The Ricochet Podcast - Everybody Must Get Stone

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Yeah, it another really busy week in the Ricochet Podcast Extended Universe (or as we like to call it, RIPEU, or repoo): we had a primary, some candidates drop out the race, we had a former Trump campaign advisor sentencing blow up into a fight between the President and his Attorney General. But we decided to ignore all of that (for at least about 70% of the show) and focus on other matters. Source

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Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie I'm reported as saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson.

I'm James Lilex. Today we talk to Yuval Levin about rebuilding our institutions and John Yu about Trump, Barr and Stone. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast. It happens to be number 483 of the innumerable ones that we intend to do in the future. But right now, we're here doing this one with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Gentlemen, how are you?

James, doing very well. How about you? Rob, you're a little bit of a side'm not i i'm lying i have a cold uh although i am heavily medicated which is good with over-the-counter medications i gotta tell you for the common cold this uh new health service i have which you can facetime a nurse anytime i really time this yes it's great. I'm telling you, American Health System, $200 a year extra. She's got to pay $200 a year. $200 a year for the right to get a nurse looking at you? It's cheaper than Netflix, basically, and it's much better. And she said, look, do this. Advil, Sudafed, at nighttime, take a Benadryl.

Yes, yes, right. You'll make it. And also a neti pot. Yes, exactly. So, like, I should be, I'm trying to remind myself that I can't really complain, which is an unusual position for me.

Right, but in America you can pay $200 in extra to call up a nurse facetime and complain over a cold over a cold or cold right okay all right great and she and she texted me a list in the checklist form to go to the pharmacy so it's like every things are great america everything is great this is an amazing time to live in this world. It's insane. Hold on a second. You have to actually use your feet to go someplace to physically choose it.

Oh, I could have said it's Postmates. I could have had a pen to look at. So you're absolutely right. It is fantastic. I had a guy in to look at the boiler and look at the water tanks. My water tanks are very old. They were put in during the first Clinton administration, before the midterms. My boiler is also about a quarter century old. It's going to go. He showed me a part that's about to bust. I'm swapping the whole thing out, everything for one

unit that's going to be in the corner. And I asked him, I said, how long is this going to take? When could you do this? And he grinned and said, today. He could find the guys to install a brand new furnace with a water heater today. All the pipes out, gone, everything hooked up by six. Is this one of the Korean ones? The Korean one, all that instant, like they're the size of a like of a set of encyclopedias. But they just do, which is an incredibly old reference. I apologize. But it's like a box and it does everything. It's about the size of a singer sewing machine put on top of a set of encyclopedias next to the globe.

It's very small. It's an American unit. Anyway, Peter, what is your contribution to how great things are and how fantastic America is and how we really ought to stop patching and moaning? Because all things considered, it really is a boon to live here, says the guy, of course, in the ivory tower. Well, OK, I actually have a question for you on this. I have been I just started Ross Dowd, its new book, The Age of Decadence. And Ross begins the argument that my friend Peter Thiel has been making for some time, that we have just stalled out when it comes to technological innovation. That if you think of the first half, last decade or so of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, my own mother grew up in a farm in northeastern Pennsylvania,

and she could remember when they got indoor plumbing, when they had electricity, when they bought their first automobile, when they got the first radio, and she could remember when they got the first television. Each of these huge, and the argument is that Peter has been making for a long time now and that Ross makes in the Age of Decadence. The only innovation of our time is the iPhone, the computer, the communications change. And they say, you know, the airplanes we fly, the 747, is half a century old. Okay, I think to myself— By the way, they're wrong.

That's what they are. It doesn't feel quite right to me. And here's what I say to myself. Well, they're wrong. That's what they are. It doesn't feel quite right to me. And here's what I say to myself. Well, wait a minute. The 747 may be half a century old. I travel, alas, I travel more than I want to even now. But when I fly across the continent to Washington, which I have to do, to New York every so often, the experience of traveling in a 747, because I have a laptop and a phone and now there's the experience has been transformed.

That's change. That's innovation, right? But yeah, right. Go ahead. You know, it's a terrible temptation that smart people and Ross and Peter are smart people. They certainly are. Smart people have, which is to sort of try to sum up eras and to say, well, we've reached a point where that's just a horrible trap. It makes you seem very, very silly in two

years or one year or 10 minutes when something new comes along. The truth is that the most remarkable thing we've done is move things back and forth across the world, either in packets, digital packets or in container ships. And that's been doing 50 years, a 50 year span of human experience and human technology is actually quite short. It's not quite short if you're, you know, you're you're desperate to come up with some interesting overarching theory at a panel or on a column, but it's actually quite short in real life. Also, you just touched on something. I'd also forgotten this, the logistics revolution, the invention of container ships, which has transformed trade, but also that you could

get your drugs delivered to your drugs, excuse me, your pharmaceuticals delivered to your apartment in Manhattan. It's also the three-dimensional analogy to what we do digitally, digital information. We are talking right now in packets, little collections of data that are being sent in different ways and then recombined at the end right by your ear. That's how this sound is getting to you, and that's how this sound is getting to all of our listeners. And that is, in fact, how container shipping works, just in a three-dimensional meat space, as they say. But also the idea, the most extraordinary thing we've discovered is that there's a huge amount, we have a huge ability to crunch data, right?

And the answer to almost all of our big problems is probably in that data. We are now in the process of collecting data, right? We're now in the process of collecting the very things that we need in order that we now have the ability to crunch. Progress doesn't ever go in a straight line. It goes in a crazy zigzag. But one of the things that happens in all forms of progress is that our capacity to do something exceeds our ability to shear sheep.

You know, that's just, you know, that's my analogy here. Our agricultural ability exceeds the fields that are planted. So now we need to plant some fields. So I just, I have no, I'm really. Let me ask you a question because there's also sort of something here, which is... James wants to jump in and yell at me. Oh, well, James can jump in and yell at you after I get this out, because I'll never be able to put it together again.

