The Ricochet Podcast - Growing Pains

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

This week on the podcast, we got the full contingent back on the bus to break down all the news in a busy week. We parse that Buzzfeed article claiming the President instructed his attorney to lie to Congress, we get granular on the all the shut down machinations, including the “If I can have my SOTU, you can’t go to Europe on a government plane” brouhaha. Then, our friend Chris Scalia joins to... Source

Feel the surge. The air is electric. Anticipation is everywhere. Following last year's incredible success, Cooper's On The Pulse DJ competition returns. Cooper invites Ireland's rising electronic music artists to create a 30-minute mix that takes us beyond the ordinary. For a chance to perform at Beyond The Pale 2025 and €2,500 to elevate your artist's journey, submit your mix online before april 6th search cooper on the pulse for more t's and c's apply it's the ricochet podcast with rob long and peter robinson i'm james lilacs today we talk about well news of the day of course but then it's tv theme songs with christopher scalia so let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast number 431. I am James

Lilacs. Rob Long and Peter Robinson are out in the ether somewhere. I believe Peter is in Hoover, or at Hoover, or with Hoover. And Rob, where do you happen to be at the moment? I am in Baltimore, Maryland. Oh, the Queen City. Well, you can fill us in on how things are there at the end of the podcast. But right now, Newsday, kinda, they're all sort of big Newsdays, but today we have the story of BuzzFeed saying that the president directed Michael Cohen

to lie to Congress. And I think we can probably sort of massage the old Ronald Reagan aphorism and say, distrust but verify. That's actually a really good way to do it. You know, when it comes to BuzzFeed and there are questions with the people who are writing the story, there's questions about the fact that the guy who was on MSNBC said, I haven't seen any

documents. And they had tweeted out earlier that he had seen documents. There's Byron York getting on Twitter to say, well, you know, uh, Corwin's lawyer was quite explicit about him being told a lie about campaign finance, but he said nothing about this. So in other words, it's a big, big miasma of the usual confusion. But let's take the temperature of the room and say, Peter, welcome. And how do you feel about this? I'm going to wait for Rob's synopsis because Rob, in describing this story for us, will tell us why he thinks, as he said said a moment ago it's either significant or significantly insignificant but i'm sure his yeah because i have to say i glanced at it this morning and i thought oh more of this and i frankly it just didn't register with me but it registered

with rob go rob why rob is stunned to silence he's collecting his thoughts he doesn't realize oh i'm sorry no i was on mute i was on mute i mute. I was on mute. I didn't realize I was on mute. One thing that I was going to say that these stories all reflect is just the huge target area for the investigation, just all of the different aspects of campaign finance law, which is incredibly, incredibly complicated and designed to trip you up. And and then all of the areas in which somebody could be could have be could commit perjury or lie to federal investigators or be suborned for perjury, all sorts of things. So it's like a target rich environment if you are an aggressive prosecutor, no matter who you're aggressively prosecuting, it's just there's just lots going on. And each one, each new BuzzFeed or some or bombshell from The New York Times is actually it's like a report from another area that we haven't heard about or another possible area or avenue of prosecution. So if you're in the Trump White House right now and you're paying attention, you have to be very, very nervous. And I think they are very, very nervous. And I think even Trump supporters, even like even Byron York, who bends over backwards, is extremely fair, is circumspect. Molly Hemingway is circumspect because this is new stuff and it would be really, really, really bad were it true.

And the claim is – the central claim is – The central claim is that Michael Cohen went to – during the campaign, Cohen was sent to Russia to meet with Russians to push – to continue to push forward on a real estate deal that trump had in moscow right and when uh cohen was called to uh testify before a house committee trump told him to lie which is support subwarning perjury which is a crime would be a very bad crime would be a crime like at that point impeachment really is and i think probably legitimately on the table the the reason this the reason this particular thing strikes me as despite the fact that it's buzzfeed despite the fact that one of the reporters has had trouble with the truth in the past and despite the fact that a lot of people who uh you know are have made their peace for

whatever temperature with the trump presidency might not like it, it's because it makes sense to me. It makes sense to me that he would do this. It would make sense to me that he'd be pushing forward a real estate deal in Moscow while running for president because he didn't think he was going to win. And that is true. That is an undeniable fact. We know that firsthand, secondhand, contemporaneous reports. Trump himself has admitted he didn't think he was going to win. He thought he was going to be, at this point, just a kind of a troublemaker on the sidelines of a Hillary Clinton presidency. At which point, by the way, most of the never-Trumpers and Trump critiquers like me would be cheering him on if Hillary Clinton was in the White House. And this makes business sense, right? Like, I'm not going to be president, and I want this real

estate deal to go through. It's probably, I have the most leverage I'll ever have in making this deal right now while people think I might be president. And they think, oh, well, Trump's not just culturally powerful, politically powerful. Now's the time to strike. Let's make sure this thing goes through. So all of that makes sense to me and even makes sense to me that a businessman and a person of Trump's character and Trump's business history would see nothing wrong and nothing imperiling about telling his lawyer to lie. Rob, I have to stop for a moment. Do you have prayer beads that you are obsessively rustling? No, sorry. nothing imperiling about telling his lawyer to lie. Rob, I have to stop for a moment. Do you have prayer beads that you are obsessively rustling? No, sorry.

We hear something on your side, yes. It was just me ranting. That was that. You haven't heard it in a while. We're hearing the loose BBs roll around on your brain as they attempt to find the little slots in that game that you got out of the Cracker Jack box, but i don't think so no i think you're right and you know the people who say who believe in the trump collusion narrative because this isn't the collusion narrative that's something else right this is sort of kind of sort of about that but it isn't the narrative that

they've been pushing i mean it's not that donald trump and putin decided to get him into power so he could destroy nato and all these other authoritarian ideas. No, he just wanted to make a buck. And that's why I think it can be terrifying if you're on the Trump side in the Trump White House because this is, again, one more new avenue. And every week when there's a new story, it's a new avenue. It's not collusion. It's something else. And that's worrying.

Yeah, well, we know he was pursuing. So two items here. One is he was pursuing a real estate deal in Moscow, not news. We know that there's been a dispute about when he stopped pursuing it, when he gave up the deal is lost. Cohen says one thing. Trump has said another. Trump's version is in is in flux. But that's a not new and be not illegal question. If Trump is Cohen claiming, according to BuzzFeed, that there were witnesses, that there's documentary evidence that Trump told him to lie to Congress, because if not, then we have Donald Trump and Michael Cohen. And you tell me whose word you'd write. You'd take between those two. On the other hand, what what you I hand, to me, you're exactly right.

