The Ricochet Podcast - Not Done With Fun

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

We’ve made it to 600, and in spite of the seemingly never-ending buffet of bad news that got our hosts talking in the first place, we manage to have a good time. Our first guest is Noah Rothman, whose latest book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, takes a deep dive into the fanatics out to break up our good time. Then Toby Young (host of Ricochet’s very... Source

Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver.

That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. That was iconic. Oh, my God. It was not iconic. It was a good movie.

Get over it. I have a dream. This nation will rise up. Live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. We control the Supreme Court, working in conjunction with extremist elements of the Republican Party to take away freedoms and our personal autonomy. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Today, it's Noah Rothen talking about the New Puritans and Toby Young talking about the fall of Bojo. So let's have our 600th podcast. I can hear you! Welcome. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number DC, if you're using Latin. 600. Oh my god. How did we get here? Well, of course, because of this NPR, by people like you, folks who've joined Ricochet.com and found that it's the most stimulating conversation and community on the web. You can join it too, and you ought to, because then you'll be the kind of guy who says,

yep, they made it to 1,200. You can put that one on me. But in the meantime, here we are for 600, and we're just going to have a regular podcast, which means it's going to be long and fantastic and full of interesting people talking, interesting people like Rob Long and Peter Rob. I'm James Lylex, by the way.

Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Rob I'm James Lylex, by the way. Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Robb appears to be in some coastal community, straight out of a late Edward Hopper painting. Peter, I assume, is in California, and you guys are enjoying great weather. I'm here sweltering in humid Minnesota. Peak of the summer, all is well, all is good. Except, of course, you look outside your house and just look at the world and you scratch your head and you you you moan and lament which of the issues of the day gentlemen popped up in your radar today is the uh-oh sort of thing that's going to dominate the news for the next couple of days i've got mine it may not be yours you mean what what of the fancy hotel brunch buffet offerings of bad news do we select as our first course? You know, when you go to the hotel thing and you're like, oh, I'm going to go there. I'm going to, wait, don't, I got to get back to that where they're making those omelets.

But you kind of never do because you're just too busy eating the shrimp. I would say, well, the good news course. When it comes to the bad news of the day rob does not want to stand in the omelet line he wants to go directly to the shrimp and i want to eat you know eat it first um the good news there there is some good news the job numbers were very very good um and that should be good news but it's also very very perplexing and baffling news because um we are we are either going we are either in a recession or we're going to be in one and we're in this terrible position which we get into in this country when we spend too much money of an inflationary period where we want we need to get

into a recession we We will cause one ourselves. The Fed is going to raise, they're going to raise interest rates faster than they announced. So, you know, if you're in politics, of course, if you're in office, say in the big office, in the Oval Office, this is not good news. And if you're an American, it's not good news. If you're a younger American, it might be potentially better news than simply letting inflation run wild. But it is already running wild. So we have to now, we're in this weird, perverse position where we're hoping that a recession is going to happen. Because that's going to soak up the inflationary powers.

That's my back of the envelope economics. Peter? Why, thank you, Rob, for tossing it to me. I saw you were looking away, and I thought I'd better shut up. No, well, no, no, no. I'm just thinking to myself that I guess this is phase two for me of the Biden administration. No, phase three. Phase one was, oh my goodness, how could the nation have elected this man and how can he

actually serve as president and how can the press report on him as if he's actually a serious person? Okay. Phase two, which began with the debacle and withdrawing from Afghanistan, was that the poll numbers caught up with Joe Biden and the Democrats, and that it was clear sooner than I expected it to be that the American people were onto these guys. And we've talked about this several times, the unbelievable way in which instead of moving to the center and moderating and sort of reaching out to the middle. And to the American people themselves,

the Democrats, including Joe Biden, have just moved left and left and left. Okay. Now we're in phase three, which is the worst of the phases. And phase three is the reality phase. This is not press and it's not politics. Now we've got the reality of the administration and the Fed policies messing up people's lives. People are going to be thrown out of work. People are watching, I'm watching my savings erode. This is not good. But it is, in a certain way, it's reassuring.

Reality is reality. The system will adjust. It'll take it some time and people will suffer. But we're now in the reality phase i agree i think unless unless you think this is putin's tax hike as the administration wants us to believe then you're in sort of the reality distortion phase of it all but i don't think people buy that i think people sense there's a sort of there's this fundamental lack and absence and things askew and it's it, it's what Peter said, you know,

watching your savings disappear, watching what you've seen, watching the diminution of things that you once expected to be sort of normal, you know, $5 gasoline is, is an affront to God and man and the rest of it, even though it's precisely what they have been telling us for years that we need to have in order to transition us to the next phase. For me, it's a little things like I tried the other day to actually eat a hamburger in the fast food restaurant. Do you know how difficult it can be to just to have a place to sit down because they don't have the staff. So you drive up and you grab the door and the door is locked. And you think I'm either going to have to sit in my car like a savage and scrabble fries into my mouth, or I can find some place that actually where you can sit

down like a civilized being. And I went to three places and in each one of them i walked up and the door bang was locked where could you they were serving only to cars through the window only to cars where could you say where does the james what what fast food burger does james lilacs prefer um well it see here's the difference rob and this is where this is why people listen because they know you can't just say fast food it's got to be fast food or fast casual the latter the latter being a little bit more upscale right so you can go to five guys where they have no choice because they have a dining room you can go to shake shack because five guys is delicious by the way i think it certainly is and they give you 48 pounds of French fries as well. But it was the tier below that, the Wendy's, the Arby's, all of it was just nothing. You couldn't go in and eat.

So, I mean, that's no big deal. I mean, here I am in a country overflowing with food. I've got the money I can pay for. It's not a big deal. Although, when did it become $7.71 to have two hamburgers and French fries? I don't know. That's another question. But there's just something about that. I mean mean the american idea is in the back of your

mind it's saturday night you're cruising down the strip with the rest of the cars the neon is bright you're going to pull into mcdonald's at 10 o'clock and you're going to sit there and have a hamburger and a shake right and when that suddenly just evaporates because we don't do that anymore it's something's been i know it's a small thing, but there are so many of them that make you feel we've gone off the course. And we know it, and we know what we want to get back to. May I rise to a brief culinary point of order to either one of you who can answer this? Why are the fries at Five Guys better? Is it McDonald's reduces the... Better than what?

Well, McDonald's reduces all the if i understand this correctly mcdonald's reduces potatoes to a kind of mush and then extrudes them into the form of sort of artificial french fries whereas five guys uses real potatoes and actually cuts them is that correct yeah there's sacks of potatoes actually there's you know so you can see i i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna counter that okay uh the it's hard to get i mean people's fries french fry taster and size preferences are you know their own right right um and i am not a fan of the mcdonald's meat offerings i don't think they're good um i think the mcdonald's breakfast menu is peer peerless, but I think their fries are utterly fantastic. And if eaten at the right time, they're hot and they're salty and they're absolutely delicious.