It's a bit, it's packet that's coming together in my mind right now. The sub-theme in this is, to the extent that we have got this new technology, it's dystopian. So, let me say this to you. If we can get artificial intelligence that can produce, well, if we get driverless vehicles that could eliminate all traffic problems in Manhattan, but the deal was you would have to get into a car and let it be driven by the computer, you would surrender the ability to drive the car yourself, would you take that deal? Well, I might, but I'd also push back on the idea that that would be the deal.

The only thing that we don't have right now in an ability to organize and manage traffic, when you are driving, you want to go the shortest possible route. That's a human desire. If you don't want to go the shortest possible route, then you don't care. But if you're trying to get someplace and you don't want to spend a lot of time in the car, the only piece of information the great traffic brain needs to know is where you're going. That's the only thing it doesn't know now, where you're going. The reason Waze works is because it knows where you're going. If you look around works is because it knows where you're going. If you look around all the cars on the road, you have no idea where they're going. But if a central brain knew where they were going, it could program us all to get there in the most efficient and quickest way.

So we don't really need someone – I mean it's nice if a machine can drive us, but we don't really need to – no one will be compelled to do that. The only thing the brain really needs to know, the big super brain is, well, okay, where are you going? Okay. Now that we know that, I know that there are 17 trucks also going there. So I'm going to route you around the corner so that you don't have to go by the trucks. That's a minimum amount of privacy invasion, a minimum amount of surrender of sovereignty, and for a maximal amount of efficient return. This is great. By the way, we are almost there. I mean, my 2018 Subaru already has things like it stays four car lengths behind the car in front of me when I'm on cruise control. It beeps if I'm veering from one side to the other. It has kind of steering

assist sometimes if it feels like I'm crossing a lane I don't mean to cross. It already does, you know, 20% automatic. And we were obsessed with the idea that a car is going to do everything. Maybe it'll just do 50%. That's pretty great. Take that, Ross Dowsett. Yeah, I mean, come on. Boy, there's just a million things here. I, too, have a car like Rob, and it refuses to let me rear-end somebody, even if I wanted to. If I floor it, it just says, nope, and it sinks to power, and I don't go anywhere. If I may ask, this is your new Honda, right? Right.

Yeah. And if I want to put it on automatic pilot, it'll take a look at where the road is and get me right straight down there. I could leave that thing in West Fargo, pointed west into the end of North Dakota. And given that the highway is just one simple straight line, I probably never would have to put my hands on the wheel. So, yeah, we're getting there. But we get to the point where Rob's talking about in New York City, or Peter mentioning that as well. You get to the places where we have to surrender a certain amount of autonomy to the thing. I don't think most people in New York would mind because traffic moves slowly. You're going from here to there, big deal.

The question is, on top of that, is what kind of society and government do you have that collects the data? In other words, once they know where you want to go, where you are going, in an ideal world, they don't care. In the real world, they use that data, as Rob was talking about before, to learn things for everybody's benefit. But they also have a massive, complete panopticon of the world. So when you add the security cameras and autonomous vehicles and the rest of it, the ability to opt out seems a little small. And most people will figure that it's not a big deal anyway, because they're getting convenience for it. And we have that today. Now, you want to say, what is the next great technological renovation that will make us not a decadent society anymore? Some people would say

that it is AI. And like Rob said, we are so close to this sort of ubiquitous world of computing. We're now at the airport. If you don't want to, I can get on a plane with my face. Delta has a system where you walk up, it looks at your mug, and it knows who you are. And you might not want to wonder how they know. Is it my passport? Is it some other thing? When did I tell? But anyway, it's easy. You scan, you go on the plane. So some people say it may be AI. Some people say it may be additional energy. Let's say it is. Let's say we get fusion power and it's too cheap to meter. And all of a sudden we've got limitless power we can use for a lot of things. How does that fundamentally change us now in an era when we already have cheap power?

For one thing, it means a political argument goes away because we're not arguing about global warming anymore. But does it mean necessarily that we have so much power now we illuminate? That's not going to change our lives either. None of these things change our lives because we're used to this wonderful sort of incremental little technological change that keeps making things cooler, more interesting, brighter for a while. And like Rob said, to go back and say – to group things in decades and say we haven't invented anything since It's kind of like getting mad at the industrial revolution for becoming the computer 20 or 30 years afterwards. I mean, they had to figure out gears and steam and electricity and all of that stuff and work it for a hundred years. And then we got computers at some point. And it wasn't a natural thing that

came out of that. And that changed everything. So now I don't look at this as decadent. I look at this as a fascinating human experiment in refining all of the things that these new tools can do. And I'll leave it with this. My daughter, I got my daughter this Furbo for Christmas. I got it for the dog, but mostly I got it for her. It's a unit that sits on the piano and remotely from Boston. She can call it up on her phone and throw treats to the dog. Oh, that's hilarious. Which he loves. And she can also make a custom programmable message for it. So the other night I'm going to check that I'm going to get the mail out of the box mails, you know, and the mailbox is this sick is this,

this 20th century thing I have to go to every day and pull out useless stuff. Nothing in there is of any note to me whatsoever. It's cruise ship stuff. It's billies, circulars. The mailbox is useless. So at the end of the day, oh, I forgot. Two o'clock in the morning, I go. As I'm walking past the Furbo unit, I hear the Soviet national anthem. Yay, yay, yay, yay. It's a great anthem, by the way.

Kibble shoots out of the mission. The worst states have the best names. Kibble shoots out of the thing states always have, or the worst states have the best names. Kibble shoots out of the thing. And I get on my phone. It's three o'clock in Boston in the morning, and I get on my phone and I said, the Soviet National Anthem is not an appropriate custom sound. Thank you very much.

Is this what college is doing to you? And she's texting back, laughing, laughing. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing.

Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. is total betting. Sign up by 2 p.m. 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Laughing and saying this is precisely the situation in which I wanted you to encounter what I had done. So here I am with my daughter having this text argument with her in another part of the country

while she is remotely directing a treat to the dog while playing the Soviet national anthem over the Internet. That is not the sort of thing that we thought was going to happen. We thought we'd have flying cars and Nehru jackets and one, you know, and Rosie the robot. It never, we never figured it would be this much fun. And Postman will tell you we're abusing ourselves to death, but I'm not feeling particularly dead. I'm feeling like I'm alive. And it's. Can I just add to that two things? One, I'd say to that, that what I love about that is that the truth is that all of these communications and all of this sort of fast stuff that we've come up with has had a lot

of negative consequences, right? Everybody's nasty on Twitter. But it's had enormous, overwhelmingly more important and more lasting connection, valuable connections between people that I think it is a younger generation simply does not believe it will lose touch with. They don't think they're going to lose touch with their friends. Think of the people we've become friends with whom we haven't even met. Exactly. And I feel like that is a really big, big deal. The second thing I would say is that we probably are entering a phase where people's deep privacy is something that they're willing to compromise on. where we need the most work is in the area of health. We study disease. We don't study health. And that is backwards. We know how many people die of cancer. We have no idea how many people die

with cancer. Because when people die of natural causes, or we think we know they died, we don't bother to investigate, we don't bother to investigate we don't bother to do autopsy so there's a huge amount of data that is there for in well people who simply die you know because they got to be old that we we really don't we only have a very very small picture of what a disease can do and how a disease is slowed or started or stopped because we only study the disaster. We only study the disease. And that's just a fragment of the data that we need in order to really, you know, tackle all of these diseases. I mean, the argument for cancer that somebody made many years ago was we should stop all actual laboratory research into cancer and instead direct all that money

and the attention into collecting cancer data across the world, meaning cancers that grow, cancers that slow, people who have them and don't die from them, people who have them and do die from them. And the answer to how to cure all cancer will be in that data. Well, we were going to talk about the Joe Biden collapse, but disease and disaster, well, we just simply went in a different direction. Yeah, there we are. It's so boring. It's so boring that all that stuff that like, oh, the Democrat thing and Biden and such.

Every four years, it's this. I mean, when are we going to start? When are we going to have that cycle of the week where all these moronic pundits are talking about the brokered convention? Brokered convention. Which never, ever, ever happens. Hey, if I can just interrupt. I know Rob in his cold, med-addled state is probably thinking there's a spot coming on and he's wondering how he's going to butcher it and step all over my segue.

Well, I don't want to box him in. I don't want to be boxed in by him. So I'm just going to say this is the spot. And it is for, of course, our friends at ButcherBox. Hey, when it comes to meat, quality matters. Of course it does. But there's more than just texture and taste. Every month, ButcherBox ships a curated selection of high quality meat right to your home. All the meat is free of antibiotics and added hormones,

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And now we welcome back to the podcast, Yuval Levin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies, and the editor-in-chief, National Affairs. His new book, which we're here to talk about, is A Time to Build, From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. Thanks for joining us. Every single word in the title of that book is something we could spend probably 30 minutes on. Let's start with

institutions. What do you mean by institutions? Yeah, well, thanks spend probably 30 minutes on. Let's start with institutions. What do you mean by institutions? Yeah, well, thanks very much for having me. It's great to be back. The term institution obviously is so broad, so basic that it could be defined in many, many different ways. But the definition that I take is one that sees institutions as the durable forms of our common life. They're the shapes, the structures of what it is that we do together. And ultimately, they're at the center of the kind of social crisis that we're living through in America, because this is a crisis that isn't well measured by the usual kinds of measures of personal well-being. The economy is doing well. People are safe and

healthy, generally speaking, in American life. The problems we have, the reasons for the dark mood of this moment have to do with the ways we connect to each other, the ways we link together. And that can really only be understood by thinking in institutional terms about what's gone wrong. Well, the quote from the book, the institutions, I'm not quoting yet, the institutions themselves may be flawed because we are, to quote, the argument of this book is a conservative one of a particular sort. It begins from the premise that human beings are born as crooked creatures prone to waywardness and sin, and that we therefore always require moral and social formulation, and that such formation is what our institutions are

for. Now, this idea of us being crooked timber who are, you know, the original sin, all of that stuff, which is going to strike a lot of people as religious, is nevertheless hard to deny when you look at the record of humanity. But we're up against people who, in their utopianism, seem to believe that we are perfectible, you know, Pelagian souls who can be guided by government, by institutions towards building and perfection. So isn't that the first argument that we have to have to convince the other side? No, we are not perfectible at all. Yeah. I mean, in a way, one of the arguments of the book is that that is a dispute that is at the core of our culture wars in ways that are not always obvious. That in fact, it's an argument between people who think that ultimately we need

to be formed before we can be free. And people who think that we we need to be formed before we can be free, and people who think that we just need to be liberated, that the reasons that things don't work out is oppressive institutions. I think much more often the reason things don't work out is deformed or dysfunctional or corrupted institutions, and that ultimately we need strong functional institutions from family and community, civil society and religion, all the way up to politics in order for a free society to be able to function at all. Yuval Peter here. You're the one guy with a book out right now about how we can put the pieces back together. Ross Douthat's new book is Decadence. Chris Caldwell's book is The Age of Entitlement. I'm only about halfway through Ross's book. I haven't started Chris's book yet, but this is, just as you said at the opening, in all kinds of ways, this is a wonderful time to be

alive and to be an American, and yet the mood is undeniably dark. Now, you've started to get to this, but I just want to ask squarely, what is your diagnosis? Before we get to how to put the pieces together, what's broken what in Yuval Levin's view is broken yeah so I think the answer that has to be found in American social and communal life because as I said before at the individual level there's not that much broken even when we think about social communal life we have this tendency to think about American life as one big open space full of individuals, and we're having trouble connecting. So we talk about building bridges, and we talk about tearing down walls or casting a unifying vision. I actually

think the problem is different than that, that it's exactly in the structures of our associational life, the shapes, the forms of what we do together that we're having trouble, those structures, those institutions from family and community all the way up to politics have become deformed in our time in a variety of ways. And it's made it much harder for us to trust our institutions. And I think a lot of what feels like such a grim mood now is this sense that nothing is working, that there's nothing we can trust. No one's doing what they're supposed to be doing well. Some of that is a function of corruption and incompetence. That certainly undermines trust in institution. But those

are permanent facts. I think there's something else that's going on in American life now, where some of our institutions that are supposed to be formative have come to be understood instead as performative, as platforms for people to stand on and yell about the culture war. And so if you look at our politics, a lot of members of Congress now basically think of Congress as a way to get a bigger social media following and a good time slot on cable news or talk radio. They don't think of themselves as insiders, but as outsiders. The president does this a lot of the time, also standing outside the government