Donald Trump is Donald Trump. And his background is well established. And almost anything could be alleged against him. And to a lot of people in the country at this point, it would sound plausible. And he and his administration would lose an entire day of the news cycle. People are talking about this instead of about China, or instead of about Syria, or instead of about the government shutdown, losing the opportunity to convey the message to the American people. And of course, getting the hopes up of the Democratic

base. And I'm sure that various Democrats who are in charge of the democratic base and i'm sure that various uh democrats who are in charge of the committees that will be open and investigate or get their email inboxes are filling up with demands investigate this investigate this and trump the other so this was back during the cam the campaign 2016 before anybody thought seriously that Trump, apparently even before Donald Trump, Donald Trump didn't think he'd become president until the vote was in. This is a friend of mine who's a banker at a major American bank. I will leave the friend and the bank nameless. But he said, listen, it's been 20 years since any creditable American bank would do business with Donald Trump. He's been getting his capital.

He's needed capital. The casinos are expensive to run. He's continued to need capital. We don't know where he's been getting his capital from, and we don't even really want to know. But Arabs are a source of capital. Russian oligarchs are a source of capital. You can get money from Russian oligarchs are a source of capital. You can get money from Russian oligarchs without

breaking the law, but it'll look bad and almost anything that's alleged. So who knows what may come out? And this is what we're in for for the next couple of years. That seems to me at a minimum pretty clear. If it's just Elliot Cohen saying, well, he told me, but nobody else was in the room. Michael Cohen. We like Elliot Cohen. Elliot Cohen. Michael Cohen. Excuse me, guys. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. I think you're right about that. I would just say that what you don't want is you don't want more avenues open if you're the target of any investigation. That's one of the reasons why when they do these investigations, and they have, I think, for every president, some poor guy who's cheating on his taxes on a completely ancillary matter gets driven to the pokey, right? It's like for Clinton— Paul Manafort is looking at many, many years behind bars because he associated himself with Donald Trump. Nobody would have looked into Paul Mana manniford's dealings and and it's all you know for that matter um uh um michael deaver or or poor web hubble or the the rose law firm under clinton suddenly they had billing records that were uh subpoenaed and proved that they were kind of embezzling uh so all this stuff it's like like

man like the minute the light turns on, the target they're looking for, they may not get. However, this one seems... I once lived in an apartment in Washington in which the metaphor was actually true. My bachelor apartment, I would

go home and walk into the kitchen and flick the light switch on, and the cockroaches literally would scatter. Right, right. But the irony here, of course, is that this is a – if this is true, and I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying if it's true, even if it's not true, it's worrying because it means that there's just a big big big field which to play on it's going to be very hard very hard for even you know real trump loyalists and supporters to kind of wiggle out of because it's it's the kind of thing that people do and it's certainly the kind of thing that he has been known to do in business it's not the kind of thing we let people do when

they're testifying in front of a legal entity like a house committee or federal investigators. On the other hand, there is something fair about it. If you're Martha Stewart and you went to – Martha Stewart went to prison for lying to federal investigators. She wasn't even under oath. If you're Martha Stewart or any of those people who have gone to prison for that, you're going to be legitimately angry if Trump skates on this, if he did it. I just don't know how you – well, we'll see. I mean, exactly. So now everybody needs to know, and there's something else we have to investigate. But I don't know how you – if it's Michael Cohen's word against Donald Trump's, I just don't know how you establish it. Different from Bill Clinton lying under oath on tape during a formal investigation. That's a different matter. And also DNA evidence. The perjury was obvious. The perjury was obvious.

The perjury was obvious. Yes, yes. I think a lot of people are going to use the fact that it's just Cohen so far now to set up obfuscation for that and just try to deal, you know, wrap it into this huge sticky amorphous ball of

stuff that's out there that a lot of people have already factored in i mean the fact that it's the fact that it's russia and the fact that it's coen i mean these names and places that are coming back again and they can try to wave it away and wave it away but if there is corroborating evidence and if there is something that that's serious that then then no what happens then i think is that yes the light when the light goes on and you see the vermin scatter it won't be a different kind of light will go on and people will start to step away. And that will be interesting because I don't exactly feel as though there's a great amount of love, passionate love, for this president amongst the Republican Party at the moment. They've got to deal with him.

So, at that point, when you have, if Trump is actually impeached, I think it would be, I mean, a lot of, our friend Rod Dreher this morning said, you know, if it's true and we're impeached,

is President Pence that bad an idea? Well, we would have the whole religious test debate. I mean, then we'd go off in a different direction. But, I mean, you would have a great number of people who would be just simply relieved to be shot of the man and get on to something that felt normal. Because there are a lot of people for whom none of this feels normal. And there are people who thrive on the fact that it's not normal and love the fact that it's not normal because it's different. And we need to break things and change things. But there, I think they underestimate the desire, the weariness and the

wariness amongst a lot of people that I talked to who don't pay a tremendous amount of attention to this. I was talking to, you know, at work with a couple of friends who are Democrats. They're not leftists. They're old-style Minnesota liberals, and they kind of sort of follow this stuff, and they read all the stuff on the left, but they don't really have their hands around the whole thing. And for them, it's – they just kind of want things to be normal again. So we'll see.

Good luck to them. Good luck to all of us. Actually, my typical contrarian view of everything, James, which I know is infuriating, is that I think that this stuff – first of all, I think all of the investigations of Trump are a lot more normal than we are giving them credit for. I think the folks on the anti-Trump side always want to paint this as crazy and outrageous and just like the world is just falling and everything's to collapse. And then I think the pro-Trump side always portray this as unprecedented attacks

on a president. The truth is, this is just a kind of a slight amplification of our investigation mania. It's just Trump, because he's a citizen, was a citizen before, you know, never really held elective office. There's just a lot more stuff there to look at because it hasn't been looked at before. Yes and no. I mean, the fact that they have the collusion narrative and the collusion story and the Steele dossier and all of this stuff is built up in so many people's minds, the question that the president could possibly be under the sway of Russian influence leads to a reporter shouting to the president when he walks outside, are you a Russian agent? And then throw

it back to the studio where Anderson Cooper says, for the first time, a president has had to answer the question as to whether or not he is an agent of America's most prominent enemy. That's not normal. That question is normal. And Anderson Cooper pretending that this whole thing, that the reason that he was asked that groundbreaking question was because of what they've been doing for the last X number of months

and, of course, what Trump himself enabled. That's not normal. No, that's true. But what they're accusing him of is anything but. I guess I'm revealing my own bias here, which is that I think the collusion and the collusion narrative and the collusion obsession, I think it's ludicrous. Yes. And a complete and utter waste of time and typical of the left or the anti-Republican media, I should say, that they have latched on like morons to the one thing that

makes them look silly. Hold on. Instead have missed, have missed probably what, I mean, what, what, what the problem's going to be. There's going to be some FEC violations in the payment of, when you pay off, you know, a porn star, that's, that's what, that's what people have to pay fines for. One or two people might even go to jail for that. That's actually – but that's not out of bounds in American politics today. known to play it fast and loose with ethics, who has already been accused of lying by all of his creditors, who is like basically a kind of a shady businessman, which is like, even if you love Trump, you have to admit that, right? If you don't admit that, then you've joined a cult. But that's true.

