The Ricochet Podcast - For The Benefit of Mr. Kite (and Key)

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

This week, Ricochet editor and podcaster to the stars Troy Senik stops by to talk about his new venture, Kite and Key Media, which produces explainers about issues in the news. So you could argue that this show is an explainer about explainers, but we are not going to be that meta. We also delve into the news of the day, including good governors and bad, what the heck is going on with President... Source

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Today's guest, Troy Senec on his new media venture and everything else that's going on. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast. Of course, it's number 535 as we roll on inexorably towards 600. Who knows what the country will be like then. But for now, well, it's shy a few bucks that we have borrowed and cast into the wind. We're going to talk about that, of course, with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Hey, guys, how you doing? Hello, hello.

Hey, how are you? I'm just Jack Dandy here in Minneapolis. And we're going to go right to a guest instead of our usual opening palaver. Not really a guest. Let's not get caught. No, not a guest. No, no, no. Ricochet Editor Emeritus,

John Ewan Richard Epstein's court-appointed legal guardian, Victor Davis Hanson's oversight straight man and his latest endeavor, Kite and Key Media's co-founder and vice president for content, Troy Sinek, who's coming to a from what appears to be a plywood box in manhattan somewhere i guess you're in a we work environment i thought that we work itself had completely imploded and uh spent about 87 bazillion dollars

uh but uh it's still there and you're there, and you're here, and welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Jake. Tell us, first of all, what Kite & Key Media is and why people should visit it. Kite & Key Media is a reaction to a twin set of irritations, one with the mainstream press and one with kind of the press and the conservative movement. So I'm supposed to say it's a digital media company, which is an insufferable formulation that I refuse to indulge. We make videos that you can see online. But what it is, it grew out of frustration.

It was founded by myself and a former colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute. We were both senior executives there. With the fact that the kind of work that comes out of think tanks, the things that actually allow you to understand the mechanics of what's happening with public policy issues, get ignored most of the time in the mainstream press, where if you are reading coverage, whatever the policy fight du jour is, you will generally get write-ups of the political dynamics around that fight. This is a constant struggle I have, for instance, doing the Law Talk podcast. When I'm trying to prep for an issue that Richard Epstein and John Yoo are going to discuss, it's amazing how often I have to go 14 paragraphs into the relevant story in the New York Times or the Washington Post to understand what is actually being disputed in one of these cases. So we wanted to rectify that. And the thing that we want to rectify for the right of center world is there's a lot of good work that's being done in digital media and in print media in the right of center world. But for my money, I think it tends too often to go one of two ways, which is stuffy or angry.

And this is neither of those things. Or both. Or both. That's my usual specialty. That's Peter's brand for Peter Robinsoninson i'm not saying that i don't indulge in both of these things in my personal life on a regular basis uh but it seemed like the vacuum so we wanted to do something that was pleasant and upbeat and short and had a sense of humor and allowed people who are never definitely never going to read think tank white papers probably aren't even going to read the opinion page of the wall street journal to have a way that they could access wait a minute wait a minute you left up you left something out of that series and probably aren't going to read and probably aren't going to read that's precisely is that truly what's in your mind that you're

this is for say kids who are the post reading generation why videos rather than you're being why didn't you found yet another magazine? You're being far too optimistic, I think, in cabining that to kids. And one of the things that we found overwhelmingly as we were researching this project was that this is true across generations. The migration to digital, but also the migration away from print to video runs through people in their 60s at this point. And we thought that it was an important delivery mechanism, particularly for this kind of work, which is tedious if you're trying to read it. Honestly, I mean, if you're trying to understand energy policy and you're uninitiated, do you want to wade through 20 paragraphs, even 20 wonderful paragraphs in a place like National Review or Wall Street Journal?

You are going to get more intellectual sustenance out of that than out of what we're doing, but we are hoping to actually push you to that material. And name the first couple of videos that are up. We've released three this week. I mean the topics. Yeah, we've released three this week. One is on America's dependence on overseas sources for critical minerals. One is on the explosion in housing costs across the United States, particularly in coastal markets.

And one is about the debate, which hasn't quite boiled to the surface yet, but is going to in a few years, about whether the United States should abolish the use of cash and go entirely to digital currency. I've watched the first two. Yeah. And you know what they are? What are they, Peter? They're explainers. And that sounds as though I'm condescending to them. But as I looked at them, I thought, actually, this is pretty brilliant.

That's great. Isn't that what Boxer was intending to do? To explain what's going on, it's a gigantic and almost entirely empty space. So I have one more question before I toss it to Mr. Lilacs and Mr. Long. And that is, so kudos this,

I have to say, I thought, thank you, Troy, Troy, this magnificently talented person and videos. What little videos, brief,

what? And then I watched the first two and they're just spectacular. Of course, on Twitter, send them to friends, all of that sort of thing. So congratulations. It's going to work. I don't know how you make money on it, but it's going to work. You can tell us that. My last question is, I don't understand how you were co-founder, but ended up as a vice president.

I didn't know you could do that. I think I've lost my connection. Can you hear me yes yes yes uh because when you are a vice president peter it means you don't have to do any of the things that you don't want to i don't have to go to the fundraising meetings i don't have to i don't have to handle the hr remember vice president in a two-person organization the distribution of responsibility is a little bit different than you might think this means that troy gets to sit down every day read the stuff he wants to research the stuff he wants to do the creative part and go home at the end of the day hey troy i've seen them both it's rob by the way i've seen them both i haven't seen the third one but i haven't done to me but i've seen

them both they're excellent they are as peter says explainers you are zigging the world is zagging uh you read the newspaper and it's pretty much opinion with a lot of priors i mean just today just for instance today there was a piece and i think it was either the walter journal new york times in the business section small piece it's not even that that important about unemployment and i all i was scanning i was just scanning all the parents it's not it's on page 897 it's not even from it all i wanted was what is the unemployment rate so i wanted to know and it wouldn't give it to me yeah and my brain went to why are they not giving it to me right because it's not that high and the article is supposed is the point of the article is we are in an employment crisis jobs have disappeared when in fact they haven't really disappeared they're just behind the closed

doors the closed sign at the restaurant right the minute that you put you turn that sign over and it says open those jobs will come back you need waiters and cooks and everything like that um but they wouldn't give me that they wouldn't give me that the the the percentage and my my brain naturally went to why or why what is their what is their agenda and so one of the things i like the most about this is that it doesn't seem to have an agenda except to sort of tell you maybe some surprising unpleasant truths um of the first two a rare earth minerals and um and a housing cost they seem like you know, you could pass them to your conservative friends and they would nod and say, oh, this is great. It's great. What's the ones coming up that our conservative listeners and readers will say, hey, wait a minute.

