The Ricochet Podcast - Perspectives on History and Herstory

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Whenever James roams for the week, a dilemma emerges. How do we make up for his erudition and charm? This time we reached out for a northerner from across the pond. Our guest is Niall Ferguson, one of the few men alive truly qualified to explain the subtleties of consensus misinterpretations of history–and the consequences. Are western leaders making foolhardy wagers in Ukraine? And if so... Source

This is the BBC bringing you news of fresh disaster. I don't know, that sounded a little too northern. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. You're going to see when you're there, young people standing in the middle of the front of a damn tank, just saying, I'm not leaving.

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. I'm Rob Long with Peter Robinson. James Lilacs is off this week, and our special guest is Neil Ferguson. Stay with us. I can hear you! Hello and welcome to the Ricochet Podcast.

This is number 586. I'm Rob Long, one of the co-founders of ricochet and along with me uh right now is peter robinson my other founder in palo alto california peter how are you i'm well rob how are you good thanks we should note that james lilacs is gallivanting around the world i think he's not even he's not even domestic right, but he is off this week and we're going to get a full report next week from him. Speaking of which, where are you? I am in a Caribbean Island for the weekend.

A friend of mine is having a birthday, a significant milestone birthday. And so a bunch of us have come down here to, I don't know, to celebrate, but it's like, and the weather's great so it's like it was easy easy decision for me to make to leave um sleety new york for uh you know whatever it is you're the only friend of mine who has friends who have caribbean islands on which to celebrate significant birthdays but i won't get started this is not i mean this is not a this is a a vacations island this is filled with vacationers so it's not you know it's open to all private

oh it's not a private island all right um uh this is theers, so it's not... It's not a private island. All right. It's one of those things where they planned it a year ago, and they got us all to commit a year ago. A year ago, I was like, yeah, I'm totally into this, yes. And a year later, I'm thinking, this is really expensive.

It's like one of those things that... Does your host listen to the Ricochet podcast? It doesn't matter, because I've already mentioned it many times. So you've already been a gracious guest and said, man, this is pricey. Speaking of not pricey, though, before we get going, I do want to remind everyone that it is not too late to sign up for the Take Back Our Schools program with Scott Walker, former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, now president of the Young Americans Foundation, and former Wall Street Journal reporter Azra Nomani. And they're going to join Bethany Mandel, our own Bethany Mandel, and Andrew Gutman, who do a great podcast for Ricochet called Take Back Our Schools. They're going to do a live podcast conversation. It's going to be a really big one at the Young Americans Foundation in Reston, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.

It's March 30th, so it's coming up. It is members only, so please join Ricochet.com for this and a couple other things I'll talk about later in the podcast. Go to Ricochet.com events slash events for more details. All right, so we have on our guest today is Neil Ferguson, who's an old friend of ours and an old friend of yours, Peter, been here for a while. So I'm wondering whether we want to hold off on talking about ukraine oh i don't are you kidding anything we say and then we bring in somebody who knows what he's talking about no let's not start ukraine until we have neil here let's get the expert in here in the meantime so if we're not

gonna uh talk we're gonna hold ukraine off till neil's here um what else is there to talk about but the the savagery and the um personal attacks and the ad hominem uh hearings that took place between um a few republican senators and uh um supreme court um uh nominee i guess you say nominee, right? That's right. Ketanji. It's Ketanji? Ketanji? Why? I do not know.

Right. And I just want to start by saying that the Washington Post editorial headline was, Republicans boast they have not pulled a Kavanaugh, meaning they have not pulled a hearing quite as dirty and nasty as the Kavanaugh hearings. In fact, they've treated Jackson worse. That is insane. What part? It is just insane. Right. And it just suggests that you could have written that editorial before the hearings. Which, and it wouldn't surprise me if some young liberal at the Washington Post did roughly that. Let's do a few obits in case somebody does. Oh, yeah, let's get this editorial written before the hearings even start. The questioning of, how are we deciding to pronounce it?

Ketanji, I think Ketanji. Ketanji, all right. The questioning of Ketanji has been about her record and her judicial opinions. So, this notion of she gives child pornographers more lenient sentences than the sentencing guidelines suggest. Why did you do that, Judge? And she has an answer, and it's a plausible answer, which is that the sentencing guidelines were written when child pornography involved actual photographs.

It was much more difficult. It involved much more intentionality on the part of the criminal. Now two or three clicks and you can find your hard drive loaded with child pornography. That's different. Well, now actually that's a plausible point. It can be argued. It raises a second question of why it should be that the judge inserts her own views of sentencing into the matter instead of going back and suggesting that the legislature take matters. Okay, but that's all legitimate. It's perfectly legitimate. Josh Hawley may have gotten testy about it. Senators are allowed to get testy, for goodness sake. The other large question,

or this is a small question, but it's important. Right, they're allowed to do that. How would you define woman? And she replies, I'm not a biologist, I wouldn't know. Yeah. Well, actually, you do need to know because there's a great deal of legislation written that depends on an understanding of the difference, a legal understanding of the difference between genders. It is of the very nature of the law that it proceeds according to careful distinctions and definitions. And if we now find ourselves in a position in which a great deal of legislation is in doubt because all of a sudden the liberals are trying to thrust upon us a new vagueness about gender identity, then what is a woman and what is a man is a very legitimate question for someone who is undoubtedly going to have to rule on such questions. It's all rooted in the law and in her record and her judicial outlook. Kavanaugh, none of that. Totally personal attacks.