And then he becomes the president of the United States. And there's a certain amount of lag time and latency period where a lot of that stuff that happened six to 12 months before he was elected unexpectedly by him um are now now come under the jurisdiction and the scrutiny of an extremely tireless investigator i mean that's not this is not a good system and then you add on to that that this is a president who tirely i mean i don't this is not not this is not a criticism of him, but he was a private citizen. There is nobody in elected office today, certainly not now, who owes him their job. He didn't campaign for anybody. He didn't go on campaign training. I mean, I think maybe the only person who didn't do this recently was Obama. They all had a boatload, a Rolodex filled with names of people from states and counties, commissioners to party apparatchiks to D.C. legislators who owed them.

And he doesn't have that. And that's going to be really hard politically as his numbers get worse and worse and worse and worse, which is exactly what's happening. It couldn't come at the worst time because if the Democrat party had decided that they're going to run grownups and they're going to go to the middle of the road, they're going to try to get everybody back by not being crazy, wide eyed socialists. That would be one thing. But the resistance is so full of itself and so sure of itself that they are determined now to give us that wonderful 70% tax rate that previously brought America to unparalleled prosperity, right? So if there is

something like this, it's going to vindicate the worst ruling class except for the one that we have now. It's going to vindicate all these people and imbue them with a moral stance that they did not deserve and should not have. They all think of themselves as, you know, Robin Hoods taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Well, Robin Hood, as we know, is taking from the state and giving to the individuals, a whole different question. And believe me, when it comes to distribution of income, you want to kind of sort of be on top of that yourself. Hard to do though. Well, not at all. And I mentioned Robinhood. And Robinhood actually is the name of an investing app, Robinhood. It lets you buy and sell stocks and ETFs and options, even cryptos. And it's all commission free. Wow. Think about that. If you're an investor who's used to the commissions or if you're just trying to get into it and you're thinking, don't I have to pay somebody for this? No, Robinhood. They strive to make financial services work for everyone, not just the wealthy. It's a non-intimidating way for stock market newcomers to invest for the first time with true confidence. It's simple and intuitive.

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I was just going to say, don't you love it when these companies come up like that? I just love that when someone comes and figures stuff out like that. I do too. I just think it's like I kind of want to applaud them. I just think that they especially demystifying this and sort of maybe flattening the learning curve up a little bit of investing like this. I think it's great.

What I love is the fact that nowhere in that copy did the word disrupt occur. Meanwhile, the economy and the lives of many are being disrupted by the shutdown. And we're going into our, what, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh month now. How are you guys doing? How do you think it's playing out? And we had a column in the paper recently by somebody who went and found somebody impacted.

I'm sorry, I used the word impact as a verb. Horribly affected by the shutdown. And the person said that they wished the Republicans would go around President Trump and get the shutdown fixed. They wanted the Republic, they held the Republic as opposed to the Democrats who could get all of this settled for a mere five bucks, which is a drop in the federal bucket. Peter? Yeah, well, no, that can't be said often enough that the, is requesting is about one-eighth of one percent of the federal budget. They ought to be able to come up with that somewhere. Of course, they can come up with it somewhere.

And as Byron York pointed out on this very podcast just a week ago, when you actually look at the details of how much wall Donald Trump wants to construct, it comes out to about 65 miles to replace old fencing and about 150 new miles of fencing or barrier or wall or whatever you call it. The whole thing is extremely modest in expense and in what it would accomplish. The idea that there's a shutdown over this is ridiculous, except, of course, that the Democrats think they've got the guy and are trying to push, push, push, make a stand here. Okay, so how is it all coming out? Hard to say, in my opinion, because the Trump, Kim Strassel had a good piece in the journal, what was it, the day before yesterday, on the way the Trump administration is doing everything it can

by contrast with previous administrations, which wanted to make shutdowns as painful as possible. The Trump administration is trying to make shutdowns as painful as possible. The Trump administration is trying to make this as painless as possible. Social security checks will go out. They always go out, but there's no question this time that they'll go out. The IRS refunds will go out. National parks are still open and so forth. However, it looks as though in the next week, they really will start running out of money for things that people will start to notice. And so I guess my prediction is that 10 days or two weeks from now at the very most, there's going to be some sort of compromise. It'll all end.

That's my thinking. It doesn't feel satisfying. It feels as though there should be some more dramatic, some sort of Donnybrook, some sort of showdown. But I have the feeling politics will reassert themselves here. Donnybrook. Oh, there's a word. I can just feel the fabric on the sweater and not it around your neck. You used impacted. I get to use Donnybrook. Donnybrook is a perfectly fine word. It could have been worse. It could have been kerfuffle.

Or kerfluffle, as some people mean. There's a big dispute about that. Ron, are you – Well, you know, these shutdowns – first of all, these shutdowns almost always punish Republicans for some reason. I mean, I just think it doesn't really matter whether you're the president or the speaker of the House. If you're Newt Gingrich, it punished you. And they tend to punish Republicans because Republicans tend to be the ones who hold the line on budgetary items. And so even though this is sort of the reverse, I don't think it really – I'll put it this way. Politically, I don't think that the Democrats are making a mistake. They do seem to be – certainly in Trump's approval numbers, they

seem to be succeeding. His approval is going down. His disapproval is going up. It's not a good situation to be in. And they make the alternative argument, which is, hey, wait a minute. You had the House and the Senate for two years. If this was a priority, in fact, you could have had it. To me, it tends – I mean there's so many things about Trump that are – it's impossible not to cheer on. The fast food banquet because the White House, whatever, party people were closed, whatever that is. It's so kind of endearing. And we have mostly had people cave. Mostly had Republicans, I should say, cave when faced with this kind of thing. And he doesn't seem like he's about to cave.

So this may be one of these things that there's a brilliant workaround for that almost always is in appropriate – when it comes to appropriations for certain. And maybe the government is going to be shut down for months. Who knows? I mean there's got to be – how many lawyers do you think are right now working on the workarounds? Like, well, wait a minute. If you pass this kind of bill, then maybe this will – who knows? So I suspect – unlike – I'll take the opposite side of Peters. I don't think it's going to result in a kind of a politics as usual.

