The Ricochet Podcast - Lies

Episode Date: February 5, 2015

We’re telling tales this week, tales about the effectiveness of vaccinations ( with our guest Dr. George Savage), we parse Brian Williams’ tales of the Iraq War, about the minimum wage in San Francisco, about the evils of porn (h/t Ricochet member Merina Smith), even about Harper Lee’s new novel. It’s another Ricochet Podcast, and that’s the whole truth. Music from this week’s episode: White Liar... Source

Hello, everyone. I'm not going to get I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with John Gabriel sitting in for Peter Robinson. Rob Long is here and I'm James Lilacs. Our guest today is Dr. George Savage on vaccinations. And we shoot that Brian Williams story right out of the air. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Yes, this is the Ricochet Podcast number 248. It's brought to you by CultureRater.com, where pop culture matters. You've got to check that out.

And it's brought to you by Harry's Shave. You know, Valentine's Day is coming up, and nuzzling your beloved with a mug full of stubble isn't going to cut it. Those old holidays are over, but for the next one, well, here's a chance to start fresh and make smart decisions. Overpaying for drugstore razors is a bad habit you should leave behind. Make the smart switch to Harry's Blades. And we'll tell you a little bit more about that later,

as well as how you can save money on shaving your face. But first, sitting in for Peter Robinson is Troy Sinek. But Troy Sinek can't be with us, so sitting in for Troy is John Gabriel. And we welcome you to the podcast. Again, my friend, how are you? I am doing great. How are you guys doing? Just dandy.

And, of course, sitting in for Peter Robinson also is Rob Long. I'm always there. But, you know, we should say sitting in for Troy is ill. But I don't know. John, this is like – were you – did you do the podcast last week or the week before? Week before. Yeah, two weeks ago. I don't know.

Maybe we have to like shake up the podcast cast a little bit. Gabriel is pretty good. Just between you and me, James. I was going to say if you want me to resign on the spot. Yeah. No, no. Absolutely not. I don't want me to resign on the spot. Yeah. No, no. Absolutely not. No, no.

I don't want you to resign until I interrupt your segue. That's the traditional James Lyle's resignation point. I would like to say if you're listening to this podcast and you are a member of Rico very close to the high tens of thousands number and you are not a member of Ricochet, please go to Ricochet.com and check it out. Don't go to Ricochet.com and say I have to join. Just go check it out. I have a good friend who runs a gigantic web business called Twitter and he said, the biggest problem on Twitter, the biggest problem on the internet in general are the trolls, is the nastiness, is the sort of general ugliness of the conversation and the interactions, and just how horrible the things can get between

people when they don't know each other. I've never met each other in person. And I thought to myself, we do not have that problem at Ricochet. We have solved that problem at Ricochet. If you are interested in like-minded conversation, even if you just want to read, ricochet.com is the place for you. It's civilized. We figured it out. And we figured it out because we are conservatives and we understand that if you feel like you have ownership of something, then you don't mess it up. So members of Ricochet pay a nominal fee and that's what keeps the conversation clean and interesting and witty and smart and thoughtful and civil instead of a disgusting swamp like the entire rest of the internet. So if you go to Ricochet.com, check it out.

If it's for you, we'd love to have you. We understand if it's not for you, it's not for everybody. But it's only for you, it's not for everybody, but it's only for the special people. So decide if you're special and if you are, join Ricochet.com. How's that? You know the CEO of Twitter? I do. I do. Nice guy. Smart guy.

It would be interesting to find out if Twitter could possibly identify and ban or use some reverse engineered electronic signal to kill everybody in ISIS who's using Twitter to praise them for their ingenuity in figuring out why it is Quranically correct to kill a guy by fire. When you realize you have this vast global information technology system that's being used by, and I don't want to say savages, because savages would pick up a smartphone and just stab at it and then throw it away because it's magic and voodoo. These are not savages.

These are intelligent people who are just irredeemably evil. And so when you look at the people twittering congratulations for ISIS for being able to find a justification in their faith for burning this guy alive and then burying him under rubble, the only thing you have to ask is if you look in that video of that monstrous act. You didn't look at that. Did you look at that, James? No, I didn't.

But if you did and you studied it friend by friend, where would you find Brian Williams? Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. Well, wait. Before we get to Brian Williams, I want to – I was – I have to phrase this carefully because I don't – I mean – and I know that we're sort of people who listen to Rick and Jay podcasts and us, we're among friends. But I still want to say it carefully. It could have happened in a – for us, for the civilized world, in a – in the context of horrible things is for ISIS to overstep as they did and to brutally – brutally, I mean savagely and with an uncivilized kind of caveman-like horror kill a Jordanian. This is what has to happen in the Muslim world.

The king of Jordan and the leaders of the Muslim world need to declare war, real war on ISIS and they need to actually fly missions and they need to bomb them and they need to create a war and kill them. It's – that's the only way it's going to be solved. It's not going to be solved by Americans flying planes. It's not going to be solved by American bombs. It just isn't. It's only going to be solved by what is essentially going to be a civil war in the

Muslim world. And there are nicer ways to put it probably but but that's what it's going to take. And there is something – I mean it's all going to turn – I'm sure it's all going and does the right thing and is acting in the right way like the king of Jordan. So that's all I want to say. I never thought I would have said that. But there is something about the Jordanians. The Jordanians are very practical people. They don't really have any oil and they're just sort of stuck there and they've managed to survive for a long time in that region.

So there you go. And the leader of Egypt as well about a month earlier had finally had enough with ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood and things like that. So it is cheering and this is really what led to the Anbar awakening in Iraq was it wasn't – obviously our forces, our troops did a great job working with the locals but they just got sick of al-Qaeda in Iraq. They're like enough already. Who are these savages?

But it helps to have an army, right? Oh, exactly. Absolutely. But I think just the fact that the neighbors of ISIS are just finally saying enough is enough. When you see them bragging about learning how to advance the technological advantage by learning how to burn people. I was going to call it medieval, but this is – you said it's caveman stuff. This is prehistoric. Yeah, it's prehistoric.

It doesn't make it fashionable just because, hey, now we learned how to Instagram burning people alive. So it is very heartening to see Jordan just basically dedicate their lives to eradicating these people. Yeah, and I think to go back to James' question, it's like – I suspect that there is a way probably ultimately a way to figure out – I don't know if you could figure sort of – what they do is they just stack data in big stacks and they keep cross-referencing it until suddenly the docs are connected and point to one jihadist they can identify. is only going to be 25% of the solution and 75% of the solution is going to be King of Jordan getting the weapons from us because we've expedited weapons, weapons sales to him or weapons transfers or whatever the official term is, and using them on his now enemies. And I think waterboarding is the least of their concerns, the jihadists. I think it might get slightly more painful than that. Yeah, exactly. The reason they burned the guy alive was not because they're cavemen and barbarians.

