The Ricochet Podcast - Pardon Us

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Gotta make this brief as we are very, very busy around here: Peter Robinson? Not here this week. Jon Gabriel sits in for him. It’s really cold in NYC today. We break down the dumpster fire Democratic debate. Then, author and New York Times science writer (no that’s not a typo) John Tierny on his book The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It . We’re positive you... Source

The thing I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. Billionaires today, if you can believe it, have an effective tax rate lower than the middle class. Why are you complaining? I wrote the code. My call was perfect. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long, John Gabriel, sitting in for Peter Robinson. We're

talking to John Tierney, by the way. Everything's really good. And Christina Hoff Summers on, well, just, you know, sex troubles. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome everybody to the Living Shade Podcast number 484. I'm James Lilex here in Minnesota. Peter Robinson is dead, tired from a day of travel, so he's not with us. John Gabriel, I believe in Arizona, is with us, as is Rob. And Rob, of course, the peripatetic soul that he is, we have to ask, where in the world is Rob Long today? I'm in New York City. It's sunny and cold. Just thought I'd give you that weather report. It's sunny and cold here. What defines cold where you are? 20 degrees. Really? Well, you know what? A little respect. I am giving you exactly a little respect. We've climbed up to 20

after some time in the polar vortex, but I'm happy anyway, because it's a great day to be here. John, you're in Arizona. It must be 104 degrees, right? Not quite. It's only going to be 77 today. So yeah, a little cloudy. So it's a little cool. But wait, John, you're from there, right? I mean, this is, you're not like somebody who just decided at some point they just weren't going to live in a cold place. All you know is Arizona. I find that so bizarre. Well, we moved here when I was six, so I have vague recollections of that white stuff, whatever it's called. And in the Navy, I moved around a bit. But other than that, yeah, I'm a desert boy through and through.

Well, that's your weather for today. Let's go to Bob with sports at the desk. Actually, it is relevant, guys, because in the last debate, which was such a joy, it was just filled with so many optimistic, smiley, happy people who were embracing the causes in which they believed and all the fellow feeling and the rest of it. Somebody asked one of them. I can't remember who it was. I think it was Joe Biden. And I think it was talking about Vegas and the fact that Vegas, get this, is hot. And it's been getting hotter. It might have something to do with the fact that it's in a desert. But they're saying that, of course, it's because of climate change and that cities like Vegas and Reno are going to be facing the brunt of this as the world increasingly turns into a hot, molten ball of wax. And he was asking, this was my favorite part, what Joe Biden's plans would be to save Vegas while still leaving in place everything that we have.

That was the deal. So, I mean, it's a given that Vegas is still going to blare its lights 24-7 and be loud and noisy and have air conditioning that blasts through open doors. It's a given. But what would you do to change these things? Biden came up with the usual word salad of 50,000 electric car chargers on all the highways that we build, which apparently will just magically generate electricity out of the earth. Trains, lots of high-speed rail and Green New Deal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He seemed to be kind of just barfing up a template response to the climate change. But, A, isn't it interesting that somebody finally said, look, we don't want to change anything that we do.

But, of course, we've got to save the world, so what would you do? And, two, that Biden just seems so, so tired and out of it and not there and not, is his heart in it? Maybe that's my question. And two, what did you all think of the debate? Well, I think, yeah, I think his heart is in it. His mind, not so much. He's trying. It seems like before every debate, he slams a couple of red bulls and comes out charging. But he only seems to be kind of competent somewhat when he's very, very loud and

very, very angry and animated, much like Bernie Sanders. So it's just kind of sad at this point, seeing him. You would wish his family would step in and say, all right, let's just chill out at the lake house for a while. Yeah. No more driving for you, dad. At Bernie's lake house. And aren't they arguing today about whether or not it's not fair to criticize Bernie for having a lake house. Bernie's not about nobody gets a lake house.

That's not right at all. Yes, actually, he is. No, his whole point is that if you've got a lake house, you probably have too much stuff and that stuff has to be redistributed according to his bullshit scheme. But anyway, Rob, your thoughts on the debate, your thoughts on Biden. You know, the debate's sort of interesting in that obviously Bloomberg imploded. Nobody expected that. But a lot of it has to do with the same kind of problem. The question of Vegas is sort of instructive, right? Because without giving up anything, how is Vegas going to bear the brunt of climate change? Which is true, because if these guys get their way, there's absolutely no way that Las Vegas is going to be able to run all those air conditioners.

There's just no way. In fact, Vegas itself is a symbol of energy production excess, of want, and we're going to move to the desert, and we're going to create where there is no water and there is no power, we're going to create this sort of resort, this mega resort. Now, a lot of Americans see that, whether it's Vegas is your cup of tea or not, they look at that and they think, hey, that's pretty cool. But some look at it and say that that's got to stop.

The problem is the people who think that's got to stop were on the stage in Las Vegas at the time. And they couldn't really they couldn't really say it, which is all of these problems are kind of fundamental structural problems with the Democratic Party the way it is now. They they they are they believe in this sort of climate change emergency, but they refuse to act as if it's an emergency, meaning even personal things like giving up your lake house or giving up your private jet, but also larger things like saying, OK, well, you know what? We're going to have to frack for more natural gas for a while. That is literally the only way American CO2 emissions in the United States have gone way down the past years only because of natural gas and fracking. So they're not serious about it. Bernie Sanders isn't serious about actually cracking down on people's lake homes. I don't think he really cares.

He's just going to tax the hell out of you. No one is really – they're not really – they have no serious purpose on that stage that they really, truly believe in. There's no true emergency. And they refuse to do what they should be doing all the time. It's talking about how terrible Donald Trump is, what an incredible embarrassment is. He is all the stuff that, frankly, only Mike Bloomberg's talking about. It's a very weird moment. It's like they've got this great, I mean, for all of Trump's stronger, strengthening poll numbers, I should, look, for all the, you know, for all, you know, Trump's stronger, strengthening poll numbers, I should say, he still is a weak incumbent. It's still, like, there's still a whole lot of people who don't like him. This is not gonna, this doesn't

have to be that hard, but it is hard if your party is absolutely in thrall to some kind of weird socialist spiral where you you're ringing the alarm bells, but then you're trying to tell everybody, no, no, we're just normal. I mean, it's a very strange dis. I mean, I found myself so disassociated from all of it. Poor Pete Buttigieg is in there trying to say one or two sensible things like, why are we telling people they they can't have a health plan that they like and everybody's jumping on him i mean it's very very weird and i i just i kind of feel for them because i i uh because the truth is it's over bernie sanders is going to be the nominee um and everybody you know all these these i'm running on and on but i one one thing i've noticed is that the primary seasons no matter what the the party, they have two phases. The first phase is the smart people on TV say things like, you know, it's still early days.

