The Ricochet Podcast - Flipping The Bird

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

This week, a super-sized episode featuring scooters, Nebraska’s own Ben Sasse on trade, tariffs, Trump, and Kavanaugh, self-driving cars, Twitter mob, and more. We could say more, but really, you should just listen to the show. Music from this week’s podcast: Summertime by The Busters... Source

Oh, sorry. No, I was I'm sorry. I was I was on mute. I do that. So three, two, one. We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. The president should not refer to us as the enemy of the people. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex, and today we scoot around a lot of topics and talk to Ben Sasse. Let's have ourselves a podcast.

Bye-bye. Welcome, everyone. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 410. The Ricochet Podcast is brought to you by the fine people at Fleur. Fleur creates sustainably crafted, award-winning perfumes delivered with transparency at an honest price. What's not to love go to floor.com today and use the promo code rico r-i-c-o to get 20 off your custom floor sample set ad or brought to you by blinkist blinkist is the only app in the galaxy that takes thousands of best-selling non-fiction books and distills them down to the most impactful elements so you

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And here is one of the founders, as they used to say on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, to tell you all about why you should crowbar open your wallet and maybe kick into this ongoing enterprise. Rob? Well, as you know, thank you, James. I used to do these all the time with limited effectiveness, shall we say. And then our director – Really? Why do we have you keep doing these things? Well, because we keep thinking we're going to get a different result. That's's how you know we're sane we do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result um this one was once again written by ricochet's director of technical

operations max ledoux uh who um enjoys um putting uh enthusiastic uh uh pro trump statements in my in my mouth but that's fine. Here at Ricochet.com, we've always tried to fill a need that we saw on the right for something, news analysis, intellectual discussion, soothing voices, along the lines of what NPR does on the left. Now, I don't know about you, but my lefty friends are always telling me about some harebrained thing they heard on NPR. I was listening to NPR, they say, or, oh, I heard on all things considered, they say. Well, I like to hear people say I heard it on the Ricochet podcast, although I do do a weekly commentary on public radio. So I don't mind it personally.

Anyway, NPR is free to listen to over the airwaves, and the Ricochet Audio Network likewise is free to listen to at Ricochet.com, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, your favorite podcast app, whatever. But unlike NPR, we don't receive any federal funding, and of course we wouldn't want to take any even if they offered. But we do have expenses. It takes money to run the best conservative center discussion website and podcast network around. Believe me, it's true. Everybody says it. I hear it all the time. They say Ricochet is the best.

And why is that ricochet is a fully moderated community is one of the few places online where you can post your thoughts and have a civil debate which uh every six months or so or three months or so or back now these days every 24 hours is an is an issue that comes up in the news where do you find civility you find it here why because we have a wall a big beautiful paywall you see the comments on other websites they're awful it's a swamp out there not at Ricochet we have drained the swamp we are making the internet great again 5 more minutes max on that line

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Pause the show right now. I know a lot of you keep thinking you're going to do it. Oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it later. I'll do it. But do it now, please. We actually need you. So pause it.

Go to Ricochet.com slash join and join. Thank you. Now, can I just say, James? Yes. These pitches have proved somewhat effective. That's why I keep doing them this way. That's why Max's copy, as wooden and awkward as it is, is more effective than what I would consider my more heartfelt, free-form style. But we live in different times. So in other words, having somebody forced to say something that he does not in essence believe is the key to getting people to part with their money. Yeah, it's the key to show business.

So how exactly – just to find out the level to which you would prostitute yourself, how many pro-Trump things would you be willing to say if it had a 25 percent increase in membership? Oh, I'd say them all. Okay. Well – You know, here's why. Because I care more about Ricochet and about the sustainability of this business. I care more about our mission.

Than your own immortal soul. Than my own integrity. Absolutely, 100 percent. Are you kidding me? Well, money over integrity, you've just confirmed every single bias that people have about conservatives. Evil breed that we are. Peter, welcome. Welcome.

I heard your genial little chuckle there as Rob was doing his pitch, as you too perceived he was selling his soul for. And mind you, I'm perfectly happy to see whatever works. And it is a show. I mean the very fact that you can have a founder who himself shall we say is something of a Trump skeptic and a lively, bumptious, entertaining scrum every day in the comment section of Ricochet about Trump indicates why I keep coming back. And I know it's not like Twitter, for example, where you just have random people that you've never met before in your life dropping into your timeline and setting up some straw man dousing it with butane and then running away cackling. It's a community of voices and names that you get to know over the course of time. But as we learned on Twitter this week, sometimes you can say whatever you want and, well, shazam, shazam, it doesn't have any effect on your ability to maintain a living in the future. So I'm going to ask you guys something. I'm going to ask your

advice. Peter, Rob, listen very closely. I'm about to say something that is going to be racist, ageist, ableist, sexist, and very offensive. But I want you to know that the horrible things that I'm about to say are being done in response to the language of a young lady on Twitter.

Oh, yes. Now then, do you think that the statements I'm about to make will be received with that knowledge and that I will suffer no consequences for what i'm about to say would you advise me to keep going or would you advise me to keep it to myself well you work for the strip you live in a decent community with decent surrounded by decent people most of them disagree with you on politics but still minneapolis is a decent place as contrasted with the new york, which hired this young woman in question.

And it turned out 10 seconds later that she had put all kinds of really racist, virulent stuff up on Twitter. Trolls made her do it. The trolls made her do it. Right, right, right. So I guess what I'm saying is you should stop now because you attempt to live a decent life among decent people. Rob, do you think I should keep going or do you think I should stifle myself Edith-wise? Well, I believe everyone should stifle themselves Edith-wise. So my general answer to that question is always loud and resounding.

Yes, silence. Don't type anything or say anything. Stay indoors as much as you can. And if you go outdoors, venture outdoors outdoors don't speak in a loud voice and if you're tempted to send something through the intertubes on Twitter, don't not because

of the chance that you'll get lambasted for some statements but because I don't want to hear it in general, I don't want to hear people's stuff like that. We should give people background on what you're saying. This is not a meaningless,

strange, little brain journey you've gone on. This is something that's really happened. I mean, this is something that really happened that caused some people on the side you're on to say C. C, exactly.

C, and also it's just another example of a double standard that we – people who are from the center to the right. I mean really from the center, I believe. Actually, maybe even some people who are even on the little bit on the left, but not sufficiently on the left. A labor under, which is that stuff that we do or say

can get you fired. And stuff that they do or say you know, gets you maybe a trip to the boss's office and then you're done. James, you'd better just explicitly state what happened because we're going to have some listeners who don't lead as much of their lives as we three lamentably do on Twitter. So briefly what happened. The New York Times editorial board has a new hire, Sarah, I can't pronounce her name correctly,

Xiong, J-E-O-N-G, I believe. There may be a U in there somewhere. And immediately, alt-right trolls seized, as they have it now, on things that she had written on Twitter over the past few years. And while everybody's had a moment on Twitter where they said something they wish they hadn't, she had just gleeful episodes in which she was doing the standard stuff for young people on the left, which is to make fun of white people, hearty horror, hope they die, why do they burn up in the sun so much,

lol, bleep white women, am I right? And a lot of this stuff that is just sort of the general vocabulary of people who want to trot out their progressive bona fides. It can't possibly be seen as racism because racism requires – there's a racism plus power equation, which means that you can't be racist if you're dragging on white people. So now it's been – now that all this horrible stuff came to light, people were saying, well, isn't this interesting? Kevin Williamson said this. James Gunn said that.