of which he's the chief executive and yelling at it. And when you see that pattern, you start to see that it's also a lot of what's happening in the media and in the academy and in American civic... In the academy, how so? I'm with you on everything until you said that. That one just puzzles me a bit. Well, I think that there are ways in which a lot of people within the American academy now think of it as another stage, another platform to stand and yell and a venue for virtue signaling. Oh, I see. Right. Rather than a place to teach and learn. And to me, the biggest problem in the academy is actually that administrators of universities think of them this way. There have always been professors and some students who think of themselves as activists. But the universities now are run by people who think their purpose is to provide a platform for that kind of of activism and virtue signaling. And I do think that that is an enormous problem. And the fact that people within all of our different institutions think about them this way means that the institutions are not different enough from each other, so that what happens now at Brown University and what happens at the New York Times is basically just the same thing. Those

are both just places to stand and yell about oppression. And when that happens, it becomes difficult for the core functions of these important institutions to really be served. And we can't trust them when they're just platforms for performance. The institutions we do trust are the ones that are unabashedly formative, that take human beings and make them better. One of the great exceptions to the loss of trust in institutions at the national level is the military. And it's not just because it's good at protecting the country, though it is. It's also because it's good at forming men and women into serious human beings. And that's what we really want out of a lot of our institutions.

It's not what we get out of most of them. So do you draw distinctions? I haven't got your book yet, Yuval. I have to make this horrible admission, but I haven't. I will. I haven't yet. Do you draw distinctions between institutions we are likely to be able to figure out how to fix and institutions that just lie beyond the reach of collective action? What I have in mind is the family. Do you have a prescription for putting back, lowering the divorce rate, increasing the

birth rate, lowering abortion rate? Do you have any idea how to fix that? I would not pretend to have a fix for the breakdown of the American family over the last three generations. I mean, I think we've lived through an enormously dangerous and painful breakdown. I do think there are ways that by understanding our responsibilities through the lens of the institutions we're part of, including the family, including our professions, including our political institutions, we can recapture something of a sense of responsibility that could help at the margins to address some of the breakdown of the American family. But look, if I had a solution to the breakdown of the family, I'd be on the street corner yelling about it. I sure don't. I mean, I think there are institutions that we can think of in terms of

reform, of institutional reform, structural reform, that could make some difference, including some of our political institutions. But the most important breakdown is the breakdown of the family. Seeing it is crucial before we can do something about it. And the book tries to lay out what it looks like from an institutional vantage point. But I sure wish I had a solution. I don't. Hey, Yuval, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. So I'll give you the tacky question. Whose fault? Whose fault is this? Where did it start? Who can we blame? What are the, you know, what are the two or three wrong turns we made, and how do we go back to that part of the road and turn the different way? My basic rule of thumb is that the baby boomers are at fault for everything.

Well, that's a good one. I mean I'm going to say that you're going to find a lot of support for that theory. So that's a way to start here. Look, I think we have lived through a period from about the middle of the 20th century, which was a period of very high American confidence in institutions, in some ways too high, I think, a time of cohesion and self-confidence. We've lived through a kind of liberalization and fragmentation that has broken down a lot of our institutions. It happened for a reason. It was not crazy, but I think it's gone way too far. And that the people responsible for it, in a lot of ways,

are all of us, all the people who have roles to play in core institutions, but instead prefer to think of ourselves as outsiders who just want to run to social media and build our own brand rather than thinking about responsibilities we have. But look, a lot of that problem has happened over the period in which, uh, at live score bet. We love Cheltenham just as much as we love football, the excitement,

the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to 10 Euro. If your horse loses on a selected race, that's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing cheltenham with live score bet this is total betting sign up by 2 p.m 14th of march bet within 48 hours of race main market excluding specials and place bets terms apply bet responsibly 18 plus gambling care.ee the boomers have been in charge of a lot of our core institutions. And I hate to say it, but it's not a coincidence. that, you know, pretty much every professor at Yale and every student at Yale could be replaced

the next day by someone equally or even more qualified, somebody smarter, somebody better, somebody who actually in the great scheme, if you believe these things deserve to be there more, that there's a certain kind of luck and serendipity to being in a place like that. And that confers upon you a certain amount of responsibility. That didn't go over well, I remember saying. And I've said it since to Yale students whenever I speak to them, and it has not gone over well with Yale undergraduates for over 30 years in my lifetime. Was I wrong to say it? Am I right to say it? Is it part of the problem? Yeah, I think you're right to say it,

and it gets at something very important about how we now think about the elite. So this book ends by talking about the trouble with meritocracy understood from an institutional vantage point. And a lot of that trouble is that it creates an elite that doesn't think of itself as having a responsibility to the larger society, because it takes itself to have already proven something by simply entering these elite institutions. I think there are two ways that an elite in a democratic society has to prove its legitimacy. One is by showing that the way in or the way up is relatively open. And I think we do a better job of that now than we used to. But the other is by showing that people with power use that power responsibly and in ways that are constrained and directed by some idea of the good of the larger society. I think the meritocracy does worse at that than prior ways of thinking about how American elites should be formed. don't now think that people with power and authority and privilege, as they say, really

have distinct obligations to the larger society for the reason you say, which is that they're basically lucky to be there. You know, any of us who are in positions of any kind of... Yuval Peter here, contrast the generation who were at Yale and the—let's go ahead and just say the Wasp ascendancy, the old Wasp ascendancy. Contrast the generation who were at Yale in the 30s and 40s with Rob and his wretched classmates and Yalies today. Here's what I'm getting at is the story of George H.W. Bush. And he was actually he was in high school at the time of Pearl Harbor, and he immediately felt an obligation at the age of 18 to sign up and go serve. You think of the men of the Ivy League who put the world back together. George Marshall, after the Second World War, he gives two big speeches. He announces the NATO plan at Harvard and he goes to Princeton. There's another

major speech about the post-World War world. There is some way in which somehow or other, the feeling, A, that the people who went to those institutions were obligated. They felt it. You can see it in the history books. They felt an obligation to serve the country. And there was some understanding that the intellectual activity at those universities was also in some way or another in the service of the country. Now, totally different, as you and Rob just said. What happened? Yeah, I think the logic of meritocracy has a lot to do with that. The American elite, and look, we shouldn't over romanticize it. There was a lot of corruption and abuse of power there, too, as there always is.