It's still very early. Let's all remind ourselves that blah, blah, blah is not going to happen for another nine months, blah, blah, blah. And then suddenly, before you know it, you turn a corner. It's like, oh, my God, it's over. It's over. This race is going to be over in 10 days. And I think we know who's going to win. I mean, it's 95% certain it's going to be Bernie Sanders. He's going to be the nominee. And, and somehow we just crossed the line right around New Hampshire and it's over. And I think the Democrats are

starting to realize, oh my God, we don't have any moderates to run. You know, we don't have anybody to run against Donald Trump. We only have. Oh, you know, they they did. But they preferred the Bolshevik. They preferred the guy who's got the. They're all pretty lefty. I mean, there was no look.

I mean, the traditional. Amy Klobuchar is not exactly out there with a tattoo of Trotsky in her left buttock. I mean, it's. But remember, like, the Democratic Party- She has one. You've seen it. That's right. Democratic Party used to field genuine conservatives. I mean, or at least conservative Democrats, not moderates, not so progressives, but actual,

you know, you could be a conservative and be a Democrat for a long, long time, even up to 92, 96 even. It wasn't considered crazy that Sam Nunn ran for president or that in 84 Al Gore ran. These are young conservatives. Now, where would they go? Who's the most prominent moderate to conservative Democrat in America? Can we use Bloomberg's cricket noise right now? Yeah, that would be appropriate. Perhaps the Jeopardy theme.

Well, John, what happened then? Is it just that 9-11 broke them all? And once they went all in on George Bush being Hitler and being the cowboy and that you had to oppose him and there was no other stance you could possibly take. Nuance evaporated and there we were. And it gave to the rise of the people who are now demanding that we get this Bolshevik in there. Who are demanding that this guy, this man who wants to use, you want to talk authoritarianism. I loved his remark about the unions who are raising a little finger and saying, excuse me, pardon, pardon us. But we fought extremely hard in a collective bargaining situation in order to get the health care situation program that we want. And we don't want to give we don't want the government to forcibly sever our relationship to that and use the power of the state to invalidate our agreement.

We don't want that. And Bernie's response is everyone will get better health care because of him. Right. I find it absolutely stunning. I think part of it is they just – their rhetoric finally caught up with them. They've been – this kind of eat the rich rhetoric works fine when you're out of power. Now a lot of their base, especially the younger members of their base, are saying, OK, we actually believe this. And the natural result of these kind of arguments where the rich are always bad, we always need to tax them more, is a Bernie Sanders. So it's like put up or shut up.

And, yeah, as Rob said, I think it is over. But now brokered convention has been the buzz this week, and I cannot imagine Bernie winning a plurality of the delegates and then saying, oh, OK, we're going to put in. Oh, here's Hillary. She's still around. We're going to put her in instead. It would be. Well, Ron, let me ask you a question. That'd be so awesome. So great. I mean, because there is one, you know they're looking at the stage you're looking all those those candidates and thinking oh god one of these people is really going to run and one of these people's going to take on trump and then suddenly you remember well there is one other person there is this like yoda talking to ghost obi-wan and so you know no there is another you

know and and it's hillary who comes down winched down from the rafters in a, in a golden chair. Well, Rob, do you think at this point that the party, the guys who run the DNC, the people who don't want to see them completely flame out over Bernie Sanders are hoping that Mike, that Mike actually does something. In other words, are they saying, thank God for citizen United, because we, we've got a guy who spent his money, money, which has the hypnotic effect on changing people's minds? I mean, are they actually looking to Mike as their savior now? Well, the thing about when parties are in this – have this crisis, which, of course, the Republicans had four years ago, there's this tendency to think of the party as this thing that has a meeting.

They're in a room and they're having a meeting and they're deciding what to do. But in fact, it's so atomized at this point. And all these operations are spending money absolutely independently, however they want to, that there's no control over the actual expenditure or the momentum of the campaign. That's already been set. So nobody's really coordinating. So they don't really have any way of helping Bloomberg or shaping Bloomberg. Maybe they're sitting there crossing their fingers, but I suspect that even Bloomberg

doesn't seem to know exactly how to run. You know, he knows how to spend money, but not how to run. We saw that on the debate night. He didn't own up to who he is. He just kind of smirked and rolled his eyes and then didn't have a couple answers. And he needs to steer in each time. So with the NDA question, when they asked him that about the nondisclosure agreements he has with a bunch of women who were, for whatever reason, dissatisfied employees, instead of hemming and hawing and saying, well, whatever, I don't, you know, these are for everybody. He should have steered right into it and said, hey, you know what? I live in the real world and I run a real business with real employees.

And everybody who's listening to this is in a real world knows exactly what we're talking about, that we need these things so that things can actually get solved. And that's what we're doing. I run, I live in the real world. You people live on planet politics where all you do is talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And all you do is talk. You haven't done anything. You haven't built anything. You haven't done, you know, Bernie Sanders has been in government for 1,000 years and doesn't have one significant piece of legislation attached to him. All he's been doing is run his mouth. And instead, he was on the defensive. Instead of running the way he really is, what he really, he's a liberal Republican running in the

Democratic Party. He should just own that. But he won't do it. I mean, ultimately, it's a structural problem because with with Trump, the Republicans thought, OK, a bunch of like crazy out of the party kind of activists are are going to support this this this nominee all the way to to the convention. He's going to win. He's going to be the nominee. All we need to do is to get him to behave. Just shut his mouth. Just don't talk. Just, you know, the Trump policies, I mean, I disagree with a lot of them on trade and foreign policy, but they're perfectly normal. They're not weird. They're not like – they're just – some I disagree with, some I agree with. They're just – they're normal. They're not crazy, right?

They're not radical. So what they – so the message they sent to the voters was, okay, you don't have to like this guy to agree with him, to vote for him, because the stuff he's doing isn't radical. It's really just a style choice. So there are a lot of people who, who say that about Trump, you know, our friend drew Clavin is really, really eloquent on that. Cause I didn't, I didn't, I didn't hire this guy to be my friend. I hired him to do this job and it's what he's doing, right? That's pretty, that's a very compelling argument. Um, the Bernie Sanders argument um the bernie sanders argument is the opposite it's i i want him to to enact medicare for all these are gonna be big plans and big programs so um it's gonna it's a structural problem for them and i think it's gonna be a really really really disastrous general election

i think the interesting thing when you went before about Bloomberg saying he's been in the real world and the rest of them are politicians, it does remind me of Ross Perot, doesn't it? You know, Ross Perot would get up there and say, you know, pop the hood and get in there and fix it. And the Bloomberg version of that would be you have to power down the CPU, you have to unplug it, you have to let the capacitor drain, and then you have to open it up, and then you have to get somebody, a guy who knows what he's doing to come in and exactly look and figure out whether it's the code or the memory chip. You can't just pop the trunk and fix it like a pickup in the old days of Ross Perot and the Texans and the rest of it. At least Ross self-financed.

