The Ricochet Podcast - It Matters

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

What matters? Well, New York City for one. We get to that topic towards the end of this show, but prior to that we visit first with economist Kevin Warsh of the Hoover Institution. He has a lot to say about humongous stimulus packages, Congress, the role of China in this thing, and what the Fed should and shouldn’t be doing. Then, newly minted Ricochet podcaster and chip the old block Spencer... Source

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Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lalix. Today, we talk to Kevin Warsh, Economic Boffin, and Spencer Claven, heretic. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 497. I almost said 437. Oh, that was 60 weeks ago. Oh, what a hell of a time that was. Oh, man. Man, just think back to those days when we were, what was going on exactly? Russia, economy was great, life was good.

We still managed to be in a state of constant peevishness, I'm sure, if we followed the news and spent our time on Twitter. But here we are in Anno Domini 2020, and Lord, Lord have mercy on me. Peter, Rob, how are you? Who was the, remember the intern, the missing, I forgot her name, the missing intern. Chandra Levy. Yes, yes. Too young to remember this reference. Chandra Levy yes you know too young to remember this reference chandra levy was an intern she was a capitol intern she disappeared it was uh an incredible mystery people talked about

for uh forever the entire summer of 2001 was obsessed with who killed her and was it the congressman and uh and then um it was i think it was like the lead story on all the news up top of above the fold all the newspapers on september 10th 2001 right and then suddenly something else happened so i think there's a whole bunch of chandra levy's i mean impeachment impeachment was a chandra levy before it started honestly um but all that stuff was like uh it just seems yeah not just distant but but from another planet yes i agree the september 11th and now the coronavirus there are certain things that just mark a new time everybody has the sense that what went before and what came after a specific moment were

just different. Let me try this out. I suspect I already know what James is going to say. Am I a Pollyanna? I know I am. But am I too much of a Pollyanna to think actually, look, it's been a tragedy, etc., etc., right? Stipulated. But on the other hand, it— Deaths may have been world misery stipulated. There are some incredibly wonderful and, to me, surprising but gratifying revelations in this period. One is that we still don't know everything, and that when we think we know everything, the world, God, nature, whatever you want to call it, comes around to humble us and remind us that actually there's a whole bunch you don't know and there's a whole bunch left before this we were talking about it had kind of this fatalistic attitude well we're just all exhausted from technology it's crazy right well now we we hope we got a lot there's a lot left

for us to do and there are companies across the country right now probably across the world but i don't even know this country that seem to be busily at them uh and motivated by something splendid like the profit motive good for them um parents all around everywhere in from college age kids to younger are discovering exactly what it is that the school was doing and not doing um so i know they're tearing their hair out frustration but they're also rethinking the financial economic and i guess time uh expense imperative of education what it really what it really costs and what it really does uh people in my neighborhood anyway are nicer to each other and more generous and laughter we were we were discovering the things in our life that we really cared about

and want to support and the things in our life that we don't care about and we can just let go so there has been a moment great moment of clarity uh or it continues to be a one big moment of clarity and so i'm choosing to dwell in that area for now you know stand on a corner in new york and just sort of say that at the top of your lungs. Oh. See how long it is before a couple of people drag you down an alley and beat you. Polly. Not long. No, all of that is true. I would put a slightly, personally, because as you know, I'm not as nice a person as you are. take on it in that here i have noticed um among ordinary people of goodwill a certain libertarian

impulse bubbling to the top as the government does well you mentioned schooling for example i had a chat with a friend of mine his son is in sixth or seventh grade doesn't matter middle school and my friend said do you know? Now that he's at home and doing work online, everything they did in an entire school day takes an hour and a half. Right. Full stop. That's what it takes. And he's sort of, why? Of course, we live in an area with very high property, really high property taxes to support all this. Or among my kids and my kids' friends, the point of that is a younger generation, they're saying, wait a minute, if we understood the government, what they were saying was, we need to go into lockdown to flatten the curve my kids are college age so they're they can read they've been reading the papers and trying to figure out what's going on the idea here is to flatten the curve so that we don't overwhelm emergency medical facilities and that is done we did flatten the curve they're still keeping good locked down. They're still keeping us in lockdown.

Why? And they have been growing more and more impatient and frankly sort of suspicious, and in my way, in my judgment, a kind of healthy cynicism as the government exerts its power, keeping us in lockdown, without being able to articulate any rationale at all. So, what am I saying here i guess if what i'm saying is yeah so some good has come of this people are even more suspicious of the government than they were in the first place i chalk that up now i'm not as happy i'm not dulcet tones rob is giving you it's a small world after all and you can hear the what a wonderful what i say to myself what a wonderful world i say to myself, what a wonderful world.

I don't say that to myself, but yeah, there's good stuff coming out of this. James is scared, eerily silent. James has to knit together this. His rage. No, I agree with that. I mean, I think Rob's right to find the golden threads amidst this this heap of done and and peter's right that a lot of kids are realizing that uh the state is not always their friend that perhaps giving it untrammeled power over your life and your purse is not a good idea whether or not you just say

golden threads among this heap of dung because that yeah that's that's wonderful even for james that should be our news that should be that should be the rico James. That should be our news. That should be the Rick Shea motto. It should be like, all the news is fit to print. Or put that on your business card, Rob. I like to look for these things. But on the other hand, here in Minnesota, our mayor has just told us that we now have to wear masks. And the edict, I read the emergency order. There are 11 emergency orders for Minneapolis.

And they all begin with the notion that doing these things in accordance with race and equity is of paramount importance. That's up at the top before they tell you exactly what you're going to have to do, which I always find. Wearing masks? How do race and equity even come into that? Well, they just have to state that at the top to get it out of the way, to let everybody know that these are the things by which they are guided. And it has to do, I mean, they will use that before an emergency order that discusses whether or not they can go forward with bonding and contracting and the rest of it. It's just boilerplate. But now we have the 11th order, which is the mask order, and it specifies cloth. I don't have cloth masks. I'm not going to get a cloth mask. I got a lot of really good paper

masks, and that's fine. If you're telling me that this thick piece of paper that I put over my face is somehow insufficient when compared to a gossamer veil that you would find in a, you know, 1001 Arabian night story of some dancing maiden, I'm sorry. No, just because it's cloth doesn't mean it has some magical properties. As a matter of fact, just because it's a mask doesn't have some magical properties. Now here's the thing, about six or seven weeks or so, when I started going downtown once a week before I started going regularly because I'm going back to work, damn it, I wore a mask. I got used to it. I got used to it in the store. I was probably adapting it before most people were. I was one of the 20%. But now at this point that it's mandated, I have a completely different appeal, a completely different emotion about the

thing. I used to get in my car and take it off with this sort of sigh of, here we come, thanks a lot, China, really great job. Now when I get in my car, I rip it off and I think to myself, this is BS. And I'll tell you why I think that. I don't want to be a mask truther and I don't want to be some sort of anti-science person who doesn't believe everything that we're told. But when I'm sitting in a state where 81% of the deaths have taken place in nursing homes, nursing homes where they put COVID-recovering patients like the other states did, when it's either a nursing home or a packing plant or a choir or something like that, I'm walking around here, and I'm getting this crazy idea that it isn't everywhere. I walk into a store and I want to shout, hey, none of us have it. I'm willing to bet that none of us did. Now, I may have it now, and I don't know, but I don't think so.