What's the one that because, you know, when you explain stuff, you explain the good and the bad. Right. Right. Right. That's true. I think it will be less that their priors will be offended, but I think we'll be veering into a lot of territory that they don't think about. So, for instance, the one that we have coming out next week, it's about crime. It's about criminal justice. And over the last year, obviously, all the debate around that has centered around

the questions of policing and the questions of race and there will probably come a day when we'll get to those what we wanted to do here partially because we're interested wait don't rush into those is my what that seems like why don't you make a few pay uh pay periods first what we're going to do here partially because you know as with this cash issue we're going to do here, partially because, you know, as with this cash issue, we're sort of interested in ideas that are, if I can call them this, pre-partisan, pre-ideological, meaning that they haven't bubbled up to the surface to the level where everybody feels like because of a partisan affiliation, they have to have a closed

prior on it. So the one that we're doing on criminal justice next week is actually on a very small factor in crime, but one that's important, one that's widely known in the research world and one that I don't think is very well known in the world of the popular press or the casual consumer of political news, which is that one of the most important variables in shaping crime in your city is nighttime lighting. How well public spaces are lit at night. You can go back to the year 2012 when Detroit was the most dangerous city in the country. By the way, it still is. And at that time in 2012, Detroit had 40% of its streetlights broken. And when you do that, you are sending a signal. You are creating an environment where crime can flourish. In fact, my co-founder at the time was at the Manhattan Institute, went to Detroit with Bill Bratton, a famous two-time New York City police chief, one-time Los Angeles police chief. They did a ride around with the local Detroit police force. When Bratton came back into the office afterwards and they were having a conversation about what he observed, the first thing that he said to him is, where the hell are your lights?

So the James Q Q Wilson's right. The broken window theory is in fact, right. All right. So let me ask you this. So I'm, I'm, I don't think that,

you know, I'm just obsessed with this topic, but I'm, I'm not sure that our listeners would be, you know, they kind of nodding. Yeah. I broke a window.

Theory's right. James Q Wilson. Yeah. What do you think is going to surprise us? And let me give you my priors. So I'm, I'm, I'm not going to lead you in this way. I have been reading more and more

and thinking more and more about the idea of a universal basic income as something worth studying. There's a study in Stockton. They did a test thing in Stockton that was really, really interesting. We know Milton Friedman

thought about this for a while, then later repudiated it uh we have been undergoing a an experiment in the country essentially on a universal basic income we've been sending people money for just stuff you know we we're gonna send them a lot more coming up um will you tackle something like that and then surprise me or shock me or tell me or bang me down on the head and say stop thinking about this or or i guess what i mean he says that's a long way of saying what is driving your topic selection what are the three big four big things that make you choose say housing or rare earth or mining or lighting a urban crime as your topics you just have a big grease board and you just write stuff up there? And in answering this question, Rob won't mind, but you need to prove to James and me that you haven't gone soft.

Yeah, well, that's a guess of subtext in my question. No, well, there are two factors at work in answering that question. One is we are focused on what we think of as inescapable issues, which means that even if you are not, to paraphrase Lenin, even if you are not interested in these issues, these issues will end up being interested in you, right? You cannot give a fig about the economics that go into setting prices in the housing market. It's going to affect you. Same thing with the crime issue. So to answer your question, the initial areas that we're working on, we are focused on economics, education, science, which is pretty broadly construed to include energy issues and environmental issues. And, oh, I'm about to Rick Perry this. What is public policy very broadly defined, which is to say things that you would not get from a magazine or a think tank necessarily.

So in a few weeks, we have a video that I'm extremely proud of that is not something you're going to see discussed at any think tank panel anytime soon, which is about what kind of preparations, if you are thinking long-term about national security, and by national security here, I mean something distinct from foreign policy. Right. What do you do as a policymaker if you're thinking about a threat like a super volcano, which is a real thing? We've got three of them in the United States. Now, they operate on such a massive timeframe that we could all live and die and 25 generations after us could live. I got to worry about super volcanoes now but some generation is going to be faced with this it's a real problem and we have as i say three of them and this applies to a wide variety of issues right you

can think of this is this is the asteroid strike this is the accidental nuclear launch this is the ai gets out of control this by the way black swan yeah is a global pandemic i mean these are things that you actually have to think about that policymakers with their short-term concerns usually are not incentivized to think about and by the way there's a group one of the reasons we did the video is there was a group at caltech about five years ago that tried to model this and tried to figure out could we drain it could we just build the equivalent of a geothermal energy plant around it and drain it and they said said, yeah, we maybe could. Two problems. One, it would take 50,000 years. And two, we might disturb the rock around the magma chamber of a super volcano.

Now, it sounds crazy to even entertain, but you actually do have to ask these questions. Some generation is going to be faced with this. They're not going to know who they are until it's too late. This is a public policy question, even though we don't think of it as one. So that's going to be faced with this. They're not going to know who they are until it's too late. This is a public policy question, even though we don't think of it as one. So that's going to be one of the issues that we're taking up. 1816, starvation in Europe as it was recovering from the Napoleonic Wars because of the explosion of, I can't remember, you probably do, the volcano in Indonesia. It wasn't Krakatoa. Tambora, which was much bigger, it turns out, than Krakatoa. Or anyway, sorry, James. Which is where this video starts.

The year without a summer, they called 1860. The year without a summer. That's exactly. Yes, yes, yes. See, I know a little history. So I'm trying to wrap my head around how would I describe this to a friend of mine who didn't necessarily share my politics? And what I would say is if you watch this, you and I can then have a debate about policy from a firm, mutual foundation of fact. Is that fair?