It's because they were seeking to send a very specific message. They chose that followed by burying him under rubble because it was an analog of what he did to them by dropping fire from the sky and then blowing things up. So this is a message that these guys – you can say, well, it's not Islamic. It's a twisted, warped version of it, but it's a very textually literal version of it, and that is the message that they're trying to send. Now, the question is whether or not Jordan has sufficient ability to do so. Former CIA number two was on the talk shows this weekend a couple of days ago saying it's going to take 100,000 – well, I was going to say 100,000 boots on the ground,

but that would be 200,000. 100,000, you know, two per. Yeah. You need people occupying the same space and pushing the other people out. You can't just do it from the air. And we have a president who is absolutely not ever, period, A, going to do it, or B, bring our forces back up to the level where we could do it if we wanted.

But that may be the right thing. I mean, that may be the right thing. The problem with our fight against ISIS has been that it's our fight against ISIS. And there's something weird and wrong, I think, about a country, our country, freaking out every time, hysterically freaking out every time a single person from our nation, a single American citizen who is in some, for some reason in Syria or in Iraq or in wherever,

being beheaded on YouTube. It's terrible. It's terrible. But we are a big, big country. We have huge, huge, huge priorities, and that's not one of them. And sending in 100,000 American troops to sort of stomp around there and just create more trouble doesn't – to essentially solve a problem that's not even our problem doesn't seem right. It seems more right for us to say to our friend, the King of Jordan, hey, listen.

You've got a problem with the cockroaches. You probably need some extermination equipment. We've got plenty. We can send it to you. The Jordanians have a very with the cockroaches. You probably need some extermination equipment. We've got plenty. We can send it to you. The Jordanians have a very, very good army. The Jordanians actually have, depending on who you ask, either the best or the second best intelligence service in the region next to Mossad. Even Mossad, some Mossad people I actually spoke to, praised the Jordanian intelligence service thinking, well, they're a little bit better than we are because they can kind of move around. The problem for Jordan now is they've been scrupulously neutral for so long.

They've been kind of playing both sides just to stay alive for so long that now, of course, the clock has run out and they have to declare a position and if the king of Jordan is going to put on a flight suit and they're going to start flying missions, that's where the fight should be. The fight should be between Muslims. It should be between the Muslim leaders of modernity and civilization and those that belong to the Manson-style death cult. They should have this fight.

I agree. Going back to what we were saying before though about Brian Williams' role in all of this, it is possible that he'll retroactively insert himself into the journey of the assault. But for the moment, we just comparable to this and what you suffered for this. Because I imagine that Brian Williams is going to suffer professionally terribly, right? I don't think so. I'm thinking he might get one less award at the Newseum this year at some big fancy gala. But people are already circling the wagons around him. And I think a lot of it is he is their friend.

He is the friend of the media and they don't want to see a buddy of theirs go down no matter what he says. Despite his brave, steely-eyed staring down of the enemy in Iraq who surrounded him and repeatedly tried to kill him, but Terminator-like, he came back at them again. I don't know. It is rolling really quick and I don't know how they can justify keeping him on but if nothing else, he will be the solemn emeritus anchor who like Tom Brokaw will step in and do special features on the second greatest generation or whatever

he goes on to. I agree with John. First of all, you have to ask yourself, what are the conversations like in NBC right now? How do you ask Brian Williams if that's all he ever said, right? Did he ever say it anywhere else? So you have to – everyone is now in NBC News has to pretend to believe this lie, this second big lie that he told. The first lie was that he shot down.

The second lie was that, oh, I just misremembered it. Oh, I just – and the fog of memory from 12 years, I just forgot it. Now, we often now believe – if you're on NBC News, you have to believe that second lie too. So now you have to have these awkward, weird conversations with probably an intern where you say you've got to go on the Googlebot machine and you've got to find all the instances of Brian Williams appearing anywhere talking about this instance. We've got to know how many – if this thing keeps coming out, if there's a new video today, a new video tomorrow, a new video the next day. I mean look, if Breitbart was still alive and behind this, he'd have 10 videos and he'd let them out every 72 hours to make Brian Williams the most miserable man on earth right because you could

never get ahead you never knew what the next one was this doesn't seem like it's that situation but if you're nbc news you've got to be looking for it now and there's probably some terrified intern or two who've been given this top secret mission by somebody who said in some weird circumlocution language, hey, maybe Brian's fog of memory includes this other – he's forgotten other times he said it. So let's help him out by finding them ourselves. The problem really is that Brian Williams is now an aristocrat. He's an aristocrat as powerful and as institutional, the Archduke Ferdinand, or that's probably that's the wrong choice, but, and he's going to be protected. John's right. I mean,

his daughter is on a hip TV show. He's a fixture of the New York scene. They are going to circle around him and protect him because he, and I know conservatives will say it's because he's a liberal and that may be partly true, but mostly it's because he's one of them. He's the ruling class in this country and they get to do whatever they want. You know, in the Ricochet comments, there's a story about sharing a limo with Brian Williams in which he managed to bring up the fact that he'd been in a helicopter shutdown. It's seemingly within 45 seconds of the car starting up and pulling away from the curb. So you get the feeling that this was trotted out an awful lot. And in this same little piece about Williams in the Ricochet comments,

they were mentioning that he has a daughter on Girls, right? That this was her first audition ever, and she landed a job on this horrible television show. If you don't know about this horrible television show, you should. I steal myself whenever it comes up for a new season because not that I want to watch it, but that I'm going to have to hear a lot of critics talk about what Lena Dunham looks like with her clothes off. But it matters because a lot of people watch the show and a lot of people are influenced by it

because pop culture matters. And that's why you, after you're done with this podcast, should skip on over to culturerated.com, where pop culture really does matter. We've got features such as the Daily Scene. And, oh, by the way, folks, yes, this is a commercial. I'm not just off the top of my head giving them a plug. It's a well-deserved spot for the Daily Scene, which has the best of the internet

on hot pop culture topics, original posts every day. They cover stuff like books, comics, culture, fashion, movie genre, music, sports, tech, TV, you name it. If you like this show, you really ought to check out OccultureRater.com and read what young conservative writers have to say about pop culture.

Things like, for example, Pulp Fiction. There used to be a great pulp series, Man of Bronze, Doc Savage. And we have him right here. Not the same one, but one of our own. And we're happy to have Dr. George Savage back on the podcast. He's a physician, biomedical engineer, and co-founder of several technologically-based medical companies in Silicon Valley. His latest project is Proteus Digital Health, where he currently serves as chief medical

officer. George is one of the co-founders of Ricochet. Welcome, sir. Hello. Hi. Dr. Savage, it's Rob Long. How are you? Hey, Rob.

I'm doing great. Thank you. All right. I got a little kind of a tickle in my throat. What should I do? Can you hear it? I know this is probably inappropriate to actually have a medical exam here on the podcast, but I got you on the phone. You're a very busy man.