I think it might go on and get even more interesting because we – that's – I think if you're Trump, you don't see the poll numbers being the problem. You see the caving being the problem. And I think he's right. We are here not because he was he's holding he was his initial impulse was to hold the line. We are here because his initial impulse was to make a deal and then he was reminded by people who are his um great supporters you know sean hannity and coulter that he really has to deliver on his campaign promise um and then he changed his mind so something's going on in his head and something's going on in the white house and i don't know i maybe i'm just asking i'm just saying what i'm hoping for but i certainly think it's going to

get more interesting or maybe i just hope it is what i'm curious to learn is how it's going to get more interesting. Or maybe I just hope it is. What I'm curious to learn is how it's going to look, what the deal is going to be, because everybody has backed themselves into a corner. I mean, the Democrats can't give him the wall, and Trump can't not get the wall. What possible compromise is there? See, you're stunned. You can't figure out what it is either the the daca the daca to the giving enacting legislation so that the daca kids are legalized and given a permanent permanent status made citizens that's the deal has been on the table for months and

months and months that's the deal everybody can revert to well i hope and i hope that's the case um but they're still going to be excoriated for giving the racist, racist, bad orange man his hideous wall. It's hard for them to delegitimize walls and borders as Nancy Pelosi has done

and then commit a substantial amount of money to build one. I mean, if Nancy Pelosi is saying that borders are immoral, if that's the direction that the party wants to go and you can feel it, you can feel the wind in their sails of Pelosi and the rest of these desiccated ancient

examples of politicians, is not the fervor that's coming from below. The wind that's filling the sails of these desiccated old politicians is not the traditional democratic notions that said, yeah, we got to control our borders. I let a lot of people in, but yeah, we kind of got to control our borders. The wind that's blowing up from below is the stuff that says that borders in themselves are immoral and that an ideal society doesn't discriminate between citizens and non-citizens. I mean, it's airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky utopian nonsense that destroys the concept of citizenship and sovereignty, but hey, we can deal with that down the road. Now there's votes to be had from getting stuff from these people who want no borders. And that's rhetorically what Pelosi's been saying.

And for them to now turn around and say, well, we got the DACA, so we're going to build the wall, they must be counting on people being able to forget and forgive and forgive and forget. So, it's… Well, the issue here is going to be, because right now they're tasting blood, right? So the other side is tasting blood, and the other – I mean the Democrats have a theory or have a strategy, and the strategy is death by a thousand cuts, continually troll, provoke, humiliate the president at every turn to get as many republicans as they can to sign on to support him uh and so that they could take as many republicans down as they possibly can like to to to allow no republicans to sort of say oh gosh i'm you know i'm in the middle here i know no they're what they want is they want clear cut lines um and the best way to do that is to sort of slightly wound the president every week, and I think that's their political strategy.

And I think it's actually a pretty smart one. I mean that is the smart move given the cards that they have to build a big wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it. And now it's, well, we're going to build little pieces of a wall, and of course he needs to pay for it. So he's already on the back foot, already on the defensive. His best move is to try to get them to agree to some kind of construction because you've got to show some construction, and then give in on every other small thing or a signal that he's willing to talk about every little every single little thing it's just that at that point there's no real reason why they should take their foot off his windpipe and there just isn't um and and i suspect what will happen is that's why i think this thing will go on for a while or you know I think that would be a definitely possible scenario because everybody's winning here at this point. That's right.

Everybody is responding to the incentives arrayed before. Exactly right. That is the pure economist view of it. Well, the point of that is that, for example, when we, this goes back to the discussion we had a moment ago, I will not drag up all the arguments, but is Cohen telling the truth? Did Trump tell him? It doesn't matter if you're MSNBC or frankly, if you're Fox News, you already know your position. You know that that story is going to sell tonight. And what doesn't get done, this is a sort of a theme of mine on the mainstream media. What doesn't get done, this is a sort of a theme of mine on the mainstream media, what doesn't get done is the very careful reporting.

We've seen one instance of it. The New York Times looks as though they devoted months of reporting. It must have been a tremendously expensive project for them to go back and look at the way that Donald Trump's father ran his real estate empire and particularly handled his tax liabilities. It was a long detailed story and they dropped that thing. And to use the word normal, in normal times it would have been an outrage, a scandal in and of itself. And then just disappeared. That's the third sort of thing that i that's what bothers me in a certain sense there are no incentives set donald trump aside for that matter set the

republic aside for just a moment there are no incentives virtually no incentives for really good careful meticulous journalism of the kind that big newspapers used to do separate matter but still well but you're right there's no incentive for them to tell a larger story the and because every story has context i mean i was i had a diet was at a dinner party with a real estate uh the scion of a big real estate family in new york city um they had done uh you know there's there's only a handful they all know each other and he said and i'm you know to full and full disclosure, he's probably more wealth from one generation to the other. And that there is not one that would be it would would read any differently

or that much differently from the way the trump story read and when you start providing context like that then you know you're you're you're the anger and the rage and your desire to paint you know the president united states this particular president as pure and unadulterated and remarkably fresh evil just becomes less possible. That is, and that, I'm not quite sure how to put this, but that, I'll be brief. I know we have a guest, but I think of it myself as the speed limit rule.

And that is to say out here in California, all kinds of places across the country, but for sure out here in California, if you actually drive the posted speed limit, you are putting your life and that of other drivers around you in danger. Nobody pays any attention to the speed limit. The California Highway Patrol doesn't drive the speed limit. There's this posted speed limit, 65, zoom, and we see the sign as we go past it, 72 miles an hour, which is the actual speed limit. Okay.

So people look at Donald Trump and say, well, maybe he's doing things that aren't correct, that aren't strictly speaking fair. But is that the norm for big real estate operations? Is that the norm for politicians when they're in that sort of circumstance? There is this kind of common sense feeling that maybe his behavior is more understandable than MSNBC screaming and squawking or Rachel Maddow would have us believe. There is that kind of reservoir of common sense, a little skepticism. Wait a minute. Life isn't quite like that right i think that is extreme that is a pretty much undeniable when it comes to the way real estate businesses are financed the way real estate families pass wealth from one generation to the other i don't think i really don't think that's um i i think that's actually right i mean

the trump's business plans and business practices are probably the worst right i mean i think that's actually right. I mean, Trump's business plans and business practices are probably the worst. Right. I mean, I think that's what all of his creditors would man. That's just – those are his liabilities as a person. That's his liabilities as a character. But it would be great if reporters went back to their sort of seen-it-all, kind of world-weary, cynical, nothing-new-under-the-sun posture, which they used to have until – really up until the 60s late 60s and gave up this disingenuous i'm shocked shocked right attitude about sort of everyone else's behavior um i think that would be helped more more helpful and that's not i wish that when when we when we investigate somebody for a crime they don't go to jail for some ancillary matter i to this day just because I brought her up, Martha Stewart, I don't know why she went to prison for lying. I don't know why you can't lie to a federal investigator. Why can't you lie to anybody you want to?

If they put you under oath, that's a different thing. But if you're just sitting there and they're just setting traps for you, I simply – I don't see – She went to prison because the nation as a whole was sick and tired of feeling insufficient and inferior because they couldn't whip up cupcakes like that using a toothpick and an eyedropper. That was the real crime. By the way, James, do you not hear Rob's Hollywood training and what he's saying right now? Lying? What's wrong with lying? That's the fascinating part about this is that I think there's still something to be said for a society that pretends to believe that there ought to be a little virtue in the way things are done. I mean, we may deep in our hearts say we know the corners are cut, that everything is not safe and pure.