You can't get better fries than McDonald's fries. There's a very famous cooking teacher in Boston named Madeleine Kamen who opened her – and she was incredibly strict and incredibly french and she would open her very very very uh tough um rigorous cooking year-long cooking school by bringing in mcdonald's french fries for her class oh really and she would pass them out and have them eat them you know and everybody would eat them and she said what do you think these fries and then people just felt compelled to say oh they're not good they're this they're that she said no they're delicious they're the best fries you can get don't be a snob french fries are chemistry that's all it is starch salt and fat that's it don't don't attempt to grow a brain um and i've uh i've always liked that anyway um but james is there a is there a um and

i know we have news to talk about is isn't there like a local booster burger place? I mean, in Southern California, it was always In-N-Out Burger. Right. And in Texas, it's Whataburger, which is delicious. Isn't there the equivalent up there? Well, we have something called the Juicy Lucy, which is a hamburger with cheese inside of it, but it's only done at one place. And then a handful of pretenders we don't have many chains we i mean we've we've every chain has has has flowed has come through made a stand done it but it would

the other day actually and i we should probably cut this because we have to get to news but i i came up to the drive-thru they asked me what i wanted and i said i want a hamburger and so in and small fries to which the person said person said, you want a junior hamburger? I said, no, I don't know. No, no, I don't. What? I want a hamburger. And the person said, you want eight hamburgers.

Eventually it got to the point where I had to drive through and I explained to them. And I kept saying, no, I want a hamburger. And I would hold up one. And the person would go and then come back and then hold up eight fingers. Eight hamburgers? I finally drove away. The idea of ordering a hamburger was such a linguistic challenge. Anyway, but I still have the freedom to go someplace else.

Freedom is what Gavin Newsom is telling everybody that California now stands for. That he's saying that it has been, I guess, for presidential run, all you people in Florida, come to California and regain your freedoms. Anybody else see that ad? Sort of scratch their heads and say, say what you will about California. But the epitome of freedom is not precise. Freedom to sleep on the street. Freedom to defecate on the court. Freedom to pass out from fentanyl.

Correct. Yes, correct. You got it all. Yes, correct. You got it all. Right, right. All that's correct. All that is correct. And do they really, I guess they do.

I guess if you live in a state that takes the extreme liberal position on abortion, I guess that's what's driving them. Then they really feel that's the only freedom. Of course, you're not free to debate the matter, but that's the only freedom that counts. If they have that, then you're in a free society somehow. Is that all it is at this moment in the liberal mind, the progressive mind? I just don't understand how he can, what is he not, what does he not, does he not, even on the political side, just imagine if the presidential race does come down to Gavin Newsom versus Ron DeSantis. Think of the ads,

the DeSantis campaign. Can illegal immigrants streaming into California on the southern border, middle-class Californians streaming out of California across all the other borders, all the needles on the streets of San Francisco. By the way, that is not hyperbole. I get to San Francisco. There are streets where you have to step over the needles and avoid the piles of human poo. I just don't understand what Gavinavin newson could have been well i mean look i mean what's he supposed to say peter what what if the governor if the sitting governor of the state of california in 2022 is planning to run for president which i think he is yes in his mind for sure yeah what what else what else is he gonna run on like, you may as well just brazen it out. You know, in a way, I think I kind of admire it.

It's just so bizarrely shameless. I mean, I don't know what, first of all, if I was in the meeting and they're trying to figure out, okay, what's your angle? I couldn't think of one. I guess it's the angle where we just alter reality. that's what it is that's right but i also feel like there is something about the gavin newsom ron desantis pairing that um would be so incredibly healthy for america i actually think that america is agree yeah is, in fact, America right now. There are some people who are sort of just kind of generally under the Ron DeSantis umbrella, and I'm not entirely under that umbrella. I think he's a little craven in some respects, but he's certainly a really, really smart chief executive and a smart, brave, informed one.

And then there's the california uh version of america and i feel like these are two very clear kind of class this is a classic american showdown it it's about the states we are then we were gonna if it if this dream uh match happens we get to vote on which state is the best laboratory for freedom and prosperity for america going forward which is exactly what the founders wanted and we'll have somehow this country is in its own weird neurotics nervous breakdown it's been having for 25 years it will somehow forest gump its way into back on track where we actually have a have an election it's about something that's really important and um based on the original architect's vision of the sky hey move those routers there

oh hey it's me your data center and as you can hear i'm making some big changes in here because ai is making some bigger ones everywhere so So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia. Right on time. Get your data center AI ready.

Someday is here with Nokia. Country. How's that for positive? The first presidential election in which both candidates come from a state that had a disneyland yeah right right no you're right the peter the i mean the ads just absolutely run themselves you have you have florida's you have california schools with all the kids masked and newsom himself laughing in the french laundry versus florida where the kids

are happily gallivanting around the playgrounds untethered by... Yeah, no, I mean, that's... I hope. By the way, the latest aspect of this outrage, I don't know if the two of you, being non-Californians, Rob a recovering Californian. This is all on Twitter. I don't know whether it's penetrated to the national media yet, but as these ads are airing of Gavin Newsom in Florida, where is Gavin Newsom? Gavin Newsom is in Montana. He is in Montana on vacation. Montana is a state with no income tax. It is a state which has taken positions on this, that, and the other social issue that California finds so outrageous and so unacceptable that California has banned trips by state employees to the state of Montana. I mean, Gavin, it's unbelievable. I'd like to take a vacation in Montana, too, come to think of it.

Excuse me. Somebody cut me off because now I'm approaching apoplexy. But it's good. We should have this. People should get to vote on this. The trend to getting to vote on stuff, meaningful stuff, is a good trend. We should be encouraging it. You know, Gavin Newsom running as Gavin Newsom is not a bad thing for America.

It's good. We should have a choice. It's not a bad thing. The idea of banning travel to another state because of the policies in California. I mean, you wonder how many California people in the government die like Sam O'Neill in the hunt for Red October. I would have liked to have seen Montana, but of course, such things were forbidden. I'm sure it's cooler in Montana, but hey, if you're in a hot place and you can't get out of the heat, get rid of your underwear. Yes.

