The Ricochet Podcast - Meet The Press

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

We know you like it when the hosts get into it and we know you like it when one of them gets triggered by a certain Chief Executive. So –no spoilers!– we think you’ll enjoy the opening segment of today’s Big Show. But stick around, because we want to introduce you to two members of the media we think you ought to be aware of. First up: Alex Berenson, once a card carrying member of the elite media... Source

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... I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it. This was a blessing in disguise. I caught it.

I heard about this drug. I said, let me take it. It was my suggestion. I said, let me take it. And it was incredible the way it worked. Incredible. I'm the president and you're fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilex. And today it's

an A.B. day. Alex Berenson on COVID, Andrew Beaton on sports. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 516. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, which right now is redolent with the aroma of fertilizer that's being sprayed far away by the farmers. They always do this in the fall. And the scent comes and envelops the Twin Cities with its distinctive odor around this time of year. So everyone's probably happy they're wearing a mask. Of course, everyone here is happy they're wearing a mask because it's the right thing to do. It's the equivalent of an aircraft carrier in World War II, is what I'm saying. And unmasked at the moment right now, I can tell by

the Zoom, is Peter Robinson in California and Rob Long in New York. Gentlemen, how are you today? I'm doing very well. So, James, this is probably not a terribly appetizing way to begin this podcast, but do you find the smell of fertilizer bad? This particular variety yes i would rather be in an elevator in 1986 with somebody who had bathed in georgio and get stuck between the you know the floors than i would to uh to have to deal with this in the air today it's not good it's not good it's not good at all general i actually don't find it that there's a there's a a, when, when, uh, fancy wine tasters will like taste a wine and, uh, and they'll say, ah, barnyard. And that is not a criticism. That's

like, yeah, barnyard. It's good for you. Like, it isn't a bad thing. There is a, something about that smell. I'll be honest that I actually find kind of like, I don't know if I would want to live there forever, but I, well, there are lots of earthy smells that i don't have an objection to because i grew up around them and they have a certain connection i like the smell of bus you know diesel bus exhaust because it reminds me of getting up in the morning to go to a debate tournament uh mimeograph paper sharpie you you are reminding me of some of the most excruciatingly embarrassing moments of my youth. My dad, when he was a kid, I had a couple of roguish great uncles who were horse trainers, and my dad worked for them during summers.

And when I was a kid, years later, my father, a grown man who should have known better, we would find, I can remember going to some Disney something or other, and there were horses in those days, would pull the trolleys, and my father would inhale deeply and loudly and publicly, and then sigh and say, oh, I love the smell of horse manure. Yeah, yeah. A father shouldn't do that in the presence of his child. I don't know. I kind of like, I agree with your dad. There's something, I mean, jet fuel, a motorcycle exhaust in European cities where, you know,

they don't have the same kind of, they were the old days. They have the same kind of standards we had. A lot of unexploded gas in there, which I thought was great. Remember when we, we're so old old now i know that you guys remember this but but if you're younger not even that much younger you won't remember oh absolutely school and they had a mimeograph machine yes and they pass it out and everybody would instantly smell it yes a friend of mine right a divorced friend of mine in his 60s is casting around for you know somebody to date and you see all these women of his demographic on these websites. And if they came out with a perfume that was mimeograph fluid that these women could draw behind their ear, their dance card would be full for the rest of their life.

It has such powerful nostalgia. Fast Times with Ridgemont High, which was a movie that came out, I think, in 82 or 83. I mean, this is how long that movie was. It was considered very seminal picture. And it came out then there's a scene where they pass out the quizzes or the dittos. We used to call them dittos. And everyone in the class instantly smells them. And everybody in the theater laughed. All the kids laughed because, of course, we used to do that. But now if you show people that, they'd be like, what? You ever gone to a used bookstore

and smelled the book pretty good right well there it's a combination of decay and mites and all the rest of it the smell that we like in our we remember from high school or grade school that warm smell that you would get the first time the radiators turned on in school was actually probably you know sloughed off skin cells being incinerated but all of these things combine um you know yep ditto fluid ditto fluid could be called the sweat that russ rush limbaugh's audience exudes at some point when they are looking at the election possibilities and not liking what they're seeing what about i'm sorry now that we're going on sense and memory he's events of the day oh are you trying are you trying to say i think he was trying to like

actually trying to get this to the point where i mean because we could do a whole hour on things that we smell yes and frankly i'm at this point in the political process i'm kind of happy about one more point that you wish to make dear no no it's just that that to this day when i sent boxwood i am for a moment or two before I can regain control of myself, I'm happy. And that is purely because for several years in a row when I was a kid, my parents, we vacationed way out on Long Island in Bridgehampton at an old estate, which was then used, let out rooms in this huge mansion uh which was let out to people on the second lower half of the middle class which is where we were now of course it's been totally

remodeled and some rich hedge fund guy from new york but there was still remnants of the old original garden that was attached to the mansion and boxwood hedges and they had a distinctive scent and that scent is locked in my mind and it means happy times of course it takes a moment or two to become grim again but yes right copper tone moan grass yes yes yes yes anyway i guess there's gotta be something going on in the world we should talk about i i don't know we we have to vamp to fill all the empty space, right? There's nothing going on. From the spring when things are flowering, I always have to turn my head when I hear somebody say, man, can you smell the lilacs today? But Peter's right.

I mean, an aroma like must, a musty room reminds me of the airport at Cozumel, a happy place. It reminds me of the barracks where we stayed in a hostel in Europe, in Italy, which happened to be Mussolini's bunker, or Mussolini's buildings for the Olympics. It never happened. And of course, when you're a kid and you're looking at these statues with fascist salutes and gas masks around their necks as they had at the time you think i'm glad we're past that but people don't think that we are people think that fascism is right around the corner here in america for example uh people are tweeting out the front page of the star tribune today which says trump calls for arrest of his foes which just shows that we're in that phase

where the fascism is about to descend with a clang on america you guys get the context here do i have to tell you anything about that for you to think oh i think i think i know what that's about but rob oh yeah i mean it's about what he's he's tweeting this um kind of insanely as he sort of spins out of control he's tweeting that he's ordered bill why doesn't bill barr arrest biden and arrest hillary why does he waiting for more information he He should just do it. And then there was a report at a cabinet meeting yesterday that he was screaming, all cabinet members, why aren't you doing more? Why aren't you should be, you know, basically he's spinning out of control. The interesting thing about all this is the only reason we know any of this is because his White House is utterly rudderless and completely chaotic

and out of control, which is something you could not say for the high command in nazi germany or for mussolini mussolini famously made the trains run on time this this is a sinking ship i think and this is what happens when the rats are there they start to talk to new york times reporters they start to tell tell them all the stuff we're going to be hearing more and more and more and more and more of this uh and then of course it's going to be this nauseating display after what i imagine and i know i'm broken record on this is a is a smashing smashing defeat for the republicans in november we're going to hear all about how oh no you don't understand i was working trying to even the ins i was never i always i was against him all along even though there are pictures of me nodding while he spoke

he's going to be utterly friendless it's going to be is it like it's gonna be like the uh the french um uh uh underground the french resistance movement in world war ii suddenly when uh when france is liberated it turns out that 93 of the french citizens were part of the resistance. It's like, who knew? And that's what we're going to have to, that's going to be the final nauseating chapter to this. It's just the cowards and the chickens pretending that they're part of it. 90% of that is pure speculation.