Oh, great. Yeah. Let me just get my flashlight. I don't want to take it. Don't tell me to take any Robitussin because I don't want to get autism. Okay. All right. So let's – can we review this a little bit? Sure. Is that. Let me let me let me come at you like a like a liberal progressive journalist. You, Dr. Savage, are a conservative. You're a you're a you're a you're a conservative and you also you go to church regularly do you not i do would you say you go to church every sunday uh not every sunday okay but you go regularly yes yeah and you are um uh you're a doctor you're a man of science oh well apparently not if i go to church right right and and you and you believe in uh in in climate change Yeah, the climate changes.

Okay. All right. But all right. So you're a proud conservative. One of the Ricochet founders, an old friend, also a doctor and sort of a general all-around brainiac.

You've got this incredible technology, a medical technology company which is going to change the world, which we're all going to be talking about very, very soon. People are already talking about it. We'll put a link to the cool stuff you're doing on the podcast notes. Is there any reason why someone should not get a measles shot?

Well, there are some reasons. Certainly what we call idiosyncraticatic individual reasons why someone may not want to or it may not be appropriate for someone to get a measles shot for most people if you don't have some sort of immune system problem or what have you that would contraindicate you from having it you should definitely have it, everyone should now some people may have personal reasons not to want to do it

or religious reasons or what have you. And not going into personal choice but focusing merely on the science, everyone pretty much on a population basis should be vaccinated against common childhood diseases so that we can continue to enjoy the strides we've made with public health where children and young adults no longer die in the prime of their life from by the thousands or even tens of thousands for or wind up paralyzed by terrible diseases. So how did this start, though? How does this how did the idea that you shouldn't be vaccinated because if you vaccinate your children, because if you do vaccinate your children, they'll become autistic. How does that start? How does something like that start?

How does it get out there? How does it get into the doctor's office as a very, very closely held belief by many parents? Well, there's a couple of things. One, I think, is the general, the tendency to want to search and embrace certain ideas like this. And the second is the specific. The general first, which was the topic of a post I put up the other day on Ricochet, is just this embedded sense that if things are going well or there's some new incredible advance, that somehow we don't deserve it. Somehow we have angered the gods. I think Autistic License

on the site in the comments to my post commented, you know, he tampered with nature, you know, you will pay, that sort of mindset. And so there's, we all suffer from this to a certain extent. And so there's a fertile field for certain ideas to get planted. And that's why it's always important in my view on important issues to really get into the data and try to at least take a look and sort things out for yourself and not just go with an enthusiasm. The specific on vaccination and the link to autism comes from a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield in 1998. And he published a paper saying that measles, mumps, rubella vaccine

caused autism. And it made quite a stir. I think it was in The Lancet. And it's been the most thoroughly debunked sort of finding in all of science. This guy lost his medical license as a result. Lancet retracted the paper. There have been, I believe, 14 subsequent papers looking for this link and never finding any such link. There's actually a book called The Panic Virus by Seth Nukin that was published a couple of years ago that goes through this at great length. And I haven't read the book, but I've read a lot of reviews of it and summations and so on and so forth. So it's just gone. But that initial headline managed to sort of find this

fertile ground and certain people picked it up and ran with it. And the problem is in any risk benefit analysis, we have diseases which are largely gone from living memory for most of us, thankfully, against some imaginary risk. And the imaginary risk fills a lot of cable TV time. Right. Now, so – but you as a conservative are anti-science. So why – but I mean did it bug you when Chris Christie and Rand Paul – Rand Paul a little less so did not take a stand for – a clear and unequivocal stand for immunization? Yeah, it did bug me because I think there are two separate issues. There's the issue as a scientist, you know, who believes in free speech and all the rest of it to speak forcefully for what I believe. You shouldn't smoke, you should exercise, you can get vaccinations. And then there's the public policy question of what do we as a society want to do about it and how – what's the tradeoff between individual rights including rights to do things that may be risky or most of us may not agree with. I mean most people in America voted for Barack Obama twice.

I certainly didn't agree with that. So what we do about poor choices is a second issue. And I think perhaps in the case of Rand Paul as a physician, he must get the science. But I think he's conflating the two issues. One of the things that drove me nuts, I was listening to a Sirius XM host who was using this as an opportunity to have a discussion about government force. And I see a lot of chatter about this on Twitter as well. Well, if we can make people have vaccinations, then can't we force them to exercise? Can't we force them to eat their broccoli? And I see a lot of chatter about this on Twitter as well. Well, if we can make people have vaccinations, then can't we force them to exercise?

Can't we force them to eat their broccoli? And I understand that. This really isn't the hill that you want to die itching and scratching and coughing up blood on. Yes, it's a teachable moment, but one of the reasons I think that the conservatives got in trouble was because they decided that this was the issue of government coercion was the most important one here, just as it was back with Perry and Gardasol and the rest of it. When it comes to a public health issue, I mean, if there was a pandemic of something that was making, you know, giving people inflamed buboes and the rest of it, there would be great calls for mandatory vaccination against the plague.

Or am I wrong? Am I just saying that this is another example of creeping statism, that we actually should make this distinction here because it's an example of the power of government? I just think there's so many other examples of intrusive government that you might want to use instead of something that makes kids dead or really sick. Yeah, I agree. I'm a big fan of this being handled the way it has been traditionally at the state and local level and communities working out things that trade off people's ability to be, quote, wrong,

in the opinion of many, including public health professionals, but against the rights of others to have their children and immunocompromised newborns and cancer patients and so on and so forth at schools, for example, not exposed. And so the idea that, well, okay, if you're going to delay vaccination, that's your choice, but you may have to homeschool your children or you may have to find a private school because you need to have those vaccines to go to the local public school. We have workarounds. It's not sort of there's going to be a vaccine police or the idea that you lock people up and don't get vaccinations. My view, though, is we certainly don't want to sit back in the face of just illogical statements

and fear mongering about how vaccines cause autism or what have you and not speak up and just say, well, you're wrong. I mean, that's a discredited, stupid idea. There's no data to support it and you have a right to be wrong I suppose but I have a right to point it out to you. And hi, this is John Gabriel sitting in. Hey, John. Hey, how are you doing? I have some experience with this. My daughters – I have tween daughters and a couple of years ago, they came down with whooping cough. Yeah. My daughters – I have tween daughters and a couple of years ago, they came down with whooping cough and that's despite being vaccinated and our whole family was quarantined for a week and I had to repeatedly tell coworkers, no, my kids were actually vaccinated. But the doctor said these cases are coming up all the time now. the internet in a few places, but I haven't seen any verification for it. We obviously are, I live in Arizona. A lot of you are in California, live along the southern border. Could emigration have

anything to do with it? Because I'm hearing people saying that, but part of me is like, is this just kind of anti-immigration talk or is there some truth to when you're integrating a large population who might not have the vaccinations that we do up here, could that be an affecting thing? Because I know also there's a lot of people, a lot of parents who willingly say, no, we're all natural, not understanding that a lot of vaccines are pretty natural, and are just opting against it. I wasn't sure what is the greater impact on our herd immunity. It's a great point. Clearly, the lack of control over the southern border is having some effect. I can't point out exactly what it is.