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John for sponsoring this number 600 Ricochet podcast. All this talk about food and hamburgers, which are sinful. Now that you think about it, you shouldn't be eating them. You're killing the world. You're destroying the planet. You ought to be eating the bug mush. Leads us to our conversation with Noah Rothman, associate editor of Commentary Magazine, co-host of the Commentary podcast, and the author of Unjust Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. As of a few days ago, he's also the author of The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressives, War on Fun. If you're watching this, you know that he is attired like Cotton Mather in order to underline the brand of the book. And, you know, well, you know, we like fun here. So we

wanted to chat with Noah about how we can fight back against this Puritan impulse. Welcome. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you very much for having me, guys. I appreciate it. All right. Basically, I got the first question here, and then I'm going to follow up and I'm going to challenge you because people like conflict. Okay. Conservatives, you know, describe the left now as puritanical and religious. It's a matter of mockery. But your book is not one of those just snarky takedowns. It's actually a very sophisticated analysis of what they've done. There's a piece in Commentary Magazine. Now you can find a great excerpt which deals with food and all of the panics over social

appropriation of these, why these foods are bad. The morality of the world has now come down to what's on your plate. So what do you mean exactly when you call the left and the world has now come down to what's on your plate. So what do you mean exactly when you call the left and the progressives Puritans? So, first of all, I mean it as an epithet, because it is. I mean, the word was originally intended as an insult. But it's also a permission structure to begin to mock what are really hilarious behavior patterns, with a performative level of self-deprivation and self-exertion and pain and anguish that's designed to communicate outwardly their commitment to the cause, their zeal, but looks to the uninitiated observer like fanaticism, you know, just to bounce off this burger talk, and you wouldn't think that there's puritanical prescriptions for food, necessarily, but there are puritanical

prescriptions for self-deprivation, for suffering, for enduring the unendurable in order to be Christ-like, to demonstrate your capacity for empathy for your for your surroundings for individuals in your orbit and that does prescribe or it does relate rather to um to the modern puritanical puritanically oriented progressives uh position when it comes to food take burgers for example now if you if you talk to a progressive in a in a room full of progressives, they won't have any qualms about saying that meat is an affront to the Eden into which we were born. It makes a burden of you on your community. It is a display of wanton cruelty to animals. All of this is very much the language of morality. It's a language of morality that if you pull on the thread, you can get to the 19th century, the 1700s, the 1600s, and ultimately, you scratch the

surface of these arguments, you get to a very moral, very spiritual argument about the anguish that these people suffer over what they believe to be their contributions to the degradation of society and the degradation of their environments, both of which are very scientifically dubious, but they are supported in part by this moral framework. And there's a moral framework that is applied to, just in this book, just about every aspect of apolitical life, life that should be pure entertainment, pure joy, existing a priori outside of politics, but nothing can exist outside politics anymore. Right. Okay, so here's my pushback, which you can easily bat away to reinforce your thesis. You write in the piece that's in commentary right now, you're quoting the rare jewel of Christian contentment by Burroughs,

right? Burroughs comes up with these maxims that tell you how people should feel about themselves. Quote, I am nothing, and I deserve nothing. I can do nothing. I am so vile that I cannot, of myself, receive good. I am not only an empty vessel, but a corrupt and unclean vessel. I mean, it's very, you know, Dave Wright and that kind of stuff. But now are you reading something, James, or is that you just saying how you feel? I can't. Yes, I'm quoting that from memory. It's the sort of negative affirmations I give myself in the mirror daily. But here's what, you know, I read that and I said, what's interesting about that is that the modern person who's telling everybody what they can and cannot do themselves feels as though they have an identity that bestows oppression, which bestows victimhood, which bestows virtue.

They are virtuous by their intersectional position on the pyramid, whatever. The people to whom they are, the people they are lecturing to are the ones who are, they don't feel unclean and vile. They have a virtue for embodying these ideas. You're the ones. Now, that seems to be, if they're Puritans, they seem to be remarkably self-content from the get-go with what they are because of what they in American culture of the prudish, blue-nosed Puritan who could not abide anything remotely resembling an enjoyable activity, particularly those that are carnal and hedonistic. That's more of a conception of a Puritanical ethos that evolved out of Puritanism, capital P, and in the 1900s in the Victorian period, where you had a progressive movement that was very much informed by a moral philosophy rooted in mainline Protestantism in New England. That's the stereotype.

And what are the years you're talking about? So Puritanism, the Puritan experiment, ended in the early 1700s. It began in the late 16th century in England, migrated over to the United States where it became much more zealous in the pursuit of its objectives, and then through a series of loss of control over the – there was no boundary between the state and the church, and through a series of loss of control over the state, the Puritan experiment began to come apart and pretty much collapsed after the moral panics of the late 1600s early 1700s culminating in the same but did it ever i mean um and i and i understand that's that that sort of puritan historical puritan finger wagging uh or even creating a community of people who are all policing each

other sort of quasi-voluntarily right but as you sort of move 100 years ago or 100 years up the chain to the late 19th, early 20th century, what you have is the next Puritan movement, which is Prohibition, which was finger-wagging at people who were drunks, right, or were drinking and having fun. Yeah. And that seemed to be not Puritan. I mean, it is Puritanism in your response. But I guess what I'm saying is there's a part of that Puritan movement that I see today that isn't just isn't let's live in an ascetic community and all eat vegan burgers and bugs. But more like I am going to finger wag.

I'm socially reforming my neighborhood. And I think that's where the friction is. Right. I mean, well, it gets far afield of the the original subject but let's talk about um booze and sex for a minute yeah because uh there's a chapter on this in this book well if we have time um there's a chapter on this book and one of the one of the reasons this book's kind of um not necessarily this broadside against uh progressives and and uh the puritanically inclined

progressive, is there's value to the social order that they're attempting to restore. There's a long history of the kind of morality that they're seeking to reimpose on their surroundings. That's why the chapters are organized by unimpeachable virtues, piety, prudence, austerity, a fear of God, god temperance and order uh and temperance is the chapter on sex and booze and we have long known that when men and women are in situations that are bathed in alcohol it can disaggregate that order it can it can disrupt that society this is something that we've that is the that is the i gotta say that is the most sort of weirdly elegantly intellectual way to put uh a bacchanalia but go ahead yeah okay but for most of our adult lives

it was the left that would respond to what we understood to be the kind of priggish prudish a moralization right a paranoid sense that innocent cultural affair can actually corrupt you into great society that was on the. And the left responded to that by emphasizing self-fulfillment, self-gratification, hedonism to the risk of maybe even self-destructive behaviors. Tune in, turn on, drop out. Correct. That was what we understood to be left-leaning liberalism. As they've begun to lean less towards liberalism, classical or otherwise, and more towards progressivism, they've adopted its habits of mind. Among them, that the disordered society is a chaotic institution, that idleness, that idle fare, cultural fare, what have you, is an empty vessel that can be filled up and will be filled up with wickedness.

