The Ricochet Podcast - Judgments

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Before we break for another reckless Thanksgiving in Anno CoViDi 3, we decided to take the scenic route this week. We go deep into the capacious mind of Ross Douthat, who’s just released his latest book, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Along with Lyme disease, fringe medicine and faith, the hosts survey Ross on everything from potential hope for American education to the... Source

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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Lott. I'm James Lilacs and today we talk to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 571. How did we get this far? Why? By people like you, as they say on NPR. Join us at Ricochet.com. Be part of the most stimulating conversations in the community on the web. And by the way, you have heard us mention this recently. We've started a new feature for Ricochet members. You've got to be a member. It's called No Dumb Questions,

where we take your questions, which aren't dumb, and they're smart. We take your comments, and we take them to notable guests. Next week, we've got the Babylon Bee editor-in-chief, Kyle Mann, and that's going to be hosted by some short tour from Minnesota. So we'll take your questions for Kyle. And yes, you can pitch him your jokes, too. Maybe he'll buy one right there on the spot and Venmo you the money. Join us Tuesday, November 23rd at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 5 p.m. Pacific. Remember, you've got to be a Ricochet member to join these events and see them.

So please sign up today at ricochet.com. It's cheap. Get your first 30 days for free. That's even cheaper. As mentioned, or maybe not, I'm James Lilacs in pre-winter desolate Minnesota. Peter Robinson is in sunny California and Rob Long is an even sunnier Madrid peripatetic flaneur that he is. What brought you there? Okay. I've assumed you've been there for about six or seven hours so give us a complete and full rundown on spanish politics what my uber driver said on the way in from the airport the mood of europe the mood of europe well i i am i have to say i just spent a week in france and i came here i'm meeting the family we're all sort of traveling around spain for thanksgiving that's kind of my uh my brother and sister-in-law and their family that my niece and nephew that's kind of their thing and sister-in-law and my niece and nephew. That's kind of their thing. They have a week, a little bit longer than a week, but they want to do something.

And my mom's game. And as long as the grandchildren are there, my mother's going to come along. So what the hell? What am I supposed to do? Just eat turkey alone? So I'm here. Is that San Geronimo out the window? It could be.

It could be. Are you two blocks from the Prado? I am across the street from the Prado. Oh, I know exactly where you are. Yeah. I know exactly. In fact, I think I know the building you're in. You probably do.

You're living well. Why are you? Wait a minute. What's tonight? What happened? The Prado is free for the last hour of the evening on Friday. You should be across. Skip this podcast.

Go look at Las Maninas. Believe me. I made those very arguments to our to our leader you can't do that but i want to say that i i i briefly mentioned this last week but i want to say it again um for the no dumb questions thing it's for members only and i i think the uh i don't know maybe it's not clear no dumb questions doesn't mean you can't ask dumb questions that means there's no such thing no such thing you're supposed to ask dumb questions um however we had uh you everybody heard i hope you did i hope you heard a jay batacharya was on our first one um a few weeks ago and they're the only dumb questions came from me and they're very smart really specific sophisticated and sort of scientifically literary questions came from me and then very smart really specific sophisticated and sort of scientifically

literary questions came from the ricochet members such that at the end and i think we still have that audio somewhere he seems like wow these questions are amazing uh everybody's like really well informed but he was kind of like exhausted by the fact that the questions except for me were were uh thoughtful so um if you're thinking about joining Ricochet, join. Just to maybe ask some dumb questions, I wouldn't mind a few, just to join me in those. Anyway, that was not about the drink. Can we, may I return to James? Yeah, absolutely. I'm just, for those of, most people won't be able to see you, only a few will be able to see,

but everybody will hear you. But I'm just, I know that one of Editha's very best friends was married in that church. That was the royal, the Church of Coronations and so forth for several hundred years. Okay, enough of that. Right. I should note to the audience who's- Back to James, you spent a week in France, and here's my thinking about France. That country's been on the decline since Napoleon returned from Moscow. De Gaulle's great achievement was taking office and keeping the communists out of office, but he did so by puffing up delusions. You can't meet a Frenchman today who doesn't claim that his grandfather was in the resistance.

Okay. And they haven't, they've been difficult. They don't know what to do with their Muslim immigrants. It's just a mess. And then you go to Paris, and it's the sweetest life on earth. So, de-conflict me. De-conflict me. Why does France always enrapture us when we're there, the moment we leave we think oh this country is doomed

well i mean i mean we talked about this a little bit last week it's not doomed um i mean instead except in the sense that we're all doomed um it's it's it's been going fine for as long as you can has these these big problems you mentioned paris itself i mean it's a kind of reverse situation in france um in that the city takes all the money. And so there's an enormous amount of tributes being paid to Paris. And a lot of it is done happily, so the city itself can be this kind of great place. France itself, I was in Marseille for three, four days. And Marseille is just a big, bustling city.

Lots of ports. Kind of cool, too, because it's right a big bustling city lots of ports kind of cool too because it's right there on the mediterranean it has this kind of very glamorous thing and you can sort of sit and get a glass of wine for very cheap um i mean by the way the wine it's no good but you can sit there and look out over the mediterranean and the rocky sort of promontories and the uh the kind of weird fortification fortified, um, uh, constructions on the, on the horizon. And it's, uh, I mean, it's kind of Monte Cristo. That's exactly what it is. Um, I was so much so that I was sitting,

I had dinner last night and there's a table of four people next to me. And, uh, one of the guys, and I was like trying to like, he was speaking too quickly for me to fully kind of get it all but about a third of the way in as i was eavesdropping i heard i thought oh my god he's telling them the story of the count of monte cristo wonderful and and he added this one thing which i had i didn't know which was that you know in cuba the cigar rollers by the way interrupt any point i'm just talking here cigar the the cigar rollers by the way interrupt any point

i'm just talking here cigar rollers the ladies would roll the cigars and they make cigars and they would sit in these giant um workhouses or you know workshops ateliers right and somebody would read to them they'd have somebody at the front of the room reading to them on a microphone and that was kind of one of the it was kind of a very sweet very elegant way to get these you know these women to roll cigars and make their lives a little bit better their working lives a little bit better and the most requested book was the count of monte cristo according to this my neighbor at this restaurant and uh and what he said that everyone you could see in the room was the you know international room but there were also a bunch of locals there nodding.

Of course, that makes total sense because we could all hear him at a certain point. Anyway, that was just a little slice of life. And the other thing I would say is that these are people who have been through it COVID-wise, and they are done. The French or Europeans in general? Europeans in general, least the to the spain and france i can say they are they are it is over yeah they are they are done meaning no meaning um in spain they're a little bit more careful with the masks indoors although they have an 80 percent vax rate uh they they say um in in france and certainly south of france they

don't care in fact they so don't care in the south of France that they have these little cartoon public service ads everywhere of a little kid, you know, a little like a cherub-faced kid saying in French, M'aime en sud en porte les masques, like smiling, which means that even in the south we're wearing masks, which of course is clearly not true well this is very strange how can that be how can the baleful influence of

donald trump the mega science deniers of the u.s extend it to europe i don't understand i mean we're at we're having a big surge in minnesota we're one of the worst in the country if not the worst today yay us and it's mostly outstate and it's uh the counties if you look at the ones that have the We're having a big surge in Minnesota. We're one of the worst in the country, if not the worst today. Yay us. And it's mostly outstate, and it's the counties, if you look at the ones that have the worst rates, they're the most conservative. And so people are naturally making the usual assumptions. And interestingly enough, pouring into those people all of their hatred of these lumpen deplorables, everything about them from their religion, their beliefs, their economics economics everything about them is they deserve this in so many ways it's like covid is the little finial that finally says you get what you deserve for believing what you do it's not um it's not pleasant to read but they believe that that that if you are maskless and you are not going about your life as if it is a dire thing then you are then you are a delusional science denier, Donald Trump.