In the current measles outbreak, I believe that originated with a tourist from outside the country attending – going to Disneyland or what have you. So that wasn't illegal immigration. But there have been reports of various viral diseases popping up around America, because if we remember just last summer, 90,000 children who are largely poor, largely unvaccinated in various issues with their health just streamed across the border and were immediately dispersed by the administration to all corners of America and integrated into public schools. And then there became these strange viruses popping up

that seemed to have the same genetic trace and so on and so forth. So, you know, a long while ago, we used to have a common sense notion that we want to have a controlled and orderly immigration system and assess people's health and make sure they're healthy before they might pose a risk to the population. And now that's gone by the boards. And it's a further example, though, of how risk assessment depends upon your emotional state. Vaccines, of which there are phenomenal amounts of data, people are all up in arms bringing their hands about the risk. And yet

the idea of people who may be ill just dispersing into your schools before they're quarantined or vaccinated or what have you is just almost ideologically something you can't talk about. And so I don't know how it pertains to the current measles outbreak, but it must be a factor. Well, and I read this fascinating white paper in a medical journal by a doctor, I believe Dr. Jenny McCarthy from Malibu. And are you saying I should just discount some of these third-tier celebrities' viewpoints on medical science? And have these people – I know Jenny McCarthy has been a huge proponent of we shouldn't vaccinate our kids. It causes autism. Have any of these people recanted just in popular culture?

I know on the medical side they've been pushing back, but I haven't seen a lot of walk back from say Robert Kennedy was another person who kept bringing this up. I'm not aware of any walk back, but one of my primary goals in just discussing this sort of thing is to point out to all Americans that we live in the era of the internet and you don't need to outsource your understanding of basic facts that are vitally important to you and your family to celebrities or to anyone you happen to see on on but she learned this on the internet george yeah yeah well you know there are different sources on the internet but you know i've just cited um you know one book another uh that's a good one is called deadly choices uh how

the anti-vaccine movement threatens us all Dr. Paul Offit. And he's a infectious disease specialist. It also came out a couple of years ago. It highlights the treatment of this and the recurrence of whooping cough, which you just told us a bit about your personal experience, John, and taking a look behind the rhetoric and it summarizes the data. So reading books is good. Looking at some medical journal articles that are available online are good. You don't have to be – spend a huge amount of time on it, but you can certainly look at both sides yourself. Well, can we – all right. We've had a polite conversation.

Let's get a little bit more political. Yeah. In a column or a piece, he overlaid a map of the measles outbreak on a voting map and a political alignment map of the United States. Where there's a measles outbreak, they are overwhelmingly liberal, democrat, progressive. Oh, my. There aren't measles outbreaks where people vote resolutely for the republican or the conservative. They're only where they vote for the for the Republican or the conservative. They're only where they vote for the crackpot left-wing candidate. But somehow this past week, we have managed to fumble the ball so that it seems like it's conservatives who are against or anti-vaxxers when in fact this is a progressive liberal

cause and always has been. And in fact, the data proves it, right? These are kids on the west side of Los Angeles where I live, on the far west side in Santa Monica where they're all rich and they all vote liberal and they drive Priuses and they have Obama stickers. Really, really. It's a monoculture there in the same way, George, as a monoculture up in Palo Alto where you are. Oh, yeah.

So how can we use this outbreak of measles and this sort of – the epidemic of stupidity on the left against them now? How can we turn it back? Let's talk about politics for a minute. Is there anything that we can say? Is there any set of arguments we can make to at least use this as our exhibit A when we try to fight this charge that we're anti – it's our side that's anti-science? Yeah, it's a great question and I don't really have a good answer to it. I sort of almost throw my hands up in despair. We can go on making the argument, which we are doing. But there's almost this invincible ignorance that some adopt or clothe themselves in that's a consequence of how affluent and successful we've been in this presumption that I'm in total control of my life. And of course, if you're poor or disadvantaged, you know you're not in control of much. And

the richer you are, the more you can fashion this illusion that perhaps you are and forget about the fact that a disease could come along and kill you potentially. You could be fine one day and not the next week. And people get disconnected from that. And so I think it's not just liberals. It's a – we tend to have this issue where urban areas are where disease is spread and that tends to be where liberals are in charge of course and where there's many people from all over mixing. But I don't really know how to break through that. If you are a conservative who believes – you call young earth creationism? I mean the earth is X number of thousands of years old and you hold to that belief and there are people who think that that belief is scientifically impossible.

But then what's the harm really? I mean it doesn't really – there's not much harm if you believe that the earth is 9,000 years old or 7,000 years old because that's what the – that's how it works out in the Bible. What's the downside of that? There isn't really one. However, if you believe that MMR vaccine causes autism, the downside is that there's a measles outbreak and that infants and kids with cancer and people with other kind of immune deficiencies are going to get measles now. That seems to have an actual downside, actual consequences to those idiotic beliefs. So really when it comes down to who's anti-science, it's less about who's anti-science than who

is categorically harmful to society as a whole and who has religious beliefs that really have no consequence or am I drawing too many conclusions here? No, no. It's a great point. In that whooping cough epidemic here in California a few years back, I think over 7,000 people got infected but lost in all the chatter. Ten infants I believe is the statistic died as a result of that from a complete – a disease that shouldn't be here. And these are real consequences and that's where we do get into public policy things about public health, about where your right to be anti-science and choose not to vaccinate your kids collides with my right to have my infant survive and grow up to be an adult. I wonder if it's possible we can break through this by having some candidate at some point in their presidential career make a point of indicating that the progressive movement has always conflated science with fear.

When they were into eugenics, it was because they were afraid of the lower orders. Now, when it comes to nuclear power, they're afraid of it because it's sparkly and scary and glowing and it'll kill people. And now they're afraid of this science because it's unnatural. There's that post-60s despair of the technological world as somehow just this big poisonous cancer orb that our planet has become because of science. And we're supposed to be the guys who are anti-science when actually they're the ones who are more medieval in their superstitions than anybody else because they apprehend a certain small amount of science and then lard onto it this free-floating anxiety that they have that mankind is this pestilence on the earth.

Global warming to nuclear power to organic foods to GMOs and all the rest of it. doctor, but do you think it's possible for whoever is going to be the presidential nominee to come out as a man of science as opposed to what the media is going to portray him, which is inevitably going to be a snake handler who speaks in tongues? I certainly hope so. And I think one of the signal illustrations of the consequences of the kind of ideology that you've talked about is just the example of malaria and the whole approach to pesticides being always bad and controlling mosquito populations always being bad and awful. The death count to date in the developing world mainly is 50 million children mostly and counting from that particular policy to ban a safe and effective pesticide 40 years ago based on Rachel Carson's work

that was later found not to be accurate. Yes, Rachel Carson and Margaret Sanger and all the rest of the lionesses and progressive heroes whose number of corpses trailing behind them we never, ever find out about and never even discuss. But that's for another show. And we thank you for coming on and pounding the table in defense of science. It must be done. There you go.