And they've begun to prosecute a moral campaign to restore a very old form of social order when it comes to alcohol. We've seen institutions that are previously understood to be licentious, libertine, left-leaning organizations sort of curtail your access to booze in social situations where there could be social conflict or perhaps even something worse, a criminal activity, you know, a sexual assault or harassment. Likewise, you would think that the permissiveness of the left when it comes to sex would be just as much as, you know, the 90s, early 2000s and the 80s. The many proliferating sexual orientations are not just for self-gratification. If you dive into the literature on the left around this sort of stuff, they all have a political program associated with it. They all get the apple polishing treatment, too, with the exception of heterosexuality. There's even a term for that. It's called heteropessimism. These are people who are

plagued by self-doubt over their attraction to the opposite sex and need absolution for their sin. But so, we not only have a – sex is defined as an instrument of political utility, but it is not permissive insofar as it is accompanied by the establishment of labyrinthine courtship rituals that make it very difficult. Beyond the statute, we're not talking about statutory assault or anything that is a crime. We're talking about the sort of nebulous nature of human interactions, which make it very difficult to woo a partner assertively and boldly, and the result is less wooing and less sex. Let me ask you, because when I read that stuff, it seems to me that they're, you know, obviously it's a different iteration of it, but the consent rules and the sexual propriety rules on campus and places like that, they seem like they're right out of a Jane Austen novel.

Yes. Yeah, but they wouldn't recognize that in themselves no no but but i'm but i'm i guess what i'm looking for is the antecedents like the the the the furious person on the airplane with the n95 mask still firmly in place has an has a is a direct descendant of which great american hey move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated.

The whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia icon the the the puritan leader in new england in the late uh 18th century or early 18th century or the um temperance women's temperance movement blue stocking in 1910 i mean where does that come from who's that person the descendant of that person you know they're not wearing a mask because they're terrified they're wearing a mask because they think you should wear a mask they're wearing a mask because they like these restrictions that they had fun a whole bunch

of people had a great pandemic they loved every second of it and they wanted to keep going um that seems like a strain of american culture that we just we were always be around with those people They loved every second of it, and they wanted to keep going. That seems like a strain of American culture, that we're always going to be around with those people, right? Absolutely. Well, one of the central premises of this book is that we are all the heirs to this political tradition. It has found a home in every political coalition. It's been remarkably long-lived compared to the shortness of the puritanical experiment, you know, properly understood. But yeah, there is a chapter on the sartorial choices that are imposed on true believers and eventually will be imposed on you if they had their way. In the Puritan's time, the sumptuary laws were designed to delineate the kind of economic

circumstances into which you were born. Right. Now they're imposed on you to to demonstrate your ethnic background and to show to whom you're subordinate and who you are um and your vegan leather yeah i don't i don't know if there's vegan leather that's a there is a different yeah i don't know what that would consist of so so i mean all right. Polystyrene? Well, I think, no, not that, for sure. Taking all the, all right, so in 2022, 2023, we'll say, do you think that we are experiencing, do you think we have a little farther to go? I mean, I'm looking at the, prohibition to me is the model, right?

This sort of movement people have been talking about for 50 years suddenly, thanks to's suffrage let's be honest became a constitutional amendment um that then had to be unconstitutionally amended uh are we are we on our way to to something that crazy that we're gonna have to undo or are we sort of um or is there already a backlash i mean i sense maybe it's wishful thinking on my part i do sense a backlash from certain young people is kind of eye rolling at the um i'm trying not to use the word woke the the the new puritan yeah they're pretty yeah but am i crazy they're uptight no i don't think you're uh you're crazy because just about everybody that i spoke to for this book nine nine out of ten, identify as liberal, vote Democrat, wouldn't vote for Republican if they had a gun to their heads. But the joy that they have for their life's work is being robbed of them. They get up every morning not able to do what they spent their lives determining that they would order themselves around, that that's what they would do.

They can't do that anymore. They have to do politics. They don't want to do politics. So while they're cowed and discouraged and kind of intimidated by this group, they do resent it. And there is a much larger host here. We're talking about a very small number of individuals, not Democrats, not liberals, not even all progressives, but puritanically inclined progressives. It's hard to quantify that. But it's not a large number of the left coalition. They do, however, punch way above their weight. And that has, it's angering a far larger host. Your first encounter with this type of mentality is going to be when they have adulterated or even prescribed something you enjoyed. That is the sort of thing that engenders

a little frustration. And yeah, I do think that there's a backlash brewing. And one of the ways in which 19th century, you know, post-Puritan Puritanism fell apart is embodied in the phrase banned in Boston. So, mainline Protestantism in Boston organized itself, comstockery organized itself in opposition to lewd and licentious literature. The sort of corrupting... The only kind of literature there really is, but okay, go ahead. The corrupting influence of Walt Whitman. Right.

That's the sort of thing that really got the... Well, they have a point. So, and this was very successful well into the 20th century. Plays were bottlerized, books were banned, songs couldn't be played on the radio what have you and a backlash formed uh commercially because initially this was a a warning against lewd and licentious literature and it evolved into a powerful advertisement for it publishers actively sought to have their books banned in boston to increase sales the modern equivalent is banned on facebook banned on amazon right because when that happens to conservative authors, and it does tend to happen almost entirely to conservative authors,

the books explode. They do far better commercially than they ever would have based on the PR campaigns around them. It's a powerful advertisement for these ideas that are being attempted to be censored by a very moralistic, left-wing, kind of paranoid culture. And it ends up backfiring spectacularly. There's always the possibility that it can go full circle.

There was a post yesterday that was running around Twitter where a young woman had announced on Twitter, and this is almost too good, and you almost think it might be some sort of a setup. But she said that my friends and I have all agreed that we are done with men unless they agree before we do anything to sign a contract that says that if we get pregnant, that they will stay around and support the child and be active in their life and not just dash off because we're done with hookup culture. And somebody pointed out, congratulations, a contract, you say, signed, you say? Congratulations. You've just invented marriage. Right. Now, speaking of marriage to drastically grind all the Greek gears and change the subject, a marriage twixt Mother Russia and Little Russia is devoutly to be wished by Vlad.