So the idea that Europeans are over this, I remember back in the 80s, I was talking to a friend who was married to a Frenchman, and they'd come back from Paris, and she was complaining bitterly about the homeless situation in Paris. I said, how long has Ronald Reagan been president of France? And she was shocked, because at the time, we were blaming all homelessness on Ronald Reagan been president of France? And she was shocked because at the time we were blaming all homelessness on Ronald Reagan. And the idea that there might be other cultural things at work is just sort of anathema. There's the idiots in the US who are spoiling everything, and then there's the virtuous Europeans. So that's interesting to note, Rob, because we're always being told we should be more like the Europeans. All right, then we should just give an F and take off the mask and get on with their lives is that what you mean exactly

that's exactly what i mean and you know i i have to stand up for the french in this respect the french are cynical and practical and all sorts of things but they they are never been as reflexively anti-american as the americans have felt. They certainly showed zero gratitude. Oh, not zero gratitude. They named a bunch of boulevards after Roosevelt and Wilson, but they didn't, you know, they got over it pretty quickly, the sort of World War II stuff. But in general, they're kind of like your cynical friend,

but they're allies. Well, yes. I mean, Johnny holiday is what is, is a port of Elvis to them and nothing says more about French culture at the time that they celebrated this guy who embodied so many of these Americans sort of archetypes. I have a French, my French brother-in-law, when I came, when he came here, still French to the core in all of his way, he has a, an app on his phone that he uses to, to dissect and do evaluate every wine he has, every bottle.

I mean, it's just an astonishing collection of bottles to begin with. And he can tell you if it's from the north side of the river or the south side, depending on the taste of it, or so he says. So he's very French in that aspect. When it comes to French foreign policy and French power and all the rest of these things, he's a Frenchman. At the same time, when he came here, one of his happiest moments was when we were all driving around the wine country in California, and he'd rented a convertible. And he had on some Ray-Bans. This was the dream. This is a dream for a lot of people in a lot of places, because that's an option open to all.

Anybody can come to America, get a convertible and some Ray-Bans, put Elvis on this, and you are part of an American experience. Difficult for me to go to France and have a similar thing. I can, for example, put on a striped shirt and go to a cafe and start playing an accordion and feel as though I'm somehow intrinsically, uniquely, perfectly inhabiting the French model. That's what I like about America. Maybe that's what they like about America, too. You can come here and you can still be LaFranche, but at the same time enjoy everything in the bounty that this country has to offer. Speaking of bounty, before we get our guests, I've got to say so.

CBO released a score of the Build Back Better, the triple B, and they estimated that before taking the effects of stricter tax enforcement, it's always tax enforcement, or my favorite German word, fraud and abuse.

We're going to save money by cracking down on fraud and abuse. So it will add $367 billion to the deficit between 22 and 31, probably more. In a separate analysis, the CBO estimated that the Build Back Better's

additional IRS funding would generate an additional $207 billion precisely in revenue over the same time period, which means, CBO you know, immense wads of spending and programs rolling down the hill that just accumulate more. Will this mean anything to anybody? Democrats voted for it with one person saying nay. And I got the feeling that this probably isn't going to be the election issues that people think because it's so vague and gassy and huge and out there. Nobody knows exactly what it means. And it won't affect them, but they will know about the inflation. They will know about that.

And there's a fighting chance that the BBB will contribute to that. Gentlemen, the CBO scoring, everybody knew that Biden's saying that the thing would cost zero was total. I don't want to say a lie because everybody says everything is a lie, but it was nonsense and stilts. We'll put it that way. The House passed this. The House was going to pass this. All Nancy Pelosi cares about is cutting this deal, that deal, the other deal to go ahead

and get this thing passed because we now know we don know, it's still a year ahead, but it now looks very likely that the Democrats will lose control of the House a year from now. This is just not serious. This is not governance. This is a kind of kabuki theater for the progressive left to mollify the activists and the donors in the Democratic Party. The Senate will not permit this thing to go through. Joe Manchin's approval ratings in West Virginia are now in the high 60s. Joe Biden's approval ratings in West Virginia are now in the low 30s. Joe Manchin gets to tell the Senate what he's going to do.

Joe Biden doesn't, and Chuck Schumer do not get to tell Joe Manchin what he's going to do. This is all kabuki this is not a great nation governing itself in a serious way that's my two cents yeah i i agree i mean i i i hadn't looked i hadn't really looked up joe mansion's poll numbers just as of you know the last week but i remember when i did uh did some MSNBC show a few weeks ago and I made the appalling comment that like Joe Manchin is a popular, popularly elected senator from West Virginia, which if if they decided to replace Joe Manchin, they would not replace him with a more progressive Democrat. correct and the look on like um i forget who uh on um who who is it like uh sally cone the look on sally cone's face was like as if i had just i mean i had i had i don't know what i had done i had done something horrible i had said something horrible and incomprehensible to her um but it's true like joe mansion is a very very popular and by the way joe mansion is the way out for democrats be more like joe mansion be more like joe and the sky's the limit but they

absolutely refuse to do what what i like about this the the complete lack of interest in what the cbo scoring says is that it reveals the essential truth, which is that only Republicans think that there's a deficit or a debt. Democrats don't think there is one. It's really just an accounting error. Democrats believe that the federal government has 100% claim on 100% of your assets. Correct. If that's the case, then really what is, what's a trillion?

What's two trillion? What five? They can make more modern monetary theory. They could just, but they don't have to, because they could just raise taxes. They, the Democrats want to raise taxes.

They want to raise taxes on you and me and everybody. And the rich first of the first week. And then everybody else that's what they want to do and they just don't they just aren't driven by any sense of like of the nation's finances going into the ditch because they know that there's a parachute the parachute is your paycheck one of the biggest disconnects on this has been the inflation debate several uh commentators have covered themselves with all sorts of wonderful rancid glory by saying it's that it's a it's not a big deal i mean a friend of mine in the media was tweeting the other day you know gas ticks up a little bit

what big deal milk tilts you know ticks up you know i gotta buy milk anyway so what's what's what's the big deal which is kind of out of touch but the other thing is that they're saying that this is all being that the panic over inflation is being fed to us by the media, which I love this, you know, that right wing media with its clickbait machine is out there telling everybody that there's this boogaboo of inflation that they shouldn't worry about. And it's their attempt to get reader. I tend to think that I mean,

New York times doing stories on inflation might be because the New York times is noticing that it's there or that people are caring and that it might hurt the democrats after months of denying that inflation was taking place the new line is it's up to somebody else's fault yeah yeah yeah it's taking place but it's not that bad and somebody else's fault and there's also good to hear them say it's good for us actually it's good because then wages go up which i actually i add the msnbc or salon or slate or commentary dysentery or something like that did that piece it's great because wages will go up how stupid do you have to be to not see the other portion of that argument I think the New York Times thinks like I don't know why people are complaining um they're complaining about inflation but Americans sure are spending more

yeah like those those things are connected I mean I I there I does raise a question and I know we have a guest here and I would actually like to talk to the guest about this, which is that the, the, the argument is somehow that you are people, the media, people, partisans of both sides really make an argument that if you, if you notice something that exists and you have experienced it, and then you mentioned that you've experienced it, you are contributing to the problem. A problem can be disappeared simply by not being talked about. That I find to be a very, very, very strange place for people to be. What I want is the gas station or the grocery store equivalent of the forever stamp.