Thanks. Thanks. Thank you, George. Okay, bye-bye. Thanks. Bye. The thing about George is that we should say – I mean he's on – we have him on pretty regularly, and I'm glad he was available to do this. I mean he is in fact a brainiac.

He's got this incredible invention. This company with this incredible invention. He's going to revolutionize the way we all take medicine and he always has time for us and he always has time to post. And more than that, he's actually a brilliant business mind too. So he's – when Peter and I are tearing our hair out about our little business ricochet and saying things like, what if we just told people they have to join just so we don't have to close the doors? He's the one who's rational and thoughtful and generally really a saint actually. Well, because technology counts, especially when it comes to delivering medicine. I remember when I was a little kid, I swear every inoculation was done with something that was about the size of eight of those spikes, the spikes they use to hammer into the ground.

Those punches they use on the conductor's punch. Train rails, right. And I mean, it was, you'd look at it and it had the diameter of a pencil and the bluntness of an unsharpened one as well. And now when I go in to get jabbed, be it for the flu or the pneumonia shot, it is. There's nothing there. I don't even feel it. If I feel anything, it's because this year's flavor of vaccine has got a little bit more tang to it and your veins or arteries raise an eyebrow spark like, hmm, that's interesting. But generally, no. I mean, the advances in medicine are incredible. The only time actually that I feel any pain whatsoever on my skin is when I happen to drag a bad blade across

it and I'm insufficiently lathered or whatever. And you, you nick yourself and you got to get out the styptic pencil and wonder whether or not the stips were actually some sort of Egyptian Christian organization like the cops, but you'll never need a styptic pencil or a Coptic pencil for that matter. If you use a Harry's razor, because Harry's, well, here we've got two guys who are so passionate about giving you a good shave. Well, they founded the company that we know as Harry's.com. They bought the factory in Germany, a 97, it's got to be 98-year-old factory now, where the blades were made to ensure the quality and to ensure they'll keep coming to you.

And, you know, here's the deal. If the blades cost less and they come to your house, why? Why would you go down to the store and spend more for an inferior product? Just don't get it. See, Harry's cut out the middleman so they can offer you an amazing shave at a fraction of the price of the drugstore brands. Come right to your door at factory direct prices. Now, the starter kit is $15. That includes the great razor, the great blades. It's a beautiful looking razor too. And your choice of Harry's shave cream or foaming shave gel. I like the gel myself. It's the way it adheres to the skin with its pleasing emollients.

I just love to say that word. It gives me a little bit more pleasure than the shave cream, but your mileage may vary. As an added bonus, you get $5 off this $15 purchase with your purchase of using the code RICOCHET. And after you use that code, you can get an entire month's worth of shaving for just $10. Shipping is free. Again, it costs you money to go to the drugstore, either the money that you spend just walking there because time is money or the gas money that you spend. And satisfaction, it's guaranteed. So go to harrys.com now.

Perfect. Now! Okay, just get over there. Well, right after you go to ricochet.com. While you're listening, well, no. You know what? No. I'm going to say put Ricochet in abeyance for a second and go to harrys.com now and they'll give you $5 off if you type in the code Ricochet with your first purchase. That's

harrys.com and enter the coupon code ricochet at the checkout for five bucks off start shaving smarter today well there's uh so much more we can talk about isn't there gentlemen i mean there's uh yes rob i'm not i'm not really done with brian williams no no absolutely a little bit more about that circle around i think we all agree there's going to be no punishment. But what possesses you to do that? I mean that – the clip from him on Letterman is so – I mean it's so shocking. It's so damning. He is lying. And the idea how do you imagine that your helicopter was shot down? And what's really galling too, I spent some time in the Navy and one thing I remember is when I was rescuing or returning General MacArthur to Corregidor, we took some shots back then.

We saw some action, but I didn't go bragging about it on a popular podcast. I think what's frustrating to me is my tour in the Navy was on a submarine, so I just hid and did not take any RPGs like War Hero, Brian Williams. But I just feel bad for the guys who were actually in the chopper that was shot down. They've been quiet about this for a dozen years because like usual, they're ferrying reporters to and fro. Then they see the reporters on the news bragging about their exploits and the soldiers just shrug and go about their duty. They don't worry about it. But basically after seeing this lie for 12, 13 years, they're like, enough already. Here's what happens.

I can't believe he's still telling the story and it gets better every time he tells it. And I don't know how he thinks with such a public platform. If I tell a small lie, I just assume I'm going to get caught. So I'll kind of won't bother in the first place how he thought he could get away with this for a dozen years and just making it more lurid. It reminds me a lot of the Hillary talking about getting shot at in Tuzla. There are fact-checkers everywhere. How do they think they're going to get away with it, which is just so bizarre to me? And I think as we were talking about earlier, they are the new aristocracy and they know they will get away with it.

So it's not an issue. The Hillary Clinton story is amazing because she said that they landed under withering – I think she actually used the term withering crossfire or something and they had to run. That's the worst kind of crossfire. That's the worst kind of crossfire. It's withering. It makes you feel bad about yourself. And they had to run for cover. And then you see the video of it and she gets off the plane and a little girl gives her flowers

i mean like where do these how delusional really mentally ill in a way do you have to be to think you're gonna get away with this stuff and that's why i find it so bananas and so strange that that he's still fighting that he's not you know he hasn't just decided to take a month off and go out into the woods and live a simple life and not speak to anybody for a month because – I mean in a similar situation, I would be humiliated and absolutely embarrassed. I don't know if I could – I certainly couldn't go sit in front of a TV camera and brazenly try to like lie and cavil and weasel word my way out of this. The psychology of it really astounds me well john hinder rocker had a post up at powerline and made a couple points one that after being around after going to iraq and being around men and women of pronounced valor whose accomplishments and a courageous level far exceeded that of mr williams that he felt some sort of need

to compensate that while he admired them um he Williams, that he felt some sort of need to compensate. That while he admired them, he was aware that he lived a costed existence for which he was paid tens of millions of dollars. And his own personal inadequacies led to him embellishing and buffing his record. And I don't know about that. But he also makes a point that if this is the case, what else is Mr. Williams shaded? What else to assuage his liberal guilt as he shaded or, shall we say, shaped to present to the American people? When you look at the agenda that's put forth by the evening news, it's less of an impact than it was before. But what they choose, the national conversation. And if Mr. Williams is revealed as a fantasist on this level, then you have to ask, is it possible that something else that he said

might, it might have stemmed from the same psychological need that, that, that made him decide that he was going to be a war hero? The answer is of course, of course it is. Of course. Yeah. Of course their agenda is shaded by a variety of things. But again, you know, what I was saying before about how science is always tinged with fear on the left because of guilt, because we live in this incredibly vast, complex, technologically adept society that is good to us, that we've got to feel a great measure of guilt because it isn't the worldwide norm. How much of guilt and fear informs the left is – well, I'll just throw it out there. Yeah. Well, I mean the weird thing about him, this Brian Williams thing is that – I mean to take it away from actual partisan politics for a minute and I'm not denying that there probably is a lot there. But there is this kind of idea that the people – that I am the hero of the news, right?