Everybody – they all suffered consequences. Yet she seems inured from any consequences to her previous statements. Why is that? The New York Times and Ms. Young came out with an explanation that said that she was fighting back at the horrible trolls who had come at her and she was using the language to parody them, which doesn't really square with an awful lot of the stuff that she said in the general tenor of her stuff, which is except for your standard issue, SJW, be hatching about white people. Am I right? So and other people pointed out David French, Jonah Goldberg saying it's good that the Times didn't fire her for inadvertent things that she said in the past.

We should allow people to grow. We should admit the possibility of grace, et cetera, et cetera, which I find a little too curious. I don't really feel like curling into a ball on this one and saying, oh, it's great that the culture wars have stopped here because they'll begin up the moment somebody goes and listens to this podcast and transcribes the things I'm not going to say. Let me tell you why I'm not going to say things along the level and the vitriol that she did, because I would like to be seen as the rest by the rest of the world as a fundamentally decent person who isn't a babbling idiot. And a lot of this stuff is just this, this promiscuous display of, of accepted, uh, tropes and the rest to show that you're,

you're, you're, you're psychological and political bona fides. However smart she may be in some of the pieces that she's written, she comes across as a really unpleasant person, nobody that you really want to know. And when you look at the picture of this person, everybody from this generation seems to always be posing in their pictures like they're auditioning for the role in a live-action version of a Disney tween superhero show.

Their arms are folded and they've got a look of resolution and a smile and the rest of it. This may be common currency for that generation. But if so, then they've demolished the standards of public discourse. Question of fact. Question of fact. At any point in the controversy i dipped in and out of twitter yesterday so it's perfectly possible that i missed something question of

fact runs as follows did she apologize did she say i was intemperate i wish i had it to do if i had it to do over again i would not say what i said all that i'm aware of is just what you sketched out james which is that she refused to apologize and defended what she had said by saying, I was defending myself against trolls. She didn't say. Explaining is wrong. Yeah, explaining is the new apology. How do you apologize for things you actually, I mean, there's the hypocritical apology.

I'm sorry I got caught. I'm sorry you read what I said. So she did not apologize, right, as far as we know? Well, there was no clear. I was wrong. I wish I used poor judgment because here's where I'm going with this. Yesterday evening in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, not for all that far from where I grew up in upstate New York, Donald Trump held a rally to support a Republican congressman who apparently is in some trouble in the polls. And the New York Times this morning says that Donald Trump devoted almost all the rally to bashing fake news.

Now, I would not have wanted to watch the rally. I have watched Donald Trump enough on Fox News. I'm pretty sure I can picture in my mind what he did. However, we now know that the New York Times has hired onto its editorial board a person who uses unabashedly, unapologetically, willing to defend it as defending her – what she did – racist – unambiguously racist comments. And you know what? Donald Trump is right. The New York Times presents its editorial board as this august body above liberal. We of course we all know but impartial, untainted by racism or bigotry of any kind, concerned with nothing but the national interest and it's a fraud. He's right about it. It's a fraud. I don't – I am not outraged by her tweets. They're just dumb jokes. I'm not outraged by dumb jokes or jokes at all. So I only want some kind of equality and parity, but I really don't want to descend into a world where people are getting fired for something dumb like this. And even if you – even her tweets are not as inane as the things that Paul Krugman has written. That's – I think that goes without saying, right? Right.

But there's a difference. I mean Krugman is saying it wouldn't be great if we could be China for a day and have an authoritarian state. No, no, that's actually that's not even Krugman, by the way. Krugman, that's that's that's Tom Friedman. Yes, yes, yes. He's the moderate Friedman Krugman. I'm sorry. I thought they combined and formed dysentery. But go on. Oh, I mean, all I mean is that I don't I don't want her to be fired. I don't think she should have been fired. I think that's wrong. And I'm glad that someone stood up and said, look, we're not going to this sort of weird pretend outrage is not going to sway us. This momentary glimpse of sanity wasn't – what I know to be temporary and what I know to be temporary until someone else on the right comes along. about this was upset about what she said because that's typical it's par for the course you see

all the time what they're upset about is the fact that you can say these things and be hired by the new york times and the new york times is fine with that and be fine with it i mean the the backdrop here for everybody is that kevin williamson who's our yes that's right kevin uh was uh uh hired by the atlantic and then um then somebody found some tweets or some statements that he made on a podcast broadcast by Ricochet.com in which he said a couple of things facetiously and they thought that was beyond the pale. He was unfired. And I do actually have – as you know, he's a brilliant writer, a very funny guy. Kevin's statement about this, this is the New York Times imbroglio, and it is – I don't know if anyone's heard it, but I'll read it to you. It's great. I am agnostic on the question of whom the New York Times hires and why.

They employ some excellent reporters, a couple of very good columnists, a fair number of mediocrities, and Paul Krugman. Beautiful. Beautiful. I love it. So funny. Yeah. mediocrities and paul krugman beautiful beautiful i love him so funny um but that's i mean that just to be you know i i try i'm trying not to fall into that you know hit where i pretend that i'm outraged by what she said and it bothers me because it doesn't um and i want her fired because i don't want her fired but i don't think that any one of these people should have been fired i don't i think that we're all walking around here like we're the culture's decided that it's we're like wounded birds and we need to be sort of taped up and put in in gilded cages and protected

i'm going to draw a distinction there and we may simply on this on this couple of points, we may simply have to disagree. What Kevin said was making a point. He was making a point about an important issue, abortion. He did not use foul language. He was not in any way racist. seen different tweets but i do not interpret it as humor uh at least some of what she wrote and at least some of what she wrote was unambiguously racist kevin should not have been fired she should never have been hired i really draw a sharp distinction there but go ahead yeah no i i see but i just in general i feel like feel like this person tweets from the past, all that stuff. It just seems so bizarrely petty to me and completely – it requires a certain theater, a dramatic theater from the people who are outraged on either side that i just i don't find authentic yes there is a theatrical nature to it but it was the left that built the sets and wrote the script and hung the drapes and the lights and hired the director it was the left that said that that racism sexism all of these this constellation of isms that constitute uh the the the the dark

puelating black forces that are going to consume the american soul they're the ones who stated that any manifestation of these sins is proof that a person is outside of the pale so when that's turned against them we hear it it was performance art it wasn't really racism because you can't because she's she's punching up which i just love harvard law graduate she who's now at the new york times is the person who has who's not in power right right so you know that if the terms were reversed that this person would be anathema and cast out of society which is why you can't say i'm glad that somebody finally said it stops here because it doesn't it just simply gives the impression, dare I say,

the sort of question as to whether or not there might be two sets of standards at work here that this class would use. Yes, yes. All three of us can agree. You need to call the New York Times on this. But if there are two classes, then are we not acquiescing in that distinction and agreeing with it and saying that – I mean are we condemning ourselves then to saying we're in that second lesser class because our ideas have been defined by the other side to be outside of the pale of normal politics? Are we fine with that?