I thought I could do it in three days, and now here we are at this point. I assume that you're following this closely and watching what's going on in the East and the difference that the American weapons are having. Before we go, just to show people the broadness of your expertise, what do you think about the war now? And what's your near-term prediction? Since February 24, Western media and American media in particular has been about two weeks behind events on the ground so uh initially russia was uh very successful in its uh in its early onslaught across the country on three separate fronts it was not um when that front collapsed uh all of a sudden ukraine was was on a pathway to ejecting all the forces, all Russian forces out of its territory, including the stuff they lost in 2014. It was not. Right now, Moscow is on path to

capture the whole of the Donbass. And it's a slow slog, but they are engaging in inch by inch advances and doing better in the Donbass. They're not doing better near Kyrgyzstan. They're not doing better near Nikolaev. There have been counteroffensive there that are getting a lot of short shrift. Our problem is that we have these negotiations with ourselves over what's escalatory, what's not, what Ukraine can do with the ordinance and the systems that we give them and what they can't. And it's the sort of thing that Moscow picks up on because then Moscow just repeats what we have determined is escalatory. And that's probably a little self-defeating. Right now, we're looking at the slow slog and a war of attrition that isn't going to be resolved anytime soon. We haven't

yet found a battlefield equilibrium that can be the basis on which we can establish some sort of a ceasefire. I don't suspect that that's going to happen anytime soon, but I also don't suspect either side of this campaign is going to achieve outright victory. Now or in the distant future, there will probably have to be a negotiated settlement, sad as that is, unfortunate as that is. I don't want that to be the case. But I don't see how, given the forces that we've provided Ukraine

and the Ukraine has, how they can eject all and everyone from their territory, including the 2014 conquered territories of Donbass and Crimea. And that is their objective. And until that is not their objective, there's going to be more fighting. So there's very little for us to be able to say there, save for our ability to continue to finance and support this campaign, because it is in our interest to finance and support. So I have one question.

Do you think that Putin is going um just simply declare those states russia he very well could um you know the most likely outcome is and what we've seen so far seems rather obvious that they're trying to break the ukrainian idea in these territories that was the idea was to break ukraine nationally but in these territories they're um forcibly moving uh citizens into russia proper they're uh distributing passports to russia they're uh changing signs to make sure their russian language not ukrainian language uh so sort of a cultural invasion and then ultimately most likely you're going to see you know referenda to have these you know proto states these you know autonomous republics that are in fact little statelets

controlled by the Kremlin. There can, in fact, be an effort to fold and annex these territories into Russia proper, as we saw in Crimea. I wouldn't be surprised by that, but I think the very near term, from what we've seen in reporting, is to try to have these false referenda that suggest the Ukrainian the ukrainian ideas defunct in luhansk it was it was 100 you know everybody was waving ukrainian flags and eu flags there three weeks ago but now all of a sudden there's you know 99 support for independence that's what i think is probably most likely well we may have russia act philanthropically as they did with snake island and just simply give something back is it right yeah no it had

nothing to do with the incest and bombardment and amphibious assault no none at all hey no thanks a lot the book is the rise of the new puritans fighting back against progressives war on fun i spoke in air before when i said that he was dressed for our zoom podcast like cotton mather he actually i have been informed is dressed more like increase mather subtle difference but available to those who know the difference i know thanks good to hear from you good to hear you talk untrammeled uh by uh and uh we'll talk again thanks guys take care great book i don't know if you guys are listening to this on headphones or on speakers or something like that but if you get walking around with stuff stuck in your ear you may have the situation where

uh-oh uh-oh sounds bad and the battery's dying. Lately, I've been listening to a lot of old-time radio, which is not a new thing for me. I like that stuff. Those shows are surprisingly good in their sound quality. You would think that old radio that came out in the 40s and 50s would be tinny. No, no, they had beautiful sets. And so it's actually necessary to reproduce all the great sounds of the old radio shows. If it's a good transcription, that's where the Raycons are great. You know, I use my Raycon

wireless earbuds to listen to the stuff as I walk to work and my Raycon everyday earbuds look and feel and sound better than ever with optimized gel tips for the perfect in-ear fit. These earbuds are so comfortable and they will not budge. Now, you trip on a curb on the way to work, they're going to stick right in there. Trust me. I bump into things sometimes. I'm the kind of guy who, you know, the old pods fell out. The Raycons, it's like they're glued. Without the glue, of course.

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but at half the price. Yes, really. But the great discount doesn't just mean they won't, you know, they're not going to last. No, I. But the great discount doesn't just mean they won't, you know, they're not going to last. No, I've seen people talking about the Raycons falling three stories out the window. They get lost in the rain, drenched in the snowstorms, and they still work afterwards. Hardly built. It's no wonder Raycons everyday earbuds have over 49,000 five-star reviews. I don't want to say how many stars it is, 49 times. Trust me, people love them. Check out Raycon's wireless earbuds. My guess, you're going to want to leave them a five-star review too. So go to buyraycon.com slash ricochet today. Get 15% off your Raycon order. If you're

wondering, that's R-A-Y-C-O-N. That's buyraycon.com slash ricochet to score 15% off. And we thank Raycon for sponsoring this, the 600th Ricochet off. And we thank Raycon for sponsoring this, the 600th Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Toby Young, founder and director of the Free Speech Union, an associate editor of The Spectator and author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. He's here to do neither, I hope. He's the co-host of Ricochet's London Calling podcast. And since he's smart and he's British, we wanted to speak to him about Bojo, who is brilliant all over the road, undisciplined, a mess. Was it always going to end in tears? Well, I think it was always going to end in tears, but I think it's ended a little sooner. You have explaining to do, Toby Young. You have one hell of a lot of explaining to do. You loved Boris Johnson in

Oxford. You've said so in print. And when he first became Prime Minister, you and our friend James Dellingpole on London Calling, to which I am a regular listener, on London Calling, you were thrilled by Bojo. Okay, so now explain how it was always going to end in tears. Well, I was going to say, Peter, before you rudely interrupted me, that I always thought it would end in tears. Most political careers end in failure, but I didn't think it would end in tears quite so quickly, and I'm very disappointed that it has. And I think the reason James and I and many others celebrated Boris's victory is that it was a victory for cavaliers over the roundheads. We had the epitome of petty, fogging, roundhead, sanctimonious wokery in the form of Jeremy Corbyn, the communist leader of the Labour Party. And Boris absolutely trounced him, stubbed

out his cigar on his head and kicked him into touch. And that was a marvellous victory for freedom-loving, hedonistic, Revelation, Falstaffian characters the world over. So it was a great, it was the restoration. It was Charles II seeing off Oliver Cromwell. But I think ultimately Boris's cavalier nature has been his undoing when he was required to summon his inner Puritan, when he was required to scrupulously avoid going to anything resembling a party at Downing Street during the lockdown, when nobody else was allowed

to go to parties, when he was required not to give a job to someone called Chris Pincher, whom Boris himself described as Pincher by name, Pincher by nature. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them.

Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. He's fond of pinching people's bottoms. Instead of not giving him a job, Boris made him a whip, which is quite a senior position in the parliamentary conservative party. So he wasn't able to summon his inner Puritan. And the political class and their outriders in the media have quite a kind of strong Puritanical streak. And that was always, I think, going to do for him.