At least, I believe he did. And Bloomberg, of course, is spending essentially what he earns in a year in interest on his various business things. It's no harm to him. So Bloomberg walks away from this with what? He's not going to walk away like the rest of them with some sort of crushing amount of debt that they have to figure out how to wave away or pay off. There's no way to worry about it. There's no way to take care of debt. Debt is crushing at the end. Actually, there is.

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That's LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. All loans made by WebM Bank, member FDIC, Equal Housing Lender. And our thanks to LendingClub for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast John Tierney, co-author of The Power of Bad and Willpower. He's a contributing editor at City Journal, and this makes me worrisome, though, is a contributing science columnist at The New York Times. John, you're probably on with some science deniers here who do not believe necessarily

in the dire effects of anthropogenic warming. We might not think that there's a kaleidoscope of genders out there. In other words, we're just absolute morons when it comes to this science. You're so far behind the times on this, really. We only have five years for the planet. You should know that, really. I forget. It always moves back.

I'm in Minnesota right now, and it's 20 degrees above zero. And last year it was 19. That's a full degree warmer than a lot of people. Hey, the power of bad. Let's talk about it. The bad thing, when you read the internet, especially amongst the youth of America, the phrase capitalist hellscape always comes up. The idea that we live in a world that is burning and that actually this is the late

stage of humanity. It's really, really bad. It's not going to get better. And yet, this seems to be not, what's the word I'm looking for? True, not accurate, but yet the power of bad floods our minds unless everybody thinks they're living in a very awful thing. Why? And what do we do about that? Okay. Well, the book is about the negativity effect, which is my co-author Roy Baumeister first identified this. And it's the universal tendency of bad events and bad emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones.

And, you know, this evolved for a good reason. You've got to pay attention to mortal threats. The people who pay more attention survive. But it's just been so overdone today that we get this stuff about the capitalist hellscape that we're just surrounded and inundated all day by what we call the merchants of bad, basically, which is the media, politicians, activists, you know, basically constantly just sort of tapping into this primal gut feeling to scare us. And this does give this profoundly distorted view of it because, you know, just about every measure of human welfare is improving around the world. You know, life expectancy, health, education, wealth, every, you know, poverty is being eliminated around the world thanks to capitalism. But, and the only thing that is not improving is hope, you know, that the better life gets,

the gloomier we get about it. That in international surveys, it's bizarre that it's people in rich countries who sound the most pessimistic. You know, the global rate of poverty has declined we get about it, that in international surveys, it's bizarre that it's people in rich countries who sound the most pessimistic. You know, the global rate of poverty has declined by two-thirds, and yet most people in the United States and Europe think it's gotten worse. So, you know, that's the problem that we're writing about in this book, which is, how do you get people to see things as they are? And this constant hyping of bad stuff, it leads to what I call the crisis crisis, which is this never-ending series of hype threats that give this false sense of danger and threat and that lead to all kinds of accidents that basically

end up leaving us worse off as a result. It's really why the government grows because, you know, there's a great book by Robert Higgs called Crisis and Leviathan, and he just shows how the government, it's always a crisis that causes the government to expand. And then after the supposed crisis, whether it was real or not, is over, the government never shrinks back to its former size. And you just get this you know problem called demos chlorosis which is you just get this accretion of regulations and and and laws and specially you know the benefits special interest to kind of slow the whole economy down and uh... it war is the tonic of the state

could be perhaps also that that good news people don't want good news because the good news about humanity is bad news for the planet? When you say that poverty is going down, that people are living longer, that societies are developing, that means that these places are going to have appetites and place demands and stresses on the earth. And really, it'd be better if we shrunk down to maybe like 500 million or so tops. There's a lot of people rooting for the coronavirus out there because they think that humanity needs a good pasting in order for Gaia to flourish. So even if there's good news, it's bad news for these people. Right. I mean, good news is always bad news for people who want to grow the government for activists because you need a crisis to grow it. So you've got to keep finding something. And there's just been one, you know, never ending. And they've been saying this about that we have to reduce the planet's population.

I mean, that was, you know, one of the huge crises in the 1960s that we're all going to starve to death because of overpopulation. And there are these awful things that, you know, that led to coerced abortions and around the world doing that, and that turned out to be a false alarm. Then there was the energy crisis that, you know crisis that we had to stop using everything because petroleum was running out. And now it's climate change. Now, I mean, I think climate change is a real threat. It's a different kind of problem than growing food or energy because the market doesn't take care of that sort of thing. But it's not the end of the world. And most of the solutions that are being put out for it actually do nothing or actually make things worse. I mean, it's striking that the U.S.

made the biggest reductions in carbon emissions last year of any country in the world because we're not doing a lot of these idiotic green policies of just massively subsidizing windmills or solar panels and banning fracking. Fracking is one of the main reasons that the U.S. has done well. And yet, you know, all the Democratic candidates want to ban it. So, you know, it's crazy. I mean, it's the guidelines that I offer, you know, for the crisis crisis are that there, you know, now whenever you look at the news, you know, start with three assumptions, that the world will always seem to be in crisis.

Number two, the crisis is never as bad as it seems. And the solution could easily make things worse. I mean, that's the way you know it is. And you asked about, you know, for instance, isn't it terrible that other people are getting richer? Well, richer societies, you know, are much cleaner environmentally. The air is much cleaner. The water is much cleaner. And as we get more advanced,

we actually use less carbon. I mean, the U.S. is actually reducing carbon emissions because we're an advanced economy that uses, you know, it's powered by nuclear power and natural gas, which are much better than wood or coal,

which is around the world. And that's this transitioning happening everywhere. So you want people to get rich and you want the environment to get cleaner. And I just think it's political. I you want people to get rich, and you want the environment to get cleaner. And I just think it's political.