And I have to say there are other speculations possible. I'm looking at the New York Times piece here, and it's not based on leaks from a White House that's out of control. It's based on his tweets. It's based on public information. There's no evidence that any, at least in this story, which I'm looking at right now, there's no evidence at all that people in the White House are leaking. The cabinet, no, they are. The cabinet, there's no evidence of it. There's no unsourced background quotations here in this story. This is all based entirely on his tweets and on public statements. As for the White House being rudderless, it could create that impression easily because right now

they're all working from home because the whole place is now considered, apparently the structure itself is under quarantine. Larry Kudlow explained this. I did an interview with Larry, who's the president's chief economic advisor, and Larry and I did an interview on Wednesday, and it was from Larry's own home. Here's how much I'll grant to Rob. Everything he says has become plausible. I thought Trump might lose in a route that was within, so to speak, the probability dispersion before the GOP convention, which seemed to me to be such a well-done convention and so persuasive that I thought, okay, now there's no longer a possibility he'll lose in a route. It'll be close. He may well still lose.

It may be that you want to put a little money on Biden. After his first debate, I'm afraid the possibility that he will lose in a route now strikes me as totally plausible. But I still don't believe that's a done event. I still believe that it's most likely that given that we live, as Michael Barone said, that for 20 years now, we've lived in a 49-49 country. I still believe it's most likely that the polls will tighten up, but that's my speculation. Rob's speculation is now plausible. That much, I am sorry to say, I have to grant. I know a lot of people who thought the win was behind their back two or three or four

weeks ago and don't feel that way now, who've had the same sort of shift in their opinion as Peter does, and not one of them has changed their vote they're just thinking about the other people that's true change their vote but they haven't changed their vote the second thing is when we talk about okay we got trump calls for the arrest of his foes not the arrest it was the indictment okay arrest indictment tomato tomato uh this stuff is the spume on the surface of the water and underneath is a very large whale that no one talks about which is actually what went on in 2016 yes yes what biden knew what obama knew what the fbi knew what hillary knew how cambridge analytica is nonsense how the bank the alfie alpha bank

paying the trump servers how all of this stuff was bourgeois and nobody is going to pay for it that's right nobody absolutely nothing is going to happen so when he calls it one of the greatest political scandals in american history he might be right and it seems to me that instead oh i think we know enough that he is right we can say now that what happened we all what's already on the record is that as is exactly as you say james a whale under the sir a huge event right and it will go unnoticed and the and the very people who claim to want to have the restoration of our norms will willingly and happily vote for the people who were involved in this thing and will who will help to usher it in you know and what does that tell you that

tells you that people don't like the president well that's the only possible there's no doubt about that yes people don't like him he is his worst enemy you know guy benson actually had a very good tweet about a half an hour ago and he said in the gallup poll like 50 something plus percent say they're better off than they were four years ago 50 plus percent say they're you know they feel like the trump administration's handling covid okay okay those numbers are very high but those numbers are pretty high historically yes so the question is well then why is the president underwater it's because of him he is and what's so bizarre to me wait let me finish it is so bizarre to me that of all of the republican politicians this is the guy the

republicans choose to get all sentimental and mushy about it's so bizarre to me it's like wait wait who's sentimental and mushy about donald trump about him james and i defend his they are i mean the trump supporters have this kind of bizarre idea that this guy is worth is worth this kind of emotional investment cut him loose he's a loser. It's Jimmy Carterville. Bury him in a hole. All right. But what you've just said then is that because people don't like Trump, because Trump has an abrasive personality and he says nuts and things and the rest of it, I get all that. I've gotten that for four or five years. Because of that, then we should shrug and be indifferent to what was done to him. To what in 2016? No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm

actually not arguing that. Right, but if people don't care because they don't like Trump, that says more about the people than it says about Trump. Fine. They ought to be able to make a distinction between their opinion about this guy and what was actually done. Well, they clearly have, right? They clearly say, okay, we like tax cuts,

and we like his China policy. We like all that stuff. We just don't like this guy, and we don't like him so much that we'll vote for somebody we probably disagree with what does that tell you about the weakness and the incompetence of the president united it tells us nothing we haven't already known for the last three and a half but that's what that's what an election is my friend that's what it is you seem to be arguing against what an election is that's what it is don't blame the american people oh no no no no i will no i i will and that blame isn't the right

word but perhaps a misguided sense of priorities a desire to feel nice and warm and fuzzy about somebody is one thing and they'll vote for joe because he's normal and all the rest of it all will go back to normalcy well what exactly is this normalcy we're going back to? That's right. If it means shoving all this stuff into the margins and never caring about it, if it means expanding the state ever more so and confiscating more property and getting down on your knees to China and Iran, if that's normal, okay. But that's a wrong decision to make for the country.

And I will judge the people who are deciding to go there. I would only say this, that the market, what I'm calling the voters, the market is trying to tell us something. What it's been trying to tell us for 30 years is they like a basically liberal president and a conservative Senate. That is because people on the Republican side, all we do is talk to each other. We watch Tucker and we watch Laura and we get thrilled and we do not do the work to persuade everyone else to agree with us. And we play games with polls. We play games with the Electoral College. All of that's fine. But we have not moved the needle. The country, when it votes, votes left. And we get mad about that. But instead of actually trying to reach out and try to convince people and persuade them

that they're wrong and we're right, we scream at them and we elected a guy who doesn't know how to grow a coalition. And if you don't know how to grow a coalition in this country, you are toast. I do what I can in the macro and the micro. But some people are absolutely unpersuadable. They adamantine their brains. You're not going to get through to them because they've been wired

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year package. That's expressvpn.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Alex Berenson, former reporter for the New York Times, where he covered everything from the drug industry to Hurricane Katrina. 2003 and 2004, he served two stints as a correspondent in Iraq, an experience that led him to write The Faithful Spy, his debut novel, which won the Edgar Award. Left the Times in 2010 to devote himself to writing fiction, but he soon became interested in researching the science around cannabis and mental illness. During the coronavirus pandemic, he's gathered attention in conservative media, and all media,

frankly, for making claims that the coronavirus was not as serious as experts said. So visit his website, alecberenson.com. Welcome to the show, Alex. I follow you on Twitter, indeed, and with great interest have noted that there seems to be a curious divergence on Twitter when it comes to COVID. There are the people who are skeptical, shall we say. Let's leave aside the people who think it's all a hoax. The people who are skeptical of what the official narrative seems to be because it changes, because it's due to the WHO, because it's due to a misreading of statistics. And then there are those who seem to believe that anything official that is said about COVID is the gospel and deviations have to be scrubbed from social media. Taking a look at Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of it, how much diversity of thought is allowed when it comes to lethality, case rate, expansion, where it comes from? Are we really