I know I didn't have it three weeks ago. Let me finally get to my point. What I think, and this is what sounds like heresy to these days, especially to the COVID bears who want to stay locked down forever and believe that it's everywhere. I don't think it's as contagious as they said at the start. Right. And didn't they just tell us we probably can't get it from surfaces? And I don't think that it is pervasive, as we are told. And when those two things are taken into account, you have to look around at how you've blasted the whole economy, flattened the curve. You've flattened the curve that was a line going up when it came to people's prosperity and happiness.

I'm sorry. I'm past the point of looking around and saying, wow, what do you know? New Yorkers are nice to each other. Okay. Well, they are. That's kind of of looking around and saying, wow, what do you know? New Yorkers are nice to each other. Okay. Well, they are. That's kind of cool. Fantastic. But I would prefer them to be as surly as ever to each other and have some sort of functioning economy as opposed to this that we're doing now.

Well, Rob, go on. You saw the newspaper. What do you think of that? I have a theory I want to try out, or I have a lens that I'm looking at this now, and I just sort of started. There are two things I've been thinking about. One is that the nearest analogy we have, I think this is the most relatable for us, is it's a peanut allergy, right? You know, five years, six years ago, no one said, I have a peanut allergy. No one said, oh, my God, do you guys have any?

And you went to a restaurant. No one asked you if you have any allergies. We just didn't do that. Now we do. It's no big deal. And if you have a peanut allergy, you are extra, extra, extra vigilant. If you do not have a peanut allergy, every now and then you think to yourself, oh, I wonder if I, if I'm having people over for dinner, I should make sure they don't have any peanut out, whatever, right? Well, these are just little things that we do now that we didn't do five years ago that we've sort of put, folded into our daily pattern. They've not been too difficult.

But the primary point about a peanut allergy is if you have the allergy or if you are susceptible to it, you have to be extra vigilant. And if you aren't and you don't, then you have to kind of every now and then you can think you can take a few precautions if you want. But the onus is on the person with the allergy, and I think that's what it's going to be. The onus here is on the people who are at the most risk, and it is not on the people who are not at the most risk, although we all sort of kind of generally share a certain amount of risk. And so washing your hands and using Purell on the subway is probably a good idea. The second lens I want to look at is the actual curve that has been flattened, aside from the mitigation thing, which worked, has been the credibility curve. That has been totally flattened. And the analogy here, there are two issues that I've always sort of been obsessed with the way we talk about them in the culture, the liberal culture.

One was AIDS. And when AIDS was first – HIV infection was rampant, and we knew enough about it. The two stories we told ourselves in the media were, one, it's actually very hard to get. There's no need to panic. Don't freak out. Nobody needs to be quarantined. We don't need to be tattooing people or locking them away on islands. And two, everybody's at risk. Everyone's going to get it. You can get it. Anyone can get it. it's not just the town drama teacher. And that, those are two absolutely diametrically opposed, utterly

contradictory stories we told people, the media told people, and the result was that people simply ignored it. It actually had a practical measurable negative effect, which is that HIV infection among young gay men went up because they believe that this, the risk was socialized across all the population, which of course it was not. In the same way, it's like saying that when I see old people walking around without masks, I'm like, dude, put the mask on. I don't need to. I'm not, well, I'm close to needing to, but I'm still a few years shy of that. And if I see a young person walking around with a mask, it's like, take the mask off. Like, you're fine, right? The second thing we do is we talk about homelessness.

We lie about homelessness. We say homelessness is about housing and affordable housing and the ability of housing and access to housing. And homelessness has almost zero to do with housing and its availability. It has almost everything to do with drug and alcohol abuse, substance abuse, and mental health. But we tell ourselves these lies, and then when you read the paper in the New York Times that it tells you the problem is housing, and you walk down the street, and every homeless person you see is a raving lunatic or a drunk, you just naturally start to bleep out what the news is telling you. And their credibility plummets, and it's happened here too. And I don't think it's a good thing. I think if you're in the information business, you should be ashamed of yourself. In the same way, if you're in the government business, you should be ashamed of yourself. Utter and total failure.

You're absolutely right. And that's a huge conversation that we ought to have. The distinction is, however, is that in the 80s, the government was not soldering your door shut and saying you can't go out to the bar and have sex whereas now we have the government doing everything possible in really i mean related to to use the analogy um to to mandating condoms i mean to having somebody at your bedroom door to check your temperature and make sure that everything gets worse i guess my point that it's it's it's it starts one way and it gets worse so yes i agree but you're right you're right the credibility has taken an enormous hit and i noticed this james in minnesota i know excuse me with it for me to talk about minnesota that's your turf of course but i noticed when was it just yesterday that a number of religious leaders caught my eye because i'm a

catholic and catholic bishops were involved but lutherans a number of religious leaders published a document yesterday. The governor of Minnesota continues to say you may not hold religious services, and they published a document saying, you know what? We're going to hold religious services. We will do, in direct defiance of the governor, if he doesn't support it, so be it. We're going to go ahead. That caught my eye because, well, if you're a Catholic and you

see a Catholic bishop behave as though he has a backbone, you've just witnessed a miracle. But if even bishops are pushing back in Minnesota, something really is happening. People know that the government either doesn't know what it's doing or as rob suggests has just reached the point at which it's lying to them and and they've had it and i think we could talk about this after our guests again but just put a little bookmark here for to bring up later and it seems to me the the politician in america who is the smartest wisest best person who i think you know i'll probably change my mind at some point, but so far to me should be the next president of the United States is Ron DeSantis, governor of

Florida. Absolutely right. Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. Here's the deal is, again, this is a clarifying time. This is a revelatory time. That's the great thing about all the swamp training and the paradigm shifting and cracking and the rest of it is we actually see what people stand and what they believe. And when the bishops and the Lutherans said, you know what, we're going to have services, what it brought out amongst the people who want us to be in lockdown forever until there's a vaccine or a cure was twofold. One, obviously, religion really doesn't care at all about people. They just want people to come and pass the plate. And I look at that and I think, first of all, we do that, it's kind of like direct deposit.

They just take it out online. It's not about the plate. Do it online. Secondly, the fact that you think it's all about the money tells a lot about you. But thirdly, to make the third of my two points, if you don't understand that people have to get together to worship. I mean, I'm not a particularly religious guy when it comes to the organized fashion. But if you don't understand the communal nature and the necessity of community, then you are revealing exactly what this whole atheistic slash secularist liberal mentality is and you are happy using the power of the state to control something you do not understand and hold in contempt because you believe you believe it to be less than rational

than your wonderful world so yeah that's i mean minnesota is learning an awful lot so so i here's what i would i know i told everybody i wouldn't say anything but here's how i would respond to that i would respond to that it's like you know what you guys are? You're Islamophobic. Oh. Because on Fridays, you know, you gotta be in mosque. You gotta go to mosque. You have to go with your community. I forget what it's called.

I forget what it's called. Damn. It's not minion. It's whatever the... Yeah, you have to be with your community. You have to do that. That's part of your worship. So I guess you're just Islamophobic is what I would say. So speaking of bookmarks, next week, let's begin. James, if I may, I'm giving you a homework assignment. Next week, begin by letting us know how that played out over this coming weekend.