I mean, the idea that people around the world are going to do without electricity, and there are still nearly a billion people that don't have electricity. You cannot tell them that they can't have electricity, and the only way that they're going to get it in the short term is through fossil fuels. It does seem – hey, John, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. It does seem a little, we were talking about it earlier before you got on the call, it did seem a little strange to watch those candidates in Las Vegas, a city powered entirely by hydroelectric power, by a giant dam, air conditioning. The streets are air conditioned, talking about how, you know,

we really do something about this global warming problem. So, okay, I have two questions. One is, all right, how do you run? I mean, all those things you said are great, but they, there's a terrible, terrible political slogans. Things are kind of okay, we don't need to do much. Sometimes things get better on their own. How do you run in a country like ours unless you're claiming a crisis? And I'm not just blaming the Democrats. I mean Republicans did it too. In 2016, we heard from Donald Trump that our biggest problem was trade, our trade deficits, all of it. Trade is lopsided. Trade is terrible. Trade is terrible. He's going to get in there and fix trade. Well, the trade deficit went up about 25% under Trump. And everybody's fine with it because basically the trade deficit is an idiotic number that's meaningless in many, many ways. But it's still – boy, you can still convince people that the sky is falling.

Why do we buy it? Why do we take the bait? Well, it's that negativity effect that we just respond to that instantly. And we talk about in the book The Rule of Four that basically a bad emotion or a bad event tends to have about four times the impact of a good one. So it's still the best way to get voters and to get everyone's attention. You know, people pay more attention to negative ads and negative information about candidates, even about their own candidates. You know, so

it's a very tough political problem to solve. I mean, I think the way that Reagan ran somewhat as an optimist this morning in America, appealing to that. And I guess the other way is to use a negativity effect for you that these people are going to expand the government and take away your rights. So you can frame it so negatively that way. They're threatening your freedom. That's one way to do it. I mean, we discussed a few kind of solutions. I mean, the best thing is, as we say, is for people to try to learn how to, you know, filter out this stuff and recognize the

hype. There are some hopeful signs. One is social media that, you know, that it gets, as usual, all we hear about is the bad stuff that's causing depression, you know, Instagram envy and all this stuff. But if you really look at the research, in general, you know, people get positive things out of social media. And it's different from mass media. When you do mass media, the easiest way to get an audience or to inspire a crowd at a rally is with something negative because we all share these common fears of death and disease and poverty. But the positive stuff that animates us tends to be much more of a niche product. We each have someone who's a Civil War buff, someone who's into medieval art, and that's a much smaller audience, but social media is great for that. So you have all these groups that, you know, that are dedicated

to positive things. And the research shows that people actually, you know, despite what you hear about the Twitter wars and material on Facebook, in fact, people tend to share positive stuff much more than negative stuff. That's different from mass media. They don't send their, on Facebook. In fact, people tend to share positive stuff much more than negative stuff. It's different from mass media. They don't send their, on Facebook, they don't post, you know, pictures of school ground massacres. They're sending beautiful pictures of this, and here's a new scientific discovery you should know about. So I think social media has some potential there that people can start curating their, you know, their news feeds. It is remarkably easy. I mean, if you go to my Instagram, you hit the the little magnify the search thing and it gives the suggested things for me to look at. They are entirely dogs. It's all dogs and food. It's

really fun. Like I'm absolutely happy with like, I'll take a five minute break and look at dogs and food. I'm perfectly happy doing that. And then for some reason, I never got to Facebook for some reason. I never go to Facebook. For some reason, I went to Facebook last night, and I noticed that a lot of the things on my news feed were versions of the same video of the little baby who suddenly gets the cochlear implant. Oh, God, yeah. And they're all insanely great. You cannot look at those videos and not feel like life is going to be okay. The version I have of that is the young person who gets a job and then looks at their first paycheck and sees what's taken out. It's sort of the complete opposite.

Yeah, right. Well, it's the same kind of sudden realization. You're suddenly getting one of your senses activated. What Rob's doing is we call it the low-bad diet, which is basically try to curate yourself so that they're not behaving that way but it does seem like a kind of a thing that you wear that makes you feel less guilty like if i if i give myself a bunch of bad news i'll feel like i'm less of a parasite on society you know in some way like well i you know i do drive an SUV, but I feel real bad about it. Is there any, is there any, aside from just the gloom and doom, is there any appeal to this kind of, is there the human emotion that sort of like think to,

I'm going to counteract my, my selfishness by, by just getting really worked up over something that I know isn't really that important and doesn't really require my interest? Well, I think that environmentalism, for a lot of people, is a substitute religion. And it has that same sort of appeal. I'm atoning for my sins. I'm confessing my sins. I'm atoning for them. I've written a lot about how recycling—I've got a piece in the New City Journal about the plastic panic.

We have to ban—people feel virtuous people feel virtuous by, you know, by dispensing with plastic grocery bags and straws. And in fact, it actually hurts the environment. You know, these plastic things are much better for the environment, but people feel better that it's a way to atone for their guilt that, you know, so when you, as you're getting to an international climate conference, you can say, well, at least I passed a law banning plastic grocery bags. And I think people just get a huge kick out of ordering, out of bossing other people around. There are just some people that love to do that. And, you know, I mean, California, you know, passed a law banning those shampoo bottles

in hotels. I mean, what kind of person wants to take away those little bottles? You just have to get a kick out of ordering people around and sort of parading your own moral virtue. Now, this is John Gabriel from Phoenix. Thanks for being on. Yeah, I had written an article about how great things are to start off the new year, just like, okay, it's not all bad news. And I knew this would happen, but I, yeah, I actually read the comments and it was just people screaming at me about how dare you say

things are good. And yeah, it was funny. One thing I've noticed, especially on social media though, and I'm wondering if this has any, what your thoughts are about it is, do a lot of people do this just as entertainment? It's like people want to get their blood level up. Maybe they've had a dull day at work. They're in an unhappy relationship, and they just need to feel. So they just get upset about the silliest things. It's really odd.

That's a great observation. I mean, it's the equivalent of kicking your dog after a bad day at work. You know, you go online, I think, and you get to vent your anger that way. We've got a chapter about online negativity, you know, how you deal with it as a business and also what happens. And, you know, once people post a negative review of a book, for instance, it tends to, you know, the other people get intimidated because you sound smarter when you say negative things. There are some, you know, clever experiments that posting a negative review by the same person or basically phrased the same way, people think you're smarter doing it.