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And now we welcome back to the podcast, Ross Dauphitt, contributing editor, movie critic for National Review, columnist for that old gray lady, the New York Times, where he's the in-house conservative. I know how that feels walking around the office halls. He's written a half a dozen books, including Grand New Party, How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, The Decadent Society, sound familiar? How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, and he's just released The Deep Places,

A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Check out the link in the description at ricochet.com to get your copy. We'll talk about that for just a second, but first of all, welcome back, Ross. It's great to be back, gentlemen. Thanks for having me. So many pieces you've done recently that each of which could spend an hour of discussion. You mentioned we were talking about this, us, before you got here, new universities, why we need them. Some people say it's ridiculous. You should inhabit the institutions that exist and attempt to change them. Other people say, no, some sort of parallel structure is necessary in order to provide a place for American ideals to flourish. What was the argument for it and what justifications and skepticisms you might have? I mean, I think the argument for it is even simpler than a sort

of grand statement about, you know, needing a place for principles to flourish. The United States is supposed to be a dynamic society. Obviously, I wrote a book calling us a decadent society, so I don't think we necessarily are, but... Well, we can be dynamically decadent. If we, but right, if we imagine ourselves as a dynamic society, wouldn't you imagine new universities popping up occasionally from time to time? I mean, if you look at the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, it is the case that occasionally a school can sort of reinvent itself and vault its way up those rankings. But basically, you know, the U.S. News, those rankings are as if the, you know, top companies on the New York Stock Exchange were all

the same ones that they were in 1947. And if that were the case, you would say that something had gone wrong, some kind of stagnation had set in. Ross, Peter here. Rob is champing at the bit to get in and talk about your book. And so I'm going to hand it over to Rob in one second. But you're a graduate of Harvard who wrote a book about the Harvard experience. Nothing more Harvardian. You live in New Haven, the home of Yale University. The argument, I can't quote them, but this is a close paraphrase of what half a dozen members of the new board of advisors for the University of Austin said. Neil Ferguson makes this point very explicitly. The great universities are lost and, critical

point, unreformable. The only hope is to found new institutions. Does that make sense to you? Does that seem right that Harvard and Yale and other great elite institutions are, A, lost to wokeness, lost to the old task of transmitting the glories of Western civilization, and so rich, vast endowments, and so tightly, so incestuous because of the self-selection of faculty, that they're unreformable. I would say that they're probably unreformable without some kind of serious competition. So I don't think any institution is lost in some, you know, absolute

200 years will go by and nothing will change kind of sense. But being around these institutions, they're certainly lost for the moment to anything that we would call conservatism. The battle in these universities is between a technocratic liberalism that wants to educate consultants and a progressive ideology that wants to educate activists. And conservatives like ourselves can sort of choose our side in that fight, and maybe we hope that the technocratic side, the technocratic liberals have more room to have the occasional conservative faculty member. But basically, that dynamic is not going to change without some kind of larger change. And I think the only plausible way to get that larger change is to have either private new institutions or I think this is one of my you know least popular opinions in certain ways but i think the federal government under republican stewardship should consider rob setting up

national universities oh no let mitch mcconnell and chuck schumer each pick 50 faculty members i think it's a terrific idea but it's a minority view ross the book is terrific i want to get to it because i i have some i have some little tributaries i want to take before i do can i just ask this question about this very topic everybody i know who teaches college has been saying the same thing for 20 years which is that college is essentially remedial because high school in america high school education is pretty much gone. And so we seem to be arguing over how to ice the cake when there's no cake. Would it be a better use of our time and our treasure and our urgency instead of trying to figure out how to make a Yale that's not irritating,

how to make a high school that teaches fundamental things that you need to know to earn a living and to flourish in 2021 and 2100, and then let colleges be what colleges are. I mean, it seems to me that the argument isn't to come up with one more way to take poorly prepared students and educate them in a different pattern, but instead to educate high school students well enough with enough rigor, which we used to do so that they arrived in college, not quite so ready to get brainwashed. So, yes, I, I absolutely agree with that. And in fact, I think, you know, there,

there are a lot of ways in which I think high school is sort of underrated as a zone of people's adult development and college is overrated. Like if you look at sort of when do kids who are religious and secularized actually stop going to church? It's not when they go off to, you know, the liberal atheist flesh pots of academia. It's usually when they're in high school, sometimes after they get confirmed, and then they just sort of drift away from religion there. So yeah, there are a lot of ways in which I think cultural conservatives should be focused on building better high schools, I guess. But I do also think that that is a place where conservatives have done some work, have, you know, if you look around the country right now, there are not just sort of lots of existing private schools, but lots of startups and lots of energy around that area.

So I guess if you said high school or college, choose one, I would say probably choose high school. But I don't think you have to choose one. And I think actually people can learn something from the successes of, you know, classical schools and other kinds of startups that applies to having, you know, a few new colleges as well. But speaking of decadent, speaking of decadent. Speaking of decadent, we've got a billion- when Rob Beacon's invented the Pinnacle Clause, you know you're in trouble. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about when I talk about decadence.

We have billionaires going to space. 100 years ago, whatever it was, 150 years ago, Andrew Carnegie built libraries. How much would it cost these billionaires to build five interesting, thoughtful, rigorous high schools as model schools around the country? Pick a place.

Pick a rural place, an urban place, an urban blighted place. Pick five different places and actually have high schools. If I read that in the New York Times, I'd be cheering. Yes. have high school if i read that in the new york times i'd be cheering yes um rather than feeling a little queasy like oh it's like somebody's just invented a new a new app which is what i was my initial response to the university of austin yeah i mean in fairness there there are billionaires who i mean billionaires do invest a lot in high school education and a lot of the charter schools the good charter schools that you see are funded directly or indirectly by

new money in certain ways. So again, some of that already happens. But I agree. I think there is a unfortunate bias in the most innovative zone of moneymaking of the last 20 or 30 years, Silicon Valley, toward the idea that we're all going to live in Zuckerberg's metaverse. And so it's sort of antiquated to invest in actual brick and mortar institutions anymore. And when the reality is that even in a world where we figure out how to do digital education, online education better than we have right now, you still, there's still no substitute for the actual places that people go to school. And I think it would be a better world if, you know, everyone from Bill Gates to Elon Musk, you know, who would all have very different ideas about how to spend on education said, you know, I want to have the Musk schools around the country i i think that would been high school college both

i think that would be a better use of their money than some of the philanthropic pursuits that uh that they follow that would be grand i mean mark zuckerberg poured millions of dollars into a school system i can't remember exactly which one in new jersey yep new jersey right utter failure complete failures like the just the money soaked into it like water into a parched ground. And it would be great if all these guys did set up parallel institutions, but in order to make this work, the reason that Zuckerberg did that was because that's the holy model. That's the model that we're supposed to admire and revere. Public education. Because we have ideas about it that go back 100 and 150 years.