I am just fascinated to know, are the cops going to show up and try to bar people from going to a Lutheran church? Are they going to go to that big, beautiful cathedral in St. Paul? Are they going to show up and stand at the doors of that magnificent cathedral in St. Paul and say to all the Catholics who turn up, go home? I can't imagine that the cops are going to try to arrest people for going to church, but we'll see. The Catholics will probably just shrug and go along with it. The Lutherans, I suspect, the Lutherans will, it'll be a whiskey rebellion all of a sudden. Well, when they did Running Man, it had Arnold Schwarzenegger in the helicopter firing people during the food riots of the future. They didn't believe that he might be firing

on the people who were trying to stream into church to have a service. If listeners from Florida, in the who are trying to stream into church to have a service. Yes, yes. But Rob's right. If listeners from Florida, you know, in the comments, please let us know what, because we don't, that's the one part of the country we don't really cover right now. You know, East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, we don't cover Florida. I'd love to know what people in Florida are doing. But Rob's right.

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for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Kevin Warsh during and in the aftermath of the 2008, see, there we go, three, two, one. And now we welcome to the podcast Kevin Warsh. During and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Kevin Warsh was a governor of the Federal Reserve System and enacted acted as the Central Bank's primary liaison to Wall Street and served as the Federal Reserve's representative for the G20 and as the board's emissary to the emerging and advanced economies in Asia. Prior, Walsh served as special assistant to the president for economic policy and executive secretary of the White House National Economic Council. He's the Shepard Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

In other words, he kind of knows what's going on in the economy. So with a little bit of trepidation, we have to ask, what is going on with you? Kevin Peter here. Actually, Kevin's entire CV can be summed up by using a phrase Tom Wolfe invented in Bonfire of the Vanities. Kevin is the real thing. He is a master of the universe. So those introductions are both absurd, so let me begin by saying that. I am a boring wonk, so why you'd want me on such a compelling, interesting, fast-paced show as this

is beyond me. Your listeners are going to be burdened for the next 20 minutes. Right, right. Okay, Kevin, I have a couple of big questions for you, but first I'd like you to solve a puzzle. You're a professional. I'm not. I just look at this and scratch my head. The economy has shrunk. This is a catastrophe, but the Dow Jones just keeps sailing along. Why do the markets seem so, the financial markets seem so out of sync with the catastrophe in the real economy? So I thought we were going to play Mad Libs as you were getting going on that, Peter. So instead, I'll answer your question as best I can. And I'll begin with tons of humility. We've never seen this. And as Peter knows, Milton Friedman used to say when he was hanging around Hoover 25 years ago, he would say, the only thing we know about economics we teach in econ one, everything else is made up. So with that front end humility, I'd say first, if you look inside the stock market, it's a little bit less ebullient as the headline numbers.

I'd say one theory of the case is the winners post-crisis are going to get all the spoils. So the big names in the stock market, what they call the fangs, Facebook, Amazon, Google, you know that group. They are actually driving huge market cap and are overweighted in the indices never in the post-war history have the top five names in the s&p 500 represents such a large percentage of the market cap and the value i go just just below the covers what you're going to see is a lot of suffering to a lot of real companies whose names we don't know. So that's one quick answer. The second quick answer, Peter, is my old institution, the Federal Reserve. The Fed has acted more aggressively this crisis than we ever dreamed of acting in 2008 and 2009. And I dare say they've crossed some what I would call red lines and markets have a Pavlovian response. The Fed has their back, so financial markets are moving

in one direction, even though the real economy is clearly suffering. All right. And how, you know, Herbert, the late economist Herbert Stein used to say, if something can't go on forever, it won't. This kind of division, bifurcation between the financial markets and the real economy has to end at some point. So the great economist Herb Stein didn't know the modern Federal Reserve. Okay, all right. So I would say you're right, he's right. The real economy and financial markets do have to become one over time.

But boy, the Fed can be a wedge between those two things for quite a while, as we learned after the last crisis, and I think as we're feeling it right now. But there will be a day of reckoning, and either the real economy will look like the financial markets, or the financial markets will look like the real economy. All right. Kevin, China, my feeling about this is that we're at a moment, something like the moment in 1983, maybe, when the Soviets shot down the Korean airliner and the Poles moved hard against China. And it feels to me as though this Donald Trump, of course, has been hard on China. Rhetorically, the trade package is a separate question. It doesn't look to me as though that's that

impressive, but still rhetorical. But now I feel, and I believe the polls tend to indicate, he has the country with him in a way that he didn't before. That the Chinese knew that there was a virus, they shut down travel within their own country, they permitted international travel to infect the rest of the world. But if we're in some kind of new Cold War, if we're in some kind of new adversarial relationship with China, it's different from the old days. They're part of our supply chain, they have huge investments here as we have huge investments there. They have more than 300,000 Chinese students at American colleges and universities now. How do we prosecute our differences with China without tanking our own economy?

Yeah, I think that's the biggest question. I'd say a couple of quick things. First, this is different than 1983 in that even on the darkest day where you were more intimately involved and I was a mere student in high school at the time, the Soviet Union were never the economic superpower that China is today. There were other things that were scary, but that analogy, I think, breaks down because Chinese military might not quite be where it is as a threat to the US, but the economic might and their control over parts of the world might be even scarier. Now, to the current moment, I would say when historians look back on the coronavirus of 2020, the thing that might stick out most was this hinge moment in the great battle between the two great powers of the 21st century. And the virus itself might in some sense be like the

assassination of the Archduke. This is what accelerated what was already long in the making. The question for policymakers, for the president, for all Americans is how do we get on from this moment in a way that strengthens the U.S. economic position? I think it's Admiral McMullin, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that our national security is tied up inexorably with our economic strength. And so what we do here vis-a-vis China has to strengthen our absolute and relative economic strength. And that's why this is the cause, I think, of this generation. That's more to come. I mean, you and I have to do at least, to me, I think, oh, wow, the challenge for this generation, I can get one show out of it,

and of course, that'll be plenty. So, Rob Long wants to come in, but let me ask one more question. When you and I recorded Uncommon Knowledge at the beginning of this lockdown, I asked how quickly the economy would recover when we finally got there. And you said the analogy is not a light switch. You cannot turn the economy on and off. The correct analogy is a living organism. And this shutdown is going to wound it. And it will have to heal. All right. Is that still the correct metaphor? And how, well, how badly wounded is the economy and how long will it take to heal? How do we get out of this? So, I'm afraid the analogy still works. You know, it's easy in

the profession of economics to really think that the u.s economy is just about hey how do we fill aggregate demand how do we get those consumers back to the stores and by the way that good americans have long bought since world war ii you know but that's not how this economy works you can't just write a big stimulus bill in congress have the fed print a bunch of money and say, great, things are back. The economy is not a pop-up store. It's a complicated organism. Supply chains are complicated. People's expectations are complicated. Governments can say, great, get back to work. But if real people aren't comfortable, they're not going to do it.