So it's the way to seem smarter on social media. The good news from social media research, though, is that positivity does help you in the long run. The negative stuff gets retweeted more quickly, but positive tweets actually travel farther, and you get more followers on Facebook and Twitter if you're positive because people just respond to that more. So there are some rewards for that, but the easiest way to get that attention is to be negative, and especially among the political class. I mean, that's journalists like us and politicians. I mean, we's, you know, that's journalists like us and politicians that, I mean, we just love to fight. And the great, you know, political polarization is among these elites that

are just, you know, going at each other on cable news and doing that. Whereas most people haven't really changed that much in politics and don't really hate the other side that much. But we just see this sort of extreme negativity is a great way to get attention on, you know, if you've got a cable news show, if you're tweeting, it's a nice way to get quick attention. Right. And your previous book with Roy was about willpower. Should we apply a bit of willpower to just not wallowing in the negativity, be it online or in our lives? Yeah, definitely. I mean, using, you know, self-control and just somehow, you know,

putting some kind of filters and also just relying on others. One of the things we wrote about in Willpower was that the people who have the most self-control, when they studied them, you know, they thought they were these brave souls who were exercising their willpower all day long using that muscle. But it turned out what they really were good at was avoiding temptations. You know, they structured their lives so that they, you know, they didn't bring a quart of ice cream home to have in the freezer to tempt them all day. And they did that. And so, and you can do that really by, you know, by going on this low bad diet.

If you can somehow filter your newsfeed so you're following positive people, so you're not, you know, you're not turning on cable news to watch the, you know, the nightly slugfest of can you believe the other side is so evil. And so I think there are ways you can do that to just avoid seeing it in the first place. I mean, you can't stop yourself from responding to this negative stuff. Your brain just automatically does it. But I think you can curate your news feed so that you don't see it in the first place. John, you're a voice of intelligence, a voice of wisdom and a voice that makes us all feel better.

You are so screwed. You are, you know, it's nothing but obscurity for you out here because there's no dopamine hits from any of this stuff. No, actually. Everyone should read The Power of Bad. Follow John Tierney, of course, on Twitter, John Tierney NYC. Look for him in City Journal, a publication we always love to look. And, of course, follow him in Science Writing in the New York Times.

Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Thanks very much. Thanks, John. Thank you. Okay. I've got to say, it is a great book. I mean, Willpower is a great book, too. If you haven't read Willpower i'd get them both but this one is great because it's it's so it's so uh uh uh accessible written conversational uh funny chatty and it's and

also if you're like me you kind of scan books like this for little things you can then throw at people uh at dinner parties casually that in fact and it's that that's one of my favorite it's actually a classic of his writing is you get to say, if you digest it well, you get to say at a dinner party a week later, well, actually, you know, and people look at you astonished

because they can't believe that, A, you know this, and B, it's true, and it's totally worth it. So buy the book. Willpower, you say, right? Well, that's the thing. I mean, when he was talking about how people go to watch cable news and remind themselves how bad the other side is, you get that sort of rush from that.

And it takes willpower to say, no, I'm not going to do it. It takes willpower to say, I'm going to look at some other sources. It takes willpower to do a lot of things and make your life better. Do you have willpower, Rob, John? Do you regard yourselves as having the strength of character to do something? Oh, let's just say, you know, two times a day, three times a day will make your life better? Well, I do with my wonderful quip, that's for sure. Yeah, ever since I got the quip, I hardly need willpower, James.

You know, I was planning just this gentle peregrination to that, but no. The word planning is your problem right there. You did the old wrinkle in time thing and just brought me right back from A to Z, from alpha to omega. Yeah, well, the point that I was going to was Quip, of course. And you know what the Quip is, right? You hang around podcasts, you listen to these things, you know that Quip is the maker of just the greatest electric toothbrush in the world. And you know that they want you to make the single discovery, perhaps, that'll matter the most for your dental care. And that discovery is this. If you have good habits, you're good. That means brushing for two minutes, twice a day, and flossing regularly, no matter what brand you use. But, you know, we recommend Quip. Why? Because they make that two

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If you go to getquip.com slash ricochet right now, at this very moment, you will get your first refill free. That's your first refill free at getquip.com slash ricochet. That's spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash ricochet. Quip, the good habits company. And our thanks to Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And our thanks to Quip for giving me the recent delivery because he was right on time. My brush had needed refilling.

I needed a new battery and it was great. There's nothing like a fresh toothbrush and there's nothing better than a fresh toothbrush from Quip. Now we welcome back to the podcast, Christina Hoff Summers, resident scholar, AEI, former philosophy professor, author of War Against Boys, host of YouTube's The Factual Feminist. You're going to get dinged and demonetized for that. And co-host of the weekly podcast, The FemSplainers, right here in the Ricochet Audio Network. Christina, welcome back. So many things to ask you. I want to start with this.

A lot of women I know are looking at Amy Klobuchar and the stories of how she treated her staff, supposedly, and saying, I understand exactly why she behaved that way. These millennials in the workplace, they're the absolute worst. You can't get them to do anything unless you throw a hairbrush at them. So she probably has the female manager demographic sewed up. But otherwise, when you look at the female candidates on the D side, aren't they supposed to be the party of women? Why have they been struggling and why is it seeming to come down to a couple of old cranky men? Well, first of all, it's the one thing I liked about Amy Klobuchar with those stories about her and her staff. It seemed like she might be able to be as ornery as our president. However, if you look at the Democrats, you see that

many of the women are supporting Bernie Sanders, and they're not going for the ladies. And we're constantly criticized for not having sufficient numbers of women in public office. And Melinda Gates is spending a billion dollars because of this crisis of non-representation and we're politically disempowered. And we compare unfavorably to Rwanda. And according to the UN, what is it, the global gender gap, we compare unfavorably to Nicaragua when it comes to that they have quoted and took people praise the number of women. So here you have progressive women with an opportunity, several opportunities to put women in place, and they're not doing it. Hey, Christine, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. I noticed on debate night there was this sense of relief from all the new sort of the pundits that I watched. I tend to watch mostly CNN because it's the most exciting and the funniest but also age demographic exactly right yeah right uh but also um they seem to be relieved

they could talk about elizabeth warren um because i feel like they felt bad about like the i guess the elizabeth warren campaign a bunch of people saying you had you have disappeared her why has she been disappeared when in fact she's been disappeared because she hasn't come in, you know, even third in any in any events or any the caucus or the primary? affirmative action for Elizabeth Warren that even though she's losing caucuses and primaries and is not showing up on election nights, she still gets to be treated like she's a top-tier candidate, when she is, by all definitions, she is not that? Well, I think she's the top-tier candidate for some feminist journalists, but you don't see it in the polls. I don't, I mean, I think she'll get a bounce from her supporters for her performance in the debate but I don't think it's going to help her.

If anything, it's probably going to help Bernie Sanders. I mean, we'll have Bernie. So I think she's, yeah, it is affirmative action but among a small group of people. Right. Well, what do you attribute that to? I mean, look, it is a hard thing because there is something,

I mean, I'm just speaking personally, there's something off-putting about her that I don't find off-putting about Amy Klobuchar. But I can't really talk about why I find Elizabeth Warren off-putting because the language I would use could be interpreted as sort of sexist or like, well, you never said that about a man.