When actually the only thing that will save us is completely dismantling and breaking up and eliminating the public school system so that people have to go, the money follows the students, and people have to go somewhere. But the uphill struggle, getting into the hearts and minds of people, of saying that public education is actually the impediment, and with the money of the school teachers union, that seems like a hard fight that's almost impossible, but worth trying anyway? Well, it varies from state to state and area to area too, right? Like I'm in the Northeast where it is extremely hard to set up a charter school. It's a lot easier to set up a charter school in Arizona and sort of to do something innovative that is still within, you know, using public money and within the public system. So in part, sort of what you're trying to do

depends on where you are. But I don't think you have to imagine it as an all or nothing, an all or nothing proposition in areas where the public bureaucracy is more flexible. You can hope to innovate within the public system in areas where it's not. Yeah, your only hope is sort of outsider alternatives and figuring out how to make them cheap in certain ways. And again, this is true of universities too, right? In a world where the bloat of administration and bureaucracy is such a huge part of, you know, what sort of overtaken, overtaken education, figuring out a model, what's the model for a high school that's a private high school that costs, you know, what a Catholic school costs to send, to send your kids to,

instead of what, you know, early or Riverside or, or Harvard Westlake costs. I'm trying to be bi-co in my choices of schools. Growing up in farther North Dakota, we had a principal. We did not have an assistant principal. We had a secretary who answered the phones, and then occasionally we had a nurse. That was the extent of the administrative layer over the school. A couple more in the home office, of course. But you're right, getting rid of that bloat is what's necessary. But the hardest job is in the cities where it seems to be most needed, to state the thuddingly obvious. Anyway, Rob, you are good. Well, I wanted to turn a little bit to the book. The book is sort of fascinating.

Because we talked, Ross, we discussed it. We're trying to sell this thing. You just tell people to buy it and don't tell them what's in it. There's always that approach that, that approach. There is, there is, there, there,

there is definitely a marketing problem with this book, which we'll get to. The book is called the deep places, a memoir of illness and discovery and spoiler alert. It's not called a member memoir of illness and recovery. So you, you, you move with your family to new England and,

and then, and then, and then something happens. Yes. The first mistake was having the conservative pundits fantasy of buying a rural retreat, raising chickens and arming yourself, you know, in,

in preparation for, for the apocalypse. And we, we did that. Basically we bought a farmhouse in connecticut a 1790s farmhouse with barns and brick walls and all the trimmings uh and i was immediately punished for it by getting incredibly sick with a sickness that it happened probably i probably got infected literally during the home inspection by the delightful deer tick that crawls

through the Connecticut pasture land. But we were still in Washington, D.C. at first, and so it took months before I saw a doctor who knew anything about the illness that I actually had, which is Lyme disease, the illness of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, although there are a lot of cases actually now in california as yes right and expand their habitats and so it was but was it diagnosed as lyme it was diagnosed as lyme once we got to connecticut so for three or four months in dc it was diagnosed as it's all in your head. You're under a lot of stress. You're imagining your phantom heart attacks, weight, 40 pounds of weight loss and total insomnia and body pain.

That was phase one. And you write about that. And I think that's a really important part of the book. This kind of weird diplomacy of a doctor telling you after you're describing pain telling you that it's not pain yes gently very gently telling you that telling you that you do not have a physical illness as i was told by many many people in in dc who did not have the experience that doctors in the Northeast have with the reality that blood tests for Lyme disease are not very good.

And symptomology is extremely weird. And yeah, so yeah, so it took, it took going to Connecticut to be told that I should be taking antibiotics rather than seeing a psychiatrist. I, I, my, my brother and his family live there, live right pretty close to you. I think I, my, my brother and his family live there, live right pretty close to you. I think, um, uh, uh, for most of the year, part of the year. And my brother is obsessed with Lyme disease. I mean, he, the children, he checks them for ticks and he's obsessed with it. It's

like, but he's also diagnosed himself with it fast enough that he got the antibiotics needed yep and he diagnosed a friend of my mom's with it in maryland on the phone now my brother i should know should note in passing he's not only not a doctor i mean he's not even i don't even think you put on he's not even me he couldn't even put on a band-aid he's not my brother will i will buy this book for my brother he will not read it even though it is a topic of interest to him. He'll look at it and go, I'm going to read that, and it won't happen. So that shows you his level. Let's put that to the test.

Why don't you send him 100 copies? Oh, well, there you go. Let's put it in every room. That's right. Bulk purchases. What I mean is that it was the failure identifying the failure of a doctor's arrogance. Is it the fact that we don't have the right diagnostic tests for this? Or is it that there is still I mean, there are there's a fundamental.

So there's a fundamental mystery or what there is is a fundamental controversy. Right. So there's sort of the mystery of diagnosis where doctors who haven't seen this disease and don't know how complex and strange it can be don't think of it as a likely thing. That's phase one. But then in places like Connecticut, where you see tons of cases, it's not that hard to get a Lyme diagnosis. It's just that if you have one and don't get better quickly, then the official medical response is there's nothing we can do for you. We've already given you four weeks of antibiotics. You're on your own. And then you either have to accept that, which in my case would have accepted, you know, living with crippling pain for the rest of my adult life, which I preferred not to do.

Or you can go to the outsider doctors who say who who are real, this is not, you know, sort of woo-woo new age people. These are, you know, Ivy League educated doctors, but they are outside the official conventional wisdom. And they say, no, we will, if you still have symptoms, we will continue treating you. And we think this disease is really hard to get rid of for a lot of people. and we will treat you with multiple antibiotics combinations of antibiotics other other stranger things sometimes and that's what i did right uh that's so the story is partially about that it's about the fringes of medicine and the strange characters you meet along the way and And it's about, in effect, the part of it that where I'm, you know, sort of with,

I'm with your brother, right, is that, you know, you end up when you, certainly when you live with this yourself, but even living, I think, in the landscape of Lyme disease, you have to become your own expert on it because it's such a fraud. You have to develop, you have to develop your own opinions because no one has, there's no certainty about the disease. The outsider doctors, right. And it's interesting how what's outside medicine today becomes mainstream 20 years down the

road. Nobody I can remember 25 years ago was talking about gut microbiomes, but here we are. I mean, the information, the knowledge, what we take for granted, what we believe, what we doubt, it's always changing. And we know now, for example, there's much more to nutrition than just calories. They used to just count calories. Well, your diet plays a huge role in many things, including, crucially, your microbiome, which in turn impacts your mental and your physical well-being. Science is clear. A healthy gut microbiome, the good bacteria that help our bodies process food, is key to a healthy lifestyle.

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Pendulum for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Ross Douthat is our guest. The book is The Deep Places, A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Ross, you just described finding your way to the fringes of medicine, and you write in the book, I'll paraphrase this badly, but I'm just asking you to explain it. You paraphrase it. In some basic way, this all taught you a life lesson. You're much more open to fringes and crazy people and the unorthodox and the experimental in all kinds of ways than you were before you got sick.