And every week and month that this goes on with all the uncertainty from policymakers and the uncertainty about the pathology of the virus itself, we're building up scar tissue. We're slowing the economic recovery. And so I think this, that I'm an optimist. I still think the 21st century is going to be America's century. I'm not like some of my friends in the ivory tower who think the Brits had their century, we have ours, and this is the Chinese. No, we're going to give this a heck of a good run, but we need to start the healing process. And that's a function of both better understanding the virus, well outside my expertise, and a set of economic policies that reward people for going back to work and reward new capital to take chances on the 21st century, I still think we're scarring now.

And the path to me looks quite a bit slower than I see on CNBC most mornings. Yeah, CNBC seems to be stuck entirely in optimist mode, which i guess i understand hey kevin it's rob long in new york thank you for joining us so i have two uh we'll talk about china in a minute but first like we just talk about us so part of me is uh you know i'm a conservative so i'm terrified all the time when the fed pursues loose money and starts pumping you know the what's the what's the the meme that libertarians like money machine go brr, you know, turn the money machine on. Although I've felt this disquiet about the money machine since the late autumn of 2008. And every quarter I've been saying, well, you know, we're going to get inflation, got to get inflation.

And then we haven't had any. And so I'm wondering, is it just when it comes, is it going to come big and fast and hard? Or, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but I kind of want to hear you tell me the answer. Or is it just, is something else happening? I mean, shouldn't, at this point, even before COVID, shouldn't we have been experiencing inflation and we weren't? So, let me start again with that humility you know there have been a few theories of inflation rob in our adult lifetimes one was management's on one side of the table labor's on the other and if labor gets too much that's inflation then we had milton friedman's

follow the money and money velocity and now we have the current theory which is popular in cambridge and even palo alto which is it's all about expectations. It's not real. It's just what's in your head. Modern monetary theory, you're referring to, right? Modern monetary theory, the latest incarnation. So begin with, my goodness, I'd feel a lot better if the world's elite monetary thinkers went back to first principles and said, what is it? Why have our models not caught it? And instead, they haven't done it. So but my short answer, Rob, a good question is, keep your discomfort about money printing. Okay. All right. Easily done. And on inflation, I would say part of the reason we haven't had inflation since 2008 is all this money printing hasn't found itself to the real economy. It's found its way to financial markets. So we've had asset price inflation. If it actually worked in the real economy the way that it works in asset prices,

then I think we would have had a big inflation problem. But because in some sense, the money printing has never put Americans back to work in a meaningful sense, even by the Fed's own judgments after the last crisis. We haven't confronted it. In some sense, the pandemic is, at least for the period in front of us, it's a disinflationary shock. But if we get out of this and the economy ultimately strengthens in spite of our government's best efforts to go the other way, if the economy strengthens and we keep zero rates and a massive Fed balance sheet, you bet we'll have inflation. It's just not what we're confronting as we speak here today. So economically, before COVID, and I use this

analogy, this could be cherry picking one specific data point. So economically before COVID, and I use this analogy, this could be cherry picking one specific data point. So feel free to tell me to buzz off. But it seemed to me that as a value of an investment went through the, you know, the investment cascade, right? It starts as an idea and someone gets, and this is obviously a very specific case, but it starts with a venture money. So venture money is a bunch of rich people put their money together and they go, we're going to, we're going to go crazy with this and make some big bets. And the valuation to us doesn't matter. We just want to be part of the action. Eventually, a company like WeWork then goes and applies itself to the public markets, to a bunch of people who aren't as rich as the LPs of a venture fund, and are looking at it,

crunching the numbers and saying, well, you know, WeWork's a pretty good business, but not at $60 billion, not at $10 billion. Maybe it's a $9 billion business. And then suddenly, there comes this screeching crash where the public markets set a value that seems reasonable, right? So reasonable, in fact, that WeWork just basically collapsed. That's how reasonable it was. Now we have have we're sort of doing the same thing the the the way a government check is going it's going to people people are holding it there are a lot of people now holding money getting money getting getting uh unemployment insurance and various other supplements and they're looking

at their their their end of the month uh bank balance and saying, hey, I made money this month, and I didn't work. That's fear one. And then fear two is the twin fear, depending on what side of the economy you're on. After this is over, those people are going to do something really stupid with that money, like spend it. Or they're going to do something really stupid with that money like save it what should we be hoping for from the great you know animal spirits that guide the economy when this thing is over that that the public markets kind of get sensible as they did you know before covid when we were just talking about one is in one ipo or that people say you know i've always wanted two

or three flat screens and now i got extra money've always wanted two or three flat screens, and now I got extra money, I can buy two or three flat screens. What's the sign here? What should I be looking for to keep the smile on my face? So in the economics profession, we always know what they should do with the money. They should either save it this way or spend it that way. I have this ridiculously old-fashioned idea. Trust them with their money to make their own decisions for themselves and so i don't i don't take great signal that they're doing what uh what the ivory tower wants if we give them the money my view is no restrictions if it's a business and it gets a ppp loan they know better than we do whether they should keep the labor get rid of half of it pay the rent ask for forbearance. These strings detached,

that's not American style capitalism. That's capitalism in some modified form we see overseas. So that's one. Two, on the labor markets, because there hasn't been college or pro sports, it's not just a theory. There's some data that's suggesting that some of these stimulus checks and some of the UI claims, they're going into that other legalized form of gambling in the last six weeks called the stock market. Retail flows look to me very surprising and from demographic groups we hadn't seen before. And again, I don't want to second guess their judgments, but gambling's probably not high on the list of what we'd want them to do with it, even for a free marketer like the likes of you guys and me. And then last, I would say, you know, to go back to your WeWork example and venture capital late in economic cycles, which is where we found ourselves before this crisis, all the fear that had been pent up quickly turns to euphoria.

And WeWork's, I think, a perfectly good example. Failure is what's essential to capitalism, rather than bailouts. And so the WeWork example, I don't wring my hands and say how troubled I am. I said, look at that. It works. Investors that didn't know the risks or decided to bear them, they did. And somehow that landlord, that real estate will work itself out and there didn't even have to be a government bailout. Well, to piggyback on what Rob was saying before, when you say this is how capitalism works, it does. And that's great. But when you have one party that is drifting towards the rejection of does, and that's great. But when you have one party that is drifting towards the rejection of capitalism, they'll keep it around because it'll fund what

they want to fund for a while, but it really isn't in their bones what they're proud of. You have a situation where we seem to be psychologically setting the battle space for eliminating the usual notions that we have about how people behave in a capitalist free market society. When you mentioned that the stimulus money that we've been spending in printing since 2008 isn't making people get to work, well, perhaps that's not the intention of the Democrat side. It's to replace work. And a lot of what we're doing now seems to be psychologically setting the stage for UBI, universal basic income, and telling people that, hey, we do have a machine that can just print as much as we need, and there really isn't any need for you to work if, indeed, that isn't what you seek to do.