Well, in fact, of course, I would say that about a man. But you might say she's a little bit of a skull and a hectoring school mom. And I'm getting triggered. You can't say it, but I, as a woman of an age, another age enhanced woman, I can say this. And, you know, even her performance in the debate, as I said, it'll be, you know, people like to debates that if you personally attack the other person in a very aggressive way, you might hurt yourself even more. People sort of attribute the negativity to you. And I think that will happen as a result of that debate. Well, I mean, I don't want to keep talking about women, but it is sort of an interesting subject, right? Because in 2018,

in the midterms, what we heard was like, well, suburban women are leaving the Republican Party. They're leaving traditional red districts because they hate Donald Trump because Donald Trump's a boar and a loud mouth. And he's, you know, Donald Trump is every guy that, you know, women have been trying to avoid in restaurants and bars for their whole life. Right. So there does seem, though, to be a problem on the other side with attracting moderate women to what is, in fact, an immoderate kind of radical agenda. Well, I just I don't know what has happened to the Democratic Party. I'm still a registered Democrat, but I don't recognize this party. And you look at, I mean, where the other night with anyone besides Bloomberg talking about economic growth, talking about creating jobs, they talk about redistribution and regulation. And it's not an inspire. And then and then the extreme positions. I mean, Elizabeth Warren is carried away with issues of, you know, trans fairness for trans athletes on the college campus and so forth.

And that's, you know, why take these positions that are meaningless to most people and to a lot of feminists, just amount to a war on women's sports. Hey, so one last thing. I know that John Gaber wants to jump in, but this seems to be of a piece to me with a lot of the Me Too movement. I mean, I know a lot of women who have been incredibly energized by the Me Too movement, and a lot of them have said, finally, these things are being talked about. You don't know how awful it is to have one woman I know keep saying these weird lunches. She calls them weird lunches where somebody, some guy, older guy usually, who's technically your superior, takes you to lunch.

He's like, weird. And I get it. Okay, I understand that. But there also seems to be this attitude among people talking about it publicly that it's this giant crisis sweeping the nation. Whereas the women I talk to, even the women who would describe themselves as progressive, say things a little bit more sotto voce like, well, you know, why was so and so in that hotel room? Or what did she think? Or, you know, you can hang up the phone or you could walk away. All the stuff that I think that we say, the sensible solutions we say. And it feels to me like maybe there's been an overreach from the Me Too movement. And I would say as an analogy, also the Democratic Party to like, to think that people who've been rattling sabers

and shouting and shouting, they don't necessarily really believe it's a crisis. This is just something they say. And if you mistake it, you end up thinking that you have a coalition that you don't have. That's a very vague and confusing and baffling series of statements I made.

But do you think there's anything to that? I know exactly what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. And I definitely agree. I think if you took a poll, most people would say that the Me Too movement was something we needed. We needed to bring the workplace, the world up to 21st century standards of mutual respect and so forth. But when it turned into witch hunts and this idea that you must just believe women, fortunately, a lot of women, liberal and conservative, understood that if you're going to treat women as this class of, you know, sort of delicate, fragile little birds that need extra protection. And you just always believe their cries for help. Well, I'm sorry, I became a feminist in the 70s and 80s, way back in

the last millennium, because I wanted to be equal to men. And women's liberation was about emancipation, it was about, you know, doing the things men do, but now I call it sort of fainting couch feminism. It takes you back to a Victorian age with these maidens fainting on a delicate chaise the first time they hear any hint of male vulgarity. And this movement is taking away—if you look at the Weinstein trial right now, no one never knows what a jury will do, but there was a fantastic article yesterday in The Nation, of all places, by a feminist writer. The case is very weak because they brought in women who the two central accusers continued to have a relationship with him and have. It's going to be very confusing for the jury to deliver a verdict of guilty. They don't even seem to understand the charges. The case is so convoluted. And the women are, once they were on the stand, you see the importance of, you know, putting someone on and being able to ask questions. And suddenly their stories just don't make sense.

So I think people might want to prepare themselves for maybe a hung jury. And what's at stake here is the logic in the Me Too movement. Hi, this is John Gabriel. And one question I have about that with the Harvey Weinstein trial is he is the big fish that kind of started this Me Too movement. And as you said, it kind of turned into a witch hunt where, you know, minor celebrities who had a bad date were outed as some kind of a menacing sexual predator. And what would that do to this entire Me Too movement, to modern feminism writ large, if he's able to get off the hook for this? Well, I think, first of all all there'll just be so much

hysterical overreaction and I urge people to look at the the testimony of these accusers and just see ask yourself would you find him guilty on these accusations and these

stories that you know these women who continue to have a relationship wrote love notes in their phone or, you know, desperately in case he would lose contact with them over a period of years. And it's not impossible that under those conditions, you could be a victim of sexual assault, but then you would need some greater evidence than this confusing record. So I think it will be a setback for the Me Too, but maybe in a good way that if we can restore some common sense, we can reaffirm the importance of due process for everyone,

for men, for women, and maybe disabuse certain journalists of the idea that everyone jumped on this bandwagon of, you know, being in a kind of sex panic and thinking that we live in a rape culture when we live in quite the opposite of a rape culture. Overall, the United States, especially college campuses, young women on the college campus were among the safest and most freest opportunity-rich young women in the world. But unfortunately, this sort of rape culture theory has been taught now for a few decades. And these young women graduate, not the majority, but a significant number graduate and go into journalism and want to change the world and avenge the wrongs that they learned about in their gender studies programs at Wesleyan or Oberlin.

And there turns out to be quite a number of them. So this might possibly, if we have to look at this case and people have to consider what went on, it might provoke just a more intelligent discussion on gender issues, which is what we try to do on the femsplainers. Christine, last question here before we let you go. You mentioned before Elizabeth Warren when she talked about trans rights in prison, which I think showed her preternatural grasp of the realities of Iowa rural culture right there. It's an issue that's just. Do you ever watch? Did you watch Succession? No, I haven't.

It's been. Oh, they're opening credits. They were making fun of Fox News and they had a chyron that said gender fluid illegals may be entering the country twice. You know, it was a big issue, gender fluid illegals may be entering the country twice. You know, it was a big issue, like gender fluid illegals. And it's like Elizabeth Warren has a position on gender fluid illegals entering the country and needing health care. I've got a heart valve replacement. I mean, when you look at the way that they're going to ration it and where the quality adjusted years means that people on the other end, long end of the demographic spectrum, don't get good care because they're no longer going to be productive. That'll be a fun debate to have. But my question is this, when Elizabeth Warren talked

about when she progressive standard bearer for women came out and said this, wasn't this sort of a signal to the feminist and the lesbian community that they lost this issue? They're going to lose this issue because they're just going to be turfs from here out and they're going to lose this issue because they're just going to be TERFs from here out, and they're going to be accused of all sorts of phobias, and they'd best shut up. Well, first of all, we no longer use the word TERF. These are gender-critical feminists, and I formed an alliance with them. And these are women like Julie Bindel. I've argued with her all my life, but she's a pistol.