having the open discussion we ought to have about this? I mean, I would separate Twitter from the other platforms. Twitter, I think, has made a commitment to be more open, and that's why I'm on Twitter. Uh, I know that some conservatives don't like Twitter and, you know, sometimes people say to me, well, I can't find your, you know, your tweets or, uh, I, I was unfollowed by you, but you're, you know, the Twitter unfollowed Twitter took you off my feed. They, you know, suddenly I was unfollowing you and I don't know how that happened. Um, but for the most part, um, Twitter has been pretty good. They haven't censored me at all. Um, and I think that some of the things I'd said might've

gotten me censored on YouTube or Facebook, which is ridiculous, but, uh, but those platforms now have, you know, they're, they're, they're actively censoring lots and lots of, of coronavirus content that to me is not conspiratorial at all and the ultimate example of this was youtube taking down something that scott atlas said now scott atlas said it in an interview with me by the way he said yes exactly right yes you know to me that's crazy he's advising the president okay by the way the crazy let's say he had said that 5g caused covid or something really absurd wouldn't we all want to know that the person advising the president is saying that you know so on some level the more conspiratorial his views are the more we'd want to

know what he's saying and of course he didn't say anything like that at all so yes on facebook and on youtube and on amazon by the way, by the way, Amazon is censoring in a different way. They're not really letting people self-publish stuff that contradicts the narrative. And that's where I, you know, that's where it hit me the hardest. Although thanks to Elon Musk, I was able to publish my, you know, lockdown booklets. But there is real censorship happening. And what I've said over and over again is i think that's i think that's dangerous on two levels first of all it you know people should be allowed to present facts and data that you know that that may run counter to what the wh was saying i mean people should be allowed to say whatever they want but but certainly people you know of integrity

should be allowed to make debates and try to move public policy in one way or another. But worse than that, when you censor people like me or like California doctors who are talking at a press conference or like Scott Atlas, even people who may not always, people may make mistakes sometimes when they're presenting data, people who are doing it in a way that's not designed to be overly conspiratorial and say, Bill Gates wants to neuter humanity. When you censor people like me, you push people who feel that the narrative, that there's something wrong with the narrative in the direction of serious conspiracy, right? So... Alex, Peter Robinson here. Here's what you said. I was so struck by this, I got the transcript. Here's what you said

on Tucker Carlson's show this past Monday. People can vote for Joe Biden or Donald Trump for all kinds of reasons, but Joe Biden has barely gotten out of his house in the last six months, and Donald Trump has lived. He took a chance. He rolled the dice, and he got caught, but guess what? It's not that dangerous, and it looks like it's going to be fine even though he's a 74 year old man who's mildly overweight so that's the lesson we need to take care quote this is all quotation but this is this is we need to live explain that so i you know i i think i think i can't say it any you know differently than i said it it there. The coronavirus is not particularly dangerous to most people who catch it. Now, it's not to say it doesn't kill people. It's not to say that we don't have excess mortality in this country this year. But for most people, even older people,

unless you have severe comorbidities, you are going to walk away from this fine. I mean, you know, maybe you'll be in the hospital for a few days. Obviously, we don't want that. Maybe you'll be in intensive care, you know, but that's a minority, a small minority of people. You know, if you believe the numbers that somewhere between 50 and 70 million people have gotten COVID in the United States, now it might be higher, it might be as high as 100 million. Let's say even if it's 30 million, you know, half a million people have been hospitalized. That's a tiny fraction of the number of people who've been infected with COVID. So most people are going to come through this just fine. And that's why I keep saying to people, look at the autopsy reports. I mean, you don't have to, you know, you don't have to go into the

details, but look at the top line reports and see who actually dies from this. The problem is that the media, you know, the public health establishment, democratic politicians, and the media have figured out that they can beat people over the head with one number. You know, they can say 200,000, 200,000, 200,000, and explaining to people what that, what's really in that number takes, you know, takes 5, 10, 15 minutes. Saying 200,000 and we've failed catastrophically takes 10 seconds and that has proven to be an incredibly powerful and successful argument is the election turning into an election about covid it certainly i mean look i'm not a i'm not a political guy but

it certainly looks that way to me you know donald Donald Trump was, as far as I can tell, he was favored to win before the coronavirus. And now, you know, if he wins, it will be, you know, it'd be a long shot, right? Right, right, right. I have one last question. Rob Long is champing at the bit. You have to know, Rob, to know how eager he is to get in right now. Oh, I can see. Okay, so listen, your friends, I can see. All you have to do is read two or three of your tweets to see that Alex Berenson is a gifted reporter and writer.

So you're part of the circle. You're part of the crowd. You run into people in Manhattan, and you see people at lunch. So have you paid a price personally? Listen, yeah. Look, it doesn't matter. I mean, there are people who used to be friends with me who aren't my friends anymore it seems like um uh if those people can't recognize that what i am saying is from the heart and that i am genuinely uh i genuinely believe this is an

overreaction i genuinely believe we're doing terrible things to our children um i i there is nothing about this that is uh that is an act for me uh then then then they can't be my friends, I guess. And I have gotten a lot of hate from people who I used to respect. And by the way, from other, what I call the blue checks on Twitter, the verified accounts that are often media, who I don't respect. There are people out there who are just hysterical and have been for months and months and have no idea what the science really says. And yet they say science, science, science over and over again. And, you know, I have no use for those people. I don't care what they say about me, but, you know, people who I consider friends, it is, it is upsetting, but there, but there's nothing to be done about it.

I'm not going to change what I think. And I'm not going to change trying to convince people. This is a fight for the future of the country. And are we going to live in a free civil society with functioning schools and where people can go outside without masks if they choose to are we going to live in this weird neutered medicalized society that we're creating well hey Alex it's Rob Long in New York thank you for joining us um can I keep hearing from people like, listen, I believe science. OK, I believe science, which is the great thing about science is you don't it's not something you have to believe. Actually, you don't have to believe it at all. You just science is the scientific method.

And the method means that I get to repeat all of your experiments and I'm going to get the same results if you did the experiments right. If the conclusions are right. OK, so but we're not in that world anymore because there's too many, there's a lot of question marks. I really have two questions. One is, just the state of play today, just as a reporter covering the story, one of the things people say over and over,

well, you know what, there's a lot we don't know. There's really a lot we don't know. Is there a lot we don't know? Look, is there a lot we don't know about sort of, you know, the specific biological mechanisms of the virus or the exact best way to treat it or where it came from? Yeah, there's stuff we don't know. Do we know what the death counts look like and what the, you know, basically how this is transmitted and whether or not children are at risk uh and sort of the really important things we know to we need to know to set public policy yes we know those things we have known then what's the what i mean i'm asking you now to like become an amateur shrink or maybe a professional shrink whatever you want um what's the attraction and i think it is an attraction to this kind of apocalyptic everybody wearing a mask

this kind of reaction that's been going on for eight months almost more than eight months what's the what's behind all that just doesn't seem so you know people want to say it's trump right that the media hates trump and they've amped up the fear to get at trump and there's truth in that okay that is part of this um but but obviously this is much bigger than that um because if it weren't uh it wouldn't be happening all over the world and we wouldn't be seeing this sort of strange distinction between the anglophone countries right now and you know other european countries that are more statist than the u.s and yet these days are pushing back against lockdowns in a way that, that, you know, the Anglo countries are not. I mean, I think there's a couple of things.