This is precisely right. I mean, these videos operate in a way they are not partisan. They are not ideological, not because we're not're not i mean this actually isn't squishy it's it's moderate in tone it is not moderate at all in substance but the dilemma that we thought people face is that so much of the information that's getting pushed now is pushed with the agenda clearly baked in right so we're i mean you can go to our you can go to our website and see all the sources for all the sources for all the videos these are all pulled from think tank papers and investigative journalism and books we're trying to give people sort of the empirical basis on which they can figure out how

and where they disagree but we're just trying to sort of set the table for people to understand what the stakes are in any of these issues okay so last question as an investor i mean an investor's question um i mean i'm not an investor but uh how how will you know that you've succeeded how will you know if you have failed uh it's just surely a numbers game it's just surely a numbers game what are the numbers we need we need the viewers we need the viewers but i'll tell you the the factor that is most important to us there it's actually easy to run up relatively if you've got the resources. It's not quite what we're trying to do, although, you know, conservatives are going to be the base for this project, there's no question. But what we'd really like to accomplish is to reach people who are not that politically engaged, who don't have strong priors left or right, who feel like they need to be responsible citizens,

don't really know where to go. In the past few years, I mean, I've seen this in my personal life, have come to, not really from a conservative perspective, but have come to sort of reflexively distrust the media. They think there's something up there, even if they can't tell you exactly what it is. And they are looking for what they regard as a reliable, James invoked Vox earlier, and this was what Vox had the pretension to be at the start. It's become very clear at this point that there's an ideological thumb on the scale there. Even though we have an ideology, we're keeping ours off. Sorry, you said Vox with a V rather than Vox with an F.

That's correct. Do you take requests? From Peter Robinson, I sure as hell do. All right, so I have two requests that come to mind right away. And one is... The history of the Berlin Wall speech. No, no, no. It's been done. One is crypto, blockchain, cryptocurrency.

All the smart kids that I know out here in Silicon Valley are investing heavily in that. And there's something going on there where they don't trust the Fed. There's just the rising generation of smart kids. The entrepreneurs are all right. So everybody's talking about cryptocurrency. And I got talked into investing a little tiny bit. So I've been watching it go up and down. I don't have the slightest idea how it works, really.

It's a little complicated. Why is Bitcoin succeeding when these 20 other Facebook is planning to launch its own? I'd love to just have one or two things that are explainers. Where did this come from? What's the potential? Why do people invest in this stuff? Item one. Item two.

And that item two is military stuff military history as a subject at universities has collapsed doesn't exist doesn't exist uh coverage of the pentagon which after all spends over 700 billion dollars a. We have 2 million men and women in uniform. Here's a question I asked of someone who helped me here with research at the Hoover Institution the other day. How many bases do we have overseas? Very, very hard to find the answer to that. It's dozens at at least and maybe a couple of hundred depending on how you count them but here's what i'd like to know we hear over and over again about the chinese are doing this so well wait a minute what what is the military how many ships do we

have how many ships do they have what? What do not particularly political military strategists think you need to control the Pacific? I would just like to know the numbers. How has the Chinese Navy grown in the last x years what we read of course in my mind the what makes the foreign policy issue that makes me nervous at the moment is taiwan um because i keep reading that the chinese are building missile emplacements and bringing troops to the opposite side of this and i just like to know the facts and it's really hard to find. The reporting has collapsed and be sort of a discrete wing of the culture that the rest of the culture is not engaged with. And I think you see that bleed through into the reporting. You certainly see it in the universities. I mean, apart from the military academies, the War College, I think Ohio State has a pretty robust military history program still. And that's about it.

And even thinking about it as a discrete subdiscipline is probably wrong. I mean, it's hard to think of how you really get your head around American history or world history if a big part of it isn't military history. There was someone, I may have seen this in the comments at Ricochet, somebody talking about taking a community college class in World War II for the sake of just self-improvement, purely self-improvement. Nobody was chasing a credential. Dropped out after a couple of sessions because it was all the race and gender implications

of military history in World War II. Right. Anyhow, there you go. A couple of requests from me. We'll get on it, Peter. Yeah. Hurry up. Those are not requests, by the way.

He just used that term. All right. So you're going to measure views. You're going to measure engagement, you know, how much if it's passed around and everything. If you're an incredible success, right? How will what is your vision? I mean, obviously, we're talking about, you know, out there 50,000 years, but when the super volcano explodes. But what is your vision for a politic or a body politic? I mean, traditionally, conservatives say, I'll know that things are okay when everyone's a conservative.

And liberals say, well, I know that things will be good when everyone's a progressive. That's not going to happen. So what is your moonshot but still realistic goal? And liberals say, well, I know that things will be good when everyone's progressive. That's not going to happen. So what is your moonshot but still realistic goal? I have a very specific answer to that, and you're going to intuit how slippery it is, Rob, because it is immeasurable. It is not empirically able to be verified, but it's something that bothers me very much about where I think American political culture left and right is right now, which is I think we've upended the proper understanding of citizenship. And what I mean by that, and what we're actually really trying to do with these videos, is to give people at least a baseline understanding of the issues on which they are presumably going to decide whether or not they

are going to support a particular candidate or a particular ballot measure or a particular political party. The thing that bothers me so much about where we are now is I think that that process as it currently stands is backwards. It works deductively. It starts from I find a tribe and whoever is at the head of that tribe or number two or number three, whatever they tell me about public policy, that's the thing I believe. Now, the thing that they the number one in the tribe is saying may be correct, but I want it to move from the bottom up and not the top down. I'll give you a good example of this. Here is a tangible example. I think in some sense, the conservative movement and its tentacles into the conservative media were never stronger than at the start of the second term of the George W. Bush administration, when George W. Bush put up

Harriet Myers as a nominee to the Supreme Court. And from the bottom up, there came a call that we have seen this movie before. She might be great. She might be. She might not be. But we don't know. And we have had the rug pulled out from under us two or three times before on this. And remember who choreographed the exit there was a charles krauthammer column in the washington post the bush administration followed almost chapter and verse to very politely usher harriet meyer's office it is sort of hard to imagine i mean you get these occasional flare-ups which i think are positive but it's sort of hard to imagine at least during the last four years it having worked that way right we took our directions from Washington. And I just want to build back that muscle in the electorate,

whether they're Republican or Democrat, to get back to the mindset that you guys work for us, and we have a series of priors that you better bend to, as opposed to the opposite. Well, Troy, we wish you well with the endeavor. And the name, of course, Keaton Key refers to Benjamin Franklin. So I imagine that the logo on your show, on your page, is going to be a sort of silhouette of Ben with his skeleton blinking on and off, cartoon-like as the celestial power. Ben was associated very strongly with electricity. There's all these wonderful French coins that were struck to commemorate him, how he harnessed lightning and brought down the tyrants and the rest of it. So we applaud your harnessing of the lightning and distributing it in a non-lethal form to the rest

of us. And there's so much more I'd like to ask you, but unfortunately, alas, your time is about to be eaten by wolves, one wolf in particular. So we're going to have to commend you back to the streets of New York. Thank you for your time here. And all the links will be at the site. And go listen. And I just think it's great that you started out by pivoting to video. Usually they take six, eight months, a year or so before they pivot to video. Pivot back. But you've gone straight there.

