The Ricochet Podcast - Lick The Sugar

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

Milestones — they seem so important when they’re far away and then you arrive at them and then it suddenly doesn’t seem such a big deal. At the start of the year, we had some big plans to mark this achievement (if that’s what you can call it), but then the lockdown happened, and well, the rest is…But, don’t fear — we actually put together a great show with a great guest: Roland Fryer... Source

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Decencies apply. See OnPost.com. I have a dream. This nation will rise up. Live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. The vision for defunding means defunding.

It means that we intend to end the Minneapolis Police Department as we know it. I'm the president and you're fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's Ricochet Podcast number 500 with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs. Today we talk to Professor Roland Fryer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you!

Welcome. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 500. Now, the mics aren't picking up the crowd, but we're coming to you from the Minneapolis Coliseum, the smoking ruins thereof. We've got an amazing audience, which is just sitting respectfully now with faces aglow with admiration and love. They're not surprised we made it this far. It was obvious to all that this would go on and on and on, but there's just this glow of contentment in the faces of everybody I see assembled before us. And it's great to be here. We'll talk a little bit later about the 500 that we've done. Our favorite moments, who am I kidding? We don't remember any of this stuff. But in the meantime, I'm happy as ever to

be joined by the founders who got us this far, Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Gentlemen? You see, Rob? I told you these podcasts would never work. Hey, could we please not call this 500? We need to celebrate 500. I was tempted. When the country is suited to a celebratory mood, let's call this 499B, shall we?

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I agree. I was going to go 499.999999. Just keep adding nines onto it. That'll do. I agree. I would like something momentous to happen. But let's just call it a podcast of its day.

And this day has several challenges, too. Gentlemen, I'm going to propose something to you here. First of all, we all know now, we've been informed that silence is violence. Therefore, that was just a form of assault. We've also been informed that words are violence. So we have a spectrum here where the absence of sound and the presence of sound both constitute violence. A word that was previously referred and kept for things like, oh, I don't know, violence, like having your knee on the back of a man's neck, that's violence. But now everything is violent, except for the things that aren't. Those are useful pieces of protest and dialogue, shall we say. Language is being defined right in front of our eyes,

as are many other things, as we seem to be undergoing sort of a junior cultural revolution. We don't have the Red Guards storming into your house and breaking your family icons and burning the books. Yet. But this seems to be a particularly perilous moment. The people who... The nation is ripe for agreement on a broad swath of ideas,

but here we are with people who do not want allies, they want remaking of the culture, the extirpation of Western civilization because it's systemically flawed, the replacement with something more enlightened. Or am I just exaggerating? Oh, I wish it weren't all quite so grim. I was really looking forward to this, actually, to the podcast, but just to talking to the two of you to regain a little bit of good cheer. Yeah, actually, what is there to say? We've been locked down for three months, this unbelievable display of government, of sheer arbitrary government power at this point early on when rob and i were arguing about the lockdown there were at least there was at least a stated rationale

flatten the curve so we don't flood the healthy rationale and it was a perfectly reasonable rationale that you could argue as i did that we didn't need to flatten the curve everywhere still it made sense it has been weeks since i have been able to find online any county official offering any rationale for keeping us locked down for moving so slowly and lifting the it there's not even an effort to make a rationale they're doing things just because it's see it feels right to some county help. All right, this is bad. And then, of course, what has taken place, the destruction, the creation of what is apparently an independent nation recognized by the governor of Washington

in, what, 20 square blocks of Seattle. And when the country, when you're dying to hear someone in office say what James just said, and to talk back to this, to reassure us and say, no, no, no, we're going to rebuild the economy. This is temporary. We're going to reassert freedoms. And the person you've got is Donald Trump, who's the polls show Joe Biden is pulling ahead. So I can't really take it. Rob, will you please crack three jokes in a row? I just honestly, I really was looking forward to this to to to feel more cheerful. And it ain't working.

It ain't working. So cut me off. Well, I don't know if I could cut you off. I would say this. I am struggling with this theory, which could turn out to be false. I'm not really suggesting it's the way to look at the world, but I'm looking at the world that way for the next,

you know, past few days, the next few days, try it on, see if it, you know, gonna go to the store, try it on, wear it a little bit, see if it works. My general theory is that the screaming is always loudest after the change has occurred. And so we tend to see the complaints and arguments and riots, et cetera, and protests after it's really, it's already happened. Civil War surgeons always noticed that when they chopped off somebody's leg or arm, they'd chop off the arm, chop off the leg, apply the tourniquet, dispose of

the chopped off limb, and then the patient would start screaming. That's what it seems like to me. The change in this country, especially ethnically, racially, has already occurred. Now I'm speaking about the riots. The number of African Americans

doesn't grow, it shrinks. As a proportion. As a proportion. The percentage of African Americans in the country is about 12%. It's not a lot. So a lot of what happens just statistically is performative behavior by white liberals and progressives on the behalf of white liberals and progressives

for the enjoyment and the approval of white liberals and progressives. Yes, yes, yes. So that's sort of, I would say that's, in a way, and we're kind of seeing that happen now, because who is paying the price for all of this? Are white liberals and progressives? Whether you agree with the firing of the editor-in-chief of Bon Appetit magazine, which shouldn't...

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're making that one up. No, no. No. No, no, no, no. What happened? No, tell me that one. Well, I mean, what I'm talking about is that these are like, or even what's happening in New York Times.

You know, these are, they have dominion over this. And so they are, you know, there is a, you know, the autonomous free zone in Seattle describes not only the Capitol area, what's Chaz, right? The Capitol Hill Area Autonomous Zone. It also describes the media autonomous zone, the New York Times autonomous zone, the Conde Nast autonomous zone, where God knows what nutty conversations are happening. But if you don't, I mean, and yes,

I'm making light of the collateral damage of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, but I don't, I mean, and yes, I'm making light of the collateral damage of the Capitol Hill autonomous zone, but I don't know if there's collateral damage with Bon Appetit magazine by replacing the editor-in-chief. And I don't really know if there's collateral damage, as much as I hate to see it, with the New York Times, now that their op-eds are being sort of vetted by 24-year-olds. I don't know. I mean, I'm not really going to get exercised about it. I do think, however, that what has occurred has been an interesting confluence of events

where we have people on the right saying, hey, these bureaucrats have too much power, and people on the left saying, hey, these bureaucrats have too much power. When I start seeing articles in left-wing papers about how, you know, getting rid of the policemen's unions wouldn't be such a bad idea, I start to think, okay, there is a silver lining here. There is a silver, and now maybe... Go ahead, Jamie. But they'll never extend that out

from the police unions. What they want is an organization that replaces the police unions that does essentially the same thing but kowtows to a particular authority and mindset. They certainly don't want to get rid of the public school unions. You can look around at failing educational systems in the major cities of America and blame a lot of that on sclerotic administrations. I'm more than happy to empower administrators at the sake of the students, but they're never going to change that. The American federal, state, county employees, that gigantic union, do you think that it would ever, the Mazda light would bing on over their heads and they would say, hmm, it is odd that we have created this institution

which seems to be set against the taxpayers and enters into these sweetheart deals with the very people who fund them? No, they're not going to have that. Well, it's a start, yes, but I mean, when it comes to the people who are empowered by this zeitgeist, they're not going to look for better, more. James, I was asked to be optimistic. Yes, yes, that's true. I mean, what they want is better Soviets. They want more efficient Soviets that are less constrained by democratic processes and more and more and answerable to the higher ideas. I don't know. I'll take Glassnose to Perestroika for a little bit because I know where that ended. Right. A hundred years down the road.