First of all, I think this is not a secret, you know, people want to live at the end of the world, right? Like because we're all going to die. So it's more fun on some level to think that everybody's going to die. I mean, there's real truth in that. There's, you know, apocalyptic movies and this feeling that the world's going to die i mean yeah no i mean there's real truth in that there's you know apocalyptic movies and this feeling that the world's going to end is a is a is a it's a real thing but there's two other things that that are going on that are really dangerous that don't get talked about and that i've only started to realize which is so American society and Western society in general has been increasingly medicalized,

right, in the last 50 years. And in the U.S., medical spending was 5% of GDP in 1960. Okay, it was only 5%. It was only $27 billion. This year, it will be 20% of GDP. We will spend almost $4 trillion on medical care. Even if you adjust for inflation, that's a 15-fold increase. Okay. Ultimately, our society has become much more interested in disease, and there are really large economic forces that want disease. I'm not saying that doctors individually want people with COVID or anything like that. I'm saying that there is a system here that works on inputs, and this is an input, and there's just no way around that. And the other thing is that the most powerful companies in society in the world right now are tech companies, big tech companies, and they have benefited hugely from this.

Okay? They have both made it possible for us to lock down because we have bandwidth that we didn't have even five years ago, much less 10 or 15 years ago. People in white-collar jobs can work from home now, and schools can supposedly operate, although we all know how that's really going. And meanwhile, so these companies have made the technology possible, and at the same time, they are making untold fortunes from this. They are the biggest companies in the world now by market cap. And so those trends are real, and they are powerful forces encouraging us to separate and to think of this disease as different than any disease

that came before when statistically, and as people who've had it can tell you, that's not true. Alex, Peter Robinson here, one more. I know James Lilacs also wants to get in here, but one more. Have there been any heroes? Are there any figures in all of this who are pointing the way? Maybe. I mean, this is just me. I don't have anything like the depth of knowledge. You've been watching this all day, every day for months now. Ron DeSantis, maybe? Is Scott Atlas a kind of a courageous figure? Are there people who have emerged from this whom, A, you admire, and B, who in one way or another are pointing the way out? You mean besides Tony Fauci, who goes on TV and podcasts 10 times a day?

St. Tony, St. Tony. You know, Anders Tegnell in, uh, in, in Sweden. Um, and then there, you know, there's a few explain who he is. So he's the, he's the head epidemiologist in Sweden. He's the one responsible for keeping Sweden unlocked. And without Sweden, we wouldn't have any data from Europe sort of as a counter case. Um, uh, you know, governor Noam in South Dakota, same thing. She kept that state unlocked. Um, but there's very few people. And there's

a couple, you know, there's a couple scientists at Stanford. There's a couple people, you know, at Oxford, you know, some epidemiologists. But if you look at political figures on the national level, there's nobody. I mean, you know, DeSantis is a governor. Noam's a governor. I can't think of a national figure who stood up and said, this is crazy. And we're, you know, we just need to move forward as a society. It's, it's clearly politically toxic to say that. have a moment here that we have a lot of listeners what would you suggest what are the three or four things people listening can do that are reasonable that sort of accept a reasonable amount of risk accept the the contours in the profile of this virus what can they do to kind of mitigate their risk as much as possible uh sure i mean uh look i think if you if you want to avoid sort of bars and restaurants uh you know sort of crowded indoor spaces that are poorly ventilated, that that's you know, if you feel that that's a risk you don't want to take.

I get that. You know, I think if you know, it's clear that if you're sick, whether or not, you know, you have the coronavirus, if you're symptomatic, you should stay inside and you should discourage people from getting near you. That's probably the one thing more than any other thing that we can do as a society. It's simple and it's effective. The evidence around masks is incredibly weak. If you really want to wear an N95 mask and get it fitted properly and wear it all the time and have a couple of them so you can rotate them out, that may marginally decrease your risk. Most people, I mean, that's not what the debate about masks is about, right? And by the way, I don't have a problem if people want to do that, even though I think it's probably, you know, of marginal benefit to them. I have a problem with the, you know, with the government mandating that I need

to wear a mask outside or in a, you know, in an average store when I'm not showing any symptoms of anything. I think that's given what we know, that's, that's pointless and an infringement on my, you know, liberty. And it's sort of setting up, you know, a future fight over vaccines. So, so, I mean, you know, those are, those are sort of things people can do, but honestly, there's not that much we can do about this. You know, unless we're going to do, you know, we're going to be New Zealand and we're going to lock down whenever we have cases and we're going to be an Island of 5 million people that's in the, you know, middle of the Pacific. And we're sort of a marginal, you know, entity on the world stage. Like we, as a, as a big, important country,

we need to function. And functioning means figuring out how to deal with this virus as, you know, as Europe is trying to do. And we'll see what happens in the really long term in, you know, in Japan and South Korea and China. You know, certainly Japan has avoided major problems from the virus until now without really any kind of lockdown. It will be interesting to see if that continues. And it'll be interesting to see why Japan has incredibly low rates of obesity, you know, and is a fairly healthy country. And, you know, is that part of the reason they haven't had problems? But, you know, what I say on Twitter, which people sometimes don't like,

is, you know, virus gonna virus. And there's a lot of truth in that. And, you know, before March, it seemed like most epidemiologists agreed that lockdowns and sort of these super harsh measures were not appropriate, and certainly not appropriate for something like this, that, you know, on the spectrum of a cold on one end and Ebola on the other is a lot closer to a cold. This is, you know, this is on the sort of severe flu epidemic spectrum, not the Spanish flu. This is on the, you know, 1958, 1957, 1968 flu spectrum. And we didn't do very much at all during those flus. And that's one reason I say that, you know, we are getting, we're the response here in part is because we can do it, which is a dangerous thing. In the middle of the Hong Kong flu, we had Woodstock, which is just the biggest Petri

dish that ever assembled in Gasker's farm. Hey, last question, Alex, and I want to go back to Sweden and I want to go back to the post, the apocalyptic thing. And I probably forgot my question because I'm so fascinated just listening to you talk but yes it's true that people like to live in an apocalypse but there's something else at work here sweden did what they did perhaps vast overgeneralization because they have cultural cohesion and cultural confidence they did not want to give up what they had they wanted to continue on as normal what i keep keep hearing now in stories from CNN to elsewhere to pronouncements from various international organizations is that we will never go back to normal. They want us to think. They're really keen to let everybody know that they ought not to hold in their head the idea

of the world as it was because it's not coming back. In fact, it's psychologically damaging to think so. We have to think to this new normal. And this seems to be taken up by people who, in this country, have been despairing of this culture for most of their lives, for whatever political ideological reason. So they like the fact that this old world, which they held as immortal somehow, and its consumerism and its consumption and the rest of it. They like the fact that all of this is an opportunity to reset. So they don't want the apocalypse. They want year zero, which they can then use to reform society in a way that fits their ideological presumptions more.