Totally fabricated. It's legitimately, I think, legitimately political. I mean, these are politicians. So it's okay for them to grandstand a little bit that's what they do that's what what it is and is personal i mean we don't know anything about how she until i know how she behaved at harvard law school and in her undergraduate years this doesn't even come close to what they did to brett kavanaugh until i'm until i know that her classmates are being canvassed by reporters and i know that this has happened with kavanaugh until I'm until I know that her classmates are being canvassed by reporters.

And I know that this has happened with Kavanaugh because I was a classmate who was canvassed by reporters. Then I know it's not as dirty and low down and despicable as what they did to Brett Kavanaugh. And also, I think what it is, it's embarrassment. And I know I just this is what struck me is that the questions, the sort of faux naive disingenuous questions that these Republican senators were asking were legitimate in the current context to say, how would you define a woman? And all of a sudden, the liberal media sort of intelligentsia rolled their eyes. Can you imagine they asked that question? But that is, in fact, a question that one needs to ask. It's not because Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, as much as I may, as much as I may have issues with them in all sorts of ways.

The floor is open for these kinds of wide-eyed, saucer-eyed, faux-naive questions because the left has brought us here. And I believe that this is – if you don't like these questions, then you can simply answer simply, how do you define a woman? You could define it. like these questions then you can simply answer simply what how do you define a woman you could you could define it um you wouldn't have to refer to a biology or biology class or bio specific biological expertise to answer that question and i think the fact that most americans would see that question and think well of course you got to ask that now it does not inure to democrats especially as we sort of enter i think think, the sort of the great, you know, sorting season that's happening now where people are starting to choose subsides.

And national identities are starting to matter for the midterms. Here's a specific instance, or we know this is coming, and it gets to the question of why defining woman is legitimate. Title IX. Right. Title IX is important legislation that requires all institutions of higher learning that receive federal funding, which is all except three or four or five in the country, to avoid discriminating between men and women. Now we have the case of a Penn swimmer who was a mediocre male swimmer, announced that he was a woman, and joined the Penn women's team. And incidentally, the entire Ivy League, which is after all a sporting league, the entire Ivy League came out with a statement affirming his decision to do so.

And you know what? The women who would have taken first place now take second place, and those who take second place would have taken third place. There will be lawsuits, and it is not the presidents and athletic directors of the Ivy League who get to exactly to whom does Title IX apply, and what is and is not discrimination against women when men decide that they are women? This is totally legitimate, and these lawsuits are coming. And rolling your eyes and pretending that these are sort of indiscreet or unfair or impolite or somehow obscure questions is like, well, I mean, unfortunately, that's where we are. I mean, it is, you know, you have to draw a line. Right. I mean, it's OK to rough up. I think I mean, these days, anyway, it's considered OK to rough up the nominee a little bit. And so both sides do it. This was by by my lights, by watching and reading it, pretty light. And she had good answers. And she had answers, I think, that Belay— This is an intelligent person.

Yeah, she's got answers that I think suggest a not-knee-jerk liberal position on a lot of things, like the Second Amendment, maybe. And the fact that she's the only judge with any kind of criminal justice experience is sort of good, I think, you know, so in general. But we are here because the left has made us be here. And it's really very simple. I mean, just to talk about politics for a minute, it's really very simple. that Leah Thomas, the trans woman Ivy League swimmer for University of Pennsylvania, you either think she's a she, or you think that she's got a he's body, a male body, and should not be competing against women. Correct. When Leah Thomas was swimming against men, she was ranked 463 or way, way down there.

When she started swimming against women, she's number one. That's either you are in favor of women's sports or you're not. And if you're in favor of women's sports, it seems to me you're in favor of them precisely because they do not have to race against people with men's bodies. And she has a man's body. She wants to be a she. I'll call her a she. She wants to be a her. She can be her. I don't care. No skin off my nose. And really, no skin off my nose because I'm not swimming against her. Maybe, I mean, unfortunately, I think the Clarence Thomas hearings were sort of a grim overture to what eventually happened with Kavanaugh, where things got personal. Nobody's been raked over the coals more than African, black male, the most recent black male appointee to the Supreme Court. So, what I think is terrible about this, I think the person who comes out the best is Judge Jackson

because she had answers to questions that she needed to have answers to. She didn't have an answer to how you define a woman. She tossed that one off as though she just gave a flip answer. That's not acceptable. That will be an adjudicated question, and that was not, in my judgment, that was she just gave a flip answer. That's not acceptable. I will be an adjudicated question. And that was not in my judgment. That was not acceptable.

I agree. But what I mean is that's the one that she tripped up over. Literally something that I think if you had held a gun to our heads and said, what is going to be the big issue? For the next Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court. We would have said Roe versus Wade. We would have said a Second Amendment. We might have said a presidential prerogative. I don't know. We've got to come up with all sorts of little death penalty, little tripwires in the culture.

We would have never come up with something so stupid as this. And I think that when the sorting season happens which is coming up it's going to be very easy to say to the american the voting public look if you think that a woman is a woman's man a man and a man a woman who's pretending a man pretending to be a woman shouldn't be swimming against women um if you think if you think that's okay then you're a democrat if you think that's not okay or makes you feel a little bit weird or you think maybe um we ought to talk about it. Then you're a Republican.

Those are really, that's what you're looking for in politics is very simple questions with very simple answers. By the way. Which is why they don't want to talk about it. The polling, which is why they don't want to talk about it. The polling on this has started to bubble up. And Hispanics have no truck with Lea Thomas. The Hispanic culture, men are men, women are women, and there is no gray area in between. And that is going to hurt.

The politics of this are beginning to emerge. Democrats were already nervous because of Hispanics moving in some numbers toward Donald Trump. And on this issue, they're not even close to the center of the Democratic Party. I mean, I'm going to... This is where we get canceled, or I get canceled. As a professional comedy writer.