But when you talk about the New York Times and you're right, these are autonomous intellectual zones of their own. And it is sort of amusing to watch the autophagy of the left as they consume their own. That's great. And the New York Times, anybody who gives it any credence at this point, them having announced that objectivity is simply an instrument of white supremacy, fine. Okay, go. We don't have to pay attention to you. But as I said before, the zeitgeist rampaging and roiling around the land right now is responsible for things like, oh, pulling down the Columbus statue at the Minnesota State Capitol. Now, am I a fan of Columbus? Not particularly. I get the historical meaning of why the statue is there.

But the point you try to want to make to people when they argue about Columbus and his genocide and the oppression and all that, you want to say, great, I get that. But there ought to be a process for reducing these things as opposed to just simply people showing up with chains and doing what they wish to do. Because if that's how we're going to roll from now on, then the whole idea of having processes for any of these things is off the table. And that's, I mean, I don't care about bon appetit. I do care when a statue I don't like is pulled down for reasons that seem contrary to those of a liberal democracy. Yeah. Okay. So here's, I'm going to ask you both to cheer me up on the following. Oh, leave it to Rob. Rob's in the cheery mood. Rob is in the cheery mood.

Maybe it's because he's been in New York through all of this. Rob has gone through and come out the other side at this point. Maybe he's just ahead of us all. So, I do not wish to speak, I really don't wish to speak ill of Donald Trump. Partly because I know Rob will handle that just fine entirely on his own. And partly because he's it. He's the nominee. He's the other choice. But I feel myself, I feel this terrible absence. Well, no, that's not even quite the right way to put it. Just one level down from Donald Trump, I feel,

there are Republican and conservative office holders who have found their voice, who do know how to talk about this kind of situation, who do know, frankly, how to fight back at an ideological level, not fight in the-American Republican senator from South Carolina, a black man representing South Carolina in the Senate. They're putting together a committee or a commission of some kind to examine law enforcement, and Tim Scott is heading that. I just feel there are people who can speak to this moment and are serious enough to begin to put it back together and take advantage of the openings that Rob just outlined, and yet none of them has national standing. None of them has achieved a national voice just yet.

And it frustrates me, and it breaks my heart, and it infuriates me. So cheer me up, Rob, on that count. All we have to do is wait. Some of these guys— Oh, I can't cheer you up on the politics. I mean, I can't cheer me up rob on that count all we have to do is wait some of these guys i can't i can't cheer you up on the politics i mean i can't cheer you up i don't think that the republican party is looking at a very cheerful november right now anyway i don't think the senate is looking that good for the republicans um in general in life in just in general president of party x tends to take all of the attention away from senators of party X. Yes, he does.

That's normal. And remember, I mean, look, everybody knows what I think about Trump. I'll just say that in 2000, when George W. Bush was inaugurated, people thought, okay, we're entering a smaller time. Peace, prosperity, it's a smaller time. Peace, prosperity, it's a smaller time. I mean, one of the reasons why that 2000 election was so close was because it was about nothing, really. There was nothing there. The biggest area of disagreement between Gore and Bush was how much money they're going to give seniors for Medicare Part D. The world was a piece of the economy was growing. We'd won the Cold War. What was there to fight about? Bush was offering a little bit less, actually, or maybe it was a little bit more.

I can't quite remember. It doesn't matter. That's one of the reasons why the election was so contested, because it's like, who cares? And nobody really thought much about George W. Bush. He was not an impressive figure. And his first six months, he racked up some impressive political gains, a tax cut that was actually pretty good, and he did it by a lot of arm-twisting, a lot of LBJ tactics,

and giving away a lot to the Democrats, which I think was, you know, that's if you want to get something, that's the way the system works, right? And at 9-11, he had a wobbly 24 hours, followed by the emergence of a leader that nobody expected nobody expected that and yet he rose to the occasion um we're not seeing that now and i think it's a problem it's a political problem i think it's less a country problem uh because the country has means of dealing with this. The country is a lot more like Donald Trump in The Apprentice than it accepts.

It fires you for a lot of reasons. Some of them are stupid and some of them are real, but it's satisfying when they do it. And it feels to me like they're going to do it. And it feels to me like they're going to do it. It feels to me like every single elected official, as I said over and over again, in the United States of America, except maybe the governor of Florida should be turfed out. If I could,

if I could wave a magic wand, I wouldn't save any of them. And I understand there would probably be some good ones that would go, you know, there'd be some babies in that bathwater. But fine by me, there are more babies to be found. Let's, a clean sweep, I'd say, because they all have been from the mayor of this city, who, I mean, I could not walk down the street now without being attacked. And, you know, if there's one thing that unifies the far right

and the far left in new york city it's hatred of bill de blasio um they're all the way to the top it's time for a change because these people have shown themselves to be unable to lead but you know the thing rob peter is that we have politicians who are unable to stand up to the aforementioned zeitgeist of the country which in every level is sort of changing in ways that we never unexpected. Warner Brothers announced they're going to do some more cartoons, and Elmer Fudd will not have a gun, because of course that would encourage all sorts of gun violence.

That would be bad. That'd send the wrong signal to the kids. And it makes you remember one of the great cartoons where he brings a gun, and Bugs brings a bigger gun, and then Elmer brings a bigger gun, and Bugs has a cannon, and then I think then they get married. It's one of those opera ones they did. No, it's Barbara of Seville.

That's it. Because Bugs takes the hair tonic and he puts it on Elmer's head and do-da-da-da-da-da a little bit and it grows a full luxuriant head of hair. You know, it's not that easy. Sorry? I'm sorry. What? I thought it was on mute.

No, it's not that easy. I was musing quietly to myself about it. There's nothing you can do. I see. I see. Well, when it comes to growing hair, there's about 80 million men and women. I'm one of them who has thinning hair. Maybe got male pattern baldness.

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with less shedding in three to six months. I'm using it now. I am. I have had a little bit thin on top, thin in the back for some time. I'm more than happy to give Nutrafol a shot, and I'll report back to you. As for you, whether you're experiencing thinning or not, you deserve hair as strong as you are, and Nutrafol can help you achieve your best hair growth naturally. Our thanks to Nutrafol, Nutrafol.com, for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Roland Fryer, professor of economics at Harvard University. Fryer's research combines economic theory, empirical evidence, and randomized

experiments to help design more effective government policies. And his work on education, inequality, and race has been widely cited in media outlets and congressional testimony. His current research focuses on educational reform, social interactions, and police use of force. And incidentally, before coming to Harvard, Professor Fryer worked at McDonald's at the drive-thru. Welcome, Professor Fryer. Thank you. May I take your order? Well, of all the things going on in the world today, I'm glad I have the opportunity to speak to you. Because when there are two lanes that merge into one, how do they know it's you when you come up to the window? That's a company secret.