That the news is really about me telling you the news. I'm the star of the news, right? That the news is really about me telling you the news. I'm the star of the news. The news is the thing – is the script that I, the movie star, read and I'm the movie star, Brian Williams. So I'm always at the center of everything and I have to be at the center of everything because the people need me and the people love me. And that's what I – this kind of horrible, creepy, malignant narcissism of these newscasters is – we already know. We already know they're all nuts, right?

Well, it is. They are crazy. Go ahead. Sorry. Oh, that's OK. It's just all I could think of is Ron Burgundy. This person is famous for reading lines off a teleprompter. There's no doubt that he's an intelligent guy. He's an accomplished guy. He must have worked very hard to get where he is. But yeah, I agree. I think there is some partisan affiliation, but I think it so always with that aristocracy, that paternalistic attitude, there's this question when they decide what they're going to report on and how they're

going to report it. The first question they ask themselves is, well, wait a minute. How is this going to be received by the minions who watch us, by my beloved public who adores me? How are they going to take away this idea of ISIS or Islamic fundamentalism? I don't want them to get the wrong idea. So I'm going to shade and I'm going to spin the story. I don't want them to think that Barack Obama is the worst president ever because that may lead them to unsavory conclusions. I don't want to say anything too good about the Republican candidate because that may lead them to actually consider voting for that candidate. I need to remember my position as basically the superhero Superman of a leader and king and sort of spiritual father of all my minions here who think of me as a hero.

I mean after all, I was shot down. I fought in the Iraq War basically. So I need to be very careful about my place here. to sort of shade the truth and spin the news and try to make sure that the poor worshipful proles who watch them on TV don't draw the wrong conclusion from something. And I feel like that more than anything is why this story seems to make people just so ill, right? I think also someone like Brian Williams, he views himself as indispensable, as an indispensable gatekeeper, not just another common sheet. If he disappeared tomorrow, decided to retire, someone else would fill his place to tend to the dwindling nightly news audience. But he needs to protect the public from themselves, from their baser impulses. I think one thing that will be fascinating over the next couple of weeks is anytime somebody is accused of something, making stuff up, plagiarism, it just keeps trickling out.

So I'm very curious is what stories unrelated to this little story that he came up with on coming under fire in a helicopter, how many other instances that are easily verifiable? You've been shading the truth on where he's portraying himself as a hero? At the start of any kind of armed conflict, you always see reporters flood to the field and they always have their new reporter vest on. It's khaki. It's got 17 pockets so they can hold all their various – whatever it is they need, their pens there are typewriter ribbon and whatever else because they are in the action. They are Ernie Pyle reincarnated.

And it will be fascinating to see what other things he's let slip over the years, which is sure to come up. It's all on YouTube. And I'm sure, as you mentioned, NBC interns are pouring through it. There are a whole lot of bloggers who have had a beef with him for many years doing the same thing. You know, my friend Harry Shearer used to do this – he had a giant satellite dish and he used to be able to steal the live feed from all the newscasters before it was aired, before it was edited. So you'd see – whatever they were sending back to New York from the satellite, he would see it, watch it uncut and it was always great. And I remember he showed one to me which I loved, which was Dan Rather. Harry had an obsession with Dan Rather. Dan Rather in Seattle, I think there was a World Bank meeting or one of those meetings

and Dan Rather is there and he's uh and for some reason there's no reason for dan rather to be in seattle but he's in seattle covering the the the economic meeting live you know and and then for another reason dan rather is across the water um set up in a little set so you can see the city in the background none of us of course had any of the news but it was a good picture and about for almost 22 minutes before he went on, there were people wandering around him, dabbing him with powder and fixing his hair and he had only one issue he wanted to discuss and I think this thing goes on for 20 minutes. He was wearing a trench coat coat collar up or collar down and they talk about it well i think we're still having this question here the question is still on the table and do we have any thoughts on that collar up or color down and then i don't remember how – 20 minutes of that. That was what they talked about.

And I thought, oh, these guys are just buffoons. They're just – well, that's the old term was the meat puppet. They just – they don't – they're not anything. They're just smiling faces. And of course, they're movie stars, so they don't really have a thought in their head. But they think that they know – they think that the news is about them. Having moved away from the term newsreader to do news anchor was one of the mistakes that we made. Yeah. BBC presenters are news readers, which just states what they do as opposed to people who interpose themselves

twixt the news and the audience, which is, as you guys were saying, has to be shielded from what they might possibly take. Now, there's another story out there, and if you allow me to move it away from Mr. Williams. Yeah, please proceed. A subject that, you know. Poor man. Poor man. Is this a wonderful little case study out of San Francisco where a bookstore has said to its customers, just so you know, we're all good progressives here.

We do support the minimum wage, and we support the effort of the state to do what it can on behalf of the people, but this particular law is going to put us out of business. So goodbye. San Francisco store is going to close because, well, they're caught in a squeeze. They can't raise prices on books,

which are set by the publishers. It's right there on the cover of the book. And they can't absorb the cost of the payroll, so they're going to close. Now, is this a, is this story got some national traction, at least on the right side of the news sphere? Do you think that this is going to be a, an instructive message for some, or just one of those pieces of collateral damage that you'll have to do? I mean, it's really isn't the point point here whether or not we should have state-run bookstores that just absorb these costs and take over from private enterprise, which obviously I guess can't do the job. Well, I am just very concerned that people aren't going to be able to get their science fiction in a timely manner without government regulation of this industry.

By all means, they should take this over. The story is just the perfect description of why these – You're being too modest. You posted on this on Ricochet. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, what happened is San Francisco already had at the time the highest minimum wage of any city in the nation. They were since surpassed by Seattle, but their mayor insisted this wasn't good enough and they needed to raise it to $15 and they needed to raise it now. And as a result, you have very right-thinking liberals and I'm sure it's a wonderful

bookstore. It's called Borderlands Books and they did the math and found out, huh, okay, we already are dealing with Amazon stealing our business. We already are dealing with rents which keep shooting up in the city and they've had to move once or twice because of that. They've had to change their practices a lot over the 10 years just to keep afloat. And if you look at the place, you can tell they're not rolling in money. And now they realize that this minimum wage law, that's the last straw.