Because it sounds like a lot of guys are perfectly fine with that. In my opinion, it seems to me – and again, I think twice every time I find myself following an argument that Donald Trump has laid out. But I do believe that we're OK as long as we say, as often as it needs to be said, the New York Times is no longer a national magazine. It has no right. Yeah, right. From any Empyrean height to look down on the rest of us and say, you, you on the right, you're being divisive. They just hired a racist. You, you on the right, you're bigoted. They just hired a racist.

The New York Times. Off the pedestal. It's just a partisan rag. Now, it's a complicated story because as Kevin – There are some fine writers. There are some fine writers. Go ahead. A partisan rag with a great food section. With a great food section, with some excellent reporters reporters with what is still probably about the

best foreign reporting although the wall street journal has been beefing up its foreign coverage a lot nevertheless when it comes to the ideology the people who run the magazine the people who write the editorials and and those who predominate on the op-ed pages, the New York Times is a partisan rag. Okay, I feel better now. Well, yes, and that's true. And they will forever on to the end of times be telling you that they are on the side of the dispossessed and the small people, while certain people in their organizations scurry about New York trying to get as many ads as possible for furs and $700 shoes for their Sunday magazine, which for years has been this wonderful instrument of the finely appointed in Manhattan. I remember I used to get the Sunday magazine in Minneapolis, and one of the reasons that

we liked it, of course, it came with these free little perfume strips you rub on your neck, and for a while, I was sophisticated because i got some little calvin klein some some some glue on me or whatever um and that probably put me off wearing any sort of scent for an awful long time because you'd walk around and people say my you smell like the sunday times and there came a time in my life when i just didn't find that to be that much of a necessary thing to do. But you know what? I have to say, not as a scent guy, I am now a scent guy again. And it's simply because of the company that I'm doing these spots for. I'll be honest.

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It doesn't tell you anything about what it's going to do on you. Would you like to be ambushed in a busy department store where somebody hoses you down with this stuff? You walk in, there's a cacophony of smells all around the room. You can't really tell where it's going. No, you get to know each of Fleur's scents, well, first of all, on the website. And you think, how does that work? There's no smell-o-vision, is there? They have pictures, words, and music on their site that give you an impression of exactly what this scent is like. You choose the one that you want to sample by what

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of your choice and then 20 off p-h-l-u-r.com promo code rico our thanks to floor for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast but trust me if you don't scents, you will like to after you try them. If you know somebody who likes to wear scents, they will love you for suggesting Floor. Rob, did you buy a scooter? No, I did not. I did not buy a scooter. What is happening in Los Angeles and parts of it are, you know, some of the little tiny municipalities and principalities are banning them. But where I live in Santa Monica, I live in Venice, in Santa Monica, Venice,

there are these things called Razor, not Razor scooters. There's like, one of the companies is called Bird, or the other is called Lime. They're little electric scooters, and they're all over the place. And, you know, you go with your app, you blink into the code, and you pay a buck, and you get to scooter around at 15 miles an hour, although I've gotten up to 17 or 18 miles an hour. You scooter around town. You can scooter up to around the corner. You can scoot up to the street.

You can scoot up to the metro rail. You can scooter anywhere you want. And then when you're done, you just sort of put the scooter – you lean it up against the wall or you put it on this kickstand and then at nighttime um the the the companies are independent contractors come around and uh recharge them all and make them all look pretty and um and fix the ones that are broken and i i when i came back to la i hadn't seen them forever uh they were not here when i was here in april and then suddenly they were and they're all over the place and i was really mad like an old man you know like they're all over the place and then people sometimes on the weekends because i live at the beach they'll just drop when they're

done let's drop them so you'll like turn a corner and suddenly they'll be like eight or nine of these scooters kind of all you know just lying around like almost – almost like the rapture had taken the scooter up. And I hated them and then I tried one because you got to try something and it was great. And I'm on it all – and look, I look like a total – As do I. I know absolutely I look like a complete fool. But at least there are people on segways in downtown Minneapolis that I can laugh at who are below me in the door corridor. And yet it's powered by Segway.

Segway is the technology behind at least I think the bird of the lime. And it's one of those things where – I've had two experiences recently where I'm seeing – I think I'm seeing something that is going to change stuff. I remember I had this one moment years and years and years ago. A friend of mine was an investor, and he was investing in a little company called Uber Cab or Uber Taxi it was called then. And he gave me a little code, and I was in San Francisco somewhere. And I thought, oh, well, maybe I'll just try this thing and see if this works. And this was a long time ago, and it worked. And I thought, oh, I've just experienced

something. This feels like something's going to be something. The second time this happened to me was a friend of mine was investigating a company called The Real Real, which is this very fancy online consignment store

where people send their fancy clothes, used clothes that are nice, but like fancy brands, expensive stuff. And they send them to this website and the company makes sure that they're authentic and makes sure that they're not stained and horrible. And then they sell them and you get a commission. A company takes the commission and you get the rest. Rob, I hate to cut you off there, but we have a guest, the junior senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse.

In his spare time, of course, he likes to drive Uber in Iowa. You can follow him on Twitter, at Ben Sasse. Hey, welcome. Let's talk trade. Let's talk agriculture. Why is a trade war bad exactly? Shouldn't we be using the leverage we have against China and the EU? China just came up with $60 billion in more tariffs.

Is this the start of something bad, or are we going to work our way through this with negotiations to come into a stronger position? Well, first of all, what problem are we trying to solve? Because we have, you know, over the last couple of decades, more trade than at any point in human history, and that's great for everybody, but it's especially great for us. We built this global trading regime, and the idea that somehow we're being taken advantage of in it is just a weird kind of whining because it's not true. So when there's more trade in the world, consumers win and producers win. And when you – by the way, on NAFTA, it turns out that Mexican consumers and producers win and and Canadian producers and consumers win, and U.S. consumers and producers win. And I live in a place, Nebraska is, I think,

the most per capita export-dependent state in the union right now. I live in a place that is literally the most productive land in human history. And we grow far more food than we could conceivably consume. So we need these export markets and lots of other people like our food. So let's start by recognizing that there's lots of really good stuff in the world. And so if your goal is to get rid of certain trade barriers, non-tariff barriers or whatever else, and it's with countries that you have a really good deal going with already, that's great. Let's be constructive and let's get rid of some of those barriers like Canadian dairy, which is ridiculous. Let's be constructive and let's get rid of some of those barriers like

Canadian dairy, which is ridiculous. But there are also things that the U.S. is doing in certain trading relationships that don't make sense. Let's negotiate with friends as friends. And we should distinguish a lot more between friends and global competitors like China. China and Canada are not the same. China and Mexico are not the same. China is a bad guy. But Mexico and Canada aren't. And so we should be able to make that distinction. Hey, Senator, Peter Robinson here. Thanks so much for joining us. My first thought is that you and Devin Nunes may have to arm wrestle over who represents the most productive land in the country. I think Devin might argue that Fresno County does pretty well, even by comparison with Nebraska. But but but we'll let you I'll let you actually we'll stage the arm wrestling on that one.