And I can't wait to see it. Can I ask you a favor before you go? I mean, not a question, but just a favor. Could you, on the member feed only, just for members, could you post the three or four phases of a video from rough, long, to cut, down, to revise, to final, just so we can see what the process is and how you do it? Or is that just my digging too deeply into you?

Don't even answer until I get to say that's actually a brilliant suggestion an explainer on explain on explainers really truly i have no idea how these videos happen do they spring directly from troy's forehead or is there some intermediate step i mean it's mostly that yes but we have to do that on the member feed and then people can go to kite and key media.com or it's kite and key media on any of your social networks. Kite and key all as one written as one word. And yes.

And and Benjamin Franklin is involved in this. Why? What's your what's the inspiration there? Well, the one thing there are two reasons behind Benjamin Franklin. One is that he seems to be the only founding father left who has no sort of partisan valence to him he's sort of recognized as an america to be canceled and you're in big trouble yes exactly but but the the other factor is the example that the chitin key provides somebody who was following their intellectual curiosity and seeing what the empirics revealed about it and when you're pulling on think tank research we thought that that was as good an

example as any and almost got electrocuted just be careful of those wires there's always a little risk in discovery peter right right uh hey so wait so so while we have you just for a minute i mean and frankly we're just we're vamp i mean i'll be honest with you troy we're vamp because we are next guest is not here yet uh did you watch the bush speech i mean the biden speech what do you think i did not i have not watched a single biden speech throughout his tenure other than the inaugural address i don't see any need to and i don't mean that as an insult towards towards him but it ain't high praise i just think it's but i think for a lot of americans this is what they voted for i can't ignore him that is an option i am not we can be pretty confident that we are not missing anything

other than him pledging goals that are going to be met whether or not he could he could nap he could rip van winkle until may and may 1st people would still have access to these vaccines right i think i think it's i think it's a little cute to say that july 4th you can have a nice little barbecue in your backyard i mean if we keep going the way that we're going, by July 4th, it'll be carnival. I mean, we'll go back to ignoring. Yeah, when you heard that, my response was, are you kidding me? Yeah.

People in America are planning their family Easter dinners. Yeah. The idea that we're going to, what, July 4th? No, because you know, if it's July 4th, well, Labor Day. Labor Day, Thanksgiving-ish, for sure but probably christmas 2022 you'll be we'll all be together again i mean you we've been through this before right we've seen the goalpost move it seemed to seem like very very bad i know what he's trying to do is manage expectations right well i said july 4th

it turns out it's flag day but i think for most people, it was going to be next week, kind of no matter what. But, you know, America is healing because we will we will go back to ignoring this crap. But I'm serious. I think everybody will. I can tell you. No, no, no. My boy, I quote, I paraphrase Trotsky right back at you. The Biden policies, he may rip them Winkle, as far as I can tell, he's engaged in a deep rip Van Winkle right now. I'm not convinced he was awake even as he delivered the speech. But set that aside, the Biden policies, you may not be interested in the Biden policies, but they just passed a $1.9 trillion supposed bailout that has nothing to

do with bailing out anything the the left is as aggressive right now as it has been in decades they're interested in you oh i agree i agree with you on on that front narrowly on the covid stuff i think we i mean i can tell you walking around new york where this inspired a panic i mean i'm sure rob has had this experience too if you walked around just forgetting to have put your mask on right right you were immediately sort of regarded as typhoid mary still even now is that the attitude you know i have to say last yesterday and day before i have detected and my neighbors have agreed it has changed this is fast a lot of it is the weather's good it's a little warmer in new york you walk around on the

street and i'd say about a third of the people that i'm seeing on the street like they've got them on but they're under their chin yeah like it's just a pro forma yeah uh that do you wear one on the street i do i do for now i haven't been vaccinated yet all right so uh and um then then then you're now you're not I know you're not a New York resident, but you're you have your your office is domiciled in New York over and under on Governor Andrew Cuomo. He's the I think it's the the 27th accuser or something like this one every five minutes has come out and accused him of it gets worse and worse. Right. It gets it goes from being the guy's an Italian guy to being. Oh, wait a minute. That was like that's kind of the you think. And then today, AOC and Jerry Nadler and a few others have got a powerful congressional Democrats from New York have called on him to resign. What's the likelihood that's going to happen?

You know, you would think for anybody else, it would feel like it's at about 95 percent at this point when you've lost the legislature and you've lost the congressional delegation. The media has clearly decided to turn the knife in a way that they were unwilling to prior Cuomo. You know, the scenario that keeps going through my mind, I don't know if you guys remember this because it didn't get a lot of press coverage at the time. Do you remember back in, I want to say it was 2007, when Larry Craig, the Republican senator from Idaho, got arrested in the Minneapolis airport with the wide stance thing and everything else? So there is a Mandela effect thing that has happened with Larry Craig where everybody thinks that he resigned. And the reason they think that he resigned is because he publicly announced

that he was going to resign and then wrote out the rest of his term because the press went away after he said that he was going to resign. This was a plot that he hooked up with Arlen Specter. He only had to write out a few more months. If you're Cuomo, and I could see him doing this, he might dig in out of pure spite

to just see the, you know, the Wagnerian climax of this whole thing and fight it for, look, if he's able to fight it for seven, eight months, if you get to the end of the year, then people say,

well, he's only got a year left anyway. What's the, you know, what just, but why should he? I mean, if you're sitting in your,

I guess, in some palatial baronial office in Albany, brazening it out seems like pulling a Ralph Northam seems like exactly the right move. Just they can't break unless there's actual impeachment, which I guess they're talking about. It doesn't seem like there's much incentive. I mean, the problem with with the psychological problem, I've never met the man, but my my, you know, and I'm not licensed to practice psychology in the state of New York. But my sense is that he what what really is affecting him now is not his governorship, but his future ambitions. Yes, he was the savior of the by his own PR, the savior of the covid crisis in New York State, despite the fact that he was the savior of the by his own pr the savior of the the covid crisis in new york state despite the fact that he was the opposite um and i think he was planning to march around on the snows of

iowa new hampshire in 2024 probably uh running exactly on that probably the same as gavin newsom um so it seems like a very hard thing for him because whether his governorship is over or not, he's done, don't you think? Yes, yes, yes. That part I think is for certain. And I suspect you're right about what the timetable was in his head. And I suspect he was wrong,

by which I mean to say all this stuff would have existed whether or not it came out, which would have meant if there was an Andrew Cuomo presidential run in 2024, we would have been having the same conversation. The same story would have come out.