But the idea that we should say, you know what? Everybody's fallible. No straight house shall ever be made of this crooked timber. Let's just admit that we're all crooked, factor that in and believe that our fellow man is on the make, because I don't think that's a recipe for a society that necessarily prospers, uh, morally.

And it's a bit of a problem, but you know, who am I? Um, I'm just some guy sitting in North Dakota who can get away with trying to be good. North. Did I say North Dakota?

Oh, I did. Giant, giant reveal right there. Well, I'm not sitting in North Dakota at all. And I'm in Minnesota where we're supposed to get, yes, another lizard this weekend. And I'm not looking forward to it in the least bit. But the winds that blow from Canada will be horrible.

We have something called the polar vortex coming. I don't even like the sound of that. It feels like it may be a segue, but I'm really trying to figure it out. I don't know. I don't know how you're going to do it. I'm not even going to bother because

when Rob can't see one coming, he decides to preemptively ruin wherever I happen to go. Before I get out of the house, before I find my keys When Rob can't see one coming, he decides to preemptively ruin wherever I happen to go. Before I get out of the house, before I find my keys and head toward the door, he's already spreading banana peels on the front steps. That's fine. Well, actually, if we talked before, if I'd gotten to this before and been able to say this, I would have mentioned that Pelosi and the rest of the party, when it comes to the people who are coming up from behind, when it comes to the AOCs and the rest, the Pelosi, the top leadership seems to me like people who are constantly hitting that remind me tomorrow button when their computer asks if they want to update their software, right? Because we all do

that until you're six operating systems behind. And that seems a little bit archaic when you think about it. I've got mine set on automatic update, which is very smooth, but you know what? Remember 1999, you know, 20 years ago? We're past that. So if you are no longer in the prince-like fashion partying like it's 1999, why is the software that you use every day at work not quite feel like it's even Y2K ready? I mean, I have some problems at work

with the software that I have that is ancient, these 8-bit icons and the rest of it that make you wince. Listen, start off this year, which is 20 years past 1999, on the right foot and find software that's, well, a little bit more up-to-date. How, where, why? Well, the why is all to be found at capterra.com, C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A. Capterra is the leading free online resource to help you find the best software solution for your business. With over 700,000 reviews of products from real software users, you can discover everything you need to make an informed yoga studio management software. They run the gamut. And no matter what kind of software your business needs, Capterra makes it easy to discover the right solution fast. So if you run a company and you're looking at your software and you're thinking this billing isn't up to date, this thing that I have to manage my customers, it's all

wrong. Well, Capterra, millions of people use it each month to find the right tools for their business. So visit capterra.com slash ricochet for free today and find the right tools to make 2019 the year for your business. That's Capterra.com slash Ricochet. Capterra. C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A dot com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Capterra for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast Chris Scalia, co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Scalia Speaks and his book reviews and political commentary of Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, all over the place. And as a smart guy engaged with the issues of the day, the first question I naturally have to ask you is when you saw the credits for a theme song being by Deval, what was his first name? Deval? I don't know this one. Who's Deval? James is showing off.

I knew that James and Rob would have a wealth of knowledge that I would not have on this topic. No, no, no. Why are you leaving out Robinson? Well, Peter, with your sweaters, I wonder how much TV you watched. You're playing polo or something. I don't know. The reason we ask, of course, is you have a piece in the Wall Street Journal called Memories of Music's Primetime. Set it up for everybody, what you were talking about and who this Norman Gimbel fellow you mentioned was. Well, sure.

Last month, a fellow named Norman Gimbel passed away. I think he was 91 years old. And he wrote a lot of songs that people know, pretty famous pop songs like The Girl from Ipanema and Killing Me Softly. But he also wrote some theme songs people know. He wrote the theme to Wonder Woman, and he wrote the themes to Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days, which people of a certain generation or maybe even a couple of generations know by heart. So I used that opportunity, I guess,

as a chance to meditate on the death of the TV theme song. Gimbel was kind of responsible for ushering in the heyday of TV theme songs in the late 70s and early 80s. And these were, you know, for the millennials listening, theme songs were the minute or minute and a half long introductory music that you heard at the beginning of a TV show. And they were it's kind of amazing that they lasted as long as they did, it was in you know it was instead of a show you watched the credits roll you you saw the actors names and clips from previous shows

and stuff like that uh while you listen to these really catchy memorable songs some of them were instrumental some of them had had great lyrics um rob of course i think everybody would recognize that uh cheers is one of the the greatest of all time because it's like a lot of the theme songs from the 80s. It was kind of melancholy but inspirational at the same time. And everybody knew the lyrics. Yeah, everybody. That's really true. I mean, part of it, I think it comes from radio where a show would begin and there would already be an orchestra there. And so the music would kind of lead you from one thing to the next um but a lot of it had to do with the fact

that at no point um were you really going to get up and change the channel exactly so the flipping was really hard so a theme song which kind of like introduced you to the idea and the characters and everything seemed like a celebration and sort of gave the radio sort of gave you time to settle around the radio around the set so you could hear it. And a lot of times they told the whole story, the whole premise. I mean, Beverly Hillbillies or even the Dick Van Dyke show had that where you met everybody that way. And then they went out, they went out because people started flipping and you wanted to like you wanted a seamless if possible they would have one show effortlessly seamlessly go to another show so you wouldn't even have time to find the remote um yeah that's that's really what happened

to them and and the truth is that even now you watch it they smush the crawl uh which is of the end titles down to a tiny little corner right um. So that they can begin the next show. So you don't even have, it's like your brain will not stop one story before it begins another story. I think some of it has to do, some of the disappearance has to do with the fact that the remote control is a good point,

but I think theme songs, especially for sitcoms, were just too earnest. And you get into the 90s, especially with shows like Seinfeld, it's just there's too much irony in those shows to really suit theme songs. I mean, Seinfeld, people remember it had kind of a weird ditty, but there was no song. And that's kind of the whole point of Seinfeld.

Seinfeld was the anti-sitcom in a way. You never learned anything. So a really inspirational inspirational memorable theme song wouldn't have suited and and i think so that kind of the irony of the 90s uh drove theme songs away there were still i mean friends for example everybody knows that theme song a little backstory the friends theme song which is i mean which is sort of what really set up that show was that the then chairman of the network hated it so much because he felt that it was saying we're having a great time you're not invited he felt that the message of the theme song was we're

too cool for you whereas in fact the message of the theme song was like oh isn't it great we're here for you you're here was the idea of the wish fulfillment which why that show really worked really well was that it was a wish fulfillment for people who are younger and for people who are that age of like i can't wait to be a grown-up in the city my life's gonna be just like that or if you were a grown-up in the city this is the way my life really is and my friends really do feel like my family and if you were a little bit older you're like remember that remember when we were in our 20s how how important our friends were now we got kids and they're throwing up on our shoulder that that song really nailed it and the same thing with the cheers theme which was you know everybody knows your name um we would we actually felt

like our characters could do mean really mean stuff to each other which they did um you know they lie to each other cheat each other and just do incredibly bad things but the theme song kind of bought us some goodwill because like well you're where everybody knows your name and everybody likes you so it can't be that bad right but. But, but in fact, they were cheating each other out of money, you know, pretty much three times a month. And I was a freshman in college, I think, when, when, uh, friends came on the air now over. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. And we would, we would gather in the, in the dorm common area, uh, to watch to watch the show in part to hang out with the girls. But if you missed the theme song, it was like you missed a really important part of the show.