Yes, I think so. And, you know, to be fair, I was already a conservative at a liberal newspaper and a, you know, believing Christian in a secular environment. So, someone could say, well, you were already open to strange ideas, right? And this only pushed you further. But yeah, this is an inevitable result of, I think, and happens to a lot of people in a lot of different ways. It doesn't just happen with the particular chronic illness that I had. But, you know, medical science is the solid floor that our whole society walks around on. And when you have an experience, an illness, something happens and the medical system can't help you, won't help you, seems to be ignoring things that will help you, that automatically changes, you know, just sort of trying to get better on your own, and I had good doctors helping me in the end, and they played a key role, but you also just have to sort of do things and try things yourself. You know, you find things that are even further out on the fringe that, you know, seem like they shouldn't possibly work or have any effect. Things that if you read about, you would say, well, that's got to be,

you know, quack, quack medicine, right? And then you try them and you get strong results. They help you, they very clearly help you get better in a way that, you know, you don't have a personal double-blind controlled trial paper to offer on the subject. But when you're sick, you have to be an empiricist about your own body. And yeah, and then that kind of experience means, you know, that on any given issue, on any given issue, you end up ascribing certainly more understanding to people who end up with fringe ideas and a little more credence to arguments that you would have written off. But then the trick is that the challenge is that you want to be able to have those experiences and become more open-minded without falling off the cliff into total paranoia,

right? So I like to tell people that I'm the guy who has a frequency machine in my attic that sends, you know, sound waves through my flesh to try and kill bacteria. But I also got two shots of the Pfizer vaccine as soon as it became available. So that's how I think about striking the balance between the things the fringe might reveal. But, you know, there are still things, there are really important things that the medical establishment is right about. That's really crazy. That sounds nuts. Getting the Pfizer vaccine or having the frequency machine? No, I have the frequency machine in my basement. You've got it in the attic. Yeah, you can't have it in your attic. Well, this is right.

I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, people do, though. I mean, again, there's also an East Coast, West Coast thing here where the people I've talked to about some of the weird stuff I've tried who are from California are much more likely to say, oh, I do have a frequency machine. I used it to treat my migraines, you know, six months ago. Whereas here on the East Coast, people raise their eyebrow at you and murmur something understanding and change the subject. I have found the same thing. I found it when I um depending on which doctor i was talking to my doctor i would just go to an la or the one in new york when i but when i suffer

vertigo in the summer and i said you know do you think that uh do you think that uh psychedelics would help me here and then the the la doctor's like i don't think here probably not uh and the new york doctor's like i don't uh that's not uh and the new york doctor's like i don't uh that's not my i don't want to that's not my area this could be very uncomfortable um to be fair rob asked that question when he had an ingrown toenail i asked that question there's always there's never anything that psychedelics won't help with in some way i definitely agree with that including column writing i believe me i agree with that too Including column writing. I believe me. I agree with that, too. So I guess my question is, what do you attribute that reluctance? I mean, why is it so hard for your doctor, a doctor, to say to you, look, here's what the book says to do.

And here's all we can do. However, I've read this, this, this, and this. And it suggests. why do you have to go to find some doctor somehow through some chain of connections who will be more entrepreneurial, we'll say, put a word, use a word, entrepreneurial, more aggressive, or more loose about attacking your pain? What is it about the medical profession is it specifically medical profession that has a hard time saying here's something i'm not sure about that you might try yeah i mean i think i think the way we've set up the system is designed to avoid that at all costs right and you know for a lot of a lot of sound reasons. It's, you know, first do no harm, right?

The idea that you shouldn't send someone off to try a treatment if you're not sure what it will do. There is the, you know, the desire for a certain kind of evidentiary certainty that goes into how the FDA approves drugs, right? Like all of these, all of our systems are built up, they're built up to protect people against the consequences of the dangers in experimentation. But as a result, they end up limiting the benefits of experimentation, right? And that's, but then there's also a way in which I think doctors, doctors are trained to distrust their patients to a certain extent, I think. That's an important part of medical culture, that you can trust scans and blood work, but you can't trust a person's testimony about their own symptoms that much. And that, I think, again, it exists for a reason. People are unreliable in some ways, but once you have

this kind of chronic illness, and I didn't understand this until I had one, right? But it really is the case that there are things that only the patient can understand about what's going on. And there are things that only the patient can actually tell you and have access to. And there has to be some kind of basic trust that talking to the patient is a crucial part of diagnosis, even if it's not the only thing you rely on. It's a terrific book. But when I was reading it, I couldn't separate it from COVID and from the experience of COVID. And especially at this particular area, I couldn't separate it from my sense that the medical community or the medical

establishment was very uncomfortable telling the nation of patients in face the truth, which is there's a lot we don't know. Ivermectin may work. Hydroxychloroquine may work. Masks, maybe not. Maybe they will, maybe they won't um keep the old people inside like there was some there was some unwillingness on their part it's almost it's a form of humility isn't it that that was lacking yes i think i mean it's there was certainly certainly for the first three to six months of covid we knew so little little. And yet there is such, I think, pressure on and demand for, from a certain kind of person, authoritative medical statements that you've got this absurd dynamic of people saying, trust the science, don't wear a mask.

Oh, oh, wait, no, trust the science, do wear a mask. Trust the science. COVID, it's not airborne. Wear two masks. It is airborne. Wear two masks, right? And yeah, I think part of it is that there's this desire, I think a totally legitimate desire among scientists to protect their authority on sort of core questions, right? Like the core achievements of modern medicine, there are people who doubt them and reject them and they shouldn't. And, and you know so you have to protect that authority but then that leads to trying to counter-productively project the same authority into debates where it just isn't appropriate so so they you know you say we know hydroxychloroquine doesn't work with the same level of intensity you say we know vaccines work when in fact we don't know much about it's a you know it was a novel a novel disease who knew you know who knows whether hydroxychloroquine worked you know um and and that's that's i think

one one step further the cdc has a budget of tens of billions of dollars. The NIH has a budget of tens of billions of dollars. They were in a position to run studies right away to find out about ivermectin and hydrochloroquine. And there was a willfulness there, not just a lack of humility but a kind of willfulness. do what we tell you to do. And by the way, these crazy ideas are crazy ideas and we're not even going to investigate them. We still don't, as Dr. Bhattacharya tells us, we still don't have good, reliable studies on whether masks work, the circumstances under which they do work, the kinds of masks that do work.