She's fantastic. She's in Great Britain and she's fighting this, a number of feminist philosophers I've disagreed with forever. I have formed an alliance because people are trying to shut down the discussion.

The trans activists or the trans Taliban, as some of my friends call them, they're trying to shut down the discussion. They are abusive and just horrible to these gender-critical feminists who criticize them. And I do not think that they've lost. I think they're just getting started. The women that want to preserve the idea that there is such a thing as a woman and a man and there's a difference. And it turns out conservatives and libertarians and, you know, sort of radical feminists have reached an agreement on this. Well, you say gender critical instead of turf, just like the people who want to be known as raced realists don't want to be called clansmen and racists.

All right. Well, we haven't settled it, but maybe we'll be settled by the time. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I mean, it's just too much. I just want to ask you one thing. If you had been Bloomberg in that debate the other night, I keep going off in my head. What could he have said? Now, today, there's an article by Lance Morrow in Time magazine saying, actually, he did the best thing he could. And now he's been through this sort of hazing and this horrible, humiliating thing. It humanized him. And that's the only way to do it.

So it was really a smart thing to do. But on the other hand, I'm just to think what what he could have said oh i you know i i was thinking about that too i i feel like he whatever you say it's got to be on brand right and his brand is i'm a realist i've done he should say look in the real world if you have real employees in a real company these are the things you have to have you have to have ndas and so we have them and and you guys this seems strange to you because you don't have any employees. You've never done anything. You've never built a company. You don't have any of these issues. But if you're out there in the real world trying to comply with all the regulations and trying to comply with what your lawyers are telling you you need to do because everybody in the workplace knows this is a minefield, these are the things that you have to do. And you guys, all you want to do is add more regulation and more controversy and more conflict to this. All you're going to get are more NDAs. That's how the real world works. If you guys can only join the real world, then maybe you'd be qualified to be president. But in the meantime, I'm the only one who's been

in the real world. And that's why I'm running for the domination of the Democratic Party. And that, I think, would have been fine. And I just made that up right now. It's not that hard. That was good. Not that hard. You know what? I would hire, he should hire you. He should. Well, listen, yes. Like from your lips, apparently this is good stuff. I'd say, look, I redistributed more income than any of the people on this stage, but I didn't do it by force. I did it because people gave me their money because I had something they wanted. And then I turned around and I gave it to an awful lot of people that I employed.

It was all voluntary all the way. The rest of you, all you people here, just want to use power and force and coercion to take it away. I'm all about freedom, except, of course, that would be a lie coming from Mike Bloomberg, because he is anything but when it comes to salt and pop, et cetera. Christina, thanks. Great. Everybody listen to the FemSplanners. It's been a pleasure, and we'll talk to you on the road.

Bye-bye. Thank you. Before we get to the all-important closing chat, in which Rob and John are going to weigh in on a weighty measure of the day, it is time for Hit It. The James Lylex Member Post of the Week. Yeah. This week it's from Rodan.

Or Rodan. I prefer Rodan. Who wrote in the member section, Day 30, COVID-19 outside of China. And you may be thinking, Why exactly coronavirus? I thought Ricochet was a center-right political content discussion thing. No, it's so much more as the member feed tells you. And Rodin, for 30 days, has been doing a very

spare, reasonable, rational, calculated, evidence-based discussion of the coronavirus, not with any fervid dreams or worries or downplaying what it could be, but just simply laying it out with charts and graphs in a very simple way on a daily basis. And I find it interesting. And it's not inconsistent at all with the member feed, because in the member feed, you will find things about science and literature and families and poetry and music and the rest of it, which is why you ought to join. You really should, because if you join Ricochet for a pittance, a mere pittittance you will have access to the member feed you'll be able to post your own stuff and join a community of people who are like-minded

when it comes to the central political issues more or less but range everywhere when it comes to the other things and every trip to the member feed is learning something and finding out it's a chat with old friends except it's not like facebook with somebody raging and screaming it's not like youtube comments where the idiots are bubbling along and it's not like Facebook with somebody raging and screaming. It's not like YouTube comments where the idiots are bubbling along. And it's not like Twitter where who knows what anonymous person is hacking at you. No, it's a safe and sane place to be. Ricochet. Now, before we finish, we've got a couple of questions here.

Rob, John, the pardons. Discuss. Yeah, a lot of it is just, I mean, some of those places, I mean, I don't know. Presidential pardons are always a strange strange idiosyncratic thing. George W. Bush didn't do many of them. Famously did not pardon Scooter Libby, which I thought a lot of people thought was a mistake. Bill Clinton, of course, sold a lot of them at the end. Some of these – I find some of these pardons I think are baffling, Blagojevich or Blagojevich, whatever.

How do you pronounce that guy's name? He should be still in prison. But I think a lot of it is a setup to probably a Roger Stone pardon at some point. So I'm not quite – the irony, of course, the irony of course is that it, that it's, since the outrage has already been dialed up to 11, that there isn't room for a lot of outrage about this too. This seems like of a piece. So I, you know, you did this brief flurry of people saying the pardons are, you know, that's going to be a campaign issue for the Democrats because it's pure corruption. But a lot of it seemed like a lot of it seemed like New York style back scratching. That's the Bernie cleric pardon. And then maybe 80s nostalgia pardon.

That's the Milken pardon. A lot of it seemed like it wasn't venal, but it was probably, I mean, I don't think that people should be pardoned because they cheated on their taxes. I feel like if you cheat on your taxes and get caught, I don't think you get a pardon because the rest of us pay our taxes. But that was kind of my feeling. John, I think disagrees with me. Well, I think, one thing, Blago, I was thinking, why on earth would you pardon this guy? He is, you know, the Illinois swamp, the Springfield swamp personified until our good Richard Epstein on the Libertarian podcast, also found on Ricochet, made a very compelling point that, no, he was over sentenced. This was a bit too much. So before weighing in, I think it's important to

look at the whole record. Um, politically it was a complete loser for him because nobody seemed to like it as far as it being a campaign issue. I cannot imagine that we'll remember this three days from now. So we'll move on to the next thing and then he'll pardon Roger Stone. And then three days after that, everyone will forget it. And, will forget it and uh yeah good luck democrats running on the pardon power yeah i mean he could pardon roger stone uh right before the i mean he should pardon roger stone the afternoon of super tuesday yeah i would too neither of you guys get it pardoning blanco was his way of draining the swamp in illinois and we're going to learn everything that Obama did when he was the senator. That's what this is all about. It's all in play.