But I also think in politics, so much of success is timing. I think if that was really Cuomo's ultimate goal, he should have done the lateral during 2020. There was a moment when the party wanted him. There was a moment when nobody was enthusiastic about Joe Biden. There was a moment he could have jumped in where he was number one in the polls. It might have fallen apart. Those white knight candidacies tend to, but it was probably a better moment than he was ever going to get so so what what it seems to me in some basic way with andrew cuomo we're in baby doc territory right baby doc duvalier all he knows is how to be a dictator just like his dad was and the question became how big is the chalet in the south?

Or the chalet, maybe I was about to say Switzerland, but I think he ended up in France. What's my exit strategy here, guys? If you really want me gone, you have to give me a comfortable retirement in a sunny climate someplace. And I'm sort of serious about that. But do you think that andrew cuomo has that well no he's thinking wait a minute when dad stepped down as governor he got to be of council and sit on boards and rake in real money and he had a revered he was revered he was rich he had a terrific retirement i was going to be president okay I can see I'm going to have trouble with that now.

But is there some way to stitch something together for me here? And there isn't, is there? Nobody wants anything to do with this guy. Well, how do you compensate a man who can only be paid in power? Yes. Ooh, nice point. Right, right. I mean, although I really want to hear Rob's formulation,

because I feel like Rob could actually answer this question in a very satisfying way. I don't think you can, actually. I think that's part of the problem for him. If he gives in now, he has to accept that there's no future. If he or someone is trying to convince him, no, give in now so that there is a future. But it isn't the next X number of months he's going to be in albany it's really the what happens after that and it is impossible for me to believe that any governor of new york city of new york state doesn't just assume he's going to be president united states i remember a friend of mine sitting at the yale club in the lobby and in the way you know in the lounge and there were some of the chairs and the couches are,

are, are back to back. So you can't always tell who's behind you. And he's sitting there reading the newspaper and he hears these two guys behind him and they're ticking off. One guy is ticking off the Republican candidates for the Republican nomination for presidency that year. It might've been 2000.

It might've been 2008. I can't remember. And he's ticking on good. Look at this guy. No, he's not gonna go mccain no i think it's over for mccain uh this person's too old this guy has no you get down to it and it's it's gonna be pataki it's gonna be pataki and at that point um uh governor pataki of new york city uh of new york state sorry was uh we going to run for president. And my friend turns, just kind of like turns his head to the side to see who's speaking. And, of course, it is Governor Pataki speaking.

And he's talking about himself. But, like, there's just no way. And I suspect that in his heart of hearts, not even in his heart of hearts, another prominent Democratic governor of a huge democratic state california gavin newsom oh gonna be president this was gonna be my question to reverse yours from earlier rob come well we don't know when a recall election will happen i guess yes oh no well we're pretty close they turn in the they turn in the petitions on march 17th that's a deadline the organizers have announced that they now they need a little if there's a formula you The organizers have announced that they now, they need a little, there's a formula, you need X percent of the winning percentage of the last gubernator,

you need that many. Anyway, it turns out to be a little under 1.5 million. They have announced, nobody's checked this yet, but the organizers have announced that they've gathered a little over 2 million with six days to go. By the way, they'd have an extra one if the office where you turn them in was open in Los Altos yesterday when I stopped by to turn mine in. It's complicated. You have to actually turn, they have to have physical written signatures. Okay. But once that is in, then the Secretary of State, who is of course a Democrat, California Secretary of State, goes through these things. Suddenly the Democrats are tremendously interested in signature verification. But the notion here is if you give them over 2 million, they're going to have trouble

denying a recall election, throwing out more than 500. Okay. So once the Secretary of State gives up and says, yeah, it looks as though there are at least 1.5 million valid signatures, then the recall election must take place within 80 days. 80 days. However, there will be two questions put to the voters on the same ballot. One, should Governor Newsom be recalled, yes or no? If yes, question two, which of the following do you vote for and in the last recall election which arnold schwarzenegger won in 2003 there were over 130 candidates one reason arnold schwarzenegger won was simply because he was the only name that everybody knew okay so it's including

gray davis i believe i believe there was a significant portion of the of the cal electorate that voted to recall Gray Davis and then selected Gray Davis to replace Gray Davis. I don't I don't think I'm making that up. I think that and the Democrats confused the matter the previous time because there was this big debate within the party over whether you signal that you're willing to cut Davis loose in favor of another Democrat, which at the time was this guy, Cruz Bustamante, who I believe was the lieutenant governor. Yes, yes. You're sort of running parallel campaigns. Keep him. But if you dump him, this is the guy that you want. And apparently there's some fighting going on about that this time as well. So here's my question for you guys.

There's variation. Wait a minute. Yeah. Who do you think? You're just a vice president, Buster. Yeah. Good luck sometimes getting those new media empires out there without getting the scrutiny of big tech. Did you read that Apple is now denying that Parler is

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slash ricochet right now to learn more. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. So here's my question for the two of you, a variation for the three of you, a variation on Rob's question from earlier. We presumably then will have a recall election in California at some point, I guess, in the fall. End of the year, who's more likely to still be in office? Andrew Cuomo or Gavin Newsom?

Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. Beautiful question. I got another question for you. My guess is they'll both still be in office, honestly. I agree. That's mine too.

I actually do. I do wonder if there's a possibility that you put Gavin Newsom on the ballot for a recall in the fall. It seems pretty clear toom on the ballot for a recall in the fall, it seems pretty clear to me that the support for that falls somewhere between the level that you would need to get a recall election to happen and a level that will fail to actually

get him recalled. It seems like that's the contingent of the California electorate that's there. So I would expect the recall to happen and then for him to not be recalled from office. By the way, I'm waiting for the kite and key explainer on the California recall. But I wonder at that point if Gavin Newsom essentially banks his reelection the year to follow, because I think so many Californians, especially in a state that defaults Democratic, are going to be so fatigued at that point by the fact that four months later, you're going to be starting another gubernatorial election. Forget it. We did this. Fine. It's done.