There's a lot of other people behind that. All right. Well, then I'll give you a simple one. When it comes to policing, what's the problem and what can we do? In terms of policing, where do we start? It's a complicated issue. The work I've done on it pinpointed that there are large racial differences in non-lethal uses of force. So putting your hands on civilians, throwing them down, pulling your gun, handcuffing them without arrest. And in those uses of force, what we found was that blacks were 53% more likely in an interaction with police to have some sort of force used on them. Even more interestingly and more problematic, they were 21% more likely to have force,

even when the police said they were fully compliant. But as you scale up the use of force and we get to officer-involved shootings, something that's in the news a lot these days, we didn't find any racial differences when it comes to officer-involved shootings. When people are in similar situations, officers statistically did not seem to use race one way or the other. So that's really kind of a broad overview of racial differences in use of force that range from putting hands on people to shooting and kind of what we found. Hey, Professor, thank you for joining us. It's Rob Long in New York. So is it all their imagination i mean i live i live on 11th street pretty close to fifth avenue in new york city downtown between greenwich village between

washington square park and union square and there's a march and a protest pretty much every day and there's people there who sit there hold up sign saying i i feel afraid i've been hassled i was this i was that is it a mania or is it is there some other way to define how the police are treating African-Americans that's different and more intimidating and maybe more dangerous than the way they're treating everybody else? Yeah, I don't think it's mania. I think the I think there is real fear. I think there is real uncertainty. I think there is real uncertainty. And if COVID-19 has taught us nothing, it's that fear over even small probability events and uncertainty can paralyze large swaths of the population. So here's what I'm feeling, and here's what i think many of them are feeling i don't know uh a black male that i grew up with who wasn't harassed by the police in some way shape or form they don't have access to the micro data i mean our paper was one of the

first to to to have access to that level of micro data so. So how could they? And so I think what you see is folks believing and feeling and experiencing those lower level police uses of force, which happened thousands of times per day, by the way. OK, shootings are traumatic. They're awful. And thank God they're a lot more rare. But in those lower level uses of force where you're roughed up where you might be thrown up against a car those things live with you for a very long time i've experienced them they're traumatic and i think if we find it in the data that in those lower level uses of force we see considerable discrimination and then there's a shooting in some other city that we don't observe. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to say a rational person would think that shooting

was discriminatory based on their own lived experience. So I don't think it's mania. I think it's a lack of data. I think it is a lived experience. And that's why I believe, and I've been pushing, that if we could do something about these lower level uses of force, that's how you'd build trust, start to build trust in communities. Oh, hey, Roland, it's Peter Robinson here. We've never met, but I know a lot of people who know you and think the world of you. So it's a real pleasure to have a chance to talk to you. Can I... You know both of them? You have fans here at the Hoover Institution. So let me ask you this. Those lower level uses of force, that's obviously, that's extremely striking. And of course, listen, when I get pulled over, I can home driving home late one night

i was really really tired and the light turned green and i made a left hand turn and it turned out that the the signal in the left hand lane didn't turn green it was still red but i was so tired and there was a cop right behind me and he pulled me over and all he did when i rolled down my window was look at me and shake my head and say, what were you thinking? And you know, that was 10 years ago, and I can still retell you exactly. Encounters with police, even when they're totally innocuous like that one, stay with you. I get every bit of that. Are there explanations, just to be thorough here, are there explanations other than race that might account for that kind of roughing up?

If the data says you've got to direct your attention to the lower level uses of force, then, of course, the first thing you do is say, is it race or are there other possible explanations? So here's what occurs to me, and I'm going to put this crudely, and please forgive me because I just don't know how to ask these questions. I just don't know the field. But we know there are neighborhoods in Chicago that are more dangerous than others. And unfortunately, some of them tend to be more African American than other neighborhoods. So if you're a cop in that kind of neighborhood, do you just generally feel more threatened or more ill at ease or that there's a likelihood of danger spiraling up quickly? Is there something like that that might be at play here? Yes and no.

So, yes, it's at play so that 53 number i shared with you is in the raw data and you were right to point out and uh god bless you man you should not be worried about pointing out rational statistical arguments there are differences across there let me let me let me lift you up and say please more of that there there are differences in crime rates differences in income differences and lots of things across space and one wants to be cognizant of that so i'm glad you mentioned that so here's what here's what we did we looked across we had five million observations in new york city across 10 years and the thing about five million observations is it allows you to get to a level of granularity that that uh

is is is quite awesome so for example i'll just skip to the point we were able to look at was the person fully compliant as reported by the police what was the reason the police stopped them because that's one thing i heard a lot from police was hey yes we're more aggressive when we're stopping for a more aggressive reason okay and then third which gets to your point we were able to do what uh pointy head economists like me call block fixed effects what that means is we were able to then isolate, because of those 5 million observations, we were able to isolate that looking at people who were fully compliant, who were stopped for the same reason, on the same city block in New York City. Got it.

And that 50% goes down, but it doesn't go away. And so that's the issue. So no matter what we did with the data, that race coefficient was still important. Now, most of the 50% went away. So that means there's some other things at play here, but it never fully went away, which is why I'm so confident in saying that's a place to start. I think it's hard to start with police officers when they view it as a life or death situation. Right. A place to start building trust would be on those interactions that they even themselves said folks were fully compliant. We could start there. If I were trying to manage this, I would start there and then try to grow. Hey, Roland, by the way, sort of a technique question.

When you mentioned that you had 5 million data points for New York City alone, you're describing big data. I am assuming that you're doing studies that couldn't have been done even five or six years ago. You're using new techniques of big data, sorting and slicing. And if I'm correct about that, that's very hopeful. Techniques are becoming available to us that shed light in ways that weren't available earlier. Is that right? I think that's right. I'm not a technologist, so I don't know the exact date.

But yes, I would say that years ago, we would have had to have supercomputers to be able to do this. And now we can do it on Macs. So yes, and looking towards the future right one of the things that i've been wanting to do is many of the police records that are out there are handwritten notes etc let's work together get a team of engineers go in with natural language processing algorithms and go digitize those things uh and and another point would be, we've got all this body camera footage, right?

There's all sorts of insights into data visual, not data visualization, sorry, but data imagery and how to process that data. We need the brightest folks in the world working on this problem. So I'm one of those. Roland, are you actually saying that there's something we can do about this

other than scream at each other? You know what? I've told folks protesting is not my ministry, but data is. And so, yes, I'm saying that we can do both. I'm going to choose to do the data part. Okay, so one more. I think Rob wants to, he was having a little technical. I see here on our Slack channel, Rob's ready to come back in.