These agencies were almost two years into this. In other words, you're being, as you always are, Ross, dispassionate and analytical and underlying it all, a great generosity toward all parties involved. And I'm saying, damn it! No, look, I don't, I don't feel any generosity towards the medical establishment. I'm just aware that I've written a book that, you know, includes me having a chiropractor put magnets on my body. So I'm, you know, I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying to, you know, acknowledge while telling the story that, you know, the stuff that's out, stuff outside of CDC and FDA world can get, really can get crazy in a hurry. And I did the crazy

stuff, I know. But no, I'm not, I'm not carrying water for these institutions. They failed completely in the first six months of the pandemic, and they've failed in more moderate ways ever since. And the reality is that like the best some of the best research during the pandemic has been done by this thing called fast grants that people at george mason university tyler cowan was involved with it set up where the whole idea was to bypass the way that the public health bureaucracy conducts studies and do things super quickly um so and you know they did one on they did one on ivermectin that seemed to show it didn't do a lot but then they found another drug that seemed that's

one of the drugs that they think might help and that's no look there's this is the you know the the decadent society to plug my prior book is nowhere more evident than in the bureaucratic structures of American medicine. May I, we're, I mean, this is a podcast time is sort of short, but I'd like to introduce a, a one new gigantic topic and set up your next book. I don't know whether you know, I don't know what it is. So I'm really glad you're about to find out you're about to find out. And what I have in mind here is two pieces of information one is that you and i have made the same bet about life you have four kids as i recall yep and i have five and your colleague at the new york times and my friend

all the way back from the 1980s david brooks wrote a big think piece. I'm quoting it. Here's the title. The nuclear family was a mistake. And here's the subhead. The family structure we've held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century, seems to me it goes back millennia, but at least the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It's time to figure out better ways to live together. Okay. You may now start writing the book proposal out loud for us. The defense of the nuclear family. I think so.

Do you want me to say something nuanced about my colleague? Because I'm obliged to. And say that I think part of... David Brooks receives much too much nuanced treatment as it is much new and all right all right um i'll just i'll just say that i think there were some good ideas in that piece um but maybe that maybe that is maybe that is the next book i think definitely the challenge the challenge is we we live in a society where you know because of divorce rates because of out ofof-wedlock birth

rates and so on, there's a huge population for whom the sort of 1952 vision of the nuclear family is already out of reach. And so you do need social models that take that into account. But with that being said, yeah, I mean, I think there's absolutely no question that the great tragedy, the accelerating tragedy of the last couple of decades in American life is, in certain ways, it's not what conservatives feared once, that it would be just sort of, you know, total social chaos and marriages falling apart every week and every child born out of wedlock. It's just, it's a retreat from all of it. It's a retreat from marriage. It's a retreat from children. It's a retreat even from sex and dating itself. And maybe that's, maybe there's a whole book in

there, but whether there is or not. For sure. In your hands, for sure. So here's the prologue. I'm just helping you to get the ideas fleshed out nice and early here, Ross. And here's your prompt. You and your wife have four kids. Why? As your wife must surely have heard, if she's at all had experiences like my wife, in the grocery store, when she's gone to the grocery store with one or two of her children, complete strangers feel perfectly entitled to come up and say, don't you know how to prevent that? And yet you have four. Why?

Because there's, if you don't have, if you aren't Mother Teresa, and you aren't either called to or capable of a life of perfect self-giving there's no better way to force yourself into a certain kind of self-giving than to surround yourself with utterly dependent creatures who make incredible demands on you day and night dude first print run a hundred thousand hundred thousand copies and also you get to listen to the soundtrack to Les Mis 147 times in the minivan as we have done over the past six months to the point where I'm now reading the Victor Hugo novel uh which is rather slow going but fascinating I can still sing Barbie Princess and Popper themes from start to finish from the game from the video and that 15 years. Yeah. But what you've described it Ross though is difficult. It's hard. And a lot of the things that we

are rejecting today, we don't like them because they're hard. They're tough and it's easier not to get married. It's easier not to date. It's easier not to have sex and just plug on something you get in the computers. And when the metaverse comes along, people are going to be able to have the ideal for some guys. You'll be able to have a spouse in one virtual world and you'll have another spouse in another. And you may find them tangentially, in an ephemeral sense, sort of emotionally supportive, enough to get you by. But it's easy. It's easy. Right.

Well, in that sense, the book might be not just the case for the family, but just the case for reality, which is, I think, going to become more and more important the more that we live inside that Mark Zuckerbergian paradise. Paradise. Did you see the commercial where they're looking at a Rousseau painting and it comes to life? Yeah, it's terrifying. It's creepy, creepy stuff. Absolutely.

The idea that anyone walks through an art museum first of all and looks at a painting and thinks wouldn't it be great if it came to life in a vaguely computer generated way and you know like it's it's just sort of no it's an insane testament to how a certain kind of personality thinks about what is good in the world you see a fragonard you don't necessarily want to go into that world and hop on the swing and go up and down first of all because they probably smell from bad body odor and secondly there's you know people marching towards the ballet at the very moment to put your heads on spikes but it's more it's just the contemplation of the object and what

it represents and the technique and the rest of it the idea that somehow we're going to improve on art by letting you go into it and talk to the people in there is the sort of thing that only a computer nerd geek with no taste from Silicon Valley could possibly come up with. Rob had one small question before we let you go. Oh, yeah, it was really more a question about your faith.

Another small topic. 30 seconds or less, yes. Did you, yes, did you, right, did you I mean, you write about in the book, but I'm interested in that, in the way prayer can be an active form of healing. That, you know, the church that I go to in Manhattan, I just learned this, because the rector's she's been there 25 years um and one of the first things she introduced in on the corner of 71st and madison uh was a healing prayer the idea that if you were sick or or in grief or whatever those that you could come and and your fellow parishioners would pray with you uh and there were some amazing people telling us after the the party after

her the celebration that how that had affected them and they all did it with a kind of a magnets on my body kind of rueful i have a frequency machine in my attic yep that's what i just tell i don't have a question and you're jumping right in yeah yeah so the yeah i mean i i think there's sort of an idea about prayer and probably meditation too right that you know you sort of you you do a regression analysis and you find that you know people who pray frequently have you know slightly better vibes, you know, feel. But when you're really sick, right, you know, I think I'm sure that that's real. But when you're really sick, you want some reaction, you know, you're looking for something, you're looking for

something different. And my experience was basically that for the first three or four years that I was sick, I prayed not in any kind of like, you know, monks, crystalline perfection, but in this sort of desperate begging, begging God asked for help and got you know some what i would describe as strange physical reactions in my body and not sort of like a magic you know finger on your head you're healed kind of thing um more like sort of a a jolt a buzz did that make you uncomfortable when that happened it what made me laugh, actually. I mean, when you have these sort of outre experiences, so in this case, I ended up on the stairs going up to the choir loft, like sort of jerking and rubbing my body, which was something that I would do when I took strong doses of antibiotics.

So this was like the divine version of taking doxycycline. But with that, as with the strange magnets and various things, you get an appreciation for the, just a heightened appreciation for the total strangeness of human existence. And, you know, this part isn't something that I could feel until I got somewhat better. At my worst, I didn't feel this. But when I started getting somewhat better, just sort of the human comedy element, right? Like the idea that here I am, Mr. New York times, fancy pants columnist, and I'm lying on a table in, you know,

a strip mall chiropractor getting magnetized, or I'm lying on the floor of a church sort of flailing my arms. Like it's absurd. And, and that's a crucial aspect of existence. I think that, um, you you know gets lost a little bit at least in the way we conduct our political debates so maybe uh maybe maybe humility for the doctors but also humility for the patients yes oh absolute absolute humility in the face of in the face of deep and abiding strangeness i would say r, this may not hit you until later this weekend, but this very podcast has been of immense commercial importance to you.