My larger question is this. A year after COVID, a lot of casualties, a lot of political casualties. It's clear that however you look at what's happening with governor cuomo a lot of it feels like it was at least partly i don't know karmic justice for his horrible covid response gavin newsom this is 100 covid his total reaction to covid you could even make the case that you know covid caused a an economy to plummet and that hurt the incumbent president in his re-election i think that's actually a legit without a doubt in my opinion covid has destroyed some political careers who's it helped that's for troy that's for yeah jump in r in. Ron DeSantis, for sure. This was going to be

my answer, too, who it seemed initially that it was hurting because the media led the charge to sort of make DeSantis the poster boy for being an irresponsible governor. Right. I think the fact that a year has passed, we've sort of seen how the numbers look. And oh, by the way, that Florida that was apparently suffering so horribly during this time also seemed to be a destination for a lot of in-migration. So it couldn't have been that bad. I think the fact that DeSantis has not only survived, but thrived against a media that was pretty clearly moving as a pack against him leaves him in a very strong position.

I would say if you bracket Trump, which obviously's not something you can do in the real world but if we are to put him off to one side yeah again not something you could do in the real world but go ahead hard for me to think of anybody who is who is better positioned if he if he wants to run for president i think there are other people who are close but santas really feels like there's there's an ascendancy happening there right yeah and the story he's gonna tell is they all called me stupid they all said i was wrong they all predict all the experts he can run a genuine populist campaign against the swamp and against the media and against the big city elites and legitimately say that he took some power some brave decisions and was right. Right?

I mean, isn't that, I mean, if you're a Republican Party media consultant, isn't this your dream candidate? I think so. I mean, the other person that I would add to that list whose appeal is probably not as wide. I mean, the thing that DeSantis has done well and that some other people like Tom Cotton have done well. Cotton, I agree.

Very effectively straddled the divide within the party without it looking too cute, without alienating the Trump side too much, without alienating the, I don't know what we call the other side, the more conventional, the pre-Trump conservative side. The other one who I think is- The Rob Longwing of the- The Rob Longwing of the party.

The Rob Longwing of the party. Yeah, exactly right. The other person who I think has gained invisibility and prominence through this is Kristi Noem. That's WeWorks. I just lost him. What happened? I see him. I lost audio.

Yeah, we hear you i don't say something oh yeah there you go you're off your mic while we while we keep running while we attempt to resolve another meter sorry james go ahead while we attempt to come back from this brief technical interruption we should note that desantis was uh you know excoriated at the first and people said that his strategy was going to lead to the death of everybody especially since they had so many old people down in florida so many people have moved down there to retire but you know what when they did so those retired people probably had their future in hand you may not be in that position. Maybe you're young and you're casting about and thinking retirement's an awful long way away. You need

to plan. You need to think ahead. And did you know that the people who work with financial advisors end up with 15% more money to spend in retirement? Yeah. No matter what stage of life you're in, thinking about your financial future doesn't have to keep you up at night worrying about what you haven't done. No, do something. And thanks to smartasset.com, the service that over half a million people have trusted to help them find a financial advisor, there's a free and easy path to financial peace of mind. Smartasset.com has built a safe and convenient tool to find vetted financial advisors in your area. I mean, I don't know, what would you do? You call up the bank, you got some guy I can talk to? Yeah, they maybe got some guy you can talk to. He'll get back to you. You go to an office. Maybe you do it remotely. What a pain.

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But she has become much more prominent on sort of the Trump side of the party and has generated a lot of enthusiasm. And Noem was pretty defiant about South Dakota wasn't going to do a whole lot of anything on COVID restrictions. Now, granted, it's South Dakota. I mean, the population densities are so different that she could social distancing is built in. Yeah. Yeah. But I think her star is risen is risen a bit, too, even if it's more a little more sectarian in terms of where in the party her appeal lies. Do you think in general, I mean, the one way to look at November and say is to say a Republican Party disaster in just a smoking ruin. Another way is to say that there's a handful of smart,

accomplished executives, chief executives, which is usually the best way to get to the White House, who have a story to tell, a success story to tell in a year that was mostly not success stories. Is that fair or am I pollyannying the Republican prospects? you tell in a year that was mostly not success stories is that fair or is it am i am i um

pollyannying my pollyannying the uh the republican prospects are you talking about the predicting the november of next year or interpreting the november of last year no i'm talking about you could you both like you could you could interpret november of last year and say well look it looks like i mean even though the republicans gain seats in House, it looks like the voters were like kind of tired of Republicans and Republicanism. They were exhausted, Trump exhausted. But it seems like there are probably some chief executives to go back to the traditional Republican way to get to the White House. Yeah, that are not just on the bench, but are sort of on the field playing pretty well. Is that is that fair? I mean, am I being too optimistic or not optimistic enough?

No, I think that's I think that's perfectly fair. I mean, it's fairly clear to me, based on the way that Biden won and the completely underwhelming results for Democrats in the congressional races, that this was not an overwhelming mandate for Joe Biden or for the Democratic Party. I don't know how much they're going to suffer for the fact that they are acting in terms of policy as if it was an overwhelming mandate. I actually, I don't think that they will suffer too much for the contents of the COVID bill, because the spending stuff never really seems to rile up anybody outside of the Republican base. I think they will when it comes to issues like fracking,

you know, especially given the geography of where that affects people. They will on the social issues. They will even if Biden has no hand in it whatsoever. If the if the cancel culture kind of extreme political correctness of stays in the headlines. I think it's bad for the Democratic Party. I mean, I think there's about 80 percent of the country that is just repelled by that, including people who share their politics on a lot of other issues. But I don't think the Republican Party is on its back, particularly. The thing that I would be concerned about, and this is the thing that you have to be concerned about a lot of the time, particularly after a president is gone. There are these acute divisions within the party right now, and I would be very concerned about instances where the the thing that is called to mind, granted,

this comes to mind more readily when you're fool enough to be writing a Grover Cleveland biography as I am, is that the Democratic Party in the late 19th and early 20th century, when there is a divide that looks not entirely similar, but not dissimilar to this one between a Democratic Party that was in the past classically liberal, that's the Grover Cleveland tradition, and that was transitioning to populism. That's the William Jennings Bryan tradition. And those two factions of the party, after the panic of 1893, which people of that generation called the Great Depression, those two sides of the party could not get together. They were fighting each other tooth and nail for decades. And as a result, they locked themselves out of the White House

for decades, from 1896 until Woodrow Wilson is elected president in 1912. And how did Woodrow Wilson get elected president? Because there was a split in the republican party that's correct teddy roosevelt a the donald trump of his day ran against william howard taft whom he had handpicked to be his successor and then turned on so so so all right you know how to do an explainer peter you just did one yes they're amazing amazing by the so one one more question for Troy, if I may. Oh, by the way, on the Democrat, of the California criminal code separating toys for boys from toys for girls in retail establishments. Correct. Correct. That would become illegal. Walmart and Target would

have to sell the little pink ballerina dresses in the same aisle with the big bazooka water guns. Just to let you know that the social stuff, when it turns into a one-party state and there is no break on the craziness in the dominant party, it gets crazier and crazier. That's the Republican secret weapon. There's no situation under which this craziness would be forgivable. But it is especially unforgivable at a time when it's being introduced in a state where they can't keep the lights on. They can't keep water coming out of the tap. You can't get off the freeway in less than two hours. You can't buy a house for less than 900.