But if I may ask one more question, sort of an open-ended question. So people of goodwill about now would be saying, okay, I think I understand two things. And one is that if a Harvard professor says that he and every black man he knows have been harassed or roughed up by the police, we cannot have that. We just cannot have that in America. We must do something about that. That's the first thing I think. When I say a person of goodwill, of course what I mean is me, Roland. But the second is, as best I can tell, and I'm no professional, I'm not an economist, I'm not an expert in law enforcement, but as best I can tell, the neighborhoods that are disproportionately hard, the people who are disproportionately hard hit by crimes against property and even crimes of violence are african-americans those

neighborhoods need policing in a way that suburban white neighborhoods just don't how on earth do you they seem more than intention they seem almost like opposed how do you how do you insist on training and better treatment while avoiding the so-called Ferguson effect, which as I understand it, this is also something you've looked at, that when you come down hard on police for abuse, they tend to back off, there's less policing, and the people who benefit most from policing, who need it the most, are then the worst hit. You see what I'm saying? I do.

How do you square this? I think you square it by having police who actually know people in the neighborhood. So when I grew up, I was a knucklehead, but there were actually people around that were kind of dangerous and I wasn't dangerous. I was a knucklehead. And, you know, our coaches who spent time with us, right, I played peewee football from five years old on up. Our coaches knew the difference. The folks at our church knew the difference. Many of our teachers knew the difference. Miss Blake, the assistant principal who got on all of us and would get in your face in the hallways, she knew the difference. You get my point. I think the issue is some police departments embed themselves in the community. They have repeated interactions with the same people, and so therefore can understand when there's really a dangerous moment and when there's not. That's police department A. Police department, drives around like Uber drivers in different

neighborhoods all day and doesn't really have a sense of who's whom. And so they stop anyone who they think looks in a, quote, threatening manner. B, I don't know how you solve the problem in the ways you described. A, I think there's hope. Okay. Hey, one more. more i'm sorry i'm apologizing to rob because i know he wants to come back in roland you just described coaches you were playing football churches there's a you were part of and and teachers you were part you growing up were part of a community. And that kind of community, and this is not limited to one race or ethnic group. Charles Murray's book, what was it called? Coming Apart, was on, talked about the breakdown of community, these structures that hold us together. One way it shows, of course, is that there's a lack of people who understand the

difference between boys being boys, read Knuckleheads, I'm the father of three sons, and I was a boy myself once, the difference between boys being boys and take that kid needs to burn off some energy, stick him in football, that sort of thing, and real violence. And these kinds of associations are breaking down across the country. White, Hispanic, Black, it's happening everywhere. Does your work address that? Of course, Roland, all I'm saying to you is, please solve all of America's social problems right now during this podcast. But does your work address that that at all is there hope on that front that that i think there's hope on that front and uh i have some future work that is going to address these types of issues but you are absolutely right you know if i was uh pulled over by the police as a kid i was more worried they were going to tell my

grandmother because her use of force was unprecedented. Okay. So you're right. And I think that is part of any potential solutions, right? I don't think there's a silver bullet here. There's no amount of training that's going to get us back to where we want. It is necessary, but not sufficient. So I agree with all and think that helping build communities and using resources to help build communities has to be part of the solution. Hey, I'm back. I'm sorry to have jumped off there. I got kicked off my

internet. But I've heard all of this, and now I'm even more depressed, because when I hear people say things like we're going to reinvigorate institutions, I just feel like that ain't going to happen. Maybe I'm a pessimist. But in the next year, are we looking at the Baltimore effect here? A rise in crime? A diminished police force? I mean, those are cascades that are hard to come back from. I mean, I'm familiar with the town.

I mean, I know Baltimore very well. I was born there. I had family there. Before the riots, it was getting a lot better in terms of crime and murder, and now it is Murder Town, USA. How do we stop? I understand we eventually need to rebuild institutions. We eventually need to return to a sense of a web in a community that kind of holds things together. But before we get there, which I kind of feel like is kind of an over-the-rainbow situation,

how do we keep from having a nationwide cascade into crime after the events of the past two weeks? Yeah, I don't know. I want to make two comments about it though one um we should do this on another podcast but i never said that it was going to be government that was going to develop those institutions right no no i i totally get you so i i do believe that there's a whole way of trying to solve that market failure which we could debate about okay so but that but so so let's but let's put that to the side. In terms of the crime skyrocket, look, I'm hopeful that one of the reasons that I am being so outspoken at this time right now is to try to save Black lives, frankly, is try to ensure that we don't thump our chest and demoralize the police because there's good police,

there's bad police. And the key question is, how do you root out bad police without affecting the behavior of the good police? I don't think many people have a good answer to that, but I do believe that the types of things that I have seen in police departments where they are a bit old school, they have a beat, they know people in the community, those I have seen work better than those in which it is a little bit more command and control. So I think we've got to get to that. I think if we do what we've done before, which is sump our chest, leave town, pat ourselves on the back and think we've done something, what we actually have done is endanger the people in those communities. And that's what the data actually tell us. That's not

Roland. That's what the data actually tells us. Professor Fryer, James Lalix here in Minneapolis. Since you have education in your bio, I've got to ask you a couple of questions about that before we let you go. And thank you for your time. One of the institutions that needs to be rebuilt is education. It would be great if we could rely on things other than the government to do so, but it's firmly in the hands of the government. Public schools are the way or the means through which these students pass. And when you add a politicized curricula, diminished, you know, restorative justice for discipline, a population that may be disinclined for whatever reason to learn. I mean, you have a horrible Gordian knot that seems to be undissolvable. What's the first thing we do to make sure that education provides not just babysitting for an awful lot of people, but a true path towards personal and economic success

and participation as a citizen? Wow. You got 30 seconds. That was an amazing question. Look, I think we actually, on education, part of the real frustration is that we have really good models of what to do. We just don't have the political courage to actually do them. taken kids who are high poverty, high single family households, high crime areas, and gotten those students to do remarkable things in the classroom. And then people have taken that and tried to distill it down and inject that then into traditional public schools that were failing. And lo and behold, what we found was that when you do that, into traditional public schools that were failing. And lo and behold, what we found was that when you do that, the traditional public schools who were failing also do well. Okay. So I really feel like on the education front, we know where to start. We know

how to make a big impact. We just don't have the political courage to do so because we're in a very polarized society. And that is the most troubling piece. It's not that we don't know the political courage to do so because we're in a very polarized society. And that is the most troubling piece. It's not that we don't know what to do. Last question, and let's go back to McDonald's. A lot of people sneer and point and snicker at McDonald's and say that it's just a carbuncle in society, et cetera. But a lot of these places actually serve a lot of important functions for the community, never mind the fact that, you know, there's the food, there's the jobs, there's the Wi-Fi for people who don't otherwise have it. There's, you know, they may say, oh, it's just all part of one huge conglomerate and they burn it down, they got insurance. No, it may be an independent businessman who owns it. are we going to get back to a point where actually we don't sneer at these as burger flipper jobs, but see them as a way of instilling perhaps for the first time,

discipline, skills of communication, time management, and all the rest of it? I mean, isn't it time to just say, yes, great, McDonald's jobs are good, and perhaps we need more of them? What James is saying here, Roland, is that when you went from McDonald's to Harvard, it was a step down. Well, let me tell you, I got Employee of the Month at McDonald's. I've never gotten such a thing at Harvard. Look, I think McDonald's and all sorts of companies can be a part of what you described. I don't want to limit it to McDonald's. I prefer coding.