Is that ridiculous to think? No, no. I mean, that's been clear from the beginning. I have this tweet from a yale uh you know epidemiologist saying you know this is back in march well there's no reason why we can't essentially you know force everybody to uh stay home for 18 months and totally remake our society we just have to decide we're going to do it um and you know clearly there's a lot of people on the left who who wanted that and you know you do sort of wonder whether some of them aren't disappointed that things weren't a little bit worse so that they could have gotten more of that um uh what's ironic

is that you know if you believe that the number one way to beat this is to spread things out well then you're getting away from sort of the density of cities and uh you know people should have less public transport and more private transport all this stuff that's not very green at all. But, you know, in their rush to remake society, I think that people on the left haven't really thought that part through. So, I'm sorry, I just want to make that explicit. You're saying things that hadn't occurred to me because I just have a little, I'm a bear of very little brain like Winnie the Pooh. But you're saying here that part of what's going on is sort of the Cotton Mather impulse, sinners in the hands of an angry God.

Oh, yeah. That there is some feeling, some deep psychological feeling that we deserve this. That this is the wrath of God or the wrath of nature, and the United States is so tainted that we had it coming. I mean, Fauci wrote, he didn't go that far but he he he wrote something like that in a piece that was published in august um and i don't have the exact language so i'm not going to quote it but he you know this is you know this is what we've gotten for messing with nature um and by the way you see this with the language around trump getting sick

and and you know the white people the white getting sick, people who correctly would have said and did say, you know, saying that AIDS is a God's punishment to, you know, to gay people is unfathomably cruel. You know, these are the same people who say that, you know, basically too bad he got the virus tough. You know, I think that I think the left has really lost its moorings on some of this stuff. Alex, thanks a lot. It's been great to hear you. We hope to have you back again when all of this is over and we're back to normal. So we'll see you in 2020. Let's see you in 2024. You know, I guess I'll never. That's right. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Alex.

You can follow him on Twitter, and I recommend doing so. Peter, you mentioned Cotton Mather. I usually used to say Mather, right? Oh, I don't know. I've come to think of it. He was a Yale man, wasn't he, Rob? What's the correct pronunciation? Oh, I don't know. Mather.

That sort of thing. But he had a brother, didn't he? He had a brother whose name was Increase, which I always thought was Increase Mather. Isn't that great? To hell with Cotton and more of Mr. Increase. Increase everything. But on the other hand, when it comes to Cotton, breathable Cotton, nice, comfortable Cotton, matter i you know great to hell with cotton and more of mr increase increase everything but on the other hand when it comes to cotton you know breathable cotton nice comfortable cotton the finest cotton you can imagine is the sort of thing that you really really do need in your life and

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him on Twitter at Andrew Beaton. Welcome, Andrew. I'm a Vikings fan, so you can sort of point and jeer right now if you like. And I've been watching the games, and it's not fun to watch. It really isn't. The empty stadiums are a depressing sight. The manufactured crowd noise, all the rest of it. But I am keen always to see exactly which pre-approved sentiment the players have put on the back of their helmet to let me know where they stand on the important issues of the day. The NBA, however, from what I understand is even worse. Ratings have cratered. Nobody's watching it. And some people are saying it's because of the whole get woke, get broke thing. Break it down for us. How bad is professional sports in this season and how much of this is due to them saying, oh, no, sports, well,

yeah, that's part of it, but mostly it's a social agenda that we really have to tell people about. Well, one of the funny things about whenever we're talking about sports ratings, whether it's now or whether it was several years ago at sort of the peak of the NFL's national anthem protests, is that when you look at the ratings, it's always hard to isolate why something is up or why something is down. And so even during those moments when there was this firestorm a few years ago, if you talk to executives, whether it was from the league or from the networks, you know, they didn't actually know that it was the political protests that were driving anything with the NFL's ratings say, you know, there's a lot of factors. It could have just been people were tired of watching Tom Brady go over and over and over in every game. Then all

of a sudden ratings go up when an exciting player like Patrick Mahomes comes along. And you sort of have the same paradigm this year where it's really hard to sift through everything that's going on and understanding people's viewing habits. You know, there's people who want to watch cable news during an election season. There is the fact, simple fact that you turn on your TV right now, you can watch an NFL game. You could be watching the French open. You could be watching baseball's playoffs. You could be watching the NBA finals. You start to take through it. And it's this really bizarre, crazy, in some ways, amazingly fun moment where there's more sports on than ever right now.

But that also means, you know what, maybe each individual league isn't getting the same eyeballs because it's so spread out among those different leagues. So it is this really strange and interesting paradigm that I'm not sure anybody knows the answer to. Hey, Andrew, Peter Robinson, it's really a pleasure to talk to you because the way I think of it, you stand in a tradition that goes back to Red Barber and beyond that to Ring Lardner, where in any day's newspaper, the best writing was going to be on the sports page. You're a wonderful reporter, but man, you can sling prose, too. You're way wonderful reporter, but man, you can sling prose, too. You're way too flattering. And I'm a Dartmouth man, and Buddy Teevens is a buddy of mine, so I just loved your story. Actually, tell us that story.

How on earth did that come to your attention, that kind of offbeat story? Fill in the listeners briefly on the story. And how did you report that? How did you find that? Well, so one of the things that was really interesting is over the years people have mentioned you know this guy at Dartmouth he's doing this really interesting thing where they don't tackle each other at practice but you know Dartmouth is football hinterlands right nobody is exactly clamoring it's hinterlands full stop it's

everything hinterlands it's an outlier one thing for this place in the school, in the Ivy League, to be doing something quirky, and it's easy to be like, all right, yeah, who cares? Even if you knew about it, it was hard to think, yeah, this is really relevant. One of the things that really struck me is when football came back this year, in the middle of a pandemic, they were basically trying to figure out how can we safely figure out how to play this game. And that safety question came on two fronts. were basically trying to figure out how can we safely figure out how to play this game and that safety question came on two fronts they had to figure out everything with testing for the virus social distancing inside the facilities mask wearing and all these really important measures but they were also concerned with these are football players who are about to play an incredibly violent game but for all we know they haven't been in a gym for months on end right they

haven't been able to be inside the team's facilities. So how can we physically prepare them to play football? And the talks between the players in the league ultimately resulted in this preseason that looked nothing like ever before. There weren't exhibition games, and there was this very gradual ramp up in what teams were allowed to do in that they, for an extended stretch, they weren't really allowed to have contact during practice. So who figured out allowed to do in that they, for an extended stretch, they weren't

really allowed to have contact during practice. So who figured out how to do that? Buddy Teevens. And in fact, the thing that was fascinating about it is this wasn't some guy who said, yeah, you know, I'm going to try to just play football safely. Like we know football is a violent game game but his outlook on it was so interesting because he said his darkness was really bad at football and they're really bad he found because they were hurt all the time right and he thought of it as making the players healthier was a means

to also being better and when you say it like that, it starts to seem really logical. But then you look at football's history and the way most football teams have always operated, is that these teams beat the living daylights out of each other in practice so often. So no wonder that guys might be getting dinged up when it comes to an actual game. And so it's really interesting that of all places, Dartmouth was a blueprint for NFL teams to be looking at, you know, this is a way to not just prepare more safely, but also very possibly make your team better. Right.