Yes. And a student of literature, world literature. Going back to the very beginning of written literature, actually beginning of oral tradition, as it were, men dressed as women and women dressed as men has been traditionally hilarious. Yes, yes. It is impossible not to make jokes. And I know that they're wrong and you shouldn't whatever they

think you cannot rewire the american brain or the human brain that quickly i mean maybe you can in a hundred years go to youtube and look at benny hill in the 60s british that's an old tradition in british comedy greek greek comedy lisa strada aristophanes everybody i mean every every single german tv show has has had as their only the germans find cross-dressing utterly hilarious incidentally as far as i can tell it's the only thing they find hilarious it's the only thing they find boy if you want to get the germans to laugh that's what you have to do um and i know that neil ferguson is coming but speaking of laughter this is the worst segue ever I don't know why I'm even doing it. One of the things that helps you live long and relax is laughter, right? It's important to remember to laugh. And so, you know, those are things that like help you sleep, help you relax. And when you sleep and you get into bed, nothing matters more than a good night's rest and a great set of sheets. Bowl and branches signature sheets feel so soft and light. You'll forget you're not actually sleeping on a cloud because they are

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Neil was taught at Oxford, Cambridge, the Stern School of Business, London School of Economics, and Harvard. And we will try not to hold that against him. Nevertheless, he's filled with wisdom. He's the author of more than a dozen major works, most recently Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe, which seemed to be an act of prescience. He's one of the Hoover Institution's good fellows, along with H.R. McMaster, Bill Whalen, and John Cochran, which you can hear here on the Ricochet Network network and he's written and presented a number of tv documentary series including the ascent of money the pity of war which actually was the first book i read of yours i've loved and a net world and he is here to sort of make sense i guess of the state of play and the future and what we should expect um in the next i don't know a couple of months it seems i i was reading i was on a plane

yesterday and i was reading um a roundup i think was the economist for some reason i had the economist magazine look forward at 2022 it was on my coffee table for a month and a half two months maybe and i picked it up to read on the plane yesterday. And I open it up and I instantly realize it's March whatever, 25th. And it's all just useless now. Every single thing it predicted is completely useless. And I sort of had to put it down. I had to read from the back because the book reviews are still sort of interesting. But it seemed like everything has been reshuffled.

The talk of the decline of the West, the talk about the decline nato the talk about um green energy and all sorts of nonsense all that just seemed like from another time am i wrong you're quite right this is nothing new i remember reviewing the performance of the economists world in series all the way back to its origins and uh it's a fascinating uh exercise because you see how much they got wrong uh and and remember you're you're just asking for 12 month predictions right they i'll give you just one example. They consistently underestimated the Chinese economy. I'll give you another. They were sure that South Africa was going to descend into bloody civil war after the end of apartheid. And so reading through back numbers of the world in is a reminder of how hard it is to make that kind of prediction.

And a lot of people do it, and they either do it for the media or they do it for investment banks, but very few people do it well. Philip Tetlock has done some work on this and argues that super forecasting is a very different activity from punditry. And one of the observations of Tetlock is that people who are professional pundits, the kind of people who go and do predictions on cable TV, have a terrible track record. But that's because their incentive is not, in fact, to be right about the future. It's just to be entertaining here and now. Whereas being right about the future. It's just to be entertaining here and now. Whereas being right about the future is really, sometimes it's quite boring.

I mean, some years actually are very uneventful. And, you know, the problem with pundits is that they predicted like nine out of the last three world wars, that kind of thing. Whereas if you're in the super forecasting business, you have to be ready to say quite a lot of boring things. And you're lucky if every now and then you get an out of consensus right call, which I'm glad to say I and my colleagues at Greenmantle did, because back in January, on January the 2nd, actually, we said there will

be a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It's going to happen, we had high probability on that. And sure enough, and if you were on the wrong side of that, yeah, all your predictions are now garbage. Right, right. So, Neil, here's the debate, broadly speaking, the two poles of this debate. I'm now thinking of them as the Mearsheimer position and the Kotkin position. You know exactly where this is going, so I'll just set it up very briefly. John Mearsheimer, very serious person, University of Chicago, and he says, in effect, we should have known better. That the Russians and your biography subject, Henry Kissinger, you can correct my positioning here, but he falls more or less, or he fell more or less in this camp, that what Putin says is largely true. The history of Ukraine

and Russia have been intertwined from the very beginning. This goes back a thousand years. Ukraine is no more a foreign country to Russia than California would be to the United States. We should have known better. Enlarging NATO right up to the borders of Ukraine and touching the borders of Russia in the Baltic states could only have strengthened the nationalists in Russia and trouble would come from that. All right. Stephen Kotkin says, oh, nonsense. The Russians have been trampling into that region.

They trampled Poland. They took the Baltic states. This has been going on century after century. And this is Russian behavior that has, it is not predicated on the expansion of NATO. It's predicated on a thousand years of Russian history. All right, Neil, untangle. Well, when it comes to Russian history, I have two rules. Number one, Stephen Kotkin is always right. And number two, remember rule number one. Yes, right.