Here's the question. I can't work it out, and maybe you can. On the one hand, in the administration, we've got Larry Kudlow saying, look, all of this tariff business is just to negotiate. We're trying to get to freer trade. And when China imposes a 25% tariff on our cars and we impose only a 2.5 percent tariff on their cars, we're just in a weak bargaining position. There's nothing we can offer to ratchet down. We're already down all the way. We're negotiating here. And then you've got Peter Navarro, also in the administration, who, as best I can tell, is arguing that protectionism is good in and of itself. And then we have the – these are like the two little angels sitting on Donald Trump's shoulders as best I can make it out.

The president, the other day he called for getting to zero-zero. He seemed to have had a very useful free trade-ish at least discussion with Juncker, the official from the European Union. And then he'll give speeches in which he seems to be arguing that protectionism is good in and of itself. What's going on? Union. And then he'll give speeches in which he seems to be arguing that protectionism is good in and of itself. What's going on? Yeah, so the opening bit on your question, Peter, was you can't work it out and can I? And the short story is absolutely not. I can't work it out either. But I don't want to do intro White House palace intrigue, but it's really hard. I'm not

going to, but it's really hard when you do this picture of Kudlow as the good angel and Navarro as the bad angel sitting on the president's shoulders because there's political cartoonage, I don't know what the right noun there is, that should be done for a long time into the future because that is a huge part of what's happening. The president has a bunch of really good advisors and the president has a couple of really problematic advisors. And the problem is that the president really does believe protectionist stuff. I appreciate that he is willing to listen. He is a guy who his doors open to not just me, but lots of people. But the president and I talk about topics like this fairly regularly and he's willing to listen. But unlike a lot of things

where I think he's kind of trolling the media, on this one, I think he just genuinely is a protectionist. So the problem is Navarro and Lighthizer have the easier hand to play because they're working with the grain, and Kudlow and others who believe the kinds of things I believe about free trade, they're having to work against the grain. And here's the fundamental problem. You've got people in the administration who believe that trade is zero sum, and it's not true. Trade is positive sum, and it is possible for us in Mexico to win at the same time. It is possible for us in Canada to win at the same time. And you have advisors who I know go to the president and say, oh, Mr.

President, you know, NAFTA has been really good for Mexico. And what they want him to hear is we got screwed. And so they know that he starts with an assumption that at a real estate transaction, if both parties really do want to make the deal at the end of the deal, if your counterparty got a really good deal, then you probably did negotiate poorly because you left money on the table because setting a final dollar price to transact this piece of real estate is ultimately zero sum. Trade isn't like that. Trade expands the world. There's higher quality, lower cost stuff when we comparatively specialize.

And so the problem here is I think that the president really is inclined toward these protectionist arguments. One more point, and then you redirect us. But I think the really big point that the public needs to get is that bilateral trade product deficits are usually not bad. IP theft is always bad. And so China is involved. The president's right about this. China's involved in some really bad stuff. And we should be pushing back against that. And we should use lots of our leverage. But if you're going to do that, what you would ultimately want to do is lead a coalition of willing nations in the Pacific that believe in human dignity, that believe in the rule of law, that believe in open seaways, that believe in contracts, that believe in trade. China doesn't believe in that stuff. And so the president's broader protectionist rhetoric actually weakens him and the U.S.

government vis-a-vis China, where if we were engaging the world, if we were wanting to trade more, then we could push back against China. And the president's obsessive focus on bilateral trade product deficits is one of the core problems here. He doesn't understand what they mean. Yeah. Senator, let me ask you. So you represent Nebraska and it is underappreciated in the rest of the country, but you're superb at explaining this. Agricultural states, Nebraska, Iowa, are really tied into the international market. Exports are a big deal in Nebraska.

What argument would you make if you were in Rob Portman's position? Rob Portman, former U.S. trade representative, but he represents Ohio and he represents some industrial towns that got whacked over the last quarter century. And Donald Trump's message really resonates in a place such as Akron, say. Yeah. What do you say to the people who feel that they have gotten the country as a whole? For sure, Nebraska farmers exporting to entirely new markets across the Pacific. Terrific. But what would you say to those who feel they've gotten hurt? Yeah, two prefatory comments. First,

shout out to Rob Portman as a guy who does this with integrity. So the U.S. Senate and the American people are blessed, not just people from Ohio, but America's blessed to have Rob Portman doing what he does because I think he argues in a really methodical, deliberate way. And number two, great question from you. If only our public discourse could be about a question like this, as opposed to the crap we're usually talking about, it would be really productive. So background, NAFTA over the last few decades has been good for every family as a consumer, period, end of story. Everybody gets higher quality, lower cost stuff when we get to the store. So at a consumption side, whether you're in Nebraska or Ohio, everybody's benefited. At a production side, we should know that NAFTA has created net US jobs. And this is not

understood. Most people think, well, it's been good for us to get plasma TVs or something that there's more trade in the world, but we lost a whole bunch of jobs in the process. I'm not sure that's a good equation. That's not true. That's not what's happened. We've gotten higher quality, lower cost stuff at the consumption side and the production side. America has more jobs because of NAFTA. Now, they don't come to every sector in the same way. And there's been lots more benefit to ag than there has been to industrial, big factory, big tool economy jobs. And here we need to step back from the trade conversation and understand what's really happening. What's really happening is automation is eating big factory jobs. So in

the same way that at the end of the Civil War, 86% of Americans lived and worked on the farm, and today well under 2% of Americans live and work on the farm, and yet we have way more output. That's because humans are smart, and we automate tasks over time. If something's a routinizable job, we'll figure out how to routinize it. We'll substitute software and robots. And that's what we do. That's what humans do. Industrialism is going through the tail end of that same kind of revolution, in that the high watermark of industrial jobs in America in the mid-1950s was 31% of the labor market. Today, it's 7% of the labor market. That is going down inevitably forever, and it's not primarily because

of trade. It's because of automation. So the number one thing to understand in Ohio is the boarded-up factory in Youngstown isn't because that factory moved to Mexico. The brand of that corporation may or may not have one in Mexico. But the important point is there were 38,000 employees at it in 1975, and today there are 800 employees servicing robots. And so what we really need to think about are the jobs of the future and trade mitigation. We're crappy at trade mitigation policies. We should get to better policies for trade mitigation. But the much bigger point is how do you take 40 and 45 and 50-year-olds whose jobs get automated and get them gainfully engaged in productive enterprises for their neighbor and to put bread on the table?