But I do think that an elite that thinks of itself at some level is something of an aristocracy. And I know that's a bad word, but it shouldn't be simply a bad word, because it's in part a way of I do think that an elite that thinks of itself at some level is something of an aristocracy. And I know that's a bad word, but it shouldn't be simply a bad word because it's in part a way of understanding that the position and power you have is not your doing. You're reared to it. You're formed for it. And one of the things it means to think about formative institutions is that they form our habits and expectations in ways that give us a sense of responsibility so that a person in a position of authority before making a decision says, given the role that I have here, what should I do? And that's a question we're less inclined to ask in a meritocratic time because we think the important test is about getting in. And once you're in, you've proven

yourself. A different way of thinking about power and authority would have you think about proving yourself all the time by asking yourself in every moment of decision what responsibility you have. And I think there's just no question that the older American elite was better at this. It was not better at letting people in. And it's gotten better at that. But we have to see the tradeoff involved. I want to press this a little bit more because I work on the Stanford campus. So I'm surrounded by these brilliant kids. And they are that brilliant. But every one of these kids to get into Stanford in the first place has received enormous gifts. Their brains, brains capable of producing these high SAT scores, that just happened to them.

On top of that, every single kid in these institutions, Stanford, Yale, my alma mater, Dartmouth, every one of them, there's a story about a family or teachers. People have given them an enormous... So why don't they feel that they've received a gift that they have to repay? Why aren't the institutions capable of saying, you are here because you represent your family, your teachers, your community, and you owe something to them? I just don't see why the argument should be weaker today for service than it was six or seven decades ago. I think a lot of our elite institutions are

just less willing to think of themselves in that way and to say that what we're offering you comes with some responsibilities. I saw recently a catalog for the University of Chicago, in my opinion, America's greatest university, which among the ways that it described itself to students was as a way to figure out how to be yourself, right? And it was astonishing. A university is not there to help people be themselves. It's there to help people be better,

and better in ways that are not just intellectual, but that are, among other things, intellectual. I think a lot of our institutions now don't approach the people within them that way, and the few that do really stand out as institutional exceptions. Don't you find, I mean, just to follow up on this, don't you find, you all, that, I mean, just to push back on what Peter said, that actually a lot of students and a lot of faculty and a lot of people at the New York Times and in these institutions, they do think of themselves as performing an important service. They do think of it as civic duty for them to call out their institutions and criticize them and, and, you know, make, make, make lists of people

who are, um, ethnically, uh, unacceptable and ethnically acceptable and, and the police, the language. I mean, this is considered at this point, activism is considered a form of, you know, social reform. Um, I'm doing, I'm, I, I'm doing the God's work because, uh, missionary work, because I'm working at the New York Times and I'm writing idiotic pieces about the 1619 Project or whatever it is. It seems like the impulse and the energy is the same. It's just being directed at undermining and destructive force ends, but maybe I'm... Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I think in some ways that is an opening to a kind of hopefulness for the possibility that institutions that approach

people with a different idea of what it would mean to be properly formed might meet with some success or some interest from those people. I think we've come to a place where the way we understand what that responsibility entails is, first of all, expressive. It's about saying the right things and being seen to be on the right team. And secondly, is liberationist, right? It's about clearing away obstacles to people being free. It's not formative in a fundamental sense. It says the people who come in here have to come out different. So when someone says to you that they went to Harvard, you might think that's a pretty smart person, not because Harvard made them that way, but because they're getting in

as proof. When someone says they went to the Naval Academy, you might think that's a serious person exactly because the Navy made them that way. There are a few institutions that really do stand out as taking seriously the responsibility to form men and women in our country. Here's the thing, Yvonne. I was looking back, don't ask why, I was researching a postage stamp and it led me to the Australian Girl Guides, which was sort of their Girl Scouts. And I was studying what their original motto was. And it was all about, I will do my best for God and queen and country and myself. It has been revised over the decades where now it is, I will do the best to live up to my beliefs. This goes back to what you were saying about

the University of Chicago saying, you're the person we're going to, you know, we're going to make you the best you. By replacing all of these larger institutions with your beliefs, of course, those beliefs could be anything, but we sort of know what they want those beliefs to be. Sort of a transnational, transcultural, paganistic, not specifically religion, but having to do with the important things like income inequality and the earth and the rest of it. The problem is, is that if we got all of our elites to, to agree that we should reform our and rebuild our institutions and gather people into them, what happens when the ideas that they are putting forward are actually inimical to Western sieve and are based

in this gaseous, ridiculous notion of some transnational progressive ideal, which frankly is going to only atomize us more into endlessly balkanized prisms of identity politics. Isn't the problem is that we at the basis, we and the elites perhaps have a fundamental disagreement about the organizing principles that we should have going forward. And I should have said that at the beginning, instead of talking for four and a half minutes, but sorry. Well, I think that's quite right. I mean, that in a sense is a lot of what the kind of culture war we're fighting is about. And it gets at a very profound level to differences that are really differences of anthropology, differences about what the human person is. But I do think that by trying to think institutionally about some of the problems we face,

we can create much more room for the kind of argument we want to make by helping people think first and foremost in terms of the responsibilities they have, given the roles they have. So that it's a little harder to say, just be yourself, and a little easier to say, what do we owe each other here, and how do we understand what it takes to become a better human being? That question is an opening to the kind of answer we want to offer. It doesn't mean that we therefore win, right, that the university becomes a conservative institution if only people think about it in these terms, but it gives us a better shot, and I think when we have a better shot, we have a chance to persuade more people because our argument ultimately is persuasive.