I've given you a book idea that's going to be a bestseller for sure, and Rob has just teased out the initial elements of a sitcom. And Rob's brother is going to receive 100 copies of the no i absolutely it has been very significant indeed and i'm very grateful for the chance to be part of it how columnists sometimes can look at these you're finding yourself in a strip mall being magnetized but the other hand it's great material i mean i wouldn't oh that's no no as a writer this is the terrible thing right i mean the absurd thing about being a writer you go through these absolutely hellacious experiences and there's always a corner of your brain that's like well when i'm better this is amazing stuff

this is gonna be so good yeah i've got three a week to write so you know when i when anything lights up that little when anything you know lights the pilot light and says, this is what next Wednesday's piece will be, I relax and start to accumulate. Ross, you've spent so much time with us today, and we're really grateful for all the time that you spent. I can only conclude that you're avoiding getting to a column. I have seven out of 800 words in a column about how bad things are or not for the Democrats. 700 out of 800? You guys have inspired me. The final hundred are going to be the most pellucid and brilliant words ever written by a mortal man.

Do you just tack on two final paragraphs saying it's even worse than you supposed? Right. Well, that's the second. The first half of the column is it could be better than you suppose and the second half is uh it could be worse typical theme of the second half is maybe only the democrat only donald trump can save the democrats you always have to be so even-handed and so fair i get that that's the 800 words that 300 and 355 words per side and then you have about 35 words a classic. Classic column design,

Peter, the, on the one hand, on the other hand, I mean, without that design, how would we live as columnists? It's essential.

Ross Douthat. You can find his columns, the New York times. You can find his book in, well, I'd say beat Alton's, but that would be, you know,

some archaic reference to it, a civilization that no longer exists uh on amazon of course and uh the deep places is its name we recommend it and get it now before all those hundred copies go to rob is it that's right and we can't yeah you gotta hurry up and can't stir up anymore ross it's been a pleasure thank you for joining us we hope to see you to talk about the next book where peter robinson will bitterly discuss the royalty situation and how he's been screwed up ross to you and your large nuclear family happy thanksgiving happy thanksgiving and to you as well bye-bye bye-bye one of the things that uh people who aren't ricochet members don't get if you if you are a member you can watch us do this which means you are able to go to zoom chinese spyware some say, and see things that happen while we're talking.

And while we were talking, the disembodied head of Mrs. Robinson came in and said something to Peter. And I presume that it was some sort of household emergency that something went awry. And I've since learned that Peter Robinson has a leaky commode. Listen, you know, we have enough problems with our physical infrastructure around the house. It's your ephemeral non-corporeal digital stuff that breaks down too as well. And when it breaks down, you're in bad shape. So what exactly am I talking about? Well, listen, between your photos, your finances, your devices, and your connections,

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to get complete protection and savings of up to 40%. That's A-U-R-A dot com slash ricochet. And we thank Aura for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, gentlemen, before we go, it's Thanksgiving. So let's date this podcast completely so that it'll be absolutely unlistenable by next Friday. And I've been looking online and there are people who are still really tremulous about getting together with other people in a room.

What with COVID raging at all there's somebody posted the question would you have uh would you have thanksgiving dinner with an unvaccinated relative who had just had who had just gotten over covid and the responses were amazing i mean just from the people who just completely wrapped saran wrapper on their entire face and body and never leave the house the terror is still undiminished with these folk yeah and it's as all ricochet members who were there for our uh no no dumb questions with dr j patachari now if they're not vaccinated and they want to come why shouldn't they come because the vaccines don't work because the vaccines don't work that's what i'm't work. That's what I'm hearing now.

We've now factored into it. Yeah, if you're vaccinated, still you can get it and you can spread it, so it doesn't really work and you need the booster. We are coming very close to the point, I think that Fauci said this, where being vaccinated will be defined by having your booster, which will eliminate

tens of millions of people from a vaccination status, right? Yeah, maybe. I guess what I mean is that the vaccines don't work if by work, you mean, they form an impervious shell against this specific virus. Because as Dr. J, who I channel now all the time, said, we're all going to get it more than once, maybe twice, maybe three times. That's the way it's going to be. It's not, it's not a pandemic. It's endemic. It's here. And so we get the vaccine and we probably, we probably will get the booster. And, you know, in a year we'll be saying, well, the only problem was that when we rest,

rush this thing into your arms, we set the, we set the amount too low. It was too weak. And we needed to, we're going to give you a big punch in the nose the next time. And that's just how we have to live. I don't think it's the way around. To be fair, they were selling this at 97% effectiveness. We were hearing high 90 numbers for these things. Yeah, but of course, that's based on time and there were no time inputs available. Right. So, I mean, again we've something happens we make our assumptions we go forward and then we learn that our assumptions were incorrect and we adjust we're doing i i understand that things evolve so i'm not i'm not digging on them for saying that what

they did about the vaccines at the time and then later finding out that that that uh immunity wanes i get that and and fine and i'm getting my booster next week i don't think this is a big pharma scheme in order to make more money. I don't think so. Perfect. Well, I mean, they're happy to do so, but do I think, do I think that they came up with a booster that they knew was weaker that they came up with a shot that was weaker than they knew? Oh, I see. No, no, no, no. Oversold. They thought, mwahaha, we'll make more money off the boosters. No. And then we're going to get the pill and the pill is going to be an effective treatment, and it'll be endemic and no big deal.

But again, there's people who still have their identity wrapped up in being the good COVID citizen and evaluating the world precisely on those terms and being the dominant thing in their life. It's like they want you... I wish that there was a physical manifestation of this where you could actually see you know one of those big spiky corona things floating in front of their face as they walk along just to indicate how absolutely obsessed they are with it well is this a low thought and i put it to the two of you because it maybe is

just me being my usual worm like so thoughts. Oh, thoughts from high-heeled people. The Democrats found that scaring people to death was very effective while Donald Trump was president. But they have a real incentive now to try to get people to think, at least, that this is all over and handled and dealt with by a year from now at the latest because some large component of their sinking poll numbers is that people are still scared and upset that the democrats haven't put covet away somehow you think so i don't know that's why i asked do you think so it occurs to me's why I asked. Do you think so? It occurs to me. Let's put it that way.

I don't. I don't. The political incentives have swapped on them. I don't because there's not as much in the news the same tenor as there was when Trump was president. Because when Trump was president, anything bad that happened with COVID could be laid at his feet because he said you should drink bleach. Right? That whole nonsense. I mean, I

think his messaging was all over the road, but they lied about what he said. But at the same time, it was a handy stick with which they could beat him every single day. And a lot of times he leaned into it and asked for a whole different question. Now, it seems as if that's not going on. We're not they're not tasking the Biden administration for not doing whatever it is they want to do. And people are upset for other reasons that have to do with economics, that have to do with this gut feeling of the decline of american prestige and power the you know remnant things that are still left over like the border didn't didn't the border wait a minute afghanistan that all of that stuff has coalesced into a national mood that is looking squarely at them because

everything that we're experiencing higher gas prices prices. That's what they want. American diminution of power in favor of international organizations. That's what they want. Strange, complex, new green, new deal regulations coming down, like the French telling us that we should shower three times a week. I'm very French. That's what they want. They're just surprised, perhaps, to find out that we don't want it. And we know that what they want is antithetical to the american experience so i no i don't i whatever your original question was i'm sure i answered it poorly but there you go rob i don't know i think it's interesting like i was um someone sent me a clip of um van jones on cnn The voice of reason now. Yeah, on election night.