And this is where Washington is still just asleep at the switch about the pace of economic change. Right. Hey, I think Rob Long wants to come in, but I'm going to indulge myself and ask you one more question if I may, Senator. Here, you have been – I want to phrase this – well, I don't have to phrase it that carefully because you'll correct me if I misstate something here. Don't worry to slap me. No, no. No, this is – Ben Sasse has been one of the more critical Republican senators of President Trump. You do not hesitate to tweet and to speak on this podcast, but to go on checked, which I grant was six months ago now, but it can't have changed that much. The last time I checked the ranking of senators who voted with the administration, as I recall, you were second or third among those who vote most consistently with the administration.

So what do you what are you up to there? And how does all this work out back home? Your folks back in Nebraska, I believe, again, this is the last time I checked the polls, they support the president. And you're out there playing this complicated game. Excuse me, it's not a game. I'm sure you're principled in everything you do. But you're voting with the administration, but you're whacking the president around pretty hard. So what are you up to and how does that play back home? Yeah. So to the political point, I don't I don't really know.

And I don't I don't really obsess over it because I think I'm one of I think eight people in the Senate has never been a politician before. And I promised Nebraskans when I was running in hundreds of town halls and my primary election night speech, my general election night speech. I think D.C. is a mess. And I think both of these parties don't have any long-term vision for what the country needs. And I think one of the fundamental problems in Washington is people are obsessed with their own incumbency. I'm not. I pledged that for four and a half or six years, I would act like I was never running for reelection. And then my wife and I will pray about it and sort it out in the summer of 19. So none of that has changed. So I don't make any decisions about whether or not I think it's short-term expedient because I just don't think we have any long-term vision in Washington.

So I don't poll. I don't know. But my sense is people in Nebraska know that I believe stuff, and they think that the vast majority of politicians don't. And so I think they cut me a lot more slack to speak about stuff I believe in. But I also want to push back on a little bit of your assumption. I think I turned down all five Sunday morning shows for 52 consecutive weeks about a year ago. So there's a desperate desire for Republicans to go out and criticize the president. But that's actually the opposite of what I do with the president.

I might be in a Venn diagram of one in D.C. in that I don't dislike the president personally. A lot of people do, especially in the media. And then there are a whole bunch of people who just kiss his butt in private, and I also never do that. And so I think the president and I have a pretty healthy working relationship in that there's a bunch of topics where we agree, judges, for instance, I think he's doing an extraordinary job. It isn't just that he's nominating great people. It's that he ran on this list, which I think is an innovation that will probably stick in American politics. And I think decades from now, we'll look back on Donald Trump in the spring and summer of 2017 and give him a ton of credit for recognizing that one of the

most fundamental powers of the American presidency is the ability to nominate people to the Supreme Court for lifetime appointments. And so it wasn't just that he ran with this idea of a list. It's that he built a great list and that he's kept his word and stuck to that list. I went on the Judiciary Committee to fight for his nominees to the bench because they're great. But I think it would be bizarre when I've always been a free trader and I think all the data points to free trade, and Nebraska's free trade dependent, and I campaigned as a free trader. And then when the president does protectionist stuff, the fact that I wouldn't try primarily in private to lobby him toward better policies, but then also to disagree with him as a member of a co-equal branch of government in public because we want to have a debate that the American people who are ultimately in charge get to understand. I don't see any misfit at all between affirming his judges when they're great and differing with his trade policy when it's bad. And I feel like, I don't put you in this box, Peter, but when you're, if I'm doing an MSNBC interview,

the standard argument is something like, well, since the president's doing this thing that we think is terrible over here, why wouldn't you filibuster Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? And honestly, I don't even know how to take the question because it'd be like if my seven-year-old kid said, dad, somebody gave us, we got an offender bender at the Walmart parking lot today. So when we get home, I assume you're going to burn down our garage. I don't know why when I've believed in these judicial nominations since way before Donald Trump gave a rip about originalism on the Supreme Court. And the president is nominating the kinds of people that I think should be on the Supreme Court. And he's a convert to my position. I'm supposed to abandon my position to thwart him.

I just think it's weird. Hey, Senator, it's Rob Long in Los Angeles. Thanks for joining us. I have just two quick questions. One is really simple. Brett Kavanaugh, how smooth is that going to be? How rough is that going to be? Should we be preparing for something? What do you think the outlook is for his speedy um an uneventful um confirmation well first of all i think we all know that brett cavanaugh was primarily nominated because of his extraordinary jump shot a heck of a basketball player heck of a basketball

coach i think this is underappreciated in our he he's a great pick all four of the president's finalists were great picks uh or would have been great picks. And I think Kavanaugh is doing a wonderful job in his courtesy visits with senators. He's a deliberate person who's very thoughtful when he was put on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which for I'm not a lawyer, but for legal nerds, it's often referred to as the junior Supreme Court. He was only 41. And in his 12 years on the DC circuit, he's authored more than 300 opinions and more than a hundred of those have been cited by more than 200 of his peers on other federal courts. So, I mean, he is, he's a judge's judge and everybody respects him regardless of whether Democrat or Republican nominee. And I think that the deciding votes on our side are going to be Collins and Murkowski. And I think both of them are being very deliberate in their

evaluation of this record. And I think we're going to be fine. And I think the president's joke that once we have the 51st vote from a Republican, we'll then end up with three or five or seven Democratic votes clamoring to be vote 52. But no Democrat wants to be vote 51 right now. But I think ultimately the confirmation won't be 51-49. And I think the one more thing to say, I won't speak about timing here because I sit on the Judiciary Committee and Chairman Grassley from Iowa is a guy I don't want to cross. He's got his views about how fast we can we get the timing done. But I do think the media's willingness to just carry Democratic water has mostly evaporated because there's just no scandal in the closet around Kavanaugh. The Onion had a great headline that said, obviously, Kavanaugh nomination is now teetering with new Democratic discovery of the fact that he missed his daughter's piano recital in 2011. Yeah, there's no there there. But the one thing that they're trying to drum up is this idea that even

though there will probably be three to five times as many pages of paper produced for Kavanaugh as for any other Supreme Court nominee in the past, the Democrats are going to try to claim that somehow if he doesn't give 10 million documents, somebody's been obstructing. I think the really important distinction here is Brett Kavanaugh was actually not the president of the United States from 2003 to 2006. What Democrats are really asking for is every piece of paper that George Bush had. And Brett Kavanaugh was the staff secretary. It was not a substantive policymaking role. He was getting paper between the president and the president's cabinet, and W's papers are not Kavanaugh's. So I think there's going to be an attempt to make that an issue, but it's not a real issue.