Right. You can do coding anywhere. Software engineers are everywhere in the world. I just wanted to hire a front end software engineer and they were in Argentina. Right. And so coding is not something where you need to know the latest in geometry or linear algebra. Coding is a language that anyone can learn. And I'd start there.

Let's have coding jobs. Let's have McDonald's. Let's have lots of options and let folks choose their comparative advantage. If you want to be the Secretary of Education in the next administration, just simply say you are in favor of replacing calculus and algebra with coding, and you will find yourself born to that position on a wave of popular sentiment and glee, because everybody knows we gritted our teeth through those things, and they had no bearing on our lives whatsoever. So yes, yes to coding, down to calculus.

I'm good at coding. I was selling sandwiches in the hallway during geometry. I can take that. All right. Well, next time we're on, we'll talk HTML5 and CSS. We'll have a good time and it'll boil the pants off of everybody. Professor Fryer, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Oh, thanks for having me. This is- Roland, a real pleasure. A pleasure. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye. You know, the thing, when I mentioned McDonald's, I didn't want to take up more of his time,

but before the pandemic, McDonald's spent all of his time and money installing touchscreens. And now this sort of idea of walking into a place and touching a public thing with the hand that you use to put the food in your mouth.

I mean, I was knuckle was knuckle touching those things beforehand but now uh no i'm i kind of like going up to there and speaking to a human being and staring with my open jaw at the menu of options before i get the same thing i always get um you want a secret guys do you like onions on your hamburgers i do i do sure but if you want the freshest possible hamburger, ask for it with onions on the side or no onions at all, because then they will have to make it fresh. That's a slew. That's an interesting solution. And it's nice. But you know, sometimes getting...

What do you get there? What is your McDonald's order? I actually just get a couple of hamburgers and a medium fries. And I used to have this debate with them, because they had small fries, extra large and i would ask for medium and they'd say sir there is no medium there's small extra large and extra large and i would say that medium was the one in the middle isn't it i'll have that one so you were the cranky i'm that guy they see you coming up the stuff the walkway they think oh man can't we get one of the kids in the playland just knock him down yeah i check it i check it up a little bit and say, I'll take the venti size.

But they stop it. Roll in their eyes like, yes, sir, your rebellion has been noted. Serious point, semi-serious point. The best, if you ask me, what's the tastiest, what food have you most enjoyed in all your life, my answer is a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke. Really? A Big Mac? Yeah. And I know your answer will be something at Lutece in New York or some fancy restaurant. I do not understand.

I mean, I do not. I'm not a big fan. Put it this way. I'm not really. Of McDonald's generally? Of McDonald's hamburgers. I don't really. I mean, I do not. I'm not a big fan. Put it this way. I'm not really. Of McDonald's generally? Of McDonald's hamburgers. I don't really. They're okay.

They're fine. Like if I'm, you know, driving on the road, they're perfectly fine. The every, almost every single breakfast sandwich is a triumph. The bacon egg cheese biscuit is a fantastic dish. And McDonald's in China used to have that available all day. Because Chinese people eat eggs all day. It's not a breakfast item for them. And I always wondered when McDonald's was going to wake up to the fact that at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, a sausage

egg cheese biscuit or bacon egg cheese biscuit is the best thing ever. And they finally did. But it took them a while to figure it out. And it is, in fact, a great, great, great... If you make it at home, it's not better.

You can't... You simply cannot improve on it. Between the two of them, I almost never choose a McDonald's hamburger. That's me. But you also can't do any better than McDonald's fries. McDonald's fries are the best fries. That is true.

It was all part of Ray Kroc's master plan when he laid it out in the 50s, is that they would start having breakfast in 1975, then they would wait 15 years before they gave you the option of having it in the afternoon. I mean, he's rolled, he had a vision. No, are you making that up, truly? Absolutely so, I am. What I'm not making up, though, is the fact that during the pandemic, people would Grubhub or DoorDash McDonald's, which I found interesting, because you got to eat it right when it's there. I mean, you, right off the grill, if it's sitting in some insulated bag for a little while, it's just going to be soggy, and it's going to not resemble food, and you're going to be disgusted by this thick bolus of carb and pseudo-meat.

It happens. There's no fresh food available, so what can you do? You can't go to the grocery store. That's out of the question. There we go. Somebody finally picked up on what I was aiming for five minutes ago. Unfortunately, you started an actual conversation, which had an interesting point. That does not count as a

segue interruption. This does. No, I started with an introduction that you mistook for a conversation and joined in. But that's fine. That's a humpback on your part, James. My segues are so interesting. They actually are their own kinds of conversation.

And them's the breaks, my friend. If you play with fire, you get burned. Anyway, have you burned your steak lately? Have you tried to cook something you didn't do a very good job at? Have you got one of those kits where you got to chop everything and it sounds fine? Oh, the family can be involved, but it takes an hour and a half. You know, there's lots of food options out there for getting stuff to your table. And sometimes people think, oh, if I want to eat better, that means hours and hours of research of recipes, trips to the grocery store, multiple trips, hours of monotonous meal prep. No, no, no, no, no. No. Freshly. If you understand what freshly is, all those things I just described are off the table. They understand that food

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things, the microwave brings to life what's already there and what's already fresh. Imagine, better for you, golden oven fried chicken, creamy springtime risotto, and a fall-apart tender beef brisket. There's just a few of the 30-plus health-conscious options to choose from. Personally, the last batch we got had an Indian number in it, which was just delicious. It wasn't like blow-your-head-off spicy. It was very flavorful and rich. And there's a buffalo chicken, and you're thinking, again, what are you? You only like the spicy stuff?

I like spicy stuff, but this isn't overwhelmingly kill-you spicy. It's really subtle and it's good and it's fresh and it's quick. One and a half million satisfied customers have already joined up and they've skipped the shopping, they've skipped the prepping, they've skipped the cooking, and they've skipped the cleanup. You can be one of them too. Freshly is offering our listeners, that would be you, $40 off your first two orders at freshly.com slash ricochet. That's Freshly.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Freshly for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, before we get back to

what is or is not the collapse of Western civilization, this is number 4999999.9. And when 500 finally rolls around, I know you guys are going to be just besotted with memories, warm flood of nostalgic emotions will flood you flood your brains uh what what comes to mind actually when i say you two have done 500 of these i joined later just it's a fog of disbelief i've told i've told the story before but rob when we rob said well while we're still working on ricochet because it takes something to design a website i to me we were starting a website we were starting ricochet.com

and rob said well you know there's this new thing new thing podcasts and we should start recording one he said we should do it every week and oh no what a waste of time nobody will listen once a month and as usual as anyone who's listened to these podcasts will know by now, Rob wins the arguments. So we started doing it once a week. And, you know, I'm still not convinced. No, me neither. Less and less. Actually, the reality is that it was Blue Yeti, Scott Emmergut.

Was it Scott's idea? He wasn't even part of the organization at the time. He was just saying, you guys, this is not going to work unless you have a podcast. You've got to have a podcast. I didn't know that. So he put you up to talking into it. I would say, though, what's interesting about it was that we started, the impulse was eight years. No, we weren't looking at eight years.