That is a nice shortcut, I'll grant you, yes. It does simplify life. So let me answer this from my perspective. Not everything that Mearsheimer has said is wrong, not everything he said is wrong. Not everything he said is wrong. But the broad thrust of the argument that NATO enlargement was our dreadful mistake that caused this war because there's a legitimate argument on Putin's side, that's wrong. And let me quickly say why. If you are in Poland or Lithuania right now, you have the perfect evidence that you were right to seek to join NATO and NATO was right to admit you. And that Ukraine's tragedy is that we offered NATO membership in 2008 and then completely failed to deliver it. I liken this to my favorite

New Yorker cartoon, which you may know has a guy in a New York office on the phone and he's going, no, Thursday doesn't work. Could you do never? How about never? And that was our policy on NATO and Ukraine. Now that created the worst possible predicament for Ukraine. There was this notional accession to NATO, like there was notional accession to the EU, but it was just never going to happen. That left them incredibly vulnerable. That, I think, was a mistake. And here, I think Henry Kissinger got it right back in 2014, at the time of the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, when he said, this is never going to work. We need to create a neutral Ukraine like Finland in the Cold War and provide them with meaningful guarantees against aggression. And

we should have done that then. That neutrality plan that he sketched out in 2014 is probably where we're going to end up is probably where we're going to end up eventually, but we're going to end up there after massive destruction and loss of life. And let me add one final point. On the history, Ukraine clearly was a separate entity politically from Russia. One can see that in multiple 17th century maps. And it was added to the Russian Empire by Peter the Great with the Battle of Poltava in 1799 as the great turning point. Its relationship with Russia has been a tense one ever since because, for example, Ukraine proclaimed its independence in 1917 and was only brought back under Bolshevik control, back under Russian control by the Bolsheviks

in a brutal conflict that took years. It, of course, was a victim of Stalin's most horrendous crime, the man-made famine that Ukrainians call the Holodomor. It was a battlefield in both world wars, taken by the Nazis, retaken by the Red Army. There were Ukrainian partisans fighting against the Soviets right up until around 1950. So the idea that Putin put forward in his article from July of last year, that somehow the Russian and Ukrainian peoples are one and an independent Ukraine is a nonsense, is historically completely bogus. The significance of that article, though, was that when I read it, which was in September last year, on my way to Kyiv, I realized the Ukrainians were in huge trouble and that Putin was going to invade. And I was pretty consistent thereafter in warning people that this was likely to happen, even if Anschluss annexation was almost certainly beyond Putin's power, as it has proved to be. So I have a couple of questions.

I first want to start just by the danger of listening to historians. How about the danger of not listening to okay that's what i guess i mean because we've definitely done more of the latter than the right so are we here because we haven't paid enough attention to history we didn't know that there were ukrainian partisans fighting through ukrainian national identity in 1950 or are we here because we do remember history and we remember a bitter, nasty struggle for a safety zone in Europe that nobody wants to get into again? Are we picking and choosing the history lessons that are easier to follow, or are we just historically illiterate? Pretty historically illiterate. This is a problem that Washington

has suffered from for many decades. I mean, Kissinger, before he even went into the Nixon administration, was writing about the lack of historical knowledge that is inherent in the bureaucracy in Washington. The United States of Amnesia is something that Graham Allison and I wrote about a few years ago when we proposed that there should be a Council of Historical Advisors so the president at least had some idea of what had been done before. The institutions of the U.S. government are very bad at keeping track of what previous administrations have done, and so you'll get the phenomenon of the Iraq occupation, in which a

whole series of mistakes were made that, from a historian's point of view, were terribly obvious. And I wrote about them at the time. So I think it's a failure, which is almost systemic, to integrate history into the policymaking process, other than on a very selective basis where a president will say, oh, this reminds me of 1938. Is there any historian here who can tell me that I'm right about that? And then you get- Historian shopping. Right. So you shop around until you find a court historian who will say, this is definitely 1938, and you are showing Churchillian leadership. But that's not how

this should work. There should be some attempt to say, well, what are the historical lessons here? And I think this should have been happening, you know, not just last year, but it should have been happening, say, in 2008, when I think the mistake was made of saying to Georgia and Ukraine, hey, yeah, NATO membership, why not? And immediately, Putin invaded Georgia. And we were like, you know, we're kind of busy with the financial crisis, so we'll just not talk about that. So I think any historian, whether you had Steve Kotkin or some other authority in the room, would have said, look, there's a reason Ukraine has probably seen more organized lethal violence in the last 200 years than anywhere else in the world. There's a

reason for that. And therefore, you should approach this subject with extreme care. What would a historian that you describe, what would your, I guess, in the timeline, what would your advice have been sort of starting a year ago, March 2021. So a year ago, when you were looking already at Russian troops building up, I mean, the buildup of troops began about a year ago, you would have said, and I did say, watch carefully here, because Putin is not satisfied with the status quo. Remember, in 2014, he annexed Crimea. Right. And he also established quasi-autonomous separatist strongholds in Donetsk and Luhansk in the east of Ukraine, in the Donbass region.

But this wasn't really sustainable because ukraine uh didn't fold uh it retained its commitment to a western orientation uh the zelensky government was not really getting anywhere in its peace negotiations with russia and crucially the russian position in donbass and crimea was not economically sustainable. And so the historian... Meaning it was costing them too much? Yeah, it was completely costing them. And it was extremely hard to manage Crimea, because you didn't have any land connection from Russia to Crimea.

It was essentially cut off other than by sea. And so there were reasons to believe a year ago that this was not a stable situation. And then when Putin published the article in July, that was the red flag. He was actually planning on taking military action. And this was flagged repeatedly, not least because of the build up of troops on the Ukrainian border. So there should have been a much greater awareness in Washington of the danger. And in fact, what the Biden administration did was exactly the wrong thing.