That's good. That's good to hear. But just let me segue that into my last question, because there is a certain amount of derangement going on right now so that everything, if you've got a problem with President Trump, you have a problem with almost every single thing he does, and every single thing he does is one step from the apocalypse. And I think that's sort of the anti-Trump side, sort of the left that's got that problem. But I think our side has a problem too, which is that we think that everything is brilliant and it's all three-dimensional chess and that um you know it seems very strange to me to have a republican senator on making a full-throated and articulate argument for free trade and me wondering are you are you going to be in trouble being this reasonable

it i'm not sure. I mean, how do you feel about the party as it stands, the party in which you're a very prominent, prominent leader? And I will disclose here, I hope a future leader. Is it are you? Are you make are you at least partly nervous about a party that seems to at at least in my view, to be losing its way a little bit? Oh, I'm a lot nervous about that. I don't know. I go back and forth in my mind about whether or not the analog for a moment is the 1850s or the 1880s to 19-teens, but it's one of those.

Let's hope it's the latter. We don't know what comes next, but these two political parties are not sustainable because they don't have any vision. They're both doing fan service for the angriest subset of their bases, and everything is good versus evil, and almost nothing is past versus future. And we're living through a digital disruption that really is revolutionary. The historian in my soul is always scared if I say something that might sound hyperbolic, but I do actually believe we're 20 years into this digital revolution. My guess is 50 years from now, we're going to look back on this moment and think this was more disruptive or at least as disruptive as industrialization, urbanization at the end of the 19th century. Can I ask you to say that sentence one more time?

Because I think that's really – I mean I just suddenly sat up straight. We hear a lot about good versus evil, but not about the past versus the future. Are you optimistic about the future? I am very optimistic about something as important but still siloed as total economic output over the globe over the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. There's going to be way more stuff. There's going to be higher quality, lower cost goods and services produced than at any point in human history. And so the curve – I'm making air hand waves of a spiking curve going into the future. The total economic utility of the globe's going to know because of the digital revolution is going to be gigantic. Is it going to redound to the median worker and the median household?

I don't think so. I'm only sort of 60-40 against, but I think what we're going through is massively disruptive. When you, for 150 years in industrialized, specialized economics, our jobs, our names, our identities come from our jobs. Bakers and Coopers and Smiths and Millers, like the specialized thing that you did as a fundamental anchor of human identity, that's going to end. We're going to go from nouns back to verbs, kind of like nomads did. McKinsey has this huge longitudinal study they've been doing on the future of work disruption in the AI era. And their hypothesis is they've looked at 800 job categories, 45 countries, the richest quarter of all countries on the globe. So it's like 94% of global GDP. And they say, let's just pretend that we don't know new technologies that may come online in 2021 or 2025 or 2029. Let's just take today's technologies.

This was a 2016 to 2018 study that they modeled. Take today's technologies and assume AI is broadly disseminated across the economy by 2030. What does the world look like? One of the things they think is that a majority of American workers are going to be primarily freelancers within four years. Everybody's side hustle, the sort of the thing that you do as your third or your fourth job might be the number one source of your income, but it'll still be less than 50% of your income. Right now, we still think of work as a noun. It is my identity marker. And work is going to become a series of verbs again. And you're going to have to string a lot of this stuff together. And your question

wasn't am I optimistic. I'm actually optimistic that this is really a fascinating, fun place to live if you've got some social capital, if you've got some margin on the road, if you've got a shoulder, if you've got some cushion in your life, you're going to be able to navigate this world, and it's going to be pretty dang cool. On the other hand, if you're living right at the edge of life, when you're 40 or 45 or 50, if you get disintermediated, not only out of your job or your firm, but your whole job category, I think that there's a chance that the social capital collapse that comes from that is way bigger than anything we've seen in the last 200 years. And I don't think our politics, either of these parties, have any vision for this moment. There's a reason that

this will be the third consecutive year that we have declining life expectancy in America. That's never happened before. The last time we had a two-year decline of life expectancy in the early 1960s, there was just a massive flu epidemic that started in the fall and ran to the spring. But we've got spiking opioid deaths. We're setting an all-time record for suicides every year. There's a declining birth rate among white people. My other numbers are not race-specific, but this is to distinguish between Hispanic and migrants still have high birth rates.

But white birth rate is declining. There's a decline of sex in America, both non-marital sex and marital sex. That's weird. That doesn't usually happen anywhere in the world. That's not going through a civil war. But in America, we're so socially isolated that porn consumption rates in the last 11 years have displaced real sex. That's a bummer. So there's a lot that's wrong. I'm just coming up. I'm just coming up right now with the uh the the ben sass for president slogan or more sex well you said yeah you'll do very well it's going to be a little tough in in uh in new hampshire maybe but yeah because it's cold up there but yes yeah that's a whole weird nurse the nursing home

nursing home town hall stops are just awkward now well Well, Senator, we know you have a plane to catch. I would like to ask you how it feels to be the first senator ever to use the phrase fan service, period. I know that that's actually – nobody else has ever used an anime term for giving the fans what they want, if you know what I mean, and I'm impressed. But I will ask you this. It's a simple yes and no. Kavanaugh, before or after the election will he be confirmed? Before. Got it. Yes. Hey, before yes hey thanks thanks for having me can't wait to thanks so much senator can't wait to call an uber in nebraska and you uh you roll up i'll be wearing a sweet camo hat have a good day

thanks uh indeed fan service that that just uh brought me back in my heels. That's – It's in the world. But what he's saying about how the economy is going to change and how the side hustle, which is a term I've never liked, is going to become your pride. This is fascinating stuff. And if you feel a little bit left behind by all of this stuff, some of these ideas that it's like, wait a minute. How do these people know about these ideas and speak about them with such confidence when I'm just hearing about it for the first time? Well, they're magic. They must be wizards. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You just need to find a way to get this stuff in your head as efficiently as possible. And I'm here to tell you a way about which you can do that, after which we're going to go back to Rob and his scooter. I'm telling you about Blinkist, actually, because if you're like me, the list of books you want to read and the things that people suggest to you, it's never-ending and it's always expanding. You just do not have the time to read everything. Well, our sponsor, Blinkist, has solved your long list of must-reads once and for all, truly. Blinkist, it's the only app that takes thousands of best-selling nonfiction books

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It's by Tim Ferriss, who you may have encountered on the web elsewhere. And it's a book about how you can really get outside of the rat race and the grind and find a way to work at a pace that suits you, which, as the senator was just saying, is what our future is all going to be like. But that's just one. The Blinkist library is massive. Timeless classics like Think and Grow Rich to the current bestsellers like, well, the four-hour work week that I just noted. You can listen to it in the office, working out. I prefer, frankly, when I'm walking the dog and I just stick my headphones in.

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and we thank blinkist.com for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Did I mention that the special code is Ricochet? It always is. Well, that was fascinating. And what he was talking about, Rob, when he was saying that we're going to have – your work will no longer be your identity. And Peter, did you notice the list of names that he – Cooper, Miller, all those things. It's like a PTA meeting in Fargo. Right, right. But those were all names that came from professions. Coopers were barrel makers, for example.

And I don't think that in the future people will say, my last name is bird gatherer because their job is to scoop all the birds at the end of the day. But there are two things about when we talk about scooter gatherer. There are two things about the whole scooter thing that interest me. One, yes, you do have this new job that's invented, which is people going around and getting the ones and fixing them. And just to interrupt you, that is in fact a side hustle. That's considered a side hustle. Yes, it is.