I just I'm very disappointed it's done for him quite so quickly. Toby, may I may I ask another question here? It seems to me, excuse me, when I say it seems to me what I'm doing is setting you up to attack me, because I know that my judgment here can only be partial and ill-informed by comparison with yours, but it seems to me perfectly clear why Boris Johnson failed. And it's not what you just said, and it's not what Andrew Neil said in today's New York Times, and it doesn't seem to be, as I peruse the British press, it doesn't seem to be anywhere in the British press. Funnily enough, it appeared in one place that I've seen, and that's in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and it has to do with matters of policy. He campaigned, well, he achieved Brexit.

He went to the country and came back with an 80-seat majority and then behaved as if he had no idea what either was for, behaved completely in a completely unprincipled manner, splitting the difference on every policy he possibly could. He's going to engage in redistribution. He's going to raise taxes to help the national health. What he clearly should have done, he had this enormous opening to use this reassertion of the sovereignty of the nation to cut taxes, to promote economic growth, to begin the job of making Britain the pro-trade, the historic nation of shopkeepers, to turn it into, this is now a dated analogy, but to turn it into the Hong Kong of Europe, to use Britain's newfound independence to enact some policy, to enact sort of the deeper

conservative policies that Mrs. Thatcher always stood for, and he failed in that utterly. And yet here everyone is saying, well, it was his personality that did him in, it was personal fail. But that's just not so. Okay, that's my argument. Peter Robinson Okay, no, I think you make a very good point, Peter. And I do think that the fact that he didn't really pursue any proper true blue conservative policies meant that there wasn't a large enough cheering section to support him when he tripped up and when he gave the puritanical enemies in his party and in the press ammunition. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I was always urging him in print whenever I was lucky enough to see him. I was always saying, for God's sake, you've got to lean into the culture war. Do something about all these boats crossing the channel with illegal immigrants.

Start cutting taxes. Stop putting them up. Do something to defend free speech. Ditch all this net zero nonsense nonsense lift the ban on fracking you know do some proper conservative things the things for which you were elected and why people like me have supported you for 30 going on 40 years but now he basically governed like tony blair in a blonde wig exactly and that meant there was no there was no core there for him to kind of rely on when his personal failings let him down. All right, Toby, right wing kooks like you and Peter always say when a conservative, you know, proto conservative or purported conservative, putative conservative leader like Boris Johnson goes down. You know, the problem with him is he wasn't right wing enough. But you guys always say and i

kind of agree with you right but just for a minute what what was holding him back from that was it just the the um the the sting of being caught at a party the sting of being essentially which i i think it's a very deep thing that that the nation is going through something and the nation is making sacrifices and then parents aren't seeing their their parents the children aren't seeing their grandparents all these things were happening here too and the elite powerful people were swanning around the garden parties of downing street right so what held him back from doing any of those things is he simply not a a cavalier, but in fact, a roundhead? I think, well, the most common explanation, Rob, is that he has been essentially constrained by his woke wife, Carrie, known in Boris's court as Carrie Antoinette. And that's the most British response.

That is the most British reason for a prime minister to fail. And I can imagine. I think I mean, it's just sort of it's the Lady Macbeth hypothesis. I'm a bit sceptical about that. I'm not sure she is as woke as she is being described as. I mean, I think in truth,is can't bear to be disliked by anyone um particularly not by members of his family and immediate social circle and they are all almost without exception metropolitan liberals so my theory is it's not carrie it's more that he

just can't bear to do anything which is going to have him demonized as the kind of british trump uh so you know he and i think he thinks of himself as a liberal conservative um so i think i think i think it's it doesn't want to be disliked by you know guardian readers in north london so so to the so the to the twin things that happen with him, one is, I think, a definite moral stigma attached to the hypocrisy of the party, which I really did feel was shocking. Maybe I'm just naive, but I really did think that was wrong. I could understand how that would hold him back. Did any of this have to do with a rethink or subconscious regret over Brexit in the nation? Well, I don't think so.

I mean, I think he was reasonably serious about Brexit and did his best to get Brexit done. And there is still some unfinished business. He's got the problem with the Northern Irish Protocol and he was hoping to get Brexit done. And there is still some unfinished business. We've got the problem with the Northern Irish Protocol, and he was hoping to sort that out. And now that's something hanging over us. And we don't know if the successor is going to do anything about it. I think fundamentally, Rob, one of the things which made Boris so appealing

and gave him this kind of election-winning magic is that he was never very serious. He always had a kind of ironic twinkle in his eye he would never quite stick to the script he'd always wander off script in a kind of semi-deliberate way and he in it why that was so appealing was it was a way of sending up the kind of less sophisticated more earnest more serious politicians he was like saying i know i i'm not going to treat the electorate with such contempt that I'm going to pretend

they think that I believe any of this stuff. I'm not going to try and deceive them. I'm going to make it obvious that I know this is all just political theatre. And they like being winked at by that, not taken for fools. And they thought, in Boris, we've got someone who's a bit different. He's not just another lying politician. When he lies,

he makes it obvious by winking at us. But I think what proved his undoing is that he started lying without winking. Without winking. Without winking. And the public thought, wait a minute, now he's trying to take us for fools. And we thought he was different. Turns out he isn't. I know Peter wants to get in. I just have one last one. You know the guy. How pissed is he right now? I mean, I remember seeing that Prime Minister's Question Time once with Boris Johnson, and I guess the camera panned or something.

And I thought, oh, good Lord, that's Theresa May. Good Lord, I think I saw John Major there somewhere. But those people are still around, still alive. Boris Johnson must be thinking, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I've never met the man, but I can only imagine the man I've seen on TV and I've read about is plotting his

revenge. I don't doubt it. I'm sure he thinks of himself as Julius Caesar, you know, betrayed by these duplicitous lieutenants who 30 seconds earlier were licking his bottom.

So I'm sure... Caesar in didn't didn't do so well next time he stood up for the curtain call that wasn't really okay yeah but i think i think i think i i think um i think he does i think he's i think he does feel as though he's been betrayed i'm sure he's he's he's nursing uh lots of deep-seated grievances and i expect his political memoirs will be um quite electric but he's not i mean do you think he's sitting there saying look he i'm he's still a young vibrant guy what's he gonna do now he's not gonna go back and be the editor of the spectator he's gonna have to do something don't you think he's gonna want that he's gonna want to walk into downing street again well i'm sure, I'm sure, I can't see how that's possible.