They can't do anymore. And they were very apologetic, almost apologizing to the government for not being able to do this. People in the comments on their own website, on the Borderland website are like, maybe we could do a fundraiser. Why don't you just charge a surcharge? That would be the right way to do it. It's just interesting because they just seem like sheep led to the slaughter and the whole time they're praising their masters who are leading them there because they don't want the impact of saying, you know what? This minimum wage law is stupid. Now our people are going to make zero an hour instead of $15 an hour or $10 an hour, something in between. And they just are unwilling to take the social stand and saying, this is really dumb. You're putting people out

of business. It also just shows the free market argument. The minimum wage is zero. That's what it is. And now these employees, they're going to make no dollars an hour in an effort to make everything livable and fair. Before even they had this raised minimum wage, they already – San Francisco had the highest income inequality in the country or among it. And those two might be related. The more government gets involved, the more they're regulating, the more inequality you're going to have because the middle class can't live in the city. They've already – families have been fleeing San Francisco proper for years, and it's just only going to get worse.

They don't want to learn the lesson apparently. Right. You go to San Francisco. San Francisco is filled with just young, rich people. It's really not a diverse city at all economically. John, what do you do? What are the progressive solutions to this aside from the surcharge? Was there anything interesting that they suggested? I mean, James facetiously said, yeah, the government should take over the bookstores. But did anybody say that? Because I would expect that. No, but a few people, even big fans of the bookstore, criticized them for being greedy. The typical argument, the Bane from Batman argument, basically. Well, you plutocrats and your fancy sci-fi bookstore, which is probably 1,000 square feet, you just won't help out the working man.

The only other people that – the only other option people suggested was, hey, let's do a Kickstarter, which is the modern version of, hey, let's put on a play. Exactly. Right. That will solve everything. Yeah, exactly. And people – that's great if you want to be a charity, but they would basically have to change to a nonprofit if you want to start doing that. They obviously are not going to be able to compete. The thing that isn't mentioned as well is people saying, well, just add a surcharge. OK, so you have a minimum wage that's been raised and now every store that these people go to are adding surcharges,

where does that minimum wage go? You're not helping the problem. Everything is more expensive. We already know it's a very expensive city to visit. Anytime you go to a restaurant there, you're going to pay twice as much for Thai food in San Francisco than you will here in Phoenix. Granted, it's much better but still beside the point. But all they're doing is just raising the income level higher and higher because nobody else can afford it. It's the first stage thinking of this that I love. There's a piece that I'm going to put up on Ricochet later today based on something on BuzzFeed. One of the BuzzFeed editors had his washing machine break. Oh, no.

And he couldn't fix it, of course. And instead of going down to the local laundromat with a smelly bunch of stuff and cleaning it there, he called some service, which is one of those little startups, service economy. Right. As you need to think like Uber, like Lyft, like the rest of it, where somebody comes to your house, picks up your laundry, cleans it and delivers it to you folded. And he was conflicted. Of course you are, dearie. Of course you are, dearie. Of course you are. He was conflicted about this because, you know, in the past there used to be jobs where people could get benefits and health insurance and the rest of it and they could make a career out of it. But now for some strange reason, from some odd confluence of events that he can't quite put his finger on, the ability of companies to hire people for these jobs

seems to have evaporated and now they're all contract employees. And there's absolutely nothing in the piece whatsoever about the idea that perhaps larding more and more mandates and taxes onto the process of hiring somebody might have something to do with the end of full-time employment and real jobs and the rise of 1099s. But they never connect those dots, do they? They never do. with the end of full-time employment and real jobs and the rise of 1099s. But they never connect those dots, do they? They never do. It's like they've got a plug in one hand and a plug in the other,

and if they actually put them together and created a spark and their hair would smoke and enlightenment would come down to them, but they don't. They just look at the two of them with confusion, wondering how these two things go together exactly. Yeah, I mean, that is the problem, right? That is the problem with – I mean in a way, it's almost the anti-science crowd, right? That the simple economics, the simple – the simplistic economics of it seem to be baffling. And so what I was expecting, John, was that what people were saying in the comments was

something like, well, we just have to charge Amazon deliveries. We have to have a surcharge or an extra special city tax if you buy a book – if you get a book from Amazon. So if Amazon ships you a book to the city of San Francisco, it's got a $5 – X percentage they have to collect and send to the city to sort of equalize the price, thus to make it OK for the price of books to go up or something like that, to eliminate the competition essentially. Because you have to build a more complicated mousetrap. You're always building this Rube Goldberg machine to counteract the regulation you just enacted because if you don't do that, then everything else is out of whack, which is exactly where we're going to be

in six months with this net neutrality thing, which we don't have time to talk about today because we've got to talk about pornography. But – Well, I was going to say speaking about whack. Oh, good one. Nice one. When I was using the electrical cord metaphor, I thought – I could say master and slave, which is what they say sometimes in cords and technology and computers. But that's offensive. And I could say male and female.

But that is not only sexist. That's – to some, it's positively rape to use that terminology. But it does bring to mind the post that got 700,000 – A jillion. A jillion, right. Well, have you seen Jillian's latest movie? She's pretty good. She is.

And Rob, you had some thoughts on the matter. Well, I mean Marina Smith, rehearses and represents the arguments about the effect of pornography on men, obviously, mostly. And it's fairly compelling, but the conversation was good, too, because everyone has kind of a I don't want to say

hypocrisy is the wrong word, but everybody's of two minds. People that I know are of two minds about it. You've got sort of free First Amendment kind of beliefs and you have sort of like this, well, it's not that bad or maybe it's bad for other people or it can be bad. But no one really has come out with – no one has really I think settled on what the – I don't know what the appropriate response to it is. But one of the things that I liked about the conversation was it got to the topic of ubiquity, which is that one of the problems with pornography is you no longer have to go like a shameful little rat and scuttle into a little kind of disgusting little store to buy it or to look at it. You now can do it anywhere. And the ubiquity of it and the elevation of it into the public sphere is probably a lot

worse than the presence of it in general. Yeah, when you were thirsty before, you had to go to a small, dank stream on the wrong side of the tracks. Now there's a fire hose in your room coming out of the box you call the computer. Yeah, the ubiquity and the expectations that it raises. But I suppose that if people actually want to calibrate their personal expectations around the realities presented in visual entertainment, well, they're in for a life of disappointment. Well, I think if you watch too much of it and you get to be kind of freakish about it and you start to expect all of your physical encounters to be just like that, then you're going to delude yourself and suddenly you'll find yourself telling people that you were caught afire in a helicopter on your way to Iraq.