I think it's right. And part of the reason that we find it so difficult now to show that to the rising generation is that the institutional frameworks are not there to allow us to even have an argument, to even have a say. That's why the book tries to begin there. This is a hopeful book in a very limited sense, right? I'm a conservative. I'm not an optimist. I don't think good things are just going to happen. But I think the resources are there for us to turn around some of these failures

if we understand them in the right terms, in the right frameworks. And that's what this book tries to offer, is a vocabulary for thinking about the social crisis we're living through that gives us a chance to see it in its proper terms. And the book is A Time to Build, From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. That's by Yuval Levin, and we thank him for dropping by the podcast today. We could go another hour and a half on this and maybe someday soon we will. It's a great book. It's a great time for it and we

thank you for coming to the Ricochet podcast today. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Yuval, thank you. Thank you very much. You know, Rob, Peter, have you ever read a book and it was so actually engaging that you felt sort of mentally exhausted at the end of it? That you'd been grappling with a book from time to time?

Only my own. Only in the commission of writing them. Of course, Peter is writing a book as well, and we know that that sort of labor just can leave you mentally spent. But, you know, the thing of it is, is that sometimes when you're doing that, it's not physical labor in the same sense. So your body doesn't need to replenish some of the stuff that it does when you're actually out there working or when you're actually out in the world, just being in the world, which can be exhausting. And you know, if you're in business or at sports, top performers know that their, their success is often attributed to their morning routine. Now, what can that be? Well,

that can be waking up early, can be setting goals for the day. It can be exercise, of course, or meditation. Everybody's got their own strategies for doing the best thing for the day, but not everybody has the time to do it all, do they? No. Well, with hydrant, hydrant, you can jumpstart your mornings. What, you ask, is this? Well, let me tell you. Hydrant creates flavored electrolyte packets that you mix directly into your water to make hydrating your body easy and delicious. Each rapid hydration mix has four essential electrolytes your body needs. It's sodium, potassium, magnesium, and zinc. They help you hydrate quickly and stay hydrated all day.

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That's drinkhydrant.com. Enter promo code RICOSHAY for 25% off your first order. drinkhydrant.com. Promo code RICOSHAY. And our thanks to Hydrant for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now, welcome back to the podcast, John Yoo. We thought he was poolside. He's informed us he's bathside, so you can imagine him there with just a bow tie and a dickie.

John, you used to be our chief impeachment pundit, but that's all gone, so now we have to talk about Barr and Trump. Trump was bullying the judicial system. Barr was fighting back. He's disappointed. Caged Clomack. What exactly is going on? Explain to us the sentencing and why we shouldn't freak out or perhaps if we should. Well, after all the impeachment, we've forgotten about this character, Roger Stone, who I believe was one of Rob Long's good friends. Right. Have you guys co-produce shows on netflix together there's no no i don't think so you know what

i think a dude who's languishing in a bubble bath right now probably taking a glass of champagne from one of those fluted flutes throwing in stone sir oh i couldn't hear you i was they were massaging my ears just now sorry what did you say so So what happened, Roger Stone is one of this cast of characters who were swept up in the Mueller investigation, which we all probably forgot about, thank God, during the whole impeachment on Ukraine mess. But what happened was that Stone, once one of the people who used to work for Roger Manafort and other people. Oh, sorry, Paul Manafort, who went to jail, spending his time in jail right now.

So Stone is a longtime associate of Trump's. And during the campaign, he apparently tried to get in touch like crazy with WikiLeaks. He was trying to get information about whether WikiLeaks had Hillary Clinton's emails, whether they were going to start publicly releasing them and so on. And then this is why I thought he was a friend of Rob's because then he was working through yet another guy who was a strange comedian slash radio host slash script writer. So when I first heard that, I thought it was Rob, but it actually turned out to be someone else. Yeah, someone else. Who Stone then appeared, proceeded to threaten and browbeat with threats from the Godfather. This is why I thought it was wrong.

But that was all, hasn't it been pretty well established that Roger was just joking about all that stuff, those threats? That's part of the sentencing. So Stone is convicted of lying to Congress because he said to congressional investigators he actually had no contact or no discussions with WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign. Apparently he had, but it turned out he had no real inside knowledge. This is, I think, classic grifter activity. He was pretending to the Trump campaign and to Trump himself that he had some contact with the WikiLeaks just to, I think, worm his way into the campaign. The real guy who was telling him all this stuff, which appears to be made up now, was this comedian slash radio host. So when they were all under investigation, Stone started calling the radio host and started.

Seriously, like a the best parts are a quoting lines from The Godfather about, I think, Frankie Pantangeli, the guy who's who later kills himself while he's in federal prison. And then he starts making threats against the guy and worse yet, his therapy dog. So one of the threats of violence with which he's being sentenced is that he he was going to steal the comedian's therapy dog. You don't do that. I tell you that you don't do that. Rob, when you have five or six, would you even know one was gone? How much therapy do you need?

So he gets sentenced. The people who are going to court for the sentencing are former leftover Mueller investigation prosecutors who've been relocated to Washington. And they ask for the maximum sentence, which is seven to nine years. And the reason it's so high, which is strange because this is a first time offender, or at least the first time offender has been caught, and who is charged with lying to Congress. It's the threats he was making to the comedian that if they really are violent, if they really are trying to organize resistance to investigation and not just joking around, like Peter said, that would justify seven to nine years. But when you read about them and when you

hear about Roger Stone's character, it's hard to take seriously. Anyway, the prosecutors went forward. Trump finds out he starts sending out these tweets demanding that the attacking actually didn't demand tell his own prosecutors to reduce them. He just started attacking the prosecutors and the court for thinking about such a the sentence. And so by the time he had, Trump already did it. So it made it look like Trump had ordered him to do it. And now Barr has to fight this rearguard action to try to protect the Justice Department's reputation as being anything other than a Trump plaything for this sentence. OK, so let's go through the rights and wrongs of this really quickly. Roger Stone is rightly convicted, as far as you can tell. He did lie. Yes, he did.

I think he did lie. In fact, he didn't even plead guilty. It was a trial and he was convicted by a jury very quickly. I think it was like two hours. That's right. Okay. So Roger Stone lied. There's a good question.