I think you make a good point about, I think it would be difficult for him to just come back as a journalist and kind of resume that career that was rudely interrupted by his premiership. I think the difficulty there is that as a journalist, particularly for the Telegraph, he was always criticising the government of the day

for not being conservative enough. Now he can't really do that. You know, everyone would often point out, well, hang on a minute, Boris, why are you putting up taxes? in the government of the day for not being conservative enough. Now he can't really do that. Everyone would often point out, well, hang on a minute, Boris, why are you putting up taxes? You wrote this Telegraph column three years ago in which you criticised Gordon Brown for doing exactly that. Why are you not following in his footsteps? So I think it would be very difficult for him to resume his career

as a sort of firebrand conservative columnist, having behaved like Tony Blair in office. Rob, you described Toby as a crazed right-winger, and that is true, of course. Of course. But I wanted to plug London Calling one more time because one of the immense pleasures of the London Calling podcast is hearing Toby, who is a crazed right-winger, regularly denounced as a squish by James Dellingpole, who is beyond the beyond. Toby Young has the Rob Long slot in London Calling.

Yes, he does. He's regularly beat about. James repeatedly describes me as a cuck. That's right. Yes, yes, exactly. Team Toby and team James. Yep. Okay, so this is the other piece that seems strange to me, at least. What comes next? When Mrs. Thatcher was taken down, you could point to two or three pretty well-defined factions in the Conservative Party, and it was also beginning to become clear that she had succeeded in transforming the Labour Party. It was not

yet, but it would soon become the party of Tony Blair. But among the conservatives, there were the Thatcherites, now disappointed, wounded, and so forth, but the notion was maybe one of them will come forward who will be Margaret Thatcher but not as hectoring, easier to take. And then of course there were the Wetts, Heseltine, and so forth. But it seems to me much more unclear. This is a kind of strange amorphousness about the Tory party now. Not only can you not point to a major figure and say, in fact, again, jumping around the British press yesterday, looking at all the stories on contenders in the race for the leadership of the party, every story listed half a dozen, eight, ten, a dozen. There are no two or three strong contenders. Why is that?

Well, yeah, I think you pose a good question. What's next? And the Tory party historically has tended to, when they defenestrate one leader, they tend to select another one who has all the qualities that the previous one lacked, but none of the qualities the previous one had. So I think we can expect someone very straight-laced, very boring, someone with no great facility for language, possibly a bit tongue-tied, probably happily married for 30 years

with very respectable grown-up children. Someone very boring. You know, Theresa May without the charisma. So, yeah, and there are a few people in the current field who fit that description perfectly. I mean, the person I quite like is Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, who is kind of channeling Margaret Thatcher. Positionally, she's in all the right places. She, I think, would be the conservative preferred candidate.

But I think the problem is that she's not very popular in the parliamentary party with her fellow MPs, for one reason or another. And they know that if she got into the final two, when it goes out to the membership, she'd probably win. And it's been described as the most sophisticated electorate in the world. So I suspect there'll be a bit of gerrymandering to stop her getting into the final two, and it'll be a contest. Just for the sake of listeners, describe the process. The parliament, that is to say, conservative MPs, members of parliament who are conservatives, winnow the list down to two, if I have this right, and then it goes out to members of the conservative party in the country, totally different from Republicans or Democrats in this country. In Britain, you actually sign a piece of paper and you pay dues. You actually have to take a step, an action or two to become a member of the party and earn the right to vote on the leaders. And

they're only about, what, 100,000 people who are members of the Conservative Party, correct? That's right, yes. You described the process accurately. And I remember, and of course, one danger is that people who want the Conservative Party to lose the next general election will join the party in order to then vote for the candidate they think is most likely to lose, which is exactly what I did in 2015. I joined the Labour Party in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, but because when asked why I joined the Labour Party, I put in the box to elect Jeremy Corbyn so I can consign Labor to electoral oblivion. They saw that and refused to let me join.

Pete Hey, Toby, one last question for you. And I have to say, there's one aspect of all this that makes me feel a bit downcast on your behalf. But perhaps you can release me from that duty. And it's this, that over and over and over again, one of the claims against Boris that the press, this is just part of the litany, what did he get wrong? And one of the things that he supposedly got wrong and is simply presented as given is that he failed to lock down even sooner and harder than he did. Why is it that even at this late stage of the game, even after you've had your website up, Lockdown Skeptics, for lo these many months now, the press is just monolithic in assuming that Boris's error during the lockdown was not to lock down, but to fail to get it done sooner? Yeah, Lockdown Skeptics is now the Daily Skeptic, and it's almost two and a half years old. Hey, move those routers there.

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Peter, yeah, you ask a very good question. I think that's three times I've asked a very good question, Toby. I will now fall silent. Oh, well. For me, that was the most disappointing thing about Boris, Boris's short premiership. He initially took the Swedish approach, not going to lock down. We're just going to take it on the chin. If we do lock down, the costs are going to outweigh the benefits. Let's just keep on nerve, stay calm.

And then he caved into pressure and locked lockdown, not once, but three times. And for me, that was that I never Boris never really recovered in my eyes after that. I thought he was going to do the right thing. He ended up doing the wrong thing in his in his defence. He did at least lift the restrictions sooner than almost anyone else and led the rest of the world, I think, in coming out of lockdown. But interestingly, within the Conservative Party, I think the view now, the majority view amongst the parliamentary Conservative Party, is that the lockdown was probably a mistake. If we did it, we should have done it for a much shorter period of time, and it shouldn't have been so draconian. So even people who were lockdown hawks back back in 2020 like jeremy hunt one of the grey men who's one of the favorites to succeed for us um even they are even they are now pretending

that they were never that enthusiastic about the lockdown um so actually we're seeing a kind of rewriting of history within the parliamentary conservative body it has almost no defenders now the lockdown policy in the conservative party so i think that view that boris's mistake was not to lock down sooner and harder that may still be some people's view but it's no longer the view of the parliamentary conservative party toby two questions before we let you go on british culture at the moment uh we had a little incident where the uh the offshoots of extinction rebellion have decided that sitting in the middle of the road and blocking traffic isn't working so let's glue ourselves to the frames of paintings and damage them in the process and now it's come out deliciously so that one of the people who did this uh is herself a a

shall we say a a enthusiastic consumer of carbon products how is this playing over there this uh the continual uh defacement evasement, and, you know, making people uncomfortable and inconvenient in order to get us all off oil right now? Well, I don't think it's playing very well. Everything they do seems designed to alienate the general public, whether it's blocking motorways, trying to vandalize, you know, artistic treasures. But I guess that recently one of them, a group of Stop Oil protesters tried to lie down during the British Grand Prix and had they not been removed by security in time, they would have all been cut to ribbons um uh but um yeah i i think that i hope that um boris boris absolutely wedded himself to the net zero policy um he was a green

conservative he completely bought into the whole environmentalist agenda and i don't think that was very popular it's attracted some criticism certainly within the conservative party and i hope that this will be an opportunity for the party and the government to reset and abandon that nonsense, lift the ban on fracking, start reducing our energy bills, which are going through the roof. If you want more of this, of course, Twitter is where you can find Toby, at Toadmeister, where incidentally, you will find an interesting roundup of news, which is presented for some reason with an image of Richard Baker. Explain for Americans why that matters, because it's sort of like somebody using,