So Andrew, I have, this is, this is a step away from COVID and from the current moment, although that's part of it. Do you, but here's all my, all three of my boys played football in high school, but you know what, the high school coaches will say, it's getting harder and harder and harder to talk moms into letting their little boys play football. And it turns out if you're a high school coach, the person you have to persuade in any family is the mom. Okay. So, do you have the feeling between COVID and the notion of concussions and the players' union going after the NFL again and again and again to pay for injuries and to fatten pensions with more medical benefits? Is this sport under such long-term pressure

that in one way or another, it's just going to start, who knows, maybe there will be a dramatic collapse, but it's just going to start fading away. If I were part of a consortium and my investing consortium knew a bunch of rich guys who'd love to own a team and we knew there were a couple teams coming up, should we underbid asking price? What's your feeling about football as the great American pastime over the longer term? We just built a huge stadium here in Minneapolis, so I'm keen on this one. Well, first of all, it is an absolutely beautiful stadium. That stadium is an absolute gem. I'm sorry that there is not a better football team this year to be playing inside of it. But what I'd say about football in that regard is there is no doubt every

pressure you just rattled off exists and is very real. But what I'd also say is look at the ratings of the most watched TV events every year. Go from one to 50, about 47 of them are NFL games. The regular season NFL games outrate playoff games in the other sports. Thursday night football games that we mock endlessly between teams with quarterbacks who just make you put your face in your palm they do gangbuster ratings and in an environment where we know what is happening to traditional television watching

it is remarkable to see how many people still tune in to watch this one product it is really in a lot of respects kind of the one last gathering activity that everyone sits down together and watches live. And I think that is the greatest strength of the NFL now and going forward, is that while everything else craters in this same industry, the fact that its ratings are still so strong is a remarkable feat. And that's why I think everyone should still have reason to be bullish on football in the longterm because despite all of those pressures,

people still love watching this so much more than everything else. It's kind of wild when you really think about it. It still has convening power. People across the country are still going to throw parties on Super Bowl day. Yeah. Okay. I get it. I get it.

And every Sunday, it's that same thing happens. You know, you check your phone and you know someone's going to be texting you at 3.30 because that's when Mahomes made the crazy fourth quarter pass. It's a ritual every week, every week throughout the fall into the winter, and then builds up that Super Bowl Sunday when everyone is watching. Rob has some very important questions, but I just have to interject this.

We turn off our phones when we're watching the game because we watch on a little bit of a delay so we can speed ahead if we have to. So we're always about 10, 20 minutes below. So somebody behind the actual action. So if somebody does something, we don't want if we have to. So we're always about 10, 20 minutes below. So somebody behind the actual action. So if somebody does something, we don't want to hear about it. That said, is it my imagination?

And it probably is. Or does the NFL this season seem to be a little bit more of imbued with the let them play spirit? The things that last year might have gotten the flag this year. It's like, you know what? Let them play.

We need something extra here. And if it means a little bit more vitality and rambunctiousness in the game, we're going to allow it. Or is that just simply subjective nonsense? I mean, that's definitely been the case in the earliest weeks of the season, right? We've seen scoring has been up. Certain penalties have been down. And, you know, is anybody upset about that

no who pays to watch the official throw a flag you know are we that upset if someone gets away with a little bit of a holding you know we always want the rules to be enforced but also we don't want sunday every sunday to be flag day right right right yeah breathing breathing on the passer is no longer being called this season. Rob? Yeah, I was going to say, there's a great old, I think it was a John Cleese joke that said that football was the classic American sport. It's brief episodes of incredible violence punctuated by committee meetings, which is

true. But then, of course, when there are too many flags it's also then punctuated by essentially by litigation um so it's like it's good to have that gone i just want to two anecdotes one about about football i live in greenwich village in manhattan i was walking down the street uh a couple weeks ago and there was a bar a local bar everybody's sitting outside big old wide screen on a sunday afternoon and they're uh or maybe it's my i can't remember and they're watching football and everybody's cheering and so i go up to the guy he's there do you guys do this like every is this every week because you know we're all trying to figure this out how you're going to watch the game with people

at a bar he said no no no just green bay but that's the weird like but like the the level of loyalty in the middle of new york city to green bay was so much so that they're like we're gonna put the big screen outside and we know that we're gonna get all the green bay fans i don't think all of them but a lot of them to come and watch it and we're not going to do it for anybody else which i just thought was the kind of a classic football thing but i'm in the the TV business, so when a network bids $50, empty $11 billion for football, what I know is that they're going to lose money on football, but it's going to be a gigantic promotional platform because, as you said, the viewership may go down,

but it's still huger than anything else around. So Thursday Night Football was a huge success for Fox. Fox had it, and they used it as a platform, and their Friday night shows, because they platform the next, you know, you get about 24, 48 hours of Halo there. And the Friday night and the Saturday shows did really well because they had football. It's the same thing with Monday.

Like CBS has football on Sundayay or had it and that helped propel their monday night so football is still this place where people come but like this is a sports crazy country how come no matter how much they try they can't sell us hockey at that level and they can't sell us soccer at that level i mean is it just that we you know we picked our sports we got basketball we get baseball we get football and we're done or is there something intrinsic about those sports i have a theory about hockey but what's the what's holding those sports back if you accept my premise well what i'd say is first of all i think there is this idea that it is in some ways distinctly american as you're saying it you know it's something that

is has been a this communal thing for a really long time but also i think you can also look at those other sports and see they had still have potential for traction. I have more and more friends who get up early on the weekends to watch the English Premier League than I would have ever said 10 years ago. There's more and more of that. But one of the things that something I also even face in my job, where it is my job to watch sports for a living, that at a certain point, every individual only has a certain number of hours in a day to commit to this. Right. And this, and so if you're spending a certain number of hours watching the jets and

the Mets or the Yankees, if you live in New York, like you do, do you have time to fit in the Rangers? Maybe during the playoffs. Everyone talks about how fun playoff hockey is. It's true. But at a certain time, you also want to see your family. You want to go to the park when it's nice outside and not spend every second of every day, maybe watching sports. So I think it's just a little bit of all these factors that everyone

has to juggle. But I think one of the things that's interesting is the potential for growth in all of these things. You know, you look at surveys and people even younger than me, and I'm a pretty young guy, people, there's real reasons to believe that esports are a thing of the future. Something that is still even a little farther off the radar

for some people than, say, soccer. But I think that just shows that these trends are constantly evolving. I know that we want to jump in. I know you got to run, but one last question. Just your thoughts on the absolutely, gigantically, quickly growing business of sports betting online, like DraftKings. Is this a thing that we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger? You can't do it in New York, but you can do it in a lot of other states. How big is this going to be? Well, I think one of the things that all this has shown is that the iceberg was already there. It was just underwater, right? The proliferation

of legal sports betting and the amount to which people are doing it, I think, has shown to a lot of people just the extent to which people were betting already, whether it was with a bookie, whether it was on an offshore site, whether it was just with friends. And so now it is more accessible. It is something that state governments can make money off of. In fact, that's been legalized. So I think one of the things that is shown is that this already existed and may as well make it somewhat mainstream, may as well have the means to regulate it. And what's really fascinating about it to me is how the leagues have pivoted on this idea over the years. For example, there was no league around that was more anti-gambling than the NFL, but their thinking on it shifted, you know, something that they once thought as a

threat to their sport, they now see as a potential driver of engagement and attention. They see it. You could bet on a game during the game. Exactly. And it's something that's really popular with young people, people who spend their time watching games with a second screen open, which is an audience that the NFL is constantly trying to attract. The idea that there would be an NFL team in Las Vegas, if you said that even 10 years ago, would have sounded absolutely nutty. You'd have been like, what bizarro planet are we talking about where the NFL would let a team be in Las Vegas? That's casinos, that's betting, that is everything the stuffy NFL would never even consider. And now it's just totally normal. The conversation around this topic has shifted rapidly. Andrew, Peter here again, Peter Robinson. Last question from me. Maybe this is a little unfair because it's sort of a big question.