So, I mean, I guess the macro question is, we can talk about free markets and capitalism and root animal spirits and the rest of it, but psychologically and intellectually, how much of the country really is on board with that and wants a paternalistic government to shelter us in their arms and take care of us when all this is over because stimulus bill after stimulus bill after stimulus bill what point do we stop so that's uh there's there's a lot there i'll say a few things first i i'm of the old-fashioned view that real people want to go to a job and want to be there, want to that go against that, that are rewarding them for leisure instead of rewarding them for work? And I hope as the administration and the Congress are figuring out what to do with Stimulus Bill 5 or CARES Bill 2 or whatever the heck they're up to,

that there are incentives to reattach to the labor force, which are every bit as important as having greater pay from working. The heart of the U.S. economy really is the business side, and that's not to the exclusion of our workers. That's to make them part of it. So I think that's a public policy question. I don't think that the ethos of the American people has changed even after the last 15 years of money. And I'll say a second thing, and on this, your viewers might have to humor me. Believe it or not, there is a limit to the government's spending. This didn't used to sound like such a crazy idea, but I suppose it does now. Money printing, where the U.S. Federal Reserve buys treasuries that are issued by another affiliate of the U.S. government, that works sort of kind of for a while.

And I would say it works best in emergencies. The problem is we had 10 years between the last emergency and this one, and we never seemed willing to get out of the emergency printing business but does anybody speaking of not getting out of business i know i know you got to run i just want to ask one uh my i guess my my twin concern here is one that um we actually have now somehow backed ourselves into a quasi temporary hope temporary policy of a quasi universal basic income that's what all of the sum total of all of these federal programs seems to add up to um and two is there a way to get out of it and if there's no way to get out of it how do we keep it at least close to i mean i can't believe i'm saying this close to what we're what, which is, as you put it, no strings attached. I mean, one of the really surprising things and gratifying things about the overwhelming

federal economic response of the money printing is that we have not also begun to print a new letterhead for new departments and new federal programs that will then be permanent. These all seem to be temporary measures. I mean, I know I'm grasping at straws here to try to find some lifeline, but that is at least some ray of sunshine. How do we make sure that, A, we can go back and we can say the universal basic income is not something we want to do,

or that if we have to go forward and we just simply can't convince 51% of American people not to take it, how do we keep the government from telling them how to spend it? Yeah, so these are hard questions. I would say when we have an emergency like we have now, the best we can do is describe it real and say this really is temporary. Unfortunately, the tradition of governments, not just in the U.S., but around the world, is when they say temporary, they mean permanent, and when they say temporary, they mean permanent.

And when they say emergency, they mean at least until the next year divisible by four. So we should be really worried about it. This crisis has been suboptimal. Why the economic trajectory isn't better than I fear is when we left the last crisis, which was a real one in 08 and 09, and we did some crazy things, many of which I thought were right and necessary in the emergency, we had a decade of normalcy. Now, growth wasn't as good as it could have been, but boy, oh boy, we should have gotten out of the emergency business, and we never did. And that means when this crisis came, we had to cross still more red lines. So, when governments say it's temporary, the American people and businesses say, oh, really? It wasn't last time. Why would it be this time? And that changes people's expectations, and I would dare

say not in a good way. Well, at some point soon, perhaps there will be a political, personal and economic penalty that accrues to people in Washington who sit atop all of this and toss out the bounty. But until that moment, we're probably going to be stuck with more of the same grinding on in perpetuity.

But at least, you know, we'll see in a year from now if it's bread lines or bounty and we'll talk to you again, perhaps sooner, we hope. Kevin, thanks for joining us today in the podcast. I appreciate it. And I'll just end with the optimism that I heard 25 years ago from George Shultz, who's still the greatest living American.

He would say, listen, government policy doesn't have to be good. It just can't be too destructive. And so long as it's not too destructive, the American experiment is going to be a huge success i hope he's right i think he's right and that's what keeps us focused on this i agree that's exactly what i like thanks for joining us kevin thank kevin thank you guys uh i would like to nominate rob of course for the department of grasping at straws um exactly i'm the secretary of grasping at straws that's for sure right and if they gave you a letterhead and all the rest of it in a nice office in dc yeah you might say that i'll take remember guys when you know if when we were talking about grasping at straws we would actually have a conversation about whether it was plastic or paper again the halcyon days of before when we thought

about these things and rob's wondering okay yes you you okay where i'm scrolling for i'm trying to figure out where you're going with this i wasn't going anywhere why are you toying with me lilacs you need to be you need to give me better clues as to which segue you're going to so i know exactly specifically how to to interrupt it otherwise i'll try something i'll try something else then one of your questions before you talked about concerns, which could possibly be a search engine term you'd like to enter and regret having done so. I don't want anybody to know. But it's possible because my search results and my search inquiries are completely transparent. There's no security on the web.

What? Right. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the client I'm about to speak to. Because your search engines, you think, well, if I enter something in an incognito mode, I'm safe. Well, you know, incognito mode is not the be-all, may-end-all of hiding what you want to do. And sometimes it isn't even a question of wanting to hide it like that's nefarious. You just simply want to have some privacy. And, you know, you don't want to have your IP address spattered all over the place.

Incognito mode does not hide your activity. It doesn't matter what mode you use or how many times you change your browsing history. Your internet service provider can still see every single website you've ever visited. For good or for ill, you never know what kind of laws are going to come down. Do you want to let them know? It's not a crazy thing to be interested in your privacy. And that's why, even when you're at home, you should never go online without using ExpressVPN. It doesn't matter if you get your internet from Verizon or Comcast or whoever, ISPs in the US can legally sell your information

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And now we welcome to the podcast Spencer Claven. He's an assistant editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the American Mind. His new podcast, Young Heretics, debuted this week in the Ricochet Audio Network. And it's almost more, well, no, it's already more popular than that other Claven guy you may have heard about, who's his dad. You should listen to it and follow him on Twitter, at Spencer Claven. Spencer, welcome. Let's set the stage here. Here's what you say in the Ricochet intro to your new podcast that, quote, we fall into a trap when we spend all of our time shaking our fists and railing against the illiberal heritants

who've taken over our campuses. Arguing with idiots is always frustrating and rarely good for the soul. What we need more than anything is an appreciation of our cultural heritage on its own terms, a new sense of what makes the West great and worth preserving. Well, that's pretty white power Nazi adjacent, isn't it? Every time I go on a site that's talking about traditional architecture, for example, and lamenting what modernism has done to our cities, people are always coming in there and slamming them for being people who want to restore us to the bad old days of the you know bavarians marching lockstep across the continent preserving the west it used to be the goal of campuses and now it seems like some sort of fundamentally you know dangerous idea so tell us what you're doing and how you think we ought to be doing it yeah you know it might sound like you're kidding when

you accuse me of being a white nazi for for talking about the west but that's basically i mean it's it's hardly an exaggeration in many circles just just yeah just the very idea of the west has become you know it gets accused of being a dog whistle or it's just a you know a false construct designed to shut out eastern cultures or or what have you and that's you know it's incredibly frustrating to me to hear those kinds of arguments made in big venues like The Guardian and these big newspapers. But when we get frustrated about that kind of nonsense, and when we spend so much time going on the defensive, defending Western culture, defending the reading of people like Homer and Shakespeare as valuable, we often get just wrapped up, so deeply wrapped up in our own rage at the nonsense that's out there

that we forget to, you know, also take a look at the actual things that we're defending. You know, we spend so much time defending Homer, we never read Homer. We spend so much time defending Shakespeare, we never read Shakespeare. And I just thought it would be good for there to be a place out there where you can set that aside, shrug identity politics off for 30 minutes of your week and get back to sort of the affirmative good of what these texts and civilizations have to offer. absolutely fantastic idea the question is sometimes though is that we we reset western aesthetics at the beginning of this century and you can understand why i mean the west had absolutely no confidence culturally after the war everything was shattered and everything had to be rebuilt and so every single little guideline aesthetic principle was was was tossed out the window and institutionally we became a place that now taught modernism as an elevated, evolutionarily advanced idea of Western aesthetics.