you know, Walter Cronkite. Does Baker have the same sort of Cronkite-esque? Well, we do. On the Daily Skeptic, we do a kind of daily news roundup of stories which are skeptical about climate alarmism lockdown zealotry and wokery pokery in all its forms um and uh and i and i promote that on my twitter account and we we alternate between three um uh different old bbc news readers we we call them news readers over here we say it like it is um and um uh and i just for nostalgic reasons i wanted to use ones that you know people from people of my age are familiar with from their childhood like i remember him from monty python doing a straight little bit as a link between various bits you know so i thought is that reginald mottling no it's richard pinker all the things you learn from his twitter feed

and it's uh it's great as is the podcast with Delling Pohl here on the Ricochet Network. And as perhaps the next time we talk to you, we hope it's about it. Innumerable success is too great to measure, but one fears things will go as they often do. Toby Young, thanks for joining us here on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure to have you on our famous 600th episode. That's special. Thank you very much. You're very special. Thanks, Toby. Toby, you terrible squish. That's special. Thank you very much. You're very special. Thanks, Toby. Toby,

you terrible squish. You terrible squish. Will you give James my best, please? Squishes unite. I will, Peter. Okay.

Good to see you, Rob. Take care. By the way, Rob, I loved your piece. And off he goes. Thank you.

That's all I did. That's all I heard. That's all I needed to hear. Cut off. And we don't know what, which piece it was. I get that. Bring him back. Bring him back on.

Let him finish. A blanket endorsement of all of your pieces, I think. I think that's the only possible gloss on what that meant. Piece here, piece there, piece what? Well, before we go, I suppose we should note a couple of things. Rob, you incessant ricochet

promoter, were going to tell us about a meetup that's coming, which is a tip of... Yeah, so, as you know, the summer of the meetup is happening. Matt Balzer's Milwaukee meetup is at the end of the month, July 29 through the 31st, so that's the last weekend in July. It's going to be a big weekend event.

Ricochet has a lot of Wisconsin members and a lot of members in the environment, so please, if you're around, you can make the drive. Do so. It'll be a lot of wisconsin members and um a lot of sort of members in the environment so please if you're around you can make the drive do so it'll be a lot of fun um and uh to know more about it all you have to do is go to ricochet.com and uh join and we would love to see you there and actually um yeah there's we i had a list here of some of the wisconsin people are going to be present it seems to have evaporated from my notes. But the thing is, we'll tell you all about it afterwards. And those people, no doubt, will be treasuring the podcast we do now and then.

It will be up to 604 by the time that meetup hits. But hey, guys, at 600, looking back, I don't expect you to remember anything. I don't. But any regrets? Any moments of pride any things you that uh that that stand out any or just a feeling of numb amazement that we got at this far 600 misspent friday mornings about 500 for me i feel like you guys were doing it before i got here so i think i only have that's the regret that took us 100 tries on our own before we realized and yet nonetheless compulsory lawsuit payout.

We are still under the sword of Damocles. So if you're moved by the 600 times we've done this. You've enjoyed them. I think the fact that we've been consistent at 600, now is the time to please join Ricochet. Just go to ricochet.com and you'll see how to do it and come to a meetup. We'd love to see you. So my only regret was that I haven't bored you enough with my importune and my begging. Let's not even dress it up. My begging. But the begging is necessary i promise you uh and i also have to tell you that it's been um somewhat effective so if you've been um putting it off you could really really really really help save it that's that's that's great

he regrets not he regrets when we had rumsfeld on the show he said so uh the secretary rumsfeld how would you try to get people to join ricochet i know i should have been right what are the known unknowns when it comes to attracting people into this thing uh peter anything stick out for you um any just uh i have spent two my regrets i have spent too little time in the middle of the country but that may be about to change my My middle son, Nico Robinson, started med school this week at the University of Michigan. That's not important. Here's what's important. Here's what he conveyed to me. This fact tells me that I have been missing something

big. The University of Michigan football stadium holds 110,000 people. That's more, for example, than the Yale Bowl, which I think is 80,000 people. And the Yale Bowl is only full once every two years when Yale hosts the Harvard-Yale football game, even here at Stanford, which holds 55,000. And that's only full once every two years when Stanford hosts the Stanford-Cal football game. University of Michigan, 110,000 seats in the stadium. The tickets went on sale a Saturday a couple of weeks ago at 10 in the morning, and by 1 p.m. they were sold out. That stadium is full, every seat taken for every home game, and has been for years on end. There is something wonderful about the middle of the country, and I want to see it.

Stop off in Fargo on your way there and try to catch a Bison game. They're a hell of a football team, and the stadium's packed as well, too. Not surprising that they don't have more people for the Harvard-Yale game, though. I mean, a Tom Lehrer song comes to mind. Really, a clash of football titans doesn't either. So yes, Petereter you do need to do so you should take a sabbatical get in a car and do a travels with charlie type thing you know you're just a peregrination around the country and ending up at you know at on rob's front door i can give you the address i've been there well gentlemen uh i think we've you know if we get out of this uh not having done 95

100 minutes people will be happy what have we learned over 600 episodes certainly not brevity but perhaps that's that's due to the quality of the guests and the great questions that peter and rob have and your patience has obviously been with us for all this and we can only hope that the next 600 will be just as entertaining oh wow how old will we be then? Well, let's find out. One of the ways we'll find out, by the way, is if we have sponsors like Tommy John and Raycon. Great products support them for supporting us,

and you will have your life improved as well. And I'm supposed to say, in case you haven't noted, join Ricochet today. We'd really appreciate that. We would very much appreciate it. If we do, Rob Long will personally come to your house and show you how to give us five-star reviews on Apple. Because we don't want to farm that out to some Chinese farm where they have a bunch of bots with fingers tapping on phones.

No, that would be wrong. We want legitimate, happy people saying, yes, five stars would listen again. Congrats, guys. You founded one hell of a website and a community and uh if you hadn't i don't know where i'd spend so much of my time chattering and arguing and agreeing and having the time you know that i was due on thank you so much and and it worked out just exactly as rob and i planned it made us both rich in spirit in spirit yes in spirit no all right so you got the rich in spirit part done for the first 600 rich in material wealth is for the next 600.

You know, we're not even going for that anymore. We're just going for paying off the lawsuit. If we could do that, that would be all the rich. That's rich enough for me. If we leave you with one inspirational word today, my friends of Ricochet, it is this. Solvency. So let that be our watchword. Peter, Rob, been a pleasure.

We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center.

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