You could write a treatise about it. You being you, you could certainly write a piece about it. Are sports still – I have no idea whether you're married or have kids, but are sports still good for people? You're a professional. We've just spent the last X minutes talking about this stuff as big business and as entertainment. And what I have in mind is I work here at Stanford where they just eliminated some sports.

I'm an alum of Dartmouth, as it happens. They just eliminated some sports. and what now seems like a quaint notion that sportsmanship and discipline and teamwork, that these things are actually good for kids to learn. And it's not only fun to watch a football game, but there's something admirable about watching these adults, football discipline, George Will wrote his book on baseball, it was called Men at Work. Something admirable about the human discipline do you you do this for a living do you feel still find do you find sports admirable or is that just quaint and ridiculous is it are we talking about big business and and entertainment well there's there's two ends of it right i mean when you're talking about

professional athletes the guys making tens of millions of dollars the owners who own teams that are worth several billion dollars then you're talking about big business that doesn't mean it can't be fun i mean watching patrick mahomes and lamar jackson and josh allen it's they do things that you never thought you could see on a football field it's incredible incredible. But at the same time, there's also the youth end. There is a guy like me could play sports. I was no good at them. Let's be very, very clear about that. But you also, I mean, you learn how to communicate with people. You learn how to make friends. You learn how to constructively disagree with people. You know, there's sort of no more, or for some people, there's no more constructive social environment

than a sports team in terms of teaching important lessons to you as a five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, middle schooler, high schooler, and so on. So I think that construct is really important no matter which sport it might be. Whether it's soccer, baseball, football, basketball, I think that's really important to people just because I know it sports is america america is sports and the the way you write about it intertwines the two perfectly we advise everybody to seek out his writings and enjoy them and learn and even if you're not a sports person i'm not a big sports person it's a joy to enjoy somebody good at their craft whether it's in sports or in the newspaper so thanks for joining us and we'll talk to you again i hope thank you so much for having me andrew thanks a lot thanks andrew bye bye there are a couple of points I wanted to make. I didn't have the time. Next time,

perhaps, one of them is, you know, Rob was asking why hockey wasn't more popular. It is around here. That's it. But I think, I mean, the last hockey game I went to, we sat there for a couple hours, and the score was 2-1. I think it'd be a lot more popular if they didn't have a defended net.

I mean, if you had in basketball somebody who was perched atop the rim knocking the ball away, you'd have the same sort of scores that hockey does. So just leave the net open and see what kind of scoring you get then. I mean, if you have a hockey. My theory about hockey is that it's too, the puck's too small and it's too fast. In basketball, you watch the ball. You can watch the ball. And it's like fast you don't in basketball you can you watch the ball you can watch the ball right and

and it's it's like people move slower so your brain can like you could watch this amazing layup you can watch all that all right well let's change hockey then right we'll have we'll change the puck to something the size of an ottoman from a 1930s drawing room visual thing you know the other i like the other point about soccer is that soccer is i mean soccer is gaining in popularity many we just saint paul built a big huge stadium here new and uh certain demographics enjoy hockey more than the other games but i think that for a lot of us we look at it and you say you know what they can't use their hands just their feet i'm a busy man i want to sport where they can use their hands and their feet and football does seem to fulfill that but what i was really interested in was the point that he was making about esports and esports are tremendously popular but are they

actually sports i think that esports is to explain explain what esports gaming gaming i mean guys sitting there with a head i like that i like that peter asked that question as if he was he knows he just means james explain it for people who don't know. When in fact, Peter has no idea what it is. No gaming using your eyes, your fast. It's not a sport. It's sitting in front of a computer. Well,

I was going to say that, that it is sports is to sports. What drone operators are to warfare. Nice. Nice connection there, but there's a difference between the guy in Florida with a joystick and somebody on the ground is shooting. It's like the difference between meat and tofu that has been shaped and formed and flavored to look exactly like meat. It may have the outward

characteristics of it, but it ain't meat. It's not meat because when it comes to meat, meat quality is what matters. But you know, there's more to it than just texture and taste. There's something else. There's a soul of it. Why is high quality humanely raised meat important to you? I am asking, he said, obviously going to a commercial. Well, because it's better for you. It's better for the animals, better for the environment, but not everybody has convenient access to high quality meat. Luckily, we have brought you the following word, butcher box. Butcher box believes everyone deserves high quality humanely sourced meat. Never be without something to cook for dinner. No, because there's always meat in the freezer.

I've got some now. That's tonight's dinner now that I think about it. One less trip to the grocery store and a better, more affordable selection too. Every month, ButcherBox ships a curated selection of high-quality meat right to my home. All meat is free of antibiotics and added hormones. And each box has 9 to 11 pounds of meat. That's enough for 24 individual meals. Packed fresh, shipped frozen, vacuum sealed, so it stays fresh. You can customize your box with one of theirs. Sorry, what did I just say? Remember, Scott, mark this.

You can customize your box or you can go with one of theirs. Either way, you get exactly what you want. ButcherBox, it's a no-brainer. It's the best meat shipped right to your door, which means one less trip to the grocers. And options like 100% grass fed and finished beef, free range organic chicken, heritage pork, wild cod, Alaska salmon, and sugar nitrate-free bacon. Now, I understand that Peter Robinson is a recent convert to ButcherBox, and he's been sampling some of their wares. Peter, your review, if you would, I'm sure. It is, first of all, it's just a very strange experience to get something delivered to the doorstep, open it up, and it actually is, all the meat actually is still frozen. So, the big development in my life,

partly at the prompting of Rob Long, is sous vide cooking, where you cook meat in a warm bath. I don't want to make this an ad about sous vide cooking, but it's the first form of cooking I have ever encountered that doesn't intimidate me because you can leave meat in from hour X to hour X. There's a big window and it's virtually impossible to overcook. So what do you do with sous vide cooking? You need the meat vacuum packed and butcher box meat comes exactly that way. So far, I've worked my way through about half of my last shipment. The chicken, big, beautiful, succulent chicken breast, delicious. I made a mistake. I hadn't quite figured out what to do

with the ground beef, and my wife took it and she said to me, by the way, what was that ground beef? That was the best ground beef we've ever had. It's just spectacular. We sirloin spectacular. It's all just really, really good. And even I, thanks to sous vide cooking, which is a separate matter, but still, even I can cook this stuff and I'm able to enjoy it. It's just remarkable. Well, that certainly sounds expensive, but it's not.