I mean, what are they doing? They're going after children's toys. It's like the Grinch. It is. So here's a question. They've all turned into propaganda sheets. Now a solution is beginning to present itself. Troy Sinek presents Kite and Key. Barry Weiss starts a column on Substack. Is that right? I think that's partially right. I put

one qualifier in there, which I think is the thing that is true throughout the economy. The Substack model, I think, works. And you're seeing a lot of people who clearly can't fit into any of these established institutions because the internal politics of those institutions are so bananas at this point that they have an outlet here, right? And they can go straight to the consumer. Great, terrific. And you've got a lot of intellectual independence with that. That is great for somebody who has established themselves at a legacy institution. That is hard to do on the way up. You still need institutions that form people. And if a young journalist is trying to come up through and who 10 years ago would have wanted to, their goal would have been to get to the New York Times or to get to the

Washington Post. Where do you start that person off if they are unwilling to genuflect to the internal ideology of those places? I don't know. My own personal bias, having worked in a newspaper that went through bankruptcy, is that it seems to me that these, the prestige papers, right, the big market papers that have been the dominant in their market, the Times, the Post, the Journal in its way, the USA Today. They're going to be fine. I think they're going to be fine for the foreseeable future. Small market newspapers, mid-market newspapers, even some larger market newspapers, depending on the environment, these economic hardships are not going to go away.

I would really like to see more journalism done on the nonprofit model. I think it'd be wonderful if the wealthy people in these communities would start endowing these things the way that Andrew Carnegie endowed libraries. Really? By the way. And you don't think they'd immediately move to the left? No, no, I think that's true. They have moved to the left. I mean, ProPublica is exactly that. You described-publica perfectly. But the problem is that the people on the other side are more interested in talking to each other. They're more interested in becoming famous and writing books that are for conservatives by conservatives and being on TV shows that are watched by conservatives and being on TV networks that are owned and broadcast by conservatives. We created our own echo chamber on the right, where the left is actually trying to sort of infiltrate into places that it might not be otherwise welcome. That's what we need.

We need some Republican, some conservative zillionaires to invest in that rather than invest in think tanks or more conservative superstars. And they don't have to create partisan publications. I mean, the thing about this is the move so far to the left that playing it straight is revolutionary. Playing it straight is provocative. Just giving people the facts is provocative. So I'd like to see more of that happen.

And also, while we're going to spend the money, if we're going to spend the money that's out there on public broadcasting, I would like to see that happen with NPR, too. I'd like to see more of that money actually go to the local stations as opposed to now where most of it gets washed to go back and buy the national programming for the local stations. Because local news has really been hit acutely by the economic transformation in the business the last couple of decades. Yes. Unfortunately, the local stations and the local papers will have the biases themselves, the same old biases. I mean, I actually work for a paper that is precisely what we've been talking about doing. We were bought by a billionaire who tends to lean to the right, which has convinced a lot of people on the left around here in town that the paper has become

nothing more than a MAGA rag, which is preposterous because, you know, anything to them outside of Pravda is going to be an alt-right newspaper. But what unfortunately it means is, I mean, we've been left alone. Contrary to what people feared, we've had no edicts coming down from high telling us how to shape our coverage. I never, my entire 30 years at the paper have had that happen. But what we do then is end up running AP for national stuff, which has a bias built into it. And there's still the belief that AP is just a neutral source, that it comes to you pristine and clears the mountain stream it so here's an example of where a right-wing billionaire bought our newspaper left it alone and consequently according to kelly's law or whoever it was it continued to drift inexorably to the left which happens um so i know you got to go troy because at we work i think the way it starts out is you put a bunch of quarters in the door uh you know, and then the timer goes over. And at the end of it, you are catapulted out.

And there's probably a line of 15 people outside your plywood cubicle right now begging to get in. So they're more patient about it now because the quarters are a significant part of their cash flow. I understand that they would be. And that would be the problem with a cashless society, of course. What would WeWork do? How could they get people to pop the quarters into the lavatory doors that they stole from Grand Central? Whatever. Anyway, Kite and Key is the place to go. You can find the link at Ricochet.com, or I assume you can just go to KiteandKey.com.org. TV.

KiteandKeyMedia.com. Ah, KiteandKeyMedia. There's your indication that you're not just going to see a bunch of words. You're going to see them fancy moving pictures, too. I love that. So, great. And do take Rob's advice. Was it Rob or was it Peter who wanted to know exactly how the sausage is made? Because, you know, it is fascinating. How do you get your graphics?

What are you using? What's your workstations? You know, how much do you have to pay Adobe to get that stock? I mean, all those little things that we never hear about, you know, do an explainer on that. Get out there, explain things. And we thank you for explaining what you're doing here on the show. Good luck. Thank you, fellas. Appreciate it. Co-founder and vice president. That is a man who can't decide whether he's a duke or a peasant, but best of luck.

Thank you, fellas. You know, it's hard when you're doing what Troy's doing, which is a startup. But then again, you know, there's the other part of being a startup, which is being an upstart. And that is, if you're doing a startup and you, for example, put everything on the card, that may work for a little while, but eventually it's going to come back to bite you. And that's where the upstart thing comes in. Because you know that credit card, you know, the one that you're so afraid to look at the monthly balance when it comes because you can't pay it all off. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

It's huge. You got debt. Well, if you've been avoiding your debt, it's only going to get worse unless you confront it. And now is the time to confront it with upstart. Upstart can help you face it. Finally, pay it off. Pay what off?

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somebody noting, you know, it doesn't matter that Joe Biden hasn't given any press conferences. Press conferences don't matter. What matters is transparency and truth. And that's what we're getting from Jen Psaki. So now the idea has shifted that it's not necessary for the president, the titular leader, the man who supposedly has the intellect to shape and guide our lives, it doesn't matter

whether or not he comes out and fields random questions that he may not have a prepared pat teleprompter answer for. What counts is that Jen is telling us the truth. Is this completely unexpected slavish tongue-bath devotion for the media, or is it expected tongue-bath devotion from the media? Definitely expected. I don't know. I mean, I don't know why he has to. I don't know why they have to.