If you wanted to deter Putin, what you needed to do was to ramp up the arming of Ukraine. They ramped it down. You wanted to maintain the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which the Russians were building to bypass Ukraine. They took the sanctions off. And you needed to take a decision about NATO membership because, and here I think is a crucial point, if we were not in earnest about Ukraine joining NATO, then we should have said, this isn't happening. Putin, from your

point of view, that's good news. But in return, if we're going to take this off the table, what are you going to do? Because we're not giving this to you for free. That would have been the moment, in fact, to negotiate and say, here's a neutrality proposal for Ukraine, the Kissinger plan. Henry could have re-updated his piece, and then we would have said, okay, this is the plan. There are going to be security guarantees. This time they'll be meaningful, not like the ones in 1994 in the Budapest memorandum, when the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons in return for what proved to be a worthless piece of paper. And in return, we should have asked the Russians to

get the hell out of Donetsk and Luhansk or accept an internationally monitored referendum in Crimea. There were things that could have been done in the last year, but we did everything wrong. We kept the NATO thing in play. We didn't arm them enough. We didn't deter Putin. And the biggest mistake of all that a historian could have warned them against, we thought sanctions were a deterrent. We, I mean, the Biden administration, we thought that we would deter him by saying, if you do this, oh, we'll impose such sanctions, such sanctions as you've never seen. It was like, bring it on. They didn't remotely work as a deterrent. Now they're just in place as a punishment. And can I add one last point? I don't want to go on, but this is an important one.

Absolutely. History tells us that when the United States imposes sanctions, it initially thinks that this will bring about regime change. Think Cuba. Think North Korea. Think Venezuela. Think Iran. If that doesn't happen, we just leave the sanctions on.

And that's what's going to happen with Russia. We've imposed these sanctions. We basically shut Russia out of a large part of the financial system. And then we sit back and wait for Putin to topple. And when he doesn't, then we'll just lock in those sanctions and decades will pass. It's an extremely unsuccessful way not just of deterring people from aggression, it is also a very ineffective way

of getting regime change if that's really what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, so you actually brought me to where I wanted to be. It's the last refuge of cowards to talk about. Let's talk about post-Ukraine. Let's talk about what happens

after what happens happens um what is what does winning look like for ukraine and for us and for putin because it seems to me that what you just described is the most likely outcome as a kind of a frozen war maybe they back up they keep the territory they've got they sort of you know control part of the the east sanctions stay putin stays um it's just a frozen mess until i don't know until what happens to putin dies or somebody who knows right but the the outcome is um the kind of murky unclear uh situation in europe that almost always leads to more disaster later on so what does it look like for ukraine is pretty obvious right what it looks like is no more war and some kind of reparations right let me uh all right take it in three steps first okay uh in some ways ukraine

has already won uh because it did not collapse as was predicted by US intelligence, by everybody. I mean, I didn't expect them to put up this good a fight. It's been awe-inspiring and heroic, but it's also been highly effective. They have waged a 21st century war against the 20th century invasion, and they have wreaked havoc, inflicting extraordinary casualties on the Russian invaders. It really has been the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan compressed into four weeks, took the Soviets almost 10 years to lose this many men and this much equipment. Astonishing. So the Ukrainians have won. They need to lock in that victory now, because the tide of

war can still turn against them, simply because of the superior firepower and manpower that the Russians can bring to bear on this conflict. And this is not properly understood by those people who write, and I won't name names, op-eds saying that this war is over they've won and it's they've only won if it stops now if they keep fighting then it is quite possible that they will suffer a significant defeat in the near future after the fall of maripol which is more or less is more or less happening now they could in fact suffer a significant defeat in the donbass area, they could lose more in the south. So the Ukrainians need to lock their victory in, because for them a draw, a tie, is a win. It's a bit like when Scotland plays England at soccer. If it's nil-nil, we won. So that's part one. And Zelensky

probably gets this, which is why he's been talking about a deal in which neutrality rather than NATO membership is the future. But a lot of his countrymen are like, hey, we're winning. Don't give them an acre. Let's have Crimea back. This is a dangerous moment for him. If he's seen to be making concessions by people who think they're winning, then his position becomes difficult. From a Russian vantage point, they've lost, but they can still win a Pyrrhic victory. So the initial plan has failed, but plan B, siege warfare and use your missiles indiscriminately, that plan B is still in

operation. And Putin has escalation options that he hasn't yet exercised, but he's threatened to use chemical weapons and, of course, nuclear weapons. So from a Russian point of view, and particularly from Putin's point of view, he can't afford to lose this war. He can't afford for this to be seen as a defeat because it's game over for him. At that point, he's Nicholas II or Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile Crisis. So he's got really high stakes on the table at this point. And we mustn't underestimate his readiness to use weapons of mass destruction. Every piece of good news that I hear right now from the battlefield of Ukrainian counter-offensives is in fact bad news

because it increases the probability of Putin doing something terrible for which we don't have a good answer in truth. Because the Biden administration doesn't look like they've done a lot of game theory recently and they definitely don't seem to remember much about the Cold War. When the other side threatens to use nuclear weapons, you don't just take your Polish fighter jets off the table. You say that if you do that, we will retaliate. They're kind of getting there

with the chemical weapons, but I still worry a lot about the predisposition of this administration, particularly where nuclear weapons are concerned. What's a good outcome for the West? Well, the answer is you have to distinguish between Europe and the United States. Europe is paying a heavier price for this, not just in terms of its reliance on Russian energy. if it does the oil embargo, that's expensive for Germany and the other European countries. But it's also bearing the brunt of the mass refugee crisis, where potentially five, 10 million Ukrainians could leave the country, and a very large proportion of them are in Poland, but they're going to end up distributed around the EU. The US is taking a trivial number of refugees at this