It's all clicking into place. I mean, it's like you guys never go to see what QAnon is saying these days. That's right. Right. Meanwhile, in Western news of depressing significance, Oxford could remove Homer and Virgil from compulsory classic syllabi because there's a diversity drive and apparently they're not popular anymore. This seems to be of a piece with Yale taking out the Western Civ painting class where Western civilization was heavily overrepresented in the study of Western civilization. I don't like it. I'm of the mind that if you want to broaden the curriculum, you broaden the curriculum. You don't remove things because some people regard them as Eurocentric. I mean, if you want to deny that there's a Eurocentric aspect to Western culture, good luck. You can require that people take other things.

But this seems to me to be, again, this reflexive cringe. Like, ooh, we can't, we oughtn't, we dastn't because our hearts were uniquely bad and the more that we privilege that. Oh, we've got to decolonize everything. I mean, when I start hearing those words, I just know you're turning up people who are going to be particularly rigorous in their thinking. Or is this just one of those issues that bugs some of us and really doesn't matter on the whole? Well, I think this is like trying to teach a philosophy course, teach a bunch of philosophy

majors without mentioning Plato, because that's the foundation that everything else that comes after is based on. It's like there's a great problem now with biblical illiteracy, and you might not be a believer, you might be of another religion, but to understand a lot of literature, you need to understand these biblical allusions, or you're going to miss half the point. Yeah, and also, I mean, we're talking especially the Bible. I mean, there are the three giant world religions, or actually two of them in one small one, but the core one is the Hebrew Bible. And then there's the New Testament, and then the Koran is sort of built on top of the, in many ways, on top of the Hebrew Bible mostly, and also bits and pieces of the New Testament, you can't really understand those cultures unless you understand the philosophical, mythological, faith-based guidance they've had for thousands and thousands of years. It seems strange, like, what's the point of having a classics department unless

you're teaching Homer and Virgil? But I guess what mean, I mean, just to not be, to take a different position or in a different tack, not being a scold is like, I mean, what an incredible cheat you, how, how, how, what, what a, what a swindle for, uh, your students to not have them read Homer. I mean, my God, those are the best stories those are great too incredibly important stories that are uh riveting and and and uh and and and you know unputdownable they're blockbusters the odyssey is a blockbuster novel i think you should read it um if only because it'll give you an enormous amount of pleasure and the idea that you're not that it somehow doesn't conform to your you know checklist is is also so weird because it was written at a time before there was even – the idea of a checklist even existed.

Everybody was sort of some couple steps out of Eastern Africa. Well, we'll get to our closing question in just a second. I have to remind you because if I said this at the end, you'd just go, right? You'd just go. But I have to remind you that this podcast was brought to you happily with joy and pride by Quip and by Lending Club. Make your life fresher and better and all around just more fantastic by supporting them. It supports us as well, Quip and Lending Club. Thanks, guys. And also, if you could, I know it's pathetic, but I have to say it. Take a minute. Leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or leave a four-star review because I said something stupid. Or a six-star review because John was on and he's so incredible. Why do this? Well, the reviews let other listeners find us, frankly.

And the more people find us, the more people join Ricochet and the more we do more podcasts. And you like that, obviously, because you're still sticking with this one. Last question then, guys. What are you watching? I am barely watching a thing right now. I'm actually reading classics. I started a project a couple years ago because my daughters were in charter schools. And when I saw their reading list, I'm like, huh, I haven't read any

of this because I was too busy screwing around in high school. And college at that time wasn't teaching a lot of classics. So as Rob said, they're just incredible. I thought I'd be like eating my vegetables going through these things. And I can't put them down. Everything from the beginning, Homer and Virgil, up to Don Quixote, which I couldn't believe it was more modern than most modern novels. Yeah, and hilarious. Hilarious. I was praising it on Twitter a couple days ago, and I said I had to set it down because I was laughing out loud too hard sometimes.

And I was amazed at that. I was not expecting it, but it's like they're classics for a reason. So, yeah, I'm doing the urbane. Oh, I don't really follow television. Don't let your monocle splash into your TV. Rob.

Well, listen, I don't, I mean, I haven't, I'm not getting into any series, really. Every time I manage to turn the TV on, I'm scrolling through Apple TV. I go to Criterion Channel and I watch an old movie. I don't know, I don't understand why everyone isn't doing that. There's like a million great old movies that are funny or interesting or even if they're like super backward, they're hilarious. So, yeah, I watch old movies.

That's all I do. As do I. Every Friday night last week, it was Shadow of a Doubt with Joseph Cotton, Alfred Hitchcock movie. And this week, I think it's going to be sing, baby singer. But as for television, I am plebeian enough to actually avail myself of the boob tube. And, uh, what I've been watching this week is the second season of Narcos, which is this sort of gangsterish drama about the,

uh, sort of kind of real. It's got, it's got a real names and real people. And they actually are following the Kingpins and the cartel, uh, Narco Tropicantes and all the rest of it. And it's interesting.

It's a co-production with Mexico, I believe. So it has the emanation of her similitudes. So you kind of think you're getting it. This is what the decor was like. This is what the music was like. This is what the hairstyle was like. And it's fascinating. And at the same time, after watching an episode of that,

I've been reworking my way through Coco, a beautiful Pixar movie. And so I go back and forth. You watch Narcos and you think this country is a bleep hole. And then you watch Coco and you think what a glorious, wonderful culture. My God, this is incredible. So warms. So somewhere between the two. It's like one balances the other.

And you watch those two, Narcos and Coco, and in the middle is probably a correct evaluation of Mexican history and culture based on what I see on my big screen. That'll do. There you have it, everybody. Hope you've learned something, enjoyed something. We've laughed a little, we've cried a little. We've sold some toothpaste. We hope we've got down

your debt. That's what we're here for, and we'll be here again next week with Peter Robinson, back from the grave. John, it's been great having you here. Everybody, of course, read what John writes and listen to what he says on the Ricochet Audio Podcast Network. And Rob, go someplace else, so we're not just talking about New York next week.

I will do it. Get out of town. See everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. sometime when you take you gotta give so live and let live or let go i could promise you things like big diamond rings but you don't find roses growing on stalks of clover So you better think it over Well, if sweet talking you could make it come true I would give you the world right now on a silver platter But what would it matter So smile for a while and let's be jolly

Love shouldn't be so melancholy Come along and share the good times while we can I beg your pardon I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine. Ricochet. Join the conversation.