We were like four to eight years of Barack Obama. That's right. Coming up, a complicated part, a complicated time for the Republican Party to reform and rethink itself. Be interesting to have conversations about

that with people who are actively engaged in it. And looking back, I don't think about the big stuff we talked about looking back i think about the stuff that we thought was big stuff that actually was like i can barely remember but at the time seemed like well this is going to be something we talked about for years right never yeah and of course we were completely wrong that that is ultimately what you have to remember when you go through these events is that it's often the thing on the sidelines that is you know it seems it seems like a small speck, but it's actually a train coming your way.

And whatever it is you're presently occupied with and presently fighting about and presently concerned with just ain't it, you know, ultimately. That ain't it so i'm trying to think if i have a residue what stays with me of over 499.9999 podcasts and it's of course i'm surprised that we're still at it i began to become surprised now i now i sort of take it for granted but i it surprised me that we were able to get important, impressive people to join us on the air. Senators, governors, and Harvard economists we just had rolling on. But I have to say, what I look forward to about it is it is a kind of rolling, it's a rolling conversation among friends. It's a kind of display of, what a pompous thing to say, display of friendship. But I just like

talking to the two of you guys. About an hour a week is plenty. Maybe that's a little carried away. At the uppermost limit, I think. I think our audience feels the same way. Also, I wonder whether this form I don't know if it's at its best when there's a pressing, urgent issue and we have an expert on.

I mean, I feel like we do a good job with that. But in that respect, we're a little bit like everybody else, right? Everybody else does that. It seems like, I don't i'm i put it this way i'm more surprised when we're looking at a week when well not much happened and you know we have a maybe an author on or or or sometimes we just we don't have any guests at all and i know this is going to be i don't know what are we going to talk about and there's always something and some of those shows are the best for me anyway i think maybe our listeners may beg to differ but some of those shows seem like to me

like okay that that's a podcast form which should be this kind of long looping snaky conversation that starts in one place and ends in another place and everybody involved is kind of surprised at where it went two things stand out for me one One of them is how years ago, years ago, we used to do the big story of the next week. Oh, that's right. And we dropped it because it was apparent that none of us had any predicted qualities whatsoever. Wrong. Right. And our inability to gauge the national mood and the way things were going was just on display.

Right. Stunning, right. So that blow to our credibility, I think, was quickly done away with and wisely so. The second would have been the anniversary show. Was it 250 that we did in Los Angeles? Yeah.

Didn't Pat come to that? USC, yeah. Pat came to that. Dennis Prager was on the panel. And we're staying in this hotel that was under renovation. There was this plastic all on the highway or in the hallways and everything. And we went to Rob's house. And what I remember most about that

and Rob's great hospitality and his fantastic whiskey bourbon collection was Doc J. And showing up with a jeroboam of Grey Goose and toilet paper in Rob's house, which was a fun moment. There was a lot of fun. I didn't invite them. So they proved their value as guests by vandalizing my home.

And Mickey was there. And I think Connor Friesdorf was there. Yes, yes. Didn't Orson Bean show up as well? Andrew Breitbart was there. Yes, it was fantastic. So that was fun. That was the inner party. But the next day, when we did this thing, and

we held this wonderful little audience that had paid actual folding money to show up there, and we got to meet and talk to them afterwards. And even though that was 250 ago, I still remember that because I see them still out there. Here we are just chattering to ourselves and scattered across the country, but they're there and they listen and they value their time and give it to us. And for that, I'm incredibly grateful. And I thank them for that, for giving us their time and their money. Let's not forget that. And for that, I'm incredibly grateful. And I thank them for that, for giving us their time

and their money. Let's not forget that. And their money. That's the important part that keeps Ricochet going. We'd like to think that they're still learning something from all this. Maybe not from us, but from the wise people that we interview. And speaking of learning at home... Oh, I'm sorry. I was on mute. Yes, I was about

to interrupt. Yes. I don't know. Yeah, not even... Don't stop for me. I was on mute. Yes, I was about to interrupt. Yes. I don't know. Yeah, not even don't stop for me. I was not prepared. Silence may be violence, but sometimes. When it comes to learning at home, obviously I'm going into commercial here, but I got something to say about that. The educational process at home, as far as I've seen, has been a miserable failure. I've had two kids here. One, Rotaria, our exchange student, and the other, my daughter, who, you know, ruinously expensive tuition at Boston University, is now zooming in the basement, and it's just not the same. It's just not the same. And part of it, a lot of it, most of it, is because the people doing it don't know how to do it. I mean, Rotaria, who's in high school, had a Photoshop class, and she, at this point,

does not know how to use Photoshop. The teacher gave her a couple assignments, said it didn't matter if you do them or not, you get an A. I mean, it's just this desultory thing that the educational experience has really shown that they can't do this online because they don't know how to do it. Now, homeschooling at home for a lot of people has been quite an adjustment, and as I've told you, you know, it's been hit and miss here. Now, how are you and your child adjusting? Have you adjusted? It's times like these that inspire people to check out alternatives, check out the professionals, check out people who've been doing this for a long time and know how to do it online. And that would be Laurel Springs. Now, online learning

might be new for your family, but Laurel Springs has been doing this for nearly 30 years. As the experts in online learning, Laurel Springs has the tools and the curriculum your child needs to maintain their learning, unhindered by whatever the future may hold. Their flexible learning programs, which are designed for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, offer challenging and diverse courses, including summer courses. So they're not going to let their brains go to rot this summer. They can sign up for Laurel Springs and still learn. At Laurel Springs, they're accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and Cognia, which means their transcripts are recognized by colleges and universities worldwide. Register your child at laurelsprings.com slash ricochet today and receive a waived registration

fee. Learn how online learning actually can be great if the people who are doing it know how to do it. And that's Laurel Springs. laurelsprings.com slash ricochet for your wave registration fee. laurelsprings.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to Laurel Springs for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, guys, let's close with this. We were talking before about, you know, all the red guards and the struggle sessions and the rest of it. You seem to have three phases.

One, you have the righteous anger, which was completely righteous over what happened to George Floyd. Then you have the opportunists and the ideologues who flow into it and try to exploit the chaos. And the third seems to be what we're going through now, which is not violent. Nothing's burning. But the really good ideological um actors are at play here and maximizing the situation for all they can get are they go is is there overreach here when we're talking about getting rid of paw patrol and making sure that there's a whoopee warning in front of gone with the wind right faulty towers has removed has removed uh more of the episodes episodes. Everything in the past is being picked apart. And it's not because they, I don't think it's really because they find an objection to that.