And the fact of the matter is that there's a lot of stuff that we've done in the last century, from music to architecture to painting to sculpture, that's interesting. And it may be outside of our tradition, but it's still part of it and connected to it, if only that it came out of the West. So is what you're talking about not necessarily going back to just the old classics and nothing but, but also finding those examples where the West's manifestations may be non-traditional, but still say something distinct and unique about the West? Yes, you raise an incredibly important point. And I think more than anything, what I'm reacting against is what I've come to call chronological chauvinism. It's not that we

might not discover new ways of expressing ourselves. We might react to fundamentally new situations, as you say, especially after the two world wars, tremendous seismic shifts in the Western consciousness, the way we think about God and ourselves. And those require new forms and new modes of expression. And I don't at all mean to just shrug off modernism wholesale as something worthless. But I do mean to, you know, raise an eyebrow when people say, oh, things like, you know, nobody believes in, you know, no smart person believes in God anymore. No smart person, you know, thinks there's anything, any truth to, you know, ancient cultures or just backwards. You hear that a lot. And I think it represents an act of intellectual

intimidation. It's an attempt to make you think and feel as if the world around you is the only possible one. And, you know, the past is another country. It was full of people just as smart as you and me. And we have this, you know, this huge wealth of tradition to draw on and to, you know, understand ourselves and where we're coming from as we move forward into new ways of expressing ourselves in new forms. Hey, Spencer, it's Rob Long here. Listen, dude, I take a lot from your dad, and I'm not going to take it from you, but I'm putting you on notice. So we had dinner like a few months ago, uh, at a steak place in LA. And, and, uh, I think I paid for it or Ricochet paid for it.

And we say, Hey, you should do a podcast and come up with the idea of young heretics. And then I'm like, exciting heretics could be heretical. And then I listened to your podcast and you're reading homer what the hell kind of hair explain yourself i was expecting you and a bunch of young people sit around talk about tiktok and instead it's the great books i know i'm i i'm ashamed of myself i failed as a heretic no i mean i i recall that dinner very well apparently not well it glows in my memory probably because you paid for it. That could be it.

Yeah. Okay. So explain, seriously though, explain why it's heretical. Sure. And explain exactly what their heresy is because I think I know, but I want to hear it. Yeah. So I am, in some ways, I'm a creature of the academy, right? I'm here in LA after having just finished going to do five years of grad school in Oxford in the UK, did a doctorate, loved it, you know, love being an egghead, proud egghead.

But it is increasingly true, especially in America, but, you know, all over Europe as well, that there exists a dogma in the academies of higher education. And that trickles down, I think, out into the popular culture. And that dogma is that you're a terrible person, you're a racist, you're a misogynist, unless you believe in sort of social justice, radical vegetarian change, and so on. That's what we're heretics, what we're rejecting, what we're, you know, being heretics against, I guess, is the way to put it right i mean that is the counterculture that used to be just traditionalism and it absolutely has a kind of antiquarian bent to it but at this point weirdly it that's the radical thing to say and do is to just study the west as if it were

great there's there's nothing more radical than reading the odyssey and saying man this homer guy is pretty good or or maybe she she's good we don't know obviously but like uh the black woman is that so sorry so um i i know that you are a person of great faith uh and i know i mean obviously we cannot visit upon you the sins of your father but i know your your dad has written one of the most beautiful books about faith around. And we'll put a link to it in the – we had him on to talk about it, so I'm not trying to sell it. But it's a great book. How is that, in a weird way, also a heresy? Yeah, sure.

You know, this is a really important feature of all of this. The second episode of Young Heretics is going to be about the prophecy of Isaiah and the Bible. And one of the things that I argue in that episode is that even if you're hugely skeptical about faith and tradition and Christianity and God at all. Just to begin with, you know, you would be a fool to therefore toss Western, or rather toss the Bible aside as sort of a collection of old superstitions, right? This in itself is a pillar of tradition, and you can't understand the, you know, the literature that follows, at least English literature, you can't understand without the Bible and, you know, much of your literature as well. So there's that aspect of it. But there's

also, you know, I was talking earlier about that chronological chauvinism, this notion that, well, nobody believes certain things anymore. And God is a huge one. You know, Steven Pinker just yesterday, I think, had this big tweet about, you know, the evils of believing in an afterlife and what a silly superstition that is. And, you know, he can only be that intellectually sloppy. Pinker's a smart guy, right? But he can only be that ridiculous and naive because we've essentially defined God out of the academy. We just think that there's this going atmosphere of nobody smart believes in God. And of course, the smartest people ever in history have all believed in God. So, you know, it's, again, it's not that we can't ask the question. It's just that in itself, you're right, it pushes back against this kind of idea that, you know,

this assumption that belief is wrong. You know what? I accept your definition of heresy, but I still want you and a bunch of young people to talk about TikToks or whatever, because we got advertisers. We got to like, got advertisers. We got to sell a little product here. Let's put a little commerce into the big thing if you don't mind. Is that okay? I'm a big video game. That's fine. Just think of it

like the Young Heretics TM. Just keep thinking. We got to brand this. I do recommend just for our listeners who are listening to this. It's really great. Actually, it is a nice diversion from people arguing about politics to celebrating culture. So, Spencer Peter here. This is what I just heard. Okay.

Spencer, sir, I have a plan. It'll save all of Western civilization. Wow. Rob, removing a cigar from his mouth. Kid, it'll never sell. Yeah, that's it. You got it. You know, there is this built-in challenge, right?

I mean, politics does sell, and we have a discourse that elevates, like, really high-octane politics. You know, I love mixing it up in that discourse. My, my Twitter is pretty scrappy in this regard. And I'm, I'm, I'm not like, you know, I don't want to be prissy about this stuff, but you, you, you've got to start stepping back somewhere. You know, C.S. Lewis has this great, this great line that, you know, the famous Christian apologist and the Narnia guy has this great line. Every time you read a new book, you should force yourself to go back and read an old book. So this is an old problem. It's an old problem that nobody wants to pull himself away from the monitor or whatever your version of that is

and sort of leave the hurly-burly of politics outside and think deeply about deep stuff. You're right, it doesn't sell. But we've got to do our best to make it sell, I think. burly of politics outside and think deeply about deep stuff. You're right, it doesn't sell. But, you know, we've got to do our best to make it sell. I think it's, you know, it's something that you lose just the depths of yourself if you don't. Rob, to the contrary, I really don't want to hear anything about TikTok because that's just another little Chinese Trojan horse. Thank you very much. But when you mentioned video games, I am interested because here's a completely new, I'll leave you with this.

We've got to head off here, but it's a new genre of entertainment, of storytelling that is generational. My generation just doesn't spend a lot of time hanging around Red Dead Redemption 2 worlds. But there's a way of transmitting cultural values here that I think is undervalued by the old folks and understood by the young. That's a subject for another podcast. Hey, maybe you'll have me on there, and I'll talk about gaming from my perspective, and we can mix it up about that. Spencer, thanks a lot. Young Heretics is the podcast.