point, and the US is an energy exporter and doesn't really need to pay the price when it cuts off imports of Russian oil. That's not something that's painful to us. So from a European point of view, it seems obvious to me that the sooner this war stops, the better. And the longer it lasts, the more costly and disruptive it is. I think the problem for the United States is the temptation to say, let it run. Let the war continue. Putin's bleeding out. Maybe he falls. And I think there are people in the administration, I can't be wholly certain of this but there are certainly some people who think this and are therefore making no effort to end the war which i think it's is that irrational or is it is there some is there a vicious cunning to it is it cynical or vicious cunning in the biden administration well okay

there's got to be somebody there is cynicism there there. There's realpolitik there, but there's also, I think, over-optimism. Of course, there's a bit of historical analogy at work here. It's, oh, this is the mistake the Soviets made in 1979, and Putin's made it, let him carry on making it. Let's fight to the last Ukrainian. That is definitely there. But the over-optimistic piece is, and then Putin will fall, and then the Chinese will realize, don't mess with the West, don't you ever try anything like this with Taiwan. That, I think, is the thinking,

at least in some parts of the administration. And I regard this as a mistaken use of historical analogy. It's not just that Ukraine isn't Afghanistan. Even if it were a good analogy, think what happened to Afghanistan in those 10 years. It was incredibly devastating. And this war, the longer it lasts, will reduce Ukraine to rubble. And so I think letting the war run, even in terms of realpolitik, is mistaken. There is also, as I mentioned, the twin dangers. Danger one, Putin wins. He just turns out to have enough missiles and manpower, crappy tanks to grind out a Pyrrhic victory. And that means the Ukrainians lose that moment of glory that they have right now in their grasp. And then the other really troubling scenario to me is that we end up with the use of a nuclear weapon or perhaps the use of chemical weapons. But we don't want to see that.

We really, really don't. So I think arming Ukrainians, yeah, I'm glad we're sending them more javelins. I'm glad we're doing what we're doing with stingers and drones. Great. Keep it up. We definitely want the Ukrainians to stay where they are, holding the Russians at bay. I think we want the Europeans to do the oil embargo because that really hurts Russia more than any of the financial sanctions. But at the same time, and this is a really important point, we, the United States, should be actively trying to stop this war because only the U.S. can do it. Sitting in the back seat, leaving the Turks, the Europeans, the Israelis to broker peace guarantees the war keeps going. Why? Because only the U.S. has the leverage. It has the leverage

over the Ukrainians because we're arming them. Just as we armed the Israelis in 1973, it's a pretty powerful leverage. But we also leverage over the Russians because we are the ones who are doing the sanctions. And so you're recommending that we continually arm the Ukrainians, but arm them even and especially towards some kind of resolution to the war. And even after there's a resolution to the war, we continue arming them. There will be no – they will become security clients of the United States. Okay, I get it. That sounds sensible to me. And just let me make this point. It's about fighting and talking.

Matt Pottinger made this point on Goodfellas this week. It's completely right. Why we're not engaged diplomatically is mysterious to me. Why we're calling Putin a war criminal, making it much harder for any deal to be done, is mysterious to me, unless we just want this war to keep going. But as I said, I think that's a highly risky strategy that will almost certainly have adverse outcomes that will affect us and will certainly affect Europe. Neil, I'd like to ask two questions. I'm extremely conscious that when we booked you, we promised a certain amount of time, and you've got other things to do, including,

I hope, consult with presidents and prime ministers and so forth. But I'm going to ask you both questions and then let you answer them at any length you choose. And if it's 10 seconds apiece, so be it. If it's longer than that, Rob and I will sit here and listen and take notes at any length you choose. Question number one. I was talking just earlier this week with our Hoover Institution colleague, Mike Bernstam. Mike is not a famous man, but he is a great man. He was a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the most important dissident group in the Soviet Union in the old days. He's a brilliant economist. He was a best friend of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He knows economics. He knows Russia. He knows

human beings as a man who spent time in prison does. And Mike said he now believes that within the probability dispersion lies the breakup of Russia. Sometime over the next couple of years, these factory managers and energy company managers who've now been told that everybody's going to have to pay in ruble. They don't want rubles. They've been used to receiving hard currency. They're asking themselves, what can Moscow do to help me? Nothing. What can Moscow do to harm me? Well, we'll see. Let's test boundaries. So, and Mike said, if that begins to happen, then the question becomes the chain of custody of almost 6,000 nuclear weapons. Question number one is, does that concern you?

Would you put that in the probability dispersion yourself? Here's question number two. I just keep going back to Faulkner. The past isn't dead, it isn't even past. There's a liberal moment in Russia in 1905 and it lasts months, not years, and they go right back to authoritarianism. Kerensky has the government put together and there's a liberal moment in 1917 and it lasts months, not years. Yeltsin gets it to last maybe a couple of years. And now we have, how can it be that this vast country, which feels so insecure, so inadequate, and has had impulses to join the West, to become more Western, since before Peter the Great, but certainly in Peter the Great and ever since.

How can it be that Vladimir Putin is acting as if the only influence on him were a thousand years of Russian history? Why can't this country catch a break? Over to you. First of all, when Americans think about regime change, they always seem to have a rather optimistic scenario in mind. It's always going to be 1776 somewhere, isn't it? It was going to be in Egypt a little over 10 years ago, and that didn't turn out just quite as planned. Most revolutions don't, in fact, go as well as the American Revolution. Revolutions are dangerous things, and wanting revolutions to happen in the world is not actually our smartest way of conducting our foreign policy. We mustn't assume that the downfall of Putin

would magically produce a liberal, Western-oriented Russian government that would say to the Ukrainians, we're terribly sorry. Please accept reparations for the damage we've done. The probability that you get something worse or as bad is not trivial. Let's just think about Venezuela. When Hugo Chavez was clearly dying, there was a widespread assumption that things would improve after he went. Let's suppose the rumors are true and Putin is in fact much sicker than we realize is in fact suffering from terminal cancer is it really probable that uh the day after his death uh Alexei Navalny will be let out uh of prison camp and installed as president, I'll definitely put the probability of that in low single digits.