I think it's because they enjoy showing that they have the power to do these things, which is a lesson for everybody. Answer him, Peter. No, I let Rob take the easy ones. I really don't know i i do feel like we as a country tend to like go overboard and then exhaust ourselves like infants you know like i'm tired of this toy um i'm surprised what i'm surprised by is that how different these things are because we hear from so many people uh and they and their opinions are always surprising. We just heard from a Harvard, if I told you a Harvard economist was saying something about policing in 2020,

you'd kind of roll your eyes and say, yeah, I bet I know what a Harvard economist is saying. Then we have a Harvard economist on saying pretty much the opposite of what we expected but close to but a very very interesting a very very interesting analysis based on data and also personal experience so it's hard to take the good the bad it it's it is i guess i don't know the answer to the question. I really don't. But I suspect that the more we let people speak, even if they're saying things that we disagree with, and for those of us on the center-right, mostly that means people on the center-right who tend to be the ones being shouted down, the more surprising and provoking the world is. And I think that's probably a better, that is the only optimistic straw that I can grab. An example is a Ricochet member, Michelle Kerr, who she and I

engage in like every now and then in an email exchange. She's got a good podcast, by the way. Oops. Well, apparently civil disorder has taken over New York. The power's off. Internet's gone. We lost Rob. But he did mention before that he was a post from somebody on Ricochet, a communication with Ricochet. And you know what? That brings us to... The James Lylex Member Post of the Week!

And if it's that good at number 500, imagine what it's going to be at number 1000. My favorite post of the week, and there was so much stuff on the member feed this, Ed Ricochet, which you can join cheap, I mean cheap, and get access to all kinds of interesting conversations about politics and music and art and family and everything. It's all the world is contained. Multitudes are contained in the member feed. But Gary Robbins had a post called My Republican Party in which he copied a picture of presidents. It's Ronald Reagan looking like they're all playing cards.

Ronald Reagan is looking cheerful and happy and laughing, talking to Lincoln, whose back is to us. There's one Bush to the left. There's another Bush leaning over Reagan. There's Ike in the background and Teddy Roosevelt. And it's an interesting piece of patriotic icon kitch. And there's a whole genre of this stuff. But what I loved about it was not only did it get into a little dust-up between Gary and some people on the Trump side of the equation, which is always fun because you get the depth and breadth of the conservative side now.

But it also had people posting other paintings by this guy, which show the Democratic presidents in similar postures, and another painting from the same artist in the same style in the same setting, which had Trump there with Reagan and the rest of it. So what turned out to be just sort of, you know, here are the presidents I like. I like this vision, this sort of mid-century masculinity. It's got something intrinsically American about it, turned into something much larger that nobody could predict, that other paintings and criticism of the art styles and the rest of it, which is just pure, pure ricochet. Do we have Rob back, by the way? Yes, yes. Yes, we do. Yes, we do.

All right. So let me end with this then. As far as when it comes to the question that I had about these people exercising power just because they enjoy it. One of the most disheartening things, and I don't want to end on a down note, was that there were three examples this week of female 30-something university arts professors who were giving advice and advocating on the destruction of monuments. It was really quite remarkable, and doing so with this flippant sort of cheer. One of them was telling people how to tear down the obelisk in Birmingham, just sort of winkingly saying, don't do this to the Washington Monument. Another one in England was talking about which household chemicals you could use to deface the statue of Churchill.

American, too. Thanks for that, Yank. And another, I believe, was talking about the best way to topple the Columbus statue. And what sort of was chilling about this was that these are the people, all of whom were in the arts curation profession, and they have no connection whatsoever to the culture that they're supposedly supposed to be curating. They don't. As a matter of fact, they are blithely indifferent to the destruction of art if they believe that that art has the improper meaning or the improper function. And it makes you feel like the people in the upper echelons of the Educational Cultural Preservation Society have no such interest at all. They're perfectly happy scouring everything back to year zero. They're perfectly happy throwing everything

on the trash heap as long as they get to keep their lithos. But they don't want to defend it because they find Western culture to be indefensible. A little bit too alarmist? No, no, it's not too alarmist at all. But I was kind of hoping to take this cheerful mood from the post of the weekends and sort of launched into the weekend with that. And you just stepped all over it. Then we'll do this. Did somebody have a birthday this week wait can i can i try to turn this into something okay good all right take it birthday boy

um it is always i mean the oldest not the oldest but the 20th century was filled on late in 19th centuries filled with arguments about art that art shouldn't be beautiful it doesn't have to be beautiful it's not about being beautiful. It's about what it means and what it's trying to instruct. You said the 19th century? Yeah, late 19th century, sure. Late 19th century, yeah. Well, go on.

And the 20th century, right? So, 100 plus years. So, it's always been this way. It's terrible, and we hate it, but people have been saying it's terrible and have been hating it for 100 years. The good news is the people, the actual consumers of art, tend to not pay attention to it. It's like that great George Bernard Shaw moment where he's turning to somebody and saying that a comedy. Someone said to George Bernard Shaw, they saw his most recent play and they thought it was hilarious

and he says comedy is the sugar with which i coat the bitter pill of socialism for my audience to swallow and whoever it was i forgot who's talking to you said ah well then how clever of your audience to lick the sugar off and leave the pill intact and that i think is sort of what happens with art people like what they like because it makes them laugh or makes them cry or makes them think or makes them just it's just beautiful on the wall and um that is ultimately what their criteria are. And the theorists are almost always wrong. It's an interesting way of putting it, and I agree with you in many respects. But in others, when you have the Western cultural tradition abandoned 100 years ago, and we can argue about whether or not late 19th century, you know, the Impressionists, the Expressionists, the rest of them,

they were devolving the forms of art, but there wasn't the same sort of rejection as there was after World War I, when everything that was cultural of the West was seen to be, you know, that which got us to this point. And so you had all the surrealism, you know, you had, you exploded into a variety of subtraction that had no relevance to the actual world that we inhabit. And you can say, yeah, that doesn't matter, that stuff in the walls of the museum, the people still like the paintings of the dogs or the poker or the presidents playing cards. But the fact of the matter is, is that in every major American city stands a library that was built by some Dutch architect whose ability to create an ugly carbuncle was unrivaled. And so the people who divorced us from Western traditions, you remember

the clap that we had when Donald Trump said he wanted federal buildings to be classical. Those people put into these, it put into cities, these monstrosities, which have a deleterious effect to the spirit and the street. And while, yeah,

you know, I see what Rob's saying. There's no way to lick the sugar off that library. And I want that to be the title of this piece of this podcast. Yeah. That's a style question though i'm not right i mean you didn't start by talking about style you started talking about people art art uh advocates of art who don't care if something's beautiful uh who only care that it teaches you and so it teaches you the proper uh lessons to learn um yeah i mean i think a lot of

that 70s you know brutalist architecture is terrible. It's not my style. It's not my taste. And I think it probably created urban spaces fit only for angry demonstrations, as my architecture professor Vincent Scully used to say. And I much prefer the postmodern style. I much prefer stuff, like ornament. I like

that. I like going to Paris. You see this pretty city and the boulevards. Yeah, sure. Style's one thing. But even those people who were radical at the time, radical stylists, didn't say, this is supposed to teach you. It's not supposed to be beautiful. They thought it was beautiful. Paul Rudolph thought his work was beautiful. And some people thought it was beautiful, too. I disagree with them. But it's not the same thing as saying the only art that's valuable is art that teaches you about diversity, which is where we are now. That's where we are now, yes. Well, we know this much.