It's here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Thanks for joining us on the show. Follow on Twitter, listen to the podcast, and we'll talk to you later down the road. Thanks so much, guys. Spencer, thanks. Spencer, thank you. You know, when you talk about what kids are taught these days, and we were talking about this before, about how the educational models may be sundering and how we're realizing you can get this done in a day, what used to take them weeks at school. Rob's right.

And his optimistic bent means that we're learning to wrap our brains around new things i see down here i think that rob knows exactly where i'm going so now he's not even bothering you know you know i scroll i lost the thing and i'm scrolling through to try to find of course there yes yes yeah there it is yeah i was like i was like i was like lost in the document james no i was go ahead give me another shot at interrupting you if you wouldn't mind I was like lost in the document. James, no, I was... Go ahead. Give me another shot at interrupting you, if you wouldn't mind. Well, that's what I'm thinking. I'm trying here because I just have a vision of Rob, as we've mentioned before, like Charlton Heston and the Omega Man and his penthouse there surrounded by busts and the things that is accumulated from Western civilizations while the zombie hordes roam below.

We'll talk about that in a second here. But first, we want to talk about learning and schooling and the rest of it. As parents, I'm a parent, you may be a parent, you may have parentage coming up, you know this, we want to encourage our children to pursue their dreams and provide opportunities to give them the best chance to succeed, right? Well, sometimes that means optimizing the routine, making it more flexible, more dynamic, so they have more time to focus on the things they love. And that's why there's Laurel Springs. Laurel Springs is an accredited online private school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Laurel Springs recognizes that each child is a unique individual with their own personal interests, their special talents, their unique learning styles.

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that seem like they are responding and developing kind of a future, you know? Like, I just kind of like that. I like the ones that seem to be saying, alright, the world's changing and the world should be changing. I'm sorry about that traffic noise outside um and so i just i you know i kind of like what i'll just take a moment like that's that's exactly how we should be

looking at this uh period of covet 19 how can we do the things we've been doing uh better uh and more efficiently than we've been before do not apologize do not apologize for the traffic noise in the background. It means New York is still alive. New York is still New York. If you stop on 11th Street to do something, you're going to get heard.

While that's a nice sound, and it is as rob in New York as the sound of planes overhead is for me, which are apparently, sadly, far and few between these days. Yes, it's also what I hate about New York as the sound of planes overhead is for me, which are apparently, sadly, far and few between these days. Yes, it's also what I hate about New York, the incessant noise and the incivility that those horns suggest. But, you know, Bethany Mandel had a piece on Ricochet this week about people moving out of New York,

deciding that it's not worth it, that actually it's the restaurants and the socializing and the bar and the museums that people go to. The deal is you've got a tiny apartment the size of a box box of refrigerator comes in, but the advantage is this wonderful world beyond. And now that wonderful world beyond is shrinking, going bankrupt, closing, and a lot of people are saying it's not worth it. There was that New York Post story this week. Rob, I'm sure you saw it. The lockdown, it needs to end now.

We have the stories of frustrated New Yorkers flooding into Central Park, not being able to go to Long Island, though, because Long Island is putting up a wall and saying, sorry, you can't come here. A, Rob, how is New York doing? And B, does New York think that anybody else in the country particularly cares? I know that sounds cold and cruel, but there it is. No, but there it is. I think New Yorkers have this kind of a weirdly unique position, right? Because it's worse here. We have it the worst.

And even though we have it the worst, we still don't have it that bad. We don't have it as badly as people thought we'd have it. The disasters didn't happen. There their hospital beds not being used there have been plenty of ventilators plenty of masks it actually was okay what we discovered was the subway is uh what they what what the professionals call a vector but what ordinary people call a disgusting snot pit which is what it really is so in cold in cold and flu season, if you don't take care of yourself, you're going to get, and you take the subway once, twice a day for longer than five minutes, right? You come in from Queens or Brooklyn, you're going to get sick. You're going to get a cold.

You're going to get the flu. You're going to get something. So they learned that. The second thing they learned is that, once again, that it actually does matter who the mayor is. It does matter. It isn't just these kind of weird stylistic irritants. It does matter. It matters that you have Ed Koch or Rudy Giuliani and not David Dinkins. It matters that you have Mike Bloomberg and not Bill de blasio it matters mike bloomberg as mayor during covet 19 would be a vastly different situation it'd be a vastly different feeling in the city um in the same way with cuomo you know governor cuomo has this you know had this period of enormous popularity because mostly because he's in new york he's new york governor uh he actually gives a good press conference and all the media is here

too so they covered him but you stack up his performance which has been disastrous deadly in many ways against the performance of my you know new uh political crush ron desantis from florida and there is no absolutely now everybody here knows how I feel about Donald Trump, so I won't even go into Trump. But except to say that I think the collective act of most politicians, save Ron DeSantis, who I'm sure has problems too, but I'm just ignoring them now, has been a disaster. And so partly New Yorkers feel like, okay, let us handle this. Stop telling us what to do. Stop being official. Stop sending me texts on the New York City app about how the weather's nice and I still have to stay inside. Leave it to us. We're the experts now. And I feel like a lot of Americans are feeling that way too. So, you know, New York is just a more amplified version of America. And we have it the worst so i suspect that um if we're feeling uh the chafe

of government um bullying everyone else is feeling it worse because they have it easier so you know i guess i aside with ovick roy on this we had ovick roy on the podcast he's written since then he's written a bunch then his basic position is the guy the country should open up but not new york not so fast. And so the New York Post piece was sort of the other side of that, and I think there's a lot – I mean, I took a big walk yesterday. In order to buy cigars, you have to call the store and then walk to the store or take your city bike to the store, and then they meet you outside and they give you. So I walked downtown to get my cigars. It comes to that um and as it was a

beautiful day it was more beautiful than it is today but it's still a gorgeous day today and there are people out and walking back along battery park uh there were people covering all over the park throwing frisbees having fun and children here yes the only thing that i didn't like was the children were wearing masks it's like the kids don't need to wear masks. The kids can't get it and they can't give it. So let them run around without a mask. But everybody, the people, as again, this is my constant mantra, the people seem to be handling this fine. The problem are the elected officials and the people in front of the camera. If we could just get rid of them, we'd be happy here's the if i may correct new york has been as new york has had it the worst which raises the following question when we interviewed kevin just now he was speaking to us from florida a lot of people who ordinarily do business in new york have gotten out right and people are and uh people are making a discovery out Out here, even, in Northern California, yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that over the next decades, Facebook is going to become substantially a work-at-home company. All right.

Have New Yorkers have, let me see how to put this. Let's put it, I'll just say it. Have rich New Yorkers looked at this and said, you know, we can do business elsewhere. Is there a permanent blow to New York? Has this inflicted a permanent blow to New York? That's the thing that kind of worries me. Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, look, the only permanent blow I can think of was 9-11 and the evidence that it was a permanent blow is that

right across the hudson and jersey city they erected gold gleaming silver office towers right and everybody got a wall street and they moved just across this is well an 11 minute ferry ride across the river um i don't i look the the i i think what will happen in new york city is a regeneration people will come people will still want to come here because it's exciting and vibrant Look, I think what will happen in New York City is a regeneration. People will still want to come here because it's exciting and vibrant. And if the rich people move out of New York, that won't be so terrible because we need the more young, broke people in New York to build stuff and do stuff and open restaurants and write novels and create businesses. There's a huge amount of entrepreneurial activity here in New York that is affordable only really because of the incredible amount of venture money that's been swirling around the economy.