The prosecution had been brought. It was a derivative of an investigation, the Mueller investigation that that was based largely on a dossier which was fake. I mean, if the Mueller investigation was illegitimate, is the conviction of Roger Stone in a kind of, what is it, fruit of the poison tree or whatever the legal doctrine is, is that tainted as well? No, it doesn't have anything to do with it. No, it's not really that. Really, what this is, is what you see classically in mob investigations, is that you try to prosecute members of the organization by charging them with other things. Right. So you look at Paul Manafort. He's convicted of money laundering and tax evasion, had nothing to do. Right. But the same was the same with Whitewater, right? Whitewater, Hubbell was convicted of billing fraud, I think. Yeah, Webster

Hubbell, right. So you go after them on things and then you hope that they're going to turn on their superiors and eventually you climb up the ladder to the top guy in the conspiracy. Problem is, as you say, Peter and Rob, this guy, actually, Roger didn't do anything. He didn't really know anything. He wasn't really know anything. He wasn't really communicating directly with the Russians or WikiLeaks. And we'll get to the question about the way he expressed himself and his timing in a moment, but was Trump, was it essentially correct? Was he onto something to say this sentencing is out

of control? This is outrageous. They're asking for way too much time. Was that right? Yes, with many things. It's the way Trump's style, not the substance, that's the problem. The president constitutionally is the only officer who's in charge of all law enforcement. The constitutional text says the president shall take care. The laws are faithfully executed. Everyone in the Justice Department is only assisting the president in doing that job. Presidents from the beginning of the history of the country have made decisions about who to prosecute, what to prosecute them for, even sentences. So this is not constitutionally improper. The thing is that the president, if he's going to do it, could just call Barr on the phone and discuss this with them. He doesn't have to go out in public and publicly

pressure his own Justice Department. Okay, so here's answer this question, which is a headline in today's New York Times, an opinion piece. Did William Barr throw down the gauntlet? He said the tweets aren't helpful. Did he throw down the gauntlet to the president? Did William Barr throw down the gauntlet, or was it just a performance? John? Oh, I think it's both. I mean, throwing down a gauntlet is a performance. Why don't you just, when you start a duel, just shoot the guy right away instead? I've never understood this part of medieval history. But look, what happened is Barr came into the Justice Department. He doesn't need the job. He's already been Attorney General before. He came into the job

to protect the Justice Department, and in his view, he said several times, to protect the office of the presidency. I don't think he thinks he's working for Trump, the man. He's working for the president, the office. And I think what Trump doesn't realize is that as a matter of policy, despite what he said about the constitutional line of authority, it's a matter of policy. It's good for the president to be able to rely on an independent Justice Department because it has a lot more sway with the courts, with the public, and it helps the president himself. When we discussed Mueller on the podcast, I kept saying, look, Trump should leave Mueller alone. If Mueller, the top federal prosecutor in maybe the history of the Justice Department clears Trump, everyone will believe it

because he has a man, he's a man of independence and integrity. If you start interfering and politicking around with the Justice Department, no one's going to believe any of the prosecutions, even that Trump will want the department to bring. So I think Barr is, and let me say, also saying this Justice Department alum, I have never never I can't think of an example where the attorney general actually went out in public and rebuked the president. And I'm sure Barr's aware of that, too. I can't. This is not just performance acting. He's really saying, if you keep this up and I guess this morning Trump did keep it up.

But if you keep this up, I might resign. And I think Trump needs Barr a lot more than Barr needs Trump. If Barr were to resign, I think that would actually throw the reelection and Trump's reelection into doubt. It would be such a really like, yeah, I mean, you think it would make all those things people think Trump was doing, messing around with Mueller, trying to obstruct justice. Don't you think people would now take an impeachment, take that a lot more seriously? Maybe. I think that's actually baked into the cake, the Trump cake.

My real question is just on sheer as a person who watches the DOJ as closely as you do, how many months or weeks do you give Barr, you know, who was by the way it was it was classically a star of the of the trump uh administration a star of the trump operation the star in trump world lauded and and praised by trump's you know mouthpieces on fox news it's only a matter of time before he becomes a great evil right and so how fast they turned on john bolton by the way right right so so how many weeks do you think bar's got um and then how many hours do you think it'll be before your tub side phone rings and it's uh i have thank god they don't have video on this thing yeah please hold have the president. Thank God they don't have video on this thing.

Yeah. Please hold for the president. Who's probably calling from a bathtub too. Yeah. First bathtub to bathtub conversation. Yeah. Well, I don't think it's – I think he's in the bathroom. I don't think he's – I don't think it's the tub that he's using. Put it that way.

What – answer those questions, John. I know I can't tell on the show, but one of these days I want to talk about my visit to the LBJ bathroom in UTI. It's a retirement home. Oh, that was awesome. Anyway, so. Stop evading. Answer the question. So I actually think Barr will serve out the rest of the term.

I think what he's done is he's kind of shot a shot over the bow of Trump and saying, stop it, knock it out. It's really harming you. And I think Trump, if he's and I think Trump has got like a kind of animal cunning. I mean, I think you can say to him and persuade, you know, explain things the way you would in a normal briefing in the Oval Office and say, here are the three reasons you shouldn't attack the Justice Department. But I think Barr instead realizing he has one of the world's worst clients, went to a medium that Trump would understand, which is a television interview that's immediately tweeted out and blasted around media everywhere. And so I expect Trump will actually pull back and stop messing around with the department. Because I do think he must, to me, it seems he must realize that Barr leaving would be

a terrible blow to him and the administration. So I'm not expecting the call. But if I were to take it, I say, I'm not going in without Rob Long, your friend, who knows all your buddies. That's my- Roger Stone's friend. Roger Stone's secret friend all right all right john we'll let you get that nixon tattoo on the back too just like roger

it only looks like nixon didn't didn't start looking like nixon john we'll let you get out of the tub before your printer naturally youthful skin becomes all wrinkled in the lake so uh we'll talk to you again down the week uh when the next legal crisis hits should be about 45 minutes from now but uh. So we'll talk to you again down the week when the next legal crisis hits. Should be about 45 minutes from now, but we'll deal with that then. Thank you, John. Talk to you later.

See you. John, you enjoy the bath. Yes, John. Don't say your own Nixon tattoo will look like W.H. Auden if you stay in too long. Wait, he's at a resort, right, in Palos Verdes?