And he said something really interesting. He said, like, he turned to his colleagues in the panel and said, maybe we're living in a bubble. We're not hearing this. We're not hearing what people are saying. And I think that was a really good diagnosis. I thought, too, I was like, you know, if I was there, I would have said, yes, continue with that. a really good diagnosis. I was like, you know, if I was there, I would have said, yes, they could continue with that.

That's that's keep going with that. He was, I think he was pretty much dismissed, you know, by the panel. So there's, you know, if you're a Republican operative, you can sleep soundly tonight. But I think part of the problem was that is that we, we is that the experience that people have of COVID is actually happening to them in three dimensions. They're outside of their house, they're in their workplace, they're living their lives. You can't scare people

more than twice, right? You just can't. A haunted house, once you turn the lights on, is a haunted house anymore. It's only haunted because you don't know it's there. But we've already been through this. So there really isn't anything left to scare us with. There are no, you know, we say the third act boo. In a horror movie construction, the third act boo is the, or mid-act boo is the moment where you're like, duh, you just, in the middle of something, you get a scare to kind of wake you up.

That doesn't seem to be happening. The American people seem to be ready to take, like they are in France, take the masks off. And if you're the democrats now your your best bet is to as always is to look at joe mansion for leadership and i guarantee you joe mansion's constituents have taken the masks off i don't think that they're living in fantasy land either i don't think it's there i'm not saying we should live in fantasy land and i mean i think you should get the vaccine. I hope the people listening to this who haven't been vaccinated and have not been vaccinated and are medically able to do so. I hope they do it because it's it could easily save your life, if a gigantic political party, which spends billions of dollars measuring, desperately trying to measure voter sentiment, and polls, takes polls every night, just like the Republicans, could possibly miss this big story. And the big story is COVID is over. Yes, Rob, to quote the great philosopher John Lennon and Yoko Ono, COVID is over if you want it. Meanwhile, of course, as everybody knows who listens to this podcast and is probably watching at this very moment, the city of Kenosha burned.

Lord knows. Hope not. The verdict is in. Gentlemen, he was acquitted on all accounts. What do you think? You always have to. We've been talking a little bit about humility, you always have to take issue pronouncements about courtroom trials with a certain humility because unless you're on the jury, you don't quite know the dynamics, you don't quite know all that was

presented. As best I can tell, and I did become fascinated with the case, so I watched a fair amount and I read a fair amount. As best I can tell, this is justice. That 17-year-old kid should not have been out on the street with a gun. For that matter, there shouldn't have been a riot taking place. There were all kinds of wrongs that were committed here, but that kid's gun was legal. That's why count six was dismissed by the judge. The kid did not, it was clearly self-defense, and this is justice being done. And honestly, we'll see what happens in Kenosha.

We'll see what the reaction is. We repeat a point that can't be repeated too often. The accused was white. All three of the people who were in whom he shot were white there is no racial component of this right whatsoever zero but yes somehow there just doesn't exist so my reading is justice has been done and I am ready to build a statue to that common sense slightly fumbly mumbly judge who kept that trial moving and um and a jury decision is so much better than a hung jury a jury decision is so much better than the judge declaring a mistrial or mistrial is so much better just to have a jury come in and say, not guilty on one, two, three, four, five, all five counts.

Let him walk. I was looking at some of the footage from protests outside the courtroom yesterday, which was interesting. And there was somebody who was screaming, screaming, you know, somebody who wanted Rittenhouse to be put away for a long time, was screaming at a pro-Kyle demonstrator and shouting that bring his, you know, bleepity bleep up to my neck of the woods and we'll show you how it's done. Words to that effect. Bring him to where I'm from and we'll show you what real justice looks like. And I'm looking at this person and says, she looks familiar. Check some websites. Sure enough, it was a Minneapolis activist from our troubles here.

And I thought, did she just cross state lines to put herself into a situation where she really shouldn't have been? Yeah, no, I think I agree with Peter. I mean, it seemed, I mean, I didn't follow all the intricacies of all five of those charges. Well, you've been traveling apart from anything else. Yeah, but it also seems to me like the minute the one surviving victim of the gunshot said, oh, yeah, he didn't do anything until I pointed my gun at him. It was sort of like game over, and you could feel it being game over and i knew it was game over because the new york times told me it was game over on the front page in the second

paragraph so but what's interesting is that we are now going to i think we're going to enter this period i hope we enter enter it peacefully and the only crackpot savagery and total moronic behavior occurs on twitter um of the idea that now we have to work backwards from a verdict that we wanted and we should change the laws so that we would get a verdict that we want that is what's going to happen now people say well well that gun charge shouldn't have been dismissed well it should have been because it's exactly it was legal that shouldn't we should go make that if if that was illegal and of certain ways certain kinds of caring were illegal then he'd be in prison and then justice would be done and once we enter that territory it's just crazy town i mean that's that's sort of what i despair of right you're

absolutely right they come up with they come up with laws that are their own sort of bill of attainers that work uh for people in the future But I tell you what, everybody's going to be talking about this. We're going to be talking about it at Ricochet. And if you would like to know where the place you can go to discuss these things without having, you know, YouTube, Facebook level nonsense being spewed, Ricochet is the place where we keep the conversation civil most of the time. And it's fun, too. And it is a community.

And you can join it, ricochet.com slash join. And not only will you get the conversation, member feed the podcast the rest of it you'll be able to participate in the upcoming no dumb questions so go to ricochet.com for all the things that you're missing out really really you haven't left that five-star review yet what's keeping you let this be a ricochet day where you join in you give us the five you give us some questions questions for no big... Please, we're counting on you. And you, and you, and you. Don't make me bring back the Rob Long member pitches. However, I would like to bring back the following names.

Bowlin Branch, Stamps.com, Pendulum, and Aurore. Great sponsors. Support them for supporting us. Your life would be better before because of it. And, you know, heck, into Thanksgiving we go. Gentlemen, have a fine fine wonderful thanksgiving with your families we'll see everybody here next week and we'll see all of you at the comments at ricochet 4.0 happy thanksgiving happy thanks feliz dia de gracias roberto gracias gracias pedro a la semana proxima Pedro. Alla settimana prossima. Sì, sì, sì. Thank you. Who am I to be blind, pretending not to see their needs?

A somebody's struggle, somebody's broken heart In a one man's soul And they followed a pattern on a window And cause I got no place to go And so why I want you to know I'm starting with the man in the mirror and I'm asking him to change his ways and no message could have been any clearer if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and the man that changed. Change.

Oh, no. I've been a victim of a selfish kind of love. It's time that I realize There was something known And not a nickel too low Could it be really me Pretending that they're not alone A willow deeply scarred

Somebody's broken heart And washed out Dream They followed a Pattern on a winter sea Cause I got No place To be, that's why I'm

Starting with me I'm starting with the man In the mirror And I'm asking him to change his ways. No message could have been any clearer. If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change. I'm starting with the man in the mirror. I'm asking him to change his ways.

No message could have been any clearer. If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change. I got to get it right. Why you got the time? You can't close your mind. Let me. The man in the mirror I'm asking him

To change his ways And no message Could have been any clearer If you want to make the world A better place Take a look at yourself And make that change. Change.

We're all going to make the change. Ricochet. Join the conversation. You don't look sick at all. I've gained at least 10 pounds since our last encounter probably, Peter, on the pandemic diet. Oh, so have I.