All of these big companies, some of whom are advertisers and we wish them well, are run on venture investment, which is fine. And they pay the rent and they have employees and they do all sorts of things. So that's good. Anything like that, I think would be fine.

I think there are people who are wondering, why am I here when I could be somewhere else? And I think that is a good, that's a good moment. You really should be thinking about that all the time. I mean, you should be thinking about that in your life, wherever you are. And so I think there are people who've left the city probably richer than than most who've left the city never to return i hope those people leave and don't just go temporarily because one of the one of the sad things about new york uh has been the the erect the erecting of these gigantic luxury office towers which are um Apartment buildings. Yeah, apartment buildings, but essentially empty, and they're owned by foreigners as a way to sort of have a solid asset outside of their benighted, horrible country where

their government is dictatorial, and it can never be taken away. And de Blasio, under the de Blasio administration, he's given them some kind of enormous holiday on property taxes, which has been a complete shock shock that they should be paying taxes like everybody else. So we don't want more of that, but if there's a little bit of churn, it'd be good. If you could arrange it so that only rich, absentee Chinese landlords pay taxes, yeah, believe me, it would be livable again. The general, this is really heartening to somebody who, A, loves New York, and B, would never consider moving there. But it's heartening all the same that you look at what you see around you, you go for a walk, you're in the middle of the city, and you say, yeah, you know, this doesn't feel like a death blow.

This town is going to come back. Great. Thank you, Rob, for setting up my weekend. I'm in a good mood. Not a death blow, but definitely a turbulence, and the turbulence in New York City is always a good thing. It means that there's churn.

This city should have people coming in, moving in, and moving out. It should be kicking people's ass. It should be embracing people. It should be an engine of change. New York City only works if it's an engine of change. When it gets ossified and stuck and sclerotic is when we're in big, big trouble. Well, we hope that its fortunes decline to the point where, once again, people can live and squat in the village in Alphabet City.

And this will lead to CBGBs and punk rock and all the rest of it. It'll be great. And the apotheosis of New York at the end of the boom of the 20s was these extraordinary monuments to commerce and capital. The Empire State Building, City Services Building, Chrysler and the rest of it. And the end of the boom here in New York seems to be, as Rob mentioned, these Chinese-owned towers where they have to spend an awful lot of time tuning the motion dampeners so that the sway of the buildings does not put the grand piano on the top floor out of tune. Wonderful. Great. While I'm heartened to hear that people are out and throwing Frisbees and the rest of it, there's just, I mean, to state the dull, thuddingly obvious, Minneapolis is not New York by any sense of the imagination.

Our downtown is not anything like the vibrant, diverse world of New York City. But one of the last things I remember before downtown emptied out was walking past this shop that this guy had selling hot dogs. That's all he sold was hot dogs. They were good hot dogs. I mean, they're Vienna beef on seeded rolls. Fort Peppers are really

good. And he was just staring at nothing because everything was gone. There was no lunch business anymore. Nobody was coming by. All the other restaurants in the food court had closed. He was the last holdout. I just remember him staring there. And I went in and I bought a bunch of gift certificates, just like, here, stay alive. That was weeks ago. The other day, I'm walking past the place and I see the guy's back. And nobody else in the food court is back, but he's back. His hot dogs are back bubbling away. He's got the fresh buns. And nobody else in the food court is back but he's back his hot dogs are back

bubbling away he's got the fresh buns and i walked in and i bought it all and i felt really great this was great and i asked him how long you've been back and he said i came back on monday he put a sign up in the skyway so that if somebody does wander by they see it and they say hey walk and the dog is open i'm gonna go downstairs and get myself a good dog and that's great and i felt heartened and it's like you survived you made it and then i turned right around and five paces away there's this big empty space where they used to be a convenience store that's where people in the building went to get their smokes and their candy and their soda and the rest of it was run i think by a guy who was a recent immigrant um and he would be there and he'd sell you stuff and it's gone it's all gone it's evaporated so

whatever that man poured into that thing for however many years it's gone it's evaporated so whatever that man poured into that thing for however many years is gone it's gone and is anything going to come back well you know churning dynamic economy where we we hope yes i hope somebody else fills up that space right but it's gone it's empty and in new york i can imagine that there may be what is it decimated 20%? The amount of hopes and dreams that were done by this, and perhaps not necessarily so, because we were in a rush to believe, we wanted to believe, we thought this was good, we bought into it, and then somewhere down the line, they lost the plot, they lost the thread, and all they could do was keep us locked. New York, good luck to you.

Hope you do well. I'm looking around here. It doesn't sound very convincing, James. No, I do. Good for you. And I know that New Yorkers care deeply about the rest of the country, so much so that it worries them very much with what Indianapolis and Cleveland and Chicago

and Fargo and the rest of those places do. But we all have to look. I think we ask Rob this question because New York is somehow the symbol of the country. And I haven't thought it's the symbol of this country for quite some time. And I mean, it's after 9-11. 9-11, yes, it was. But today, that's why I asked whether or not you think the rest of the country cares, whether or not New York occupies that. I know we're going along here, but whether or not new york occupies that's and we'll go along here but whether or not new york still occupies it does but i but i but i i think new york is now

more emblematic of the virus because we have it worse so if it whatever whatever effects the virus has the rest of the country they just amplified in new york that's that's it and but new york still i mean i think still has a part of the imagination in america and take it or leave it it still generates a lot of heat and a lot of interest and a lot of nonsense and a lot of great stuff. All countries need a place like New York, and the countries that don't have a place like New York, I think, suffer. If you want to send Rob a letter, an email telling him how much you don't care about New York, and you want your identity hid, that would be a good time to go over to express VPN also to teach kids online and get them started on the online learning experience in a way that's accepted transcript wise by universities and colleges, Laurel Springs.

And of course, freshly.com is, you know, you learn, but you, you, your, your protection,

your privacy, your education, your food. What don't we bring you short, concise podcast. That's what we don't bring you. Hey, thanks everybody for joining. Rob, Peter, we'll see you next week.

And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet4. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas. New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down. New York, I love you, But you're bringing me down Like a rat in a cage Pulling minimum wage New York I love you

But you're bringing me down New York, you're safer, and you're wasting my time Our records all show You were filthy but fine But they shuttered your stores When you opened the doors To the cops who were bored Once they'd run out of crime New York, you're perfect. Oh, please don't change a thing.

You're mild billionaire mayor's now convinced he's a king. And so the boring collect I mean all disrespect In the neighborhood bars I'd once dreamt I would drink New York, I love you But you're freaking me out. There's a ton of the twist, but we're fresh out of shout. Like a death in the hall.

Ricochet. Join the conversation. New York, I love you, but you're freaking me out. New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down. New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down. No less a figure than the President of the United States has said to Kevin, you know you're an unusually handsome man.