He's always at a resort. He hooks up to more academic conferences. I've never known him. Isn't there a Trump resort there? Is he actually staying? Is he part of the emoluments problem? Could be. I don't know.

That always sounds like something you should put on your skin to make it smoother. Oh, can you hand me those emoluments, please? Oh, yeah. It does make your skin better. That's for sure. Well, we have a couple of things to deal with before we end the show. And where would we be without the, well, since we have a custom-made shout, let's have the custom-made. Let's hear it.

George Jetson. What? The James Lydon Member Post of the Week. Unbelievable. I just love that. It's from Bucknell Dad this time and it's again from the Member Post. French court scrambles the debate

over what is a GMO in foods. Now why do I pick this one? Because I'm intimately and fascinated with the subject. Yes and no. What I like is when progressive societies like France come up against science. And while everybody on the concern side believes that frankenfoods and genetically modified organisms are the horrible things that are going to bring us all down and create famine and kill people and give them cancer, no, a lot of stuff is genetically modified.

As a matter of fact, a lot of the things that we take for granted as being natural have been modified heavily by treatments and science and the rest of it. So when you have a court that has to look at decide whether or not something is actually a GMO based on science, it's this bind into which they put themselves. And it's delicious to watch and delicious to eat, too. So I like that because it shows, again, the breadth and depth of the member feed where it's not politics. It's music and it's recollections and it's family and it's lessons on life. And it's casting an eye to all over the globe to see what they're going on that conveniently fits our own ideological profile. That's what I love. I'm kidding. And more, we usually would have a Rob Long post of the week but he's been sick as a poll yeah i

don't have a post yeah and so i would just like to can i just do a poll a quick poll just a poll i just do it inside your brain if you are listening to this and you are a ricochet member then you can skip this poll but if you're not a ricochet member, I'd like you to answer one or two. Well, I answered this question one or two ways. What will it take you to get you to join a more begging from me, which seems to be ineffective or B you're just going to do it. Cause you know, you want to do it and you just keep putting it off and you're going to do it and you'll do it right. You know, as soon as this podcast is over, you'll go to ricochet.com and you'll join. It's not expensive, and you'll be part of a larger network and part of a larger group, and you'll be striking a blow for a civilized, smart, interesting, center-right community on the web. Yeah, and if you think people are going to pay for something on the web, you're on drugs,

which just brings us to the Reason podcast, which apparently this week is called How Rob Long Went From Cheers to National Review to LSD. This is an interesting little Pilgrim's Progress here. I don't know. Were you on that podcast or were they just talking about you? No, no, I was on. I mean, Nick Gillespie is a very fine writer, very fine person. He's got a podcast called The Reason Interview.

So I just did it this week. Reason. It's just – Yeah, they're all're all it's excellent it's excellent but it it's a little i mean hollywood reporter i could see that cigar aficionado but reason is a little august for you rob did we be able to yeah it was i made a few libertarian jokes you know like kind of humorless and randy stuff and it I don't know how it went over. I don't know. I don't know where they, where they keep their, their comments.

I don't think I want to go find it. Cause I'm sure there's a lot of angry libertarians. I haven't found the comments yet, but they have a little write-up on their website describing who you are. Rob Long's been a writer since. And here's the line I like in 2010, he co-founded the right of center podcast and blogging empire. Empire is the operative word there.

A podcast and blogging empire known as Ricochet. We're emperors, Peter. We're emperors. Well, if we're emperors, we're suffering from imperial overstretch. Well, back to the membership pitch. But yeah, do we have a triumvirate here or do we have a duumvirate? What am I, the master of the horse here? I'm trying to figure out my role in this. Who's first citizen is what I want to know.

You're the vizier. You're the grand vizier. You are the extremely grand vizier. So, Rob, what point, in retrospect, I have two questions. What was the point that you're proudest of, and what was the point, this always happens, the moment the interview ends, you thought to yourself, should have said this give us each well i mean to be fair i was so uh i hadn't yet begun my medications so this is like happened two days ago uh three days ago and i was so kind of hazy and woozy and feverish that i really have no no strict recollection of what i said

except i'm pretty sure that i, I, what I usually do when I'm in that state is I only say about a third of the actual thought. I just go right to the conclusion. Right. And then I skip over every sentence. So it's really like you're tuning in. It's like when you're listening to something and, and it, and it keeps dropping out and you keep catching up to it later, like a bad Skype connection. So I'm not sure I made a lot of connective statements or arguments. I think I made a pretty good argument about the psychotic break that both of the major parties have had over the past 20 years and was brought us to this kind of crazy moment in politics. But but nothing I haven't said here. That you know of. You've been hopped up on goofballs, so we'll go and listen to the podcast and see at the

end of it, you're playing Charlie Manson songs backwards and screaming acid as groovy kill the progs. Right, right. Gentlemen, I think we're out of time. We need to move on with our day. And with that, Rob needs to get back to bed, of course. He does. And Peter needs to get back to work.

I need to get to the office. And there you go, gentlemen. It's been great fun. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas. Oh, gosh, you know what I really... At the end of it, you always think what you're supposed to say.

Darn it, darn it, darn it. I wish I had the time to say that the podcast was brought to you by Hydrant and by ButcherBox, and you can support them for supporting us. And I wish I'd said that people really ought to go to iTunes and give us a five-star review and say nice things so more people can discover the podcast and join Ricochet. Shoot, shoot, shoot. I wish I'd said those things. Oh, well, make a note of it.

I'll say them next. That was great. Well, they'll stone you when you're trying to be so good. They'll stone you just like they said they would. They'll stone you when you're trying to go home. They'll stone you when you're there all alone. But I would not feel so all alone. Everybody must get stoned Well, they'll stone you when you're walking on the street

They'll stone you when you're trying to keep your seat They'll stone you when you're walking on the street Ricochet! Join the conversation When you're walking on the... Ricochet! Join the conversation. When you're walking to the door But I would not feel so all alone Everybody must get stoned They'll stone you when you're at the breakfast table

They'll stone you when you're... How do I sound? No, I'm bathtub side. Oh, man. Oh, we don't. Just reassure us right now that you're alone.