You had to get there early to hear the theme song. And there were there were no DVRs. You couldn't rewind it. It was the same with Cheers. I was I watched I didn't watch Cheers. It was that was when I was a kid, I watched mostly the family sitcoms, but I would hang around to watch the Cheers theme song. That was the part, and that also meant the cold open too, but that was the part of the show I needed. I'm making up for it, Rob. I'm going through the whole series again. Chris, Chris Peter here. You have just proven that you are too young to be making the point that I believe you may be making, which is everything's going to hell. Things used to be better in the old days.

Explain this strange streak of nostalgia from a man whose oldest child is 11. How old is your oldest child? Oldest child is seven. Seven? Yeah. Explain yourself. I don't think everything. You're too young to be an old crotchety old man.

I've been nostalgic since I was about 11. But no, I think... I don't think everything is going to hell because in some ways TV is a lot better. You have more options. The quality of programming is in many cases a lot better. If you watch a show from the 80s like The A-Team, it's terrible.

Or Knight Rider. those shows are terrible now the theme songs are still awesome um greatest american hero a fantastic theme song nobody remembers anything about the show because it only lasted two seasons but shows today the theme songs uh we don't share the theme songs and i think that's a I think that's a loss. So what about what about. Aha. You see, I'm not as as out of it as you think. What about the Sopranos? Sopranos is one of the last great ones. I mean, I never liked that song, by the way. What was I don't remember the name of the band, but it was it was one of those songs that wasn't made, especially for the show. It was a single by kind of an obscure band um but i don't i don't remember the artist of that one i was never a huge fan of that song but everybody else seemed to like that

so there i mean there are still like game of thrones has a theme song um most of the prestige dramas have theme songs but they're just not as catchy and memorable the openings now are more about the visuals especially for hbo shows um like the new season of True Detective, which started last week. It's got it. T-Bone Burnett, I think, is responsible for the song. So that's a big name. But it's not really a memorable song. It's a moody song with really interesting visuals behind it. The idea is that the song is supposed to set the tone right those that's different from from uh you know a old old-timey intro to a show or like to demark the fact that it's nine o'clock or because the person

the star of it has a signature song you know like um like uh jackie gleason um all that stuff you don't need anymore you're just trying to set the tone and create a little bit of this anticipation of it and then you also have to do some business which is you have to put in the tone and create a little bit of this anticipation of it. And then you also have to do some business, which is you have to put in the credits and you have to, for some people, those credits have to be at the top of the show. And, uh,

the longer the show, the more the credits and you would, you'd be having your opening crawl would go all the way to the, you know, the second or third or fourth actor, maybe even to the end credits. So it helps to have that minute. You,

the, the problem is that of course at each, the benefit of an HBO show or a streaming show is that it doesn't matter to them. If you're, if it goes on long, because they don't really care if you watch the show or not, they only care if you're subscribing to the service.

The horror of it now for people who write themes or love themes is that when you're on Netflix, a little box appears down in the corner that says skip intro. Exactly. You know, I would love there's somewhere there's got to be a composer who's actually named skip intro that is just fuming about this. And it has the effect of taking you out of I mean, if you're binging, I can understand. But even though I watched Netflix, I went through and rewatched Boardwalk Empire every night, and I would watch the theme every single night, even though it's anachronistic for the piece and reflects the fact that Marty Scorsese just wanted a Stones-like riff in there

somewhere. It still was important to see that. But you're right. It's the visuals, not necessarily the song itself. And so you might think that, okay, the great era is dead. We have to go back to our childhood. And truly, a lot of us remember these things with great fondness because we were sitting around the television in our footie jammas, you know, being irradiated by a cathode tube and listening to these great songs. And they got their hooks into us. They're in our DNA. And we think, oh, kids today, they're missing that. But they're not.

My daughter grew up watching Disney television and other shows. And they all had catchy, fantastic themes, some of which were done by rock and roll people who had played out that particular string and were now writing ditties for kids' television shows. I think Mark Motterbaugh, who is one of the Devo, did something for, it may have been Clifford the Big Red Dog or the Backyardigans or any number of songs that I can actually sing now.

I won't, but I can actually sing now. I won't, but I can sing them now because I heard them every single day and they were wonderful. So at least there's still a generation coming up that like ours will look back and say, I remember that great song there. But if you have to go, I mean, and it's not new that you have rockers going into, uh, you know, doing, doing theme songs. I mean, the theme song for the Mary Tyler Moore show was done by the guy who wrote I Fought the Law. Oh, I did not know that. Sonny Curtis, who went into the crickets

after Buddy Holly had his unfortunate aviation incident, wrote I Fought the Law and also wrote all this all around, the Mary Tyler Moore theme song. And you look at the MTM productions, you look at the stuff that Norman Lear look at the, uh, the stuff that, um, uh, that, uh, Norman Lear did. And I mean, that was just the sound there, there were the background unofficial soundtracks for, for, for decades. And it's a shame. Go on. If I can add to that, that list, James, um, Quincy Jones wrote San,

the Sanford and son theme. Henry Mancini wrote theme songs. B.J. Thomas, who had a few hits in the 70s, sang the Growing Pains theme. And Johnny Mathis sang the Family Ties theme. It's really amazing. And you still have, like, the Barenaked Ladies do the Big Bang Theory theme, but it's just not as, doesn't seem to have the prestige anymore.

No, the most important composer of the later 20th century, post-war, you could make the argument, maybe it was Lenny, okay, but maybe it's this other guy who wrote stuff that everybody knows. And he wrote all the themes for Erwin Allen's wonderful little, you know, science fiction adventures that we saw, Land of the

Giants, Lost in Space, and the rest of them. And he went by the name of Johnny Williams. Johnny? Oh, yeah. Who's the guy? I'm now trying to toss in my other piece of knowledge on this subject. Who's the Hungarian guy who wrote the Mission Impossible theme or the... Lalo Scherz. That's it.