You get high-quality meat for about $6 a meal, and they even have free shipping nationwide, except Alaska and Hawaii. Right now, ButcherBox is offering new members two lobster tails and two filet mignons for free in their first box. Yum. That's two lobster tails and two filet mignons for free in your first box.

How to get it? Simple. ButcherBox.com slash Ricochet. That's ButcherBox.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to butcher box for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast. And now it's time for you know, it's always a challenge to find something that really sums up ricochet or stands as such an anomaly that you think, well, this can't possibly be what the site is all about. Ricochet is about everything. We

contain multitudes. It's the world, it's politics, it's sports, it's religion, it's everything. But this one just stuck out. I had to do it. Reader sought, it's from Dr. Robert, who wrote, Ricochet has many literate members, several authors, and several editors. For 12 years, I have been working on a paper on the making of copies of Baroque oboes in the United States, 1960 to 1995. I've got to stop right there. That just gets better and better. I've been working on a paper about making oboes. No, about Baroque oboes. No, about Baroque oboes in the United States. No, let's narrow it down to that position between 1960 and 1995. He goes on. This paper is nearly ready to send to a major musicology journal for review. It's 15,000 words, 35 illustrations, 200 footnotes, most of these being citations. While I think it's very good, he wrote, I can't judge it fairly. I can

especially no longer recognize flaws in my logic, inconsistencies in my timeline, that sort of thing. I therefore seek two reviewers, preferably Ricochet. He experienced in arts writing, preferably non-oboe players. I will pay a modest fee for your services. Please contact me promptly. Why did I choose this as the post of the week? A, because he could reasonably assume that within the Ricochet audience, there would be somebody who fit all of those criteria. B, he did. C, it led to somebody discussing ivory, which led to a discussion of the Trump administration's lifting of some of the prohibitions on ivory, which itself is an interesting question about whether historical ivory should be factored in and the rest of it. But that was, I mean, where in your day do you find somebody saying i have i have the old baroque copies of baroque and

oboes from the baroque period within this american that's my metier anybody else care to share that's why i love it the greatest issues of the day in the smallest also i love the idea that like people engaged that that's the thing like it's a community that's so incredibly vibrant and interested and interesting that someone oh you know nobody said who cares they said oh no this is everything like they engaged engagement is the you know it's what it's a term that people use in the business for like when you know you're you know it's what everybody at facebook is going for everybody at instagram is going for engagement but um on Ricochet, it happens naturally.

I think Peter took him up on that, too. Peter is now going to be writing the foreword to the book on Antigua. That piece, Ricochet, this is the first time I've ever seen the comparisons ever come to mind. But in this regard, Ricochet reminds me of the Académie Française, the French Academy. Across the street neighbor, the late René Girard was one of the 40 immortals. You're elected to this thing. You're called one of the immortals. It's established by Napoleon, 40 seats at a time. And their one work output is the French dictionary. And René was a member of the Academy for something like 10 years. And during got they got they worked their way through the letter g

and about halfway through the letter h and they and they're the ones who come up with french words to replace yes yes you know the franglais like uh le weekend they had to come up with something for the weekend i think they actually chose le weekend and email everyone's like, send me an email, do you want to email? And what they're, they're French is un courriel électronique. Electronique, yes. Nobody uses.

That's so high-minded and it reminds me that one of the things I've been enjoying this year has been going back and looking at the free online collections of a consortium

of 12 Paris museums. They put them all up. Public domain. And I've been learning so much about 19th century French culture just by going through there. And I'm doing a website on it next year. And that sort of high-minded stuff is completely co-exist because this is America with stuff from the popular culture. For example, Peter Robinson, name this song. That's, uh, it's something to do with ABBA, isn't it?

No. Oh, Peter. Oh, what was it? Well, you might be mistaken for thinking so because of the synthesizer. Oh, don't, don't, don't do this, James. James throws me a lifeline. You might think if you would walk past a record store during the 80s and heard that coming out you might have thought that was abba because there was a poster of such in the window but no no it's jump uh attuned by van halen which we're playing because

and it's interesting that we play that instead of eddie van halen's guitar because and everybody's been playing jump here's a guy known for his fantastic guitar technique and playing and the song that they play is the one that has a famous if not somewhat synth riff just started out do we have any of Eddie's actual guitar well it does remind me pyrotechnics is the story that uh John Lennon would say but when he went when uh he and Yoko, I guess, would go to a fancy restaurant in New York City and they have a violin player. In homage to John, they would always play Yesterday,

which everybody knows is like he had nothing to do with. It was all Paul McCartney. And he kind of laughed like, well, you know, I get half the money, so it's okay. But still, people play the hits. That's what they want. They want the hits. I suppose. And it's okay but still it's people play the hits they that's what they want they want the hits i suppose and it's a pity too because everyone's talking about eddie and the double you know the 10 the double tapping guitar technique and there's a big online argument about

whether or not steve hackett of genesis actually did it first and you're right when somebody from genesis fine would phil collins dies may he live forever and then be reincarnated as an Alamo tour guide, they're going to play something that is completely and ridiculously removed from the great skill and technique they deserved elsewhere. But, you know, it's better than being utterly forgotten, and it's better than not being known for anything. We've had some famous people, or soon-to-be-famous people, on the show here today, and it's been great. And obviously, I'm winding it up. So I have to say this first. The podcast was brought to you by VPN Express, ButcherBox, and Tommy John.

Support them for supporting us, and your life will be better. So will ours. And, of course, go to Amazon and leave us five stars. I don't know if we're there. Can't hurt. But go to Apple Podcasts, if you would. Five stars. That means the show gets more listeners.

It surfaces in more people's recommendations. More people join Ricochet. And the happier you are, we're just great. And stay tuned also. Check your local listings for the Best of Ricochet clip show, which is a compendium of the best moments of the Ricochet Audio Network, which is a thing. And Rob's happy about it because it means we're coming up with our own

competitor version to NPR. Right? That's the dream. That is the dream. That's the dream. Well, there is a thing. And Rob's happy about it because it means we're coming up with our own competitor version to NPR, right? That's the dream? That is the dream. Well, there are many dreams. The year is still young. No, actually, the year is getting quite old. How many years into the election? Two or three? Oh, Lord. At least when election day comes, it'll be all over. And what will

we talk about that day on the podcast? Something. Well, that's the future. For now, we're done. Gentlemen, it's been great. We'll see everybody at the comments section. We'll be sharing more when we're done. Next week, boys. Have you seen her?

So fat and pretty. Mover with a style and ease. And I feel her from across the room Yes, it's love in the third degree Ooh, baby, baby Won't you? Till you're at my height Ooh, baby, baby

Take a dance You're old enough to dance the night away. Oh, baby, baby, dance the night away. A light walk. Well, you're a beginner, but just watch that lady go. She's on fire, cause dancing gets her higher than anything else she knows. Ooh, baby, baby, won't you turn your head my way? I'll see you next time. Dance the night away Oh, yeah Ricochet

Join the conversation Ricochet. Join the conversation. Dance, dance, dance the night away Come on, dance the night away Three, two, one. Welcome everybody, it's the Ricochet Podcast, number 516. I'm in James... I'm in James Lylex. Sorry, again. I like what she said. Story. Three, two, what?