But the other thing that fascinates me about this is that before when they came out with cool electric scooters, people would say, oh, I got to own one of those. But now you have a generation that doesn't want to own them. They just simply want to use them. They want to be able to walk up with their phones and the QR code. And there is something psychological at the end of this, though. because it's not yours. When you extend that mentality to more and more things, jobs, homes, cars, transportation, you're creating a different mindset. It's not an ownership. There's no stake as much as there used to be.

And I don't think that's not going to be an unalloyed good. It's convenient as hell. But I don't think that's going to be. Yeah, I think we're in a transition period, aren't we? I mean, we don't know what – human beings do form attachments. They always have. It's kind of a human nature. We just don't know yet what people are attaching themselves to.

I mean it's curious because I've lived in Los Angeles for 30 years. On Labor Day, it will be 30 years. And so with 30 years, a huge part of my life, the majority of my life has been spent entirely in a car culture. But my car is back in New York, and I don't have a car here. And I'm here for a month, maybe six weeks trying to – I'm setting up projects. I have a lot of meetings and all that stuff. And so how am I getting to there? How am I getting to these meetings?

I'm taking UberX. I haven't even rented a car yet. I'm taking the Metro. I took the Metro Rail for the first time from Santa Monica to South Pasadena for lunch with a friend. Or I'm meeting somebody for lunch in Santa Monica on a scooter. I had a meeting at a studio. A lot of studios now move to the west side. So a meeting at a small indie studio about a couple of television projects, one of which I'm very excited and I think will be something that will

ricochet listeners will really enjoy. And I was walking out and I was saying goodbye to everybody and it was a great meeting and they were very excited and bought the idea so we're going to move forward with it. And I'm walking out at the glass doors. It's on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

There in front of the building, all lined up neatly, are a bunch of scooters. I just think, oh, it's a scooter home. I'm not going over any freeways. It's not that far. I think it was maybe four or five miles at the most, maybe three or four miles tops. Believe me, they made fun of me getting on that thing but i thought well this is bizarre i'm actually leaving a uh an important meeting um at which a major studio uh in success meaning it just assumes assume i write a script somebody wants to make and assume they order it.

This studio is now on the hook for $50 million, $60 million in deficit financing for the first year or two. And the person, the prime mover – I mean not the prime mover, but a very important – I'm not being disingenuous. I mean I'm a very important part of the project. And I left the meeting and got on a little electric scooter and scootered home. It's like, this is bizarre, right? Rob, when you had that really beautiful BMW some years ago, and to what extent did you have that because you love the BMW? And to what extent did you have it because you felt you needed to have a status car to do business in Hollywood? In other words, to what extent has the culture just shifted? The culture has not shifted that much.

It has not. But it's the beginnings of it and we're looking at something that I think will be significant. And I think so – so when you hear Ben Sasse talk about it, I mean at least there's somebody talking about the world that we're living in and the world of the future that I think is really crucial. I think he's wrong that the left doesn't have a vision for it. I think they do. That vision is socialism. The socialism answers all the

questions. The problem for us is that the right doesn't have a vision for it. We don't really know how to say to people, no, you're not going to have a job forever. But to go back to your status question, yeah, I mean, I think partly when I was younger, I felt like, oh, I'm making money. I should have a fancy car. But for the past eight years maybe, eight years maybe? I've loved – 10 years.

I've driven either my Chevy Trailblazer, which I loved, or the Subaru, which I really do love. And so I do – even if I was driving around here in LA, I'd be driving around in my Subaru and be very, very pleased. My own little two pieces on this story is that I've got my two oldest kids. My oldest daughter bought a Ford – what's the cheaper Ford? The Ford Focus, I guess, a few years ago because she felt she had to have a car. It was the sort of thing you did after you got out of college. She's now trying to sell it to me because she doesn't want to own a car. My next son, whom you know very well, Rob Pedro, I said,

I was talking to him, when are you going to get a car? He said, Dad, I will never own a car. I can Uber from one place to another. When I want to go up to the mountains camping, I'll take a zip car. And I thought to myself, wow, this is here. I also thought to myself, if I were running Ford or General Motors, two companies that have a century of investment in their brands and a century of investment in the whole idea that you – here's the starter car. Here's what you move up to when you get a better job. Here's the luxury brand. Sort of this whole lifetime cycle, it's all gone, just gone. What I mourn is the old image of dad waxing the Bel Air in the driveway and then maybe changing the oil.

I will vanish until these suburban tract houses with their large garages will turn the garages into grandma houses where they can stow the relatives or just extra rooms because fewer and fewer people will use it. And the problem is, Rob's right. The left says socialism is the answer because the government will provide your education and then they'll provide your health care and they'll possibly provide your food. Who knows? And what you get to keep later is your allowance. Right. So life becomes a self-actualization project.

And the right can't answer that because the right says, well, it will be great because everybody will have an opportunity. And it didn't work for Mitt Romney. Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. Not everybody wants to have three or four jobs. Not everybody wants to have to provide the basics so that people can pick up birds and then write poetry and be a barista and all the rest of these things. SAS is right. It's going to be an interesting thing to shank out. But I mean right now, for example, it is easier to have food delivered to your house by a restaurant than to go out.

And every single restaurant in the city – and we have just thousands of them. They're fantastic. I can have any cuisine dropped here by somebody. And I have no idea what this person is also doing. He's probably also an Uber driver. He's probably also doing Amazon on weekends. All of these things he does to make money. He's busy as hell.

But is he happier than somebody who's sitting in a cubicle in an office somewhere in a suburban mortgage place? than somebody who's sitting in a cubicle in an office somewhere in a suburban mortgage place. I tend to think that maybe he is because it may be more stressful, but it's more exciting than simply sitting there in a polyester shirt and a tie tapping away at a screen. One of the things they deliver, however, is – well, it's the good meat. If you like good meat, that's where ButcherBox comes into this. I have to tell you about this before we get to our final remarks here, which Rob is preparing at this very moment.

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You're going to be so happy. And our thanks to butcher box for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast. Well, what else? You know, I, this may be the second week in which we have not discussed the, the flame out to the flame up the hair on fire thing.

And I think it's kind of wise because do you guys remember what everybody was screaming and panicking about last week? Yeah, I have no idea, but I'm sure it was really bad peter zero zero idea zero idea however may i make my closing comment about the the subject we were just talking about technology i'm going to throw out a question and see what people comment on so i found myself in a conversation earlier this summer with somebody who spent his entire life in the automotive business. And we were talking about autonomous driving. And he made the point that the technology is actually here. It really is right here. It'll get better quickly over the next two or three years, but they know how to drive cars around

without a driver already. And the prediction, the kind of growing consensus within the industry, I have not read about this. It may be the kind of thing that they're hesitant to talk about. Consensus runs as follows. It'll go through two phases, two regulatory phases. The first phase is the one we're going through right now, which is regulators feel very uneasy about permitting vehicle. And I'm talking, this guy was in the European car business. So he's talking about the phases that they expected to go through generally around the world. One, regulators will resist autonomous vehicles. Every time there's an accident involving an autonomous vehicle that will chill the whole project for another few months, so forth. But that's only the first phase. In the second phase,

the regulators will reverse themselves because it will suddenly occur to them that autonomous vehicles shift power from consumers to them, the bureaucrats. This is going to happen in China first. Chinese officials will realize they can get a handle on traffic in Beijing by simply running all the cars themselves from some huge computing station somewhere in Beijing. And then somebody like Bill de Blasio in New York will say, look, the bureaucrats are going to run your cars for you because we can handle traffic in Manhattan. And these will be quite compelling arguments. It'll make a lot of sense. But suddenly, the entire car industry, which has been built now on selling cars. No, but it's been 100 years since anybody sold a car on its reliable ability to get you from place A to place B.