Okay. Oh, you knew it. I thought I meant Stump James. That would... Oh, well. All right. I'll do myself again and let you kids play. Go ahead uh for my

money the the best uh theme song composer is mike post uh he was responsible for some of the most memorable ones for sitcoms and dramas uh he co-wrote the rockford files theme which was a pop hit and he wrote uh la law um hill street blues was his hill street blues was his yeah i think he co-wrote that with carpenter i'm not sure he co-wrote a few of them uh and law and order and uh and a lot of other really good ones um and he's i argue that my theory is that though nobody knows who he is he's responsible for more more people know his songs or heard his songs more often in the eighties than say Madonna songs or Michael Jackson songs, because everybody,

they weren't listening to the same radio stations, but they were maybe watching the same shows. And he was all over the place on those shows. There's an old show. I, a friend of mine was working. His name was Mike and he'd work in post-production. With his phone ringing, he'd say, Mike, post.

And some people would say, Mike, post. I was trying to get Mike in post-production. Yeah, no, this is who you're talking about. Because he kept thinking they had misdialed, and they called Mike post-office. The downside of having a name that is also a term. You're right. Mike Post was the sound of a generation as much as the newly introduced curves of Ford cars in the early 80s set the tone for what things were going to be. There's a very 80s timber to what he does. And Rockford's a great file, but it has a

unique synthesizer sound that's very much of that era that nails it to a time um and the instrumentation also tells you an awful lot about an era whether or not you hear a little harpsichord you can probably say harpsichord well i'm guessing brian keats is going to come along and it's 1969 and it's uh whatever that show he did with mr french and the rest of it if you hear an awful lot of flutes and a whack-a-joo in the background you're probably thinking oh it's one of those 70s gritty crime dramas or something like that. If the orchestration is absolutely incomprehensible, it's Vic Mizzi doing Green Acres.

I mean, there's so much there. There's so much talent. And the number of people who've worked in it, actual serious composers, have been remarkable. Bernard Herrmann was writing soundtracks and opening credit music for radio shows into the 50s. And he was, again, one of the greatest composers ever. And if I can, sorry, if I can take just one second to go back to Peter, a question Peter asked me a couple of minutes ago is like, why am I sad about this? I think to answer it a different way is that a lot of other people have pointed out kind of how fragmented our culture has become.

We don't share entertainment anymore. I can go to satellite radio and I don't have to put up with the hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s. And today I can just listen to the hits of the 90s. And what's more, I can only listen to grunge if I want to. I can we can be so specific and so siloed off from everybody else. And TV's the same way. Theme songs

were kind of remnants of the time where you didn't have that, and they were easy to share. They were some of the most shareable parts of a shared culture. Because you might not necessarily talk about an episode of Knight Rider, but you can sing the theme song to Knight Rider together,

even if that person didn't like the show at all. And so it's, I think, worth just taking a moment to remember and to mourn just for a second because it is kind of representative of the fact that we don't share some things that we used to share. Well put. And give the composers the credit they deserve. I have a friend in England who wrote one of the most beloved theme songs for a television show on British television. It's called Black Beauty. Never made it over here to the States.

But he did a lot of what he was in a boy band, and then he decided to become an actual serious musician and wrote ditties and jingles and ads and songs and musicals and the rest of it. But the one thing that everybody, everybody in England over a certain age seems to know is Black Beauty. And I mean, it was his one thing, you know, people meet him at the store. They had no idea that this unprepossessing man wrote this anthem that everybody knows. But finally, he the other day or month decided to embrace it and and got an orchestra and recorded it again in this beautiful, lush, symphonic manner. And it just sold wonderfully and got him all over the radio and BBC as people are weeping, remembering this song of their childhood. It's extraordinary how it touches us. And great that you wrote that article to remind us of what is important. I think Peter

had a question about some pop star that he's been following. Slightly different question. Before we dismiss you, young Christopher, I would like to know how it happened that you are no longer the house right winger in your own home. It's true. My wife, Adele, has become more conservative over the past few months in particular. She is from Trinidad. She moved to the United States when we got married in 2010. And she was always, I wouldn't say she was liberal, but she was certainly less conservative than me. Obviously, she didn't know that much about American politics, but she sympathized, I think, more with the left on a lot of issues, race issues and criminal law issues and things like that. She was always pro-life, so she had that in common with, with the American right. But, um, when Brett Kavanaugh, uh, when we went

through all that rigmarole, she, uh, I think started to realize that, uh, I guess she saw that the left didn't play fair and that the things that they claim to represent and stand for, they actually didn't. And she thought that the whole thing was an unfair fiasco and they were trying to ruin a good man. So she didn't, she just didn't buy what they were selling. And she wrote a piece on the Federalist about it, I guess, in September that got quite a bit of attention. And so now people usually want to talk to me about my father, but now more and more Adele. So that's why I had to write about theme songs. Right.

But before we let you go, do you think that's a – I mean, this is exactly what we were supposed to never do, which is four dudes talking about this. But do you think that that she's unique in having that reaction i mean my instinct and from what i have heard from women is that they're that that she's not unique but i haven't seen any you know i haven't seen any people just tend to not want to want to talk about it but what what are your instinct? We initially thought, and she initially thought, that she was unique. And this piece she wrote for The Federalist basically came out and said,

I'm a unicorn. I'm a minority woman who is trending right. But after she wrote the piece, she realized that she wasn't all that unique. There are a lot of women and also minority minority women who who agreed with her. And in large part, it was because they were worried about their their sons. But sometimes they just kind of recognize that that it was unfair. Not not everybody felt that way. But I think Adele got a lot more positive reception reception than negative, though, of course, she did get some negative reactions on Twitter. So I think that a lot of women reacted that way. I think that's probably true. But I just love the idea that you're the squish. No, seriously, it's getting more and more like that.

It's pretty hilarious. I really didn't think it would go that way, but that's where we are right now. You and Rob want rhinos. I feel like a fool because when I heard that Peter wanted to ask a question about Adele, I thought he was going to refer to Singer. So it shows how much I know. Chris, thanks so much for being with us today. Is Singer called Adele? Oh, no.

We'll deal with this afterwards. People, go read his story at the Wall Street Journal. Follow him on Twitter of course. And nobody else ever gets to do this, but we're going to let you choose which TV theme you'd like to end the show with. Let's do Growing Pains sung by E.J. Thomas.

Appropriate. Thanks, Chris. Hope to talk to you again. Chris, thanks. Give our best to Adele. Absolutely. Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend. We're going to get to Rob's story about Baltimore in just a second. Chris, thanks. Give our best to Adele. Absolutely. Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend. Thank you. We're going to get to Rob's story about Baltimore in just a second. And Rob now is surprised, saying, I have a Baltimore story.

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Well, Rob, I don't know what brings you to Baltimore, nor what will take you away, but what are your impressions so far? Well, I mean, that's my hometown. I was born here, and I'm here visiting my family. It's sort of a sad event. My father passed away a few weeks ago. And, you know, short battle with cancer. And he was surrounded by the family. We were all there. You know, as beautiful as these things

can be, you know, with the understanding that, you know, as someone said to me, listen, God's plan is not always easy. Sometimes it's really hard, and that was really hard. So I'm here with my mom, and we're just hanging out.