Whereas a scenario in which the current head of the, of the internal secret service takes over, and that's more likely. And the problem with regimes like Venezuela's and Russia's more likely uh and the problem with regimes like venezuela's and russia's petro states with quasi-mafia elites extracting the rents uh they can run these countries into the ground and still be making money look look at the maduro regime which we've been waiting to collapse for so long that i can't remember when I started expecting that. So I think we have to be much more sanguine about our expectations of Russia's political transition and recognize that there are as bad or even worse possibilities than Putin.

Secondly, Russia's history is the history of an empire. It's not a country. To call it a country or imply that it's a nation state is a complete category error. Russia's the last of the European empires that's still standing. The difference between the Russian empire and the British empire is that most British possessions were by definition overseas, even Ireland, and most Russian possessions are by definition overseas, even Ireland, and most Russian possessions are overland. Look at the Russian army that's fighting in Ukraine right now. Those soldiers doing the nastiest fighting include Chechens and conscripts from other predominantly Muslim parts of the Russian Empire.

One reason that the casualties aren't causing great consternation in the Russian elite is that it's not the children of the Russian elite who are doing the dying. So we need to understand that Russia is this survivor empire of the 19th century. Its expansion across the Eurasian landmass mostly happened in the 19th century. It happened at an amazing speed, and it took them all the way to Vladivostok. And this empire refused to die when it ought to have died, which was in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up. And Putin's project wasn't to resurrect the Soviet Union, it was to resurrect the Russian Empire. This is a thing that many people get wrong. Yeah, he thought the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster, a world historical tragedy, or whatever he called it, but the project right now is much more Tsarist than Stalinist. When people say to me, let's go back to Mersheimer,

oh, there's some kind of legitimacy to Putin's claim that Ukraine is his, is rightfully Russia's. I mean, what if the British government said the same about Ireland and invaded the Republic of Ireland? Would anybody for even 10 seconds consider that a legitimate conquest? No. And it's the same. Ukraine's independent. I go there every year. I go to Kiev. I used to go to Yalta before the Russians annexed it. And the young people of Ukraine look West. There was a poll just before this invasion. 75% of Ukrainians want to be in the EU and about 66% want to be in NATO. The extent to which the country yearns to be poland can't be overstated and ukrainians have been to western europe many have worked in western europe they know

what the deal is and they also know what the alternative is because they have relatives or friends in russia an increasingly benighted authoritarian despotism. So I think we just need to recognize that these are the death throes of empire. And usually, unfortunately, when empires die, that's when they're at their bloodiest. That's the problem. So it's a question of the screaming is always loudest after the change has occurred. When the empire is dissolving, there is always a peak of conflict as the custodians of the old imperial order make one last desperate attempt to hold the edifice together. This was a central argument of my book, War of the World. War of the World was a book essentially about not just World War II, but 20th century violence. And one of its central points is the most violent place in the world is located between the Baltic, the Balkans, the Black Sea.

That's where a huge proportion of World War II deaths occurred. And I argue the reason for that is that the fault lines of empire met there. Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov. And as those empires disintegrated, great bouts of violence occurred, not least because the multi-ethnic societies that were left behind didn't naturally form nation states. And that book, I think, has stood up well to the test of time because, apart from anything else, it's about these places. I mean, I've been to many of the places that are currently being fought over,

and therefore the whole experience of this conflict, for me, is like a waking nightmare. Because if you drain the color from the photographs of Kharkiv and Mariupol it's the early 1940s all over again and I want to share with you a feeling of a nausea a feeling an awful feeling that I haven't had since I was a teenager it hasn't been like this since the 1970s that things could could go so bad. It's like 1979 is happening again, the Iranian revolution, the invasion of Afghanistan. I remember feeling genuine fear about the possibility of nuclear war at that time as a teenager in Glasgow. And I haven't felt that way

since, you know, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the feeling that history was going our way. And I don't feel that way. Peter Robinson Neill, now I simply cannot resist asking one more question. Because of course, I remember the late 70s as well. I was, I actually, I was at Oxford when the Iranian hostage crisis was taking place and the humiliation of being an American, even in the friendliest, of course, country, they all wished us well. Mrs. Thatcher had just come to power, but the humiliation I felt that, all right. From 1979, hostage crisis.

One decade later, the Berlin Wall falls. That is an astonishing renaissance of the West. You could lay it to individuals. I think it's impossible to write the history of that decade without Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and John Paul II. Probably you ought to include Helmut Kohl and Lech Wałęsa, all right. But it almost seems, if we say that, then you have to stop thinking like a historian. You have to simply say, ah, well, Providence called into being these great figures who saved us, which is not really, in my humble theological opinion, it's not quite the way Providence works, but it's certainly not the right way to attempt to think about history. So, here's the final question, and if you

answer this one in 10 seconds, I'll be furious, because it deserves at least 90. What do you see the predicate? How do we get the restoration? How does the west step up step up how do we get another miraculous decade when we so need one similar bounce back if you think about it between 1933 and 1943, by which time there was no way the Allies could lose the war. And each time we have the phenomenon of the other side underestimating the United States and making strategic errors. So I think the question I would ask is, first, why was the 1980s such a successful decade when the 1970s had been such a mess? And the answer to that is, of course, about more than just the charisma and strategic genius of Thatcher and Reagan. It's about the way in which the Western economies leapfrogged the Soviets, particularly when it came to information technology, technology that the Soviets simply could not match. So there are structural forces at work

