after having spent 30 years with her almost. The delusion cannot be fixed. If you are that delusional at this point about Hillary Clinton, there's no book, there's no set of data that's going to wake you up and change your mind. loyal but they leak and every clinton move generates two or three fantastically juicy books where people scream at each other via the author and snipe at each other and it's a kind of a it's a it's it's nice it's like a nice comfortable blanket that you know that every time a clinton

does something there's going to be a book about it, about how awful it was. So I enjoy that. What I did not enjoy was the idea that this is the book that's going to – the outcome for the Clinton World book is – of this book is Chelsea 2020. Oh, please. It's just staggering. Please, please. What's amazing to me about it, the authors conducted more than 100 interviews. I haven't read the book yet.

I'll get it. But I've skimmed excerpts and read the reviews. What's amazing is that if they conducted 100 interviews, 90 of the people suspected the campaign was in trouble. 50 of them thought she was going to lose. This notion that the Hillary campaign was some kind of juggernaut rolling its way inevitably to victory, even inside the campaign, they never believed it. And there's a – I don't know. Somehow or other, this is really cannot have a competent campaign. The message and the competence are somehow or other very tightly interwoven. maybe the details to follow but make America great again, what he stands for can be placed on a cap, then in some strange way, deep experience, the kind of competence that all of Hillary's people

had, the kind of money, that doesn't matter nearly as much. The candidate must stand for something. And when the candidate doesn't, you end up with a campaign like hers and a book like this. Well, the candidate has to stand. The campaign has to stand for something. I mean, we're still exactly what Donald Trump stands for is an evolving discussion, right? I mean, there's some basic touch. I mean, at a minimum, though, it's he has done a good job of defining himself negatively. We know quite a lot that he doesn't stand for.

We know quite a lot that he would't stand for. We know quite a lot that he would oppose. Does he stand for China? And that's not nothing. Does he stand for China being a currency manipulator? No, he stands for, yeah. I mean,

that's, that's at the level at which we know that he hasn't thought things through. He's listening to advisors. Are we going to get a wall? And as somebody pointed out is the wall that, you know, the part of the border, that's the river. What side is the wall going to go on wall? Somebody pointed out is the wall that, you know, the part of the border that's the river.

What side is the wall going to go on? Even there, even there. No. Well, I don't. It's highly likely we. Kelly has already said it's not going to build. He's not going to build a wall all the way across the southern border. On the other hand, are resources being devoted to enforcing the rule of law at the border that would not otherwise have been devoted to that they certainly are i agree i just find the the protean nature of mr trump's evolving position is interesting because people will adjust and adapt what they think to conform

to what the latest thing that he's done i get that mean, I'm not saying it's unique to this particular politician. He's a cloud of meaning, James. But also just to know that it isn't. But to jump in with James for a minute, we're not going to get a wall. We're going to get comprehensive immigration reform. And it's going to remind us a lot of what George W. Bush proposed. That was rhino, complete sellout. That's what we're going to get. We're going to get a bunch of things that were absolutely unacceptable from anyone else who could probably get them. And I hope we get them.

We may not get them because a president at 30 percent popularity or 35 percent popularity, depending on how you want to calculate it, doesn't have a lot of leverage and may, in fact, lose the House. So there's a reason for trying to occupy the big, fat middle when you're the president of the United States. And it's a political reason. It's how you get your stuff done. Well, I'm sure the press after the House, after the 2018 elections, that they won't say that Trump lost the House. They'll say it was repossessed.

Because you know real estate jokes. It's reaccommodated. Everybody, I want to remind you of something very important, and I'm going to say it in just a few seconds here, but you have to let me go through this first. Because otherwise you'd just turn off the podcast and say it's over, it's done, it's not. I would like to tell you that it's been brought to you by Casper Mattresses, HelloFresh, and Away Travel. You'll find the links there at Ricochet.com, where you can

go, enter the coupon code, save money, sleep better, eat better, travel better. We're here to help you. And, by the way, while you're at Ricochet, you can visit the store where it's got lots of R-branded swag you can use as you walk about town and devil people with a mysterious logo. I enjoyed the show you might want to wander on over to itunes if you wouldn't kick out a good review because that helps surface the show as we say in the podcast industry

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Thanks to Rob Long. Thanks to Peter Robinson. Thanks to you for listening. And we'll see everybody Thanks to Peter Robinson. Thanks to you for listening. And we'll see everybody in the comments over at Ricochet 3.0. Bye, guys. Next week, fellas. Next week. We'll be right back. Thank you. Ricochet.

Join the conversation. He ain't into hip-hop, he ain't into rap, he like to riddle them speakers with a rolling music. CD, cassette, and digital tape, a CB and radar and standing sharp waves. And if he needs to talk to his honey at home, he shows a doll's upper number on his celly phone. Now he's a high-tech redneck Big Daddy meets Star Trek He's a bumpkin, but he's pumpkin He's a high-tech redneck He's a high-tech redneck Big Daddy meets Star Trek

He's a bumpkin, but he's pumpkin He's a highkin, but he's pumpkin He's a high tech