We would rather that the iconoclastic movement in the Byzantine Empire had not taken place, that a lot of gorgeous art was destroyed because it was thought to be religiously incorrect. And then we had after the Reformation, King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The statues are only visible above a certain level because that was the level the then iconoclasts couldn't reach as they rampaged around England destroying beautiful... Those were not high moments. Yeah. we we really would those were not high moments and uh yeah and we would really rather that that had not happened and i i would really rather that those three art experts had just gone back to finishing their doctoral dissertations whoever they are whatever they thought they were doing um but somebody cheer me up. Rob, happy birthday.

Yeah. Uh, I feel like Debbie Downer right now. I think, yeah, birthdays. I'm a one year older, you know, I'm closer to the inevitable stroke. That cheers me. Oh, I see. Okay. That's good.

That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're closer to the inevitable stroke, look in the bright side, it's possible you won't survive it. And if you, because if you do, you'll be in an immobile state, and it'll just be horrible, and it'll be dreadful. So continue to live your life as you have, working for the best possible stroke ever. Now, that's not really a cherry on number 500.

I have it. I have it. Rob, what did you drink on your birthday? Oh, that's a good question. Here's what I did in an act of shocking civil disobedience not really for me but uh but not even really civil disobedience because the uh i guess the ferguson effect is in in effect now a little bit in new york city i walked down to dante which is a local italian restaurant makes really really great negronis and i got one and I walked around with it. And in New York City, we call that now walk tales.

Oh! Take out a drink, and then you can walk around. And I took a, like, walk, and I walked by a bunch of cops on break, and they're smoking cigars. So I was like, wait. I had my cigar. I waved to them. They waved to me.

It's like small town. And I sipped my cigar. I waved to them. They waved to me. It's like small town. And I sip my cocktail. On the street, like a common drunk. That was a pretty good birthday. What goes into a Negroni? Just give me the ingredients. It's a fantastic cocktail.

It's divided in thirds. It's a third sweet vermouth, a third Campari, although you can make it with another bitter. And a third Campari, although you can make it with another bitter, and a third gin. You can only sip that slowly, I assume. It's a wonderful cocktail. It's actually one of

the greatest. I would go this far. Is that shaken with ice or how does it mix? Stir it or shake it. It depends on how cold you want it and whether you're a fancy-pantsy. If you're fancy-pantsy, you stir it. If you're like, give me the Negr you want it and whether you're a fancy-pantsy. If you're fancy-pantsy, you stir it. If you don't, if you're like, give me the Negroni, you shake it, because shaking it just gets it colder faster.

I'm going to say this, I don't know. So maybe if you're a member of Ricochet, and if you're not, you should join, and you know something, you should let me know. I think it is definitely a foreign cocktail, and I would have to say it is the best. Most cocktails are not foreign to say it is the best. Most cocktails are not foreign.

American cocktails are the best. And this is a foreign one that I believe is the finest of the foreign cocktails. Well, and with a happy vision of being outdoors here as well in Minnesota, we've opened up. It is possible to go to a restaurant again if it's outside. So we went to a rooftop restaurant to celebrate the graduation of Rotaria. We made a reservation. We stood in line with all the people. And everyone on the staff had masks.

They all had masks. They all had gloves. But frankly, we wouldn't have cared if they tottered around in deep-sea diving suits, whatever. The fact is, we're here. We're out in the open. And we're enjoying food prepared by somebody else and brought to us in the open. And it was marvelous. And what I liked about it the most, I think, was an hour per table.

That was it, because they had to hose everything down with bleach afterwards, I presume. So you got there. Your menu was accessed by a QR code on your phone. Your food came up like that, which shows, hey, they can actually get it out quicker than they told you. And the bill came like that. And then after an hour, no endless chit-chat and pushing around the crumbs of your dessert, you go. So what was fun about it was sitting outside and feeling the breeze of a beautiful Minnesota June day and having great food in front of us and realizing that we're back. We're doing this again. We are out.

We are in the open. That time has passed, and this has returned. And then it began to rain. But even that was okay. Even the drops, even the cold drops in the back of your neck were something that made you think that you're glad to experience this again. Peter, you're not open there yet, are you? We know you have to run. So as you go out, tell us when's the next time you're glad to experience this again. Peter, you're not open there yet, are you? We know you have to run. So as you go out, tell us when's the next time you're going to be.

We are open. The restaurants have opened, and you have to stand in line and put on a mask when you go up to order, this, that, and the other. But it was just lovely to sit outdoors and have a burger from Kirk's Burgers, a place that's stood where it is since 1948, which in California is really, really old. And what a pleasure it was for the family to go get the first burgers of the summer. And gentlemen, it has been an honor and pleasure serving you, as they said,

as they put down their instruments in the Titanic before it finally disappeared beneath the waves, for 499.999999 episodes. And isn't it remarkable that the amount of time that we've actually spent talking about COVID has been about, I think, maybe 37 seconds or something like that? Oh, yeah, today. Right. Because it's over. It'll be back. It's here. But it's over. But it's not. But it is. But nobody believes anybody anymore. All the institutions have fallen from positions of trust. We're on our own.

And in Ricochet Podcast, 1,000 will be coming to you from whatever fragmented state remains after the inevitable dissolution of the United States, which, no, I don't believe is going to happen. But I do believe that you are, you are, you are going to go to Apple iTunes or Apple Intunes, Apple and Music. Sorry. Long day. And you're going to give us five stars. You're just going to do it. That, or Apple Intunes, Apple Music. Sorry, long day. And you're going to give us five stars. You're just going to do it.

That's all there is to it. And anything else I should say, guys? Next week? No. Got to tell them that the podcast was brought to you by Nutrafol, by Laurel Springs, and by Freshly. Support them for supporting us. And now, I'm done,

and we say we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. See you next week. Next week. When I wake up, well, I know I'm going to be. I'm going to be the man who wakes up next to you. When I go out, yeah, I know I'm going to be. I'm going to be the man who goes along with you.

If I get drunk, well, I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you. If I get drunk, well, I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who gets drunk next to you. And if I heaver, yeah, I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who's heavering to you. But I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more To meet a man who walked a thousand miles to fall down at your door But I'm walking, yes I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who's walking hard for you And when the money comes in for the work I do I'll pass almost every penny on to you When I come home

I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who Comes back home to you And if I broke Well I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who's going over you But I would walk 500 miles And I would walk 500 more

If the man walked a thousand miles To fall down at your door Ricochet. Join the conversation. I'm gonna be the man who's lonely without you And when I'm dreaming Well I know I'm gonna dream I'm gonna dream about the time when I'm with you When I go out Well I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you And when I come home

Yes I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who comes back home with you I'm gonna be the man who comes back home with you. I'm gonna be the man who's coming home with you. Yeah, I'm here. I'm here. This is proof, by the way, that Rob Long is rich. When I lived in New York, my apartment was so small I could never have sounded that far away from the mic. Oh, I was literally sitting, I have a stand-up desk. It's tiny, and I was sitting right below it. So it's a little more.

It has nothing to do with the size of apartment. Although, you know, it's New York Apartments Go. It's not tiny.