They've been sold on status and sex appeal and fun. All of that will just be squeezed out of the business. I put that to you, my friends. And that's the left – in other words, according to this fellow, the growing consensus is that the socialist vision of one part of the future, how we'll get from place A to B in vehicles, is what the car industry thinks is going to take place. Grim, grim, grim, grim, grim. Rob, lighten it up, would you please? I sort of agree with that.

I think that it's not unalloyed. I mean, cars were the symbol of freedom, right? The car, you can go anywhere. That's part of the American culture. There is a scientific and statistical reason why if only the automatic brain and the automatic traffic brain knows where you're going. That's the difference between Uber and a self-driving car. If it knows where you're going, it can route you more efficiently, and it can route everyone else more efficiently.

But then first you've got to tell it where you're going. And for a lot of people, driving itself has been a fun thing that you did and you didn't know where you were. You're just driving around. So that's sort of a – that is the technological hammerlock on this stuff. question earlier, which is if you don't have the sense of ownership and pride of ownership in the things anymore, these large capital goods, a house and a car and stuff like that, where does it go? My fear right now is that what it's going to is a kind of

the self, the ego, my personal brand. It's going to – and this is completely indefensible in any way, but my sense is that people are replacing maybe wisely their sense of identity with things and what I own, meaning it's who I am with what I, what, what's the, the, the face that I present to the sort of interconnected world in my Instagram feed is more mine and more me. And I have more pride in it and I care about it more and I care about burnishing it and fixing it and face tuning it and, you know, selfie-ing, sticking it. Then I, then someone like me would have felt about their front lawn. And that's a sad – I don't know.

I should say – maybe it's not sad. I don't know. But what I hope is that by freed up from this kind of weird and probably not that healthy attachment we have for things, house and status symbols and cars and all that stuff freed up from that, we can maybe be more, um, you know, thoughtful and philosophical and more, maybe more in touch with something that's more, more valuable, but it could also just be that we like all retreat to our Instagram feeds. Uh, yeah, I'm not sure that more thoughtful isn't necessary, necessarily follows from that. Um, I mean, there's something to be said for maintaining your property because the guy next to you moses lawn and you have to do

so too i mean that's a whole different way of looking at it but rob's right about the you know the generation coming up i had a co-worker who quit a a nice job at the newspaper with union guarantees to just simply travel and do instagram posts and take from patreon and be experiencing out there, which I suppose when you're young you can do, and it's a great leap. But that's the – what's your job? I'm a brand. And when you get to self-driving cars, the idea of everybody going, whizzing along in these little pods

as they're staring down at their phones, fine-tuning the little details on their brand, is just simply a collection of narcissists, like a whole big, enormous swimming pool full of discrete plastic bubbles, none of which really integrate into each other. And I don't like it. I don't like it at all. But what I really don't like is the idea that the cars, you've got to ask for permission to go someplace. And it's just hilarious that the resistance generation

wants something where the government is the one who has a complete database of wherever they go and can tell them they can't go into the main city right now because traffic is too so but it's never going it's not it can't it won't it doesn't replace the vehicle because there are people who are going to be living in cold parts 30 40 miles away from any city of any note who are going to need to get into town. And why will people still need to live in Fargo in this new world? Because they want to. And I'm not even talking about Fargo. I'm talking about people who lit out for the territories because Fargo got too crowded,

which is what people are saying now. This is the part that you still haven't persuaded Rob and me to understand, to grasp, that there are people who live up in your neck of the woods because – in the neck of the woods in which you grew up because they want to. Right. Because they like, for whatever reason, to have a life that does not include constantly being hemmed in at all possible ways by brick walls and people walking down the street singing and spitting and exhaust and all the rest of it. They're not urbanites. Now, I am an urbanite. I like to live here. That's why I left North Dakota. But I know why people love it.

And the idea that people out there are going to give up their cars and patiently wait, their calloused fingers drumming the farmhouse table as they wait for the little Uber to arrive is nonsense. It's not going to happen. There are going to be enough of us, and I hate to feel like Winston Smith sitting here look at the Civil War and look at the World coasts, is still going to want to have the keys in their hand – well, the fob – and the knowledge they can get behind the wheel and go wherever they want and never have to tell a single freaking soul why or where. That's my hope for America. And when that's gone, then close her down. We've got to shut this podcast down, by the way. Isn't it convenient that I managed to do that at the end of my rant? Listen, when you form the Lilacs militia, send me a note.

Will you please? I want to join up. Well, you'll want to join up with Fleur. You'll want to join up with Blinkist. And you'll want to join up with ButcherBox because each of these guys have got – these folks have wonderful things. You'll smell better. You'll feel better. You'll be smarter.

You'll eat better. Trust me. These are You'll be smarter. You'll eat better. Trust me. These are three great sponsors. Support them for supporting us. And, of course, go to iTunes, as everybody says. If you leave a little review, that's nice. Other people find us, and that keeps the show going. And as Rob told you at the top of the hour, money also keeps the show going.

Lots and lots of money. So there's that. And it's been a pleasure, guys. Thank you very much. Of course, next week we'll all be replaced by robots or something, right? If they can do it more efficiently and better, sure. Odds are that the art has us all on scooters. I'm saying it's pretty good, like 90 to 1.

I accept it. If it's as good as the scooters, I'm all in. All right. Flipping the Bird will be the title. I'm just calling it right now. And we'll see you guys next week. Next week. Summertime is back in town.

Time to get your scooter out. Winter day so far away. Take it for a ride. Show them all your custom bits. Get your Gromit Dutch police. Seaside B bomb is back again And you and me are your friends Your scooter looks

Just like a mess I saw you try Your very best Somebody stole Your pork pie hat Your girlfriend moved to Switzerland I bet she's got a new boyfriend Sound systems are back in town

Blasting out the sharpest sound Cloppy bass and all nighters Getting dressed up really cool Having fun and getting pissed Is what you have always missed Take your chance and join the fun And keep on dancing all night long Your scooter looks

Just like a mess I saw you try Your very best Somebody stole Your pork pie hat. Your girlfriend moved to Switzerland. I bet she's got a new boyfriend. Ricochet.

Join the conversation. Summertime, summertime, summer, summertime time.