Kind of a short line really, to be rat. Kind of a short line, really, to be honest. Did anybody bring up the point that the way that the sexes seem to be struggling today has something to do, that men might be just given up on women for long-term satisfying physical, spiritual relationships because they're afraid they're going to be taken to the courts

and the cleaners and a divorce, or they're going to be brought up on charges for not getting proper consent at every step of the way. I mean, nobody has to get consent from the thing they're watching on their computer screen. Yeah, I think society is changing a lot on that. You see marriage being put off until older and older, but I think it's – the marriage stats are very easy to compile. But you just see this in the dating world. I have a lot of single friends and the horror stories I hear of this Tinder hookup culture. I will be sent basically Tinder ad pitches by people just by these mortified men and

women saying, oh my gosh, somebody is selling themselves this way. But it's all about – it's not, hey, I have a stable job and I'm a good family man. I love pets and kids. No, it's just basically I a stable job and I'm a good family man. I love pets and kids. No, it's just basically I'm near you and I'm available. That's the entire thing, just this hookup culture because people want the physical affection. They want to fill that need in their life, but that's it. That's kind of all they want to do because long-term relationships, it's not – it's just not sexy to anybody

anymore, which is – well, there's always the minority who likes it. But more and more people are just afraid of all the social consequences. They see men pilloried if they are the good stand-up faithful guy. So they just want to have the quick hookup and that's it. Yeah, and Tinder, I mean for those of you who are of a certain age and are unaware, Tinder has managed to gamify what used to be sort of the complicated – fairly complicated computer dating system where you input your preferences and answer a lot of weird profile questions. And on OkCupid, they'd ask you a lot of sort of hypothetical questions to kind of get a psychographic map of you and then match you up. Tinder, really, they just show you pictures and you swipe left or swipe right. And so you can see it. You can walk through airports or places and you can see people, single people,

sitting and looking at their phone and their thumb is just going back and forth. And it's like they're shopping. It's a game and that does seem like that – it's almost impossible to imagine that's not going to ultimately change the way we interact with each other. I think ultimately that – I'm sorry, Jim. I think ultimately people will come back to long-term relationships. That's the way the human race has been perpetuated so long. I think eventually people will settle on that once again, but we're just in a transition period right now. We started with the internet.

Now it's just the mobile phones and you're going to see disruptions. I think the ubiquity of porn has definitely helped that. People do expect the completely unrealistic I think the ubiquity of porn has definitely helped that. People do expect the completely unrealistic I think. When you – when that's your input all day, you're going to expect the real world to act like that. I've been afraid to order a pizza for years because it's just dangerous out there. I don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, you've got to stay inside. Where Kleenex boxes on your feet like Howard Hughes.

I will say this though to end on a happier note because I know we've got to wrap it up. Michael Brown – the second time I've referred to Michael Brown, he had an interesting piece about a week ago called The New Victorians, which I think we posted on Ricochet as well. And he described the attitudes of millennials, younger millennials, as very close to traditional traditional pre-traditional more traditional than boomers they save more they're hard working they have a slightly uh a flintier uh more um practical outlook on life they're more interested in long-term relationships and more traditional with families and and and and two two-parent families they If these trends and attitudes hold, there could be this weird, spontaneous American restoration to, you know, the stuff that Charles Murray is always complaining about, which is the breaking apart of the American family, that it might actually be coming back.

Well, that would be grand because that's the future that we need. Yeah. When you look at some of the other dystopian visions of the future that I grew up with, Logan's Run comes to mind. Horrible, awful, dreadful movie. Everybody when they were 30 had to go to a carousel and die because they were old. But there was a scene in that where somebody is actually swiping through holograms to find a sex partner for that evening.

I mean, when you mentioned that Tinder, Rob, it brought to mind that little moment in Logan's run where so much of what we actually thought was an unimaginable future in the 1970s, the good parts came true, the technological parts, the bad parts, the dystopia, the cities crammed with millions of people because of overpopulation, the pollution that destroyed the oceans, all the rest of those things. All of those fears, again, to go back to what I was saying before about how the left looks at science, technology and the future with fear and dread and guilt, it didn't come true. And that they do. One more thing before we go because I know we do have to wrap up, but there was a member post about the sequel to Kill a Mockingbird, which is not a porno crush video for anybody who's unaware of the book. And apparently some folks are a little excited about it. I'm nervous about this, about –

Eustace Scrubb. We should say that's the member. Eustace Scrubb. Right. Are you guys anxious for this? It's actually a prequel that she wrote before. And, well, let's just say Jezebel is not a site that I go to an awful lot, but Jezebel has been writing about the case of Harper Lee, who is very old and had a guardian who I think her guardian died, her legal guardian. And now there are people who are around her that makes you wonder exactly why now this is popping out? But my favorite tweet about the whole thing was that the ghost of J.D. Salinger looked down at Harper Lee and said, man, pace yourself.

Yeah. Who are you trying to beat the clock? I don't know. It doesn't seem like this is a – it's going to be a good thing, right? I mean it doesn't feel like – it was a completely different novel maybe but I don't know. I have a bad feeling about it too. Some things need to just stand there by themselves alone, no sequels. Unless of course somebody wants to hire me to write one of these things, in which case I'm on it right away.

We're not going to pace ourselves so we have another podcast in 50 years. We're going to have another podcast next week, one of many that you will find on Ricochet. And by the way, you'll not only get podcasts and great conversation and member feeds if you join, you can get The Daily Shot, an amusing little summation of what's gone on before,

a little history, some japery, some observations. It's a great read that pops in your daily mailbox every day. The Daily Shot, and you can find it at Ricochet. And, of course, the Ricochet store will also have some items that you can either pour caffeinated beverages into or put on your body. Some of those new T-shirts designs are maybe right up your alley. You mean like, I think we've got a couple coming for the diner.

They're very cool, yeah. If I can be arsed to actually get them out. We're also brought to you, of course, by Acculturated.com, where pop culture matters. Go there, read it, find out some stuff, and be up to speed. The next time somebody in a younger age demographic starts yapping about culture, you can say, oh, here's my opinion on that. Don't you love when that happens? And, of course, Harry's.com. Harry's the best shave you can possibly get.

Why pay store prices? Why go to the store when Harry's Harry's the best shave you can possibly get. Why pay store prices? Why go to the store when Harry's will bring the best shave right to your house? Enter the coupon code RICOSHAY at Harry's.com. You'll get $5 off your first order, and you'll never stop ordering after that. Gentlemen, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks to George Savage, our guest, and everybody who listened to this, the podcast. We'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 2.0.

See you soon, fellas. Thanks, John. Thanks, James. Thanks, gentlemen. Thanks, John. And it spreads just like a fire Slips off of your tongue like turpentine And I don't know why, why I like you You better be careful what you do

I wouldn't want to be in your shoes If they ever found you well You better be careful what you say It never really added up anyway I've got friends in this town Hey, white liar Truth comes out a little at a time And it spreads just like a fire

Slips off of your tongue like turpentine And I don't know why, why I like her You said you went out to a bar And walked some lady to her car But your face has more to tell Ricochet! Join the conversation. And it spreads just like a fire Slips off of your tongue like turpentine

And I don't know why, why I like her Here's a bombshell just for you Turns out I've been lying to you