There are people, there are legit liberal reporters, journalists that I know who think that he should. And I'm not sure why. The press conferences always seem like, you know, come kind of elaborate kabuki theater to me anyway um but i think it's bad politics i think it's better for the president this president and probably for all presidents to lay low let people forget your president when when everybody asks how the president is doing it's about who the president is if they can't remember, like, oh, yeah, I guess he's doing fine. They get approval. When they heard about them

the last day or two, it's like, I don't like that guy. That's the way it is. It's the way with every president. When you go, you go underground for a little bit, just spend a few, a couple of weeks in the catacombs,

just keep your head down. Your approval ratings go up. There's no reason for, I mean, no reason for Joe Biden to make a speech at all. Politically, and I don't you know, I don't really they're not they're not they're not interesting debates on policy. There's no give and take. It's simply an opportunity for one of the two parties to embarrass themselves. It's a show and I, you know, I don't need to see it anymore.

OK, I mean, there's something in what you say we know what the press is covering for him he can't handle a press conference it in to some extent the traditional press conference president walks into the east room calls on people to some extent it's kabuki theater. But the president gets questions for which he had no way to prepare exactly. They're briefing books. They try to anticipate questions. But there will always be one or two questions the president wasn't expecting. Biden's people have very clearly decided that he just isn't up to that. And so, Troy made the point earlier earlier i think it's part of the point you're making rob we'll see what james comes where james comes down on this but

yes i understand that it's a relief after donald trump but there's a difference between a having a relief after donald trump and having theval Office essentially vacant. And that's where it's this weird thing where the speech last night, which I watched for a moment, nobody can really believe that this guy is in charge, which raises this strange, strange moment when nobody actually knows who's running things. It's all more on, it's, it's a little over the longer term, it strikes me that it'll be a little unsettling. James said the question, they asked the question, is this unexpected?

I have to say, Rob said, of course it's expected. The press continues to shock me, but that's just because I'm so slow really getting with the program here. I actually feel like, I mean, I think there are probably some people saying he doesn't need to. But the only people I've read saying that he needs to are left-wing reporters. Because reporters ultimately believe that they're the stars of the movie. That's true. Not anyone else.

Not the president. The reason they're mad at him for not having a press conference has nothing to do with transparency or accountability or any of those things, because that's our time. That's on my airtime. Right. When I get to be the star and he say he's just, you know, sleepy, sitting in his chair, probably nodding off in the afternoon, which, by the way, I do? In addition to reprinting your press releases verbatim without checking it, we kind of also want to be in the spotlight too. And that I think is what's driving this. I want them. It's good to have Rob back.

I would like the other side to just have, you know, four years of wincing when their guy starts to speak because the rights had that for some time. I mean, with Bush, we winced because we didn't know what malapropism was going to come out. But it wasn't because he wasn't all there. It's just because sometimes speaking got a little tangled. With Trump, you just got the fire hose. And who knows what was going to come out of that the other day.

And when you finally did the little thing and measured all the torrent with a sieve, some things would come out and we'd talk about that. But with Biden, I mean, Rob mentioned the Kabuki theater, and it is that. But at least in Kabuki theater, people are expected to come out with a white face and the traditional garments and perform a certain amount of movements. If Biden comes out for Kabuki theater wearing a clown mask and does the Charleston and starts yodeling, that's not Kabuki. That's an insane man who doesn't know what it's going on and i think that the american people ought to see whether or not the guy who's at the head of the government is all there how fast he

is what what how much of his snap that he's lost so yeah of course right you know you're all right rob's right it is their time they're peeved because they don't get to shout questions. Mr. President, they don't get to perform some performative peacock preening that lets everybody know where they stand. But at the heart of it, at least the interchange between the American people and the president ought to be expressed through a press conference. So we see whether or not all of the marbles are present and accounted for. So far, the evidence does not seem to be suggested that they are. And the fact that some people are saying it's good that he doesn't show up. We don't need it. I wonder how much of that is just their own little private fears that when subjected to the withering fire of a friendly, the withering fire,

the nerf bullets of the press corps, that he would still be unable to dodge them and would be bruising from the nerf bullet of the press corps that he would still be unable to dodge them and would be bruising from the nerf bullet impact the day later hey look we're gonna get out of here on time so we gotta go um but we thank um troy senek for sticking around and doing yeoman's work and of course great guy can speak on any subject we really would like to thank our guest who didn't show up we don't want to say anything about that. In case she comes back next time, maybe, I hope. We'll see. But gentlemen,

any last words, any thoughts for the week before we sign off? Or should we just wave and get back to our lives? Go to your podcast app or martinishotpodcast.com and subscribe. Oh, right.

New thing. I relaunched it. I announced to people, I'm doing right thing i relaunched it i'm off i i announced to people like i i'm doing it now i restarted it and um i've been trying to do it for the past four or five months and just putting it together and someone tweeted at me like so uh so they cancel you huh like well they yeah they canceled me but not like canceled culture cancel they just said after 16 years we're going to move on. And, and then I think someone else sort of sent me,

that's a very gracious way to put it. Like when I actually literally is what happened, but now I'm, I'm, I'm getting credit for being canceled when I really wasn't canceled, but I'm. Go for it. Take it. A subscriber is a subscriber.

There was no Piers Morgan storming off. No, go to the site and take a look at it. Because if you look at the about, you will actually see a picture of Rob in studio. And it's a very nicely well-appointed sort of, you know, very pristine and not my not my studio. But, yes, I was a guest. Well, I was giving you the opportunity to say there was.

But, of course, honesty, honesty above all guides Mr. Long and us. And we're honestly out of time. And we thank you for listening. We'll see everybody at the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, Mr. Long and us. And we're honestly out of time, but we thank you for listening. We'll see everybody at the comments at ricochet 4.0 next week, boys. Thanks. We fells. The benefit of Mr.

Kai. There will be a show tonight on trampoline. The Henderson's will all be there Later Pablo Bank is there What a scene Over men and horses Hoops and garters Lastly through a hog's head

Of real fire In this way Mr. K Will challenge the world The celebrated Mr. K Performs his feat on Saturday At Bishop's Gate The Hendersons will dance and sing As Mr. K flies through the ring

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