Her life has changed a lot, so that's kind of what I'm here to do. As long as I've known you, I didn't know actually that you hailed from Baltimore. How did I miss that fact? Well, it's extraordinary. So that was a stupid question of me entirely to ask what I was doing there. I thought it was some – so the city itself, I mean do you – how do you – the rest of the country looks at Baltimore. They may have gone there. They see the waterfront. They see the nice stadium, and then they regard everything beyond that as beyond here be dragons. I imagine that you have a different

field but you remember you remember baltimore from a different time don't you well i do but i i you know what i remember i mean it's it's rapidly returning to that time i mean i remember baltimore from when it was you know i mean i don't really remember it but when i was growing up here not even i mean i left when i was eight but those were turbulent years 65 to 73 um and there was tough years and it was kind of coming out of it baltimore is a great great great victim of every crackpot progressive left-wing shibboleth that ever existed if there if one exists existed they did it in baltimore if a progressive idea of urban renewal was to tear things down and to build, you know, plazas, then we did it in Baltimore.

If it was a progressive shibboleth to have, you know, radically different and unstructured public schools that were under the iron grip of the teachers union, we did it in Baltimore. If it was high taxes, they happened in Baltimore. And then, of course, the Me Too movement or the whatever the anti-law enforcement movement that came out of that was sort of is in full force in Baltimore. The homicide rate, which was going down, is now going up. The city government is incredibly inefficient, and the parts that aren't efficient are corrupt. It's a real challenge but on the other hand it's huge potential because it's a beautiful beautiful city with a beautiful downtown and a beautiful beautiful architecture and and incredible incredible cultural legacy

that um you know you just if you're an optimist you believe that this is the you know this is the the we hit bottom and we're bouncing back to the top and if you're not you think well this is what i mean and not trying to be political or partisan but this is certainly what uh the best practices of urban progressivism has brought us yeah personal note if i'm i'm how many neighbors are still there who were there when you were a boy anybody yeah i mean baltimore is a really sort of incredibly insular, parochial town. I mean, the people are here. Until really recently, my parents' friends would say, so when are you moving back to me?

As if you would do that. Well, I'm not. But it's also, you know, I mean, look, what you discover when you have that experience is that on one hand, you can say it's parochial. On the other hand, you can say that my parents' close friends for 50 years are still their close friends and are here helping my mom, that my cousins live up the street, that other cousins live 10 minutes away, that everybody – when two weeks ago, my father passed away – two weeks ago today, actually. They were all gathered by – two today actually, they were all gathered. Two hours later, they were in the living room. And so there is something that you get. The parochialism means that you're in a parish, and your parishes are people who are with you and are there with you.

And that, I think, is upsides to all that. When we have matter transporters, like in Star Trek, there's still going to be just huge numbers of people who never moved 10 blocks away from where they were born. There's a reason for that. I mean, you feel bound to a place, you stay there, but what you described before about how it's a beautiful city with beautiful architecture, I mean, it's almost like every major American city west of the Mississippi, east of the Mississippi, you can say the same thing. And it was inherited by people who salted half the fields and then decided to start eating the seed corn. And you wonder, you know, at what point does Bill de Blasio and the politics

make these places uninhabitable for anybody who is not a, you know, a extraordinarily rich or Russian oligarch. And it's, it's depressing because there, there used to be a democratic element to that beauty. I mean, you were a guy, you could go to the bank, the beautiful bank with a huge gore or Nate guilt lobby. Uh, you know, anybody could give you the, the phone company bank would be stylized and modern and the rest of it. There were these civic institutions that provided beauty, grace, and civic uplift for ordinary people. The great crimes, I think, that were done to cities, and maybe even to societies in general, the great disasters

first came as solutions. They arrived on the table as solutions. Here's the solution to your problem, and in fact, it was a great desecration. I mean, I've changed my mind a little bit but robert moses i feel like it is a it's time to rethink uh the reflexive uh criticism of him but um but certainly in terms of like how we teach how we how kids are taught in schools what we expect of them what we expect of a city what we expect of a city, what we expect of a cityscape. The unfettered, rapacious real estate developers did less damage than urban...

Than the planners, the technocrats. And I was about to say Moses, and we could have a talk maybe someday about our qualified admiration for him. I'm not qualifying for him'm not qualifying. No, I don't. Okay. No, me either. I'm a Jane Jacobs, man. Moses. So am I. I mean, he dropped the swimming pool here and there very nicely done. The reason though, we have Soho at all is because he threatened to ram a freeway through the middle of Manhattan and nobody wanted to build around the area. So it's just, he did not get to build, he did not get to build his canal street freeway. That is true. Yeah.

I mean, and we had those guys in Minneapolis, too. They would just level everything and drive a freeway. And I'm very much in favor of freeways. But these people believed as much as a Stalinist, as much as a Maoist in just leveling the past, that it was irrelevant and insufficient to meet the needs of the future. And the lack, the amount of history, the urban history and the granular level that they destroyed is unforgivable. They weren't content

with Grand Central Station. They just had to go elsewhere and level block after block after block after block and build these godless towers in which people were stuck like little ants in a storage box. But that's another podcast.

Are we done? You mean Pennsylvania Station, by the way. Grand Central Station. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. They wanted to do Pennsylvania Station. Still this glorious, yeah. They wanted to do Pennsylvania Station. Still is glorious. Yeah.

They wanted to build something on top of it and drive foundation structures through the waiting room. Vandals. God, just. Anyway. One other thing that I'm going to tell you in just a second, but first I have to tell you that the podcast was brought to you by Capitara, by Lending Club, and by Robin Hood. Please support them for supporting us, which is a nice thing that they do, and you should be nice to them as well. If you enjoyed the show, well, like I say,

would it kill you to go to iTunes and leave a review? Would it just kill you? No, do it, because it allows new listeners to discover us. That keeps it going. And also what keeps us going is money. Right, Rob? So before we say that last thing, you were going to tell people that Ricochet also is the thing that needs the money.

Yeah, listen, if you like the podcast, you're listening to it people that Ricochet also is the thing that needs the money. Yeah. Listen, if you like the podcast, you're listening to it. We'd like you to become a member of Ricochet. We certainly need that help. We certainly need your participation. Ricochet is a civil and free market solution to the horrible swamp that is on the Internet. And our podcasts come directly out of that. And we would love to have your voice join us.

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very well said and here's the thing I was gonna tell you before and waited until the end it's Frank Duvall that's the guy frank devall was the composer i with that we leave you guys rob tell your mother we're thinking of her i will do that thank you all right next week guys next week boys Don't waste another minute on your crying We're nowhere near the end The best is ready to begin As long as we got each other We got the world spinning right in our hands Baby, you and me We gotta be

The luckiest dreamers Who never quit dreaming As long as we keep on giving We can take anything that comes our way Baby, rain or shine All the time We got each other Sharing the laughter

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