in the 1980s. Can similar structural forces coincide with similar quality leadership to turn this around today? In theory, yes, because I think we still lead China technologically, but it's close. And China is a more formidable economic rival than the Soviet Union ever was. This is Cold War II. I've been saying this for ages. We're in Cold War II. We've been in it for some time, and it may last as long as Cold War I. So we might not get a 10-year turnaround. It might take 40 years to contain China. But I think we have the ability to out-innovate them, not least because we get to import the world's talent and they don't. Remember, 44% of all the unicorn companies founded since 1997 were founded by non-American-born Americans, i.e. non-native born entrepreneurs.

That's the superpower that the U.S. has. And no doubt more Ukrainian geniuses are on their way. Let them in, please. Don't leave them stuck in Poland. But the leadership question is the one that worries me. Because it's not exactly 1979 in terms of our political clock is it we're we're we're further away from the next presidential election and it's a long time until we get to november 2024 and it's not clear who the republican nominee will be but

there's a scenario which you can't discount that it's don Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is not the kind of leader that Ronald Reagan was. He's almost like the opposite. And so I worry that we're not going to have the same success that we had in 79-80 in finding new leadership. And as a result, we won't be able to exploit our innate innovative advantage and win Cold War II. The reason I feel somewhat sick is I just worry we're going to lose this Cold War because we're not as internally united. We're not as self-confident. Young Americans don't even really believe in liberty in the way that people listening to this show probably understand. In fact, half of them think socialism is better than capitalism or as good as. So that's my reason for feeling uneasy.

We shouldn't assume that just because we won Cold War I, we get to win Cold War II. History is not like that. And history is telling us this is a tougher Cold War to win. And just to finish the analogy, think of this war in Ukraine as the war in Korea. The first hot war that tells you the Cold War is real. But notice, we intervened in Korea. We sent soldiers as part of a multinational coalition with a UN Security Council mandate,

and we stopped that war. Eventually, we ended up having to settle for the partition of Korea, but we stopped what was Stalin's aggression from succeeding. Right now, we're doing not nearly as much to stop Putin's aggression succeeding. And that's why we have to feel worried about where we go from here in Ukraine, not just for Ukraine's sake, not just for Europe's sake, but because this in Cold War II is the opening round. Neil, watch this carefully because from your feeling ill, from the worst moments since the 70s, from the collapse of the West and the rise of the tyrants, Rob Long is now going to produce merriment and get us out on a note of light, amusing uplift, because he's that good. Go for it. Well, I don't know if I'm that good.

I would just say that somewhere in the chaos of American culture and political culture, there has always been a consensus, a leader emerging, and that is sort of our great strength, right? We look like we're doing something else. We look like we're distracted by whatever we're distracted by at the moment. And then somebody foolishly clarifies our thinking. Somebody awakens a sleeping giant. I recognize that that is not a law, a natural universal law. But I think people don't treasure freedom and liberty now because they just don't know how valuable it is.

And I think they're discovering how valuable it is. Watch Zelensky. And watch him do that. Watch Zelensky. Remember what it's all about. You have to be ready to fight and die for freedom. Very simple. Ukrainians are just modeling it for us.

So I can do it, including a comic actor, including an actor. It doesn't take, you don't have to have a ribbons on your chest and you don't have to have some kind of, you know, fancy PhD. You can just be a show business comedian. But if you do the right thing and you do it well, and you can speak on your feet and you can speak with passion, you can lead a country. In the US case, it helps to be the governor of a sunny state as well. Just saying. That's right. Right. Exactly right. Exactly right. And and luckily i think there is one who's going to run so we'll have to see what will happen neil thank you so much i know we've

gone way over time and we feel incredibly lucky to have ruined your day this way um and please come back because things you know things seem to be happening as you put it in very compressed timetable thank you rob and you cheered us up there successfully and thank you peter as always for the best questions in the business. That's and that's, that is consent. I have another attribute to add to my list. You're not only accomplished, productive, charming, you're the most useful historian in the world, as far as I can tell.

You really do clarify things. All right, now take the rest of the day off. Yeah, you've done it. Thanks very much. Give our best to it thanks very much great to see you uh that was so incredibly edifying i just you know we're just lucky and i think you're lucky if you're listening to this you should um it's it's called long form conversation and you don't see it on the cable news and you don't see it even in your newspaper so you're not this level uh but i did enjoy his talking about the maybe there are some green shoots of spring i don't know maybe so maybe he's a little less a little less pessimistic than he

lets on the beginning and there are green shoots of spring spring and summer are the seasons for finally getting outdoors and entertaining you know pool, pool parties, barbecues. Peter, stop laughing at my transition. It's good. You are actually, this is the stress. Yes. You are an accomplished show business professional who is aspiring to a James Lilac's Lake Segway. All right. Keep at it.

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today talking about the decline of the oscars is really just a sign of the decline of the movies and he goes on and on about how the movies are sort of disappearing and that's a big problem or not a big problem but we're missing something out that we had that was great. And I have some thoughts on that I can share with you, but do you think that's happening? Do you agree? Here's what I can tell you. First of all, this has been an easy podcast for me, baby, because I defer to everything to Neil. I defer to Neil in every matter of any importance. I defer to you in matters culinary and cultural, certainly at least with regard to the movies, 100%. So, here's, I'll just tell you the experience of the last couple of days.

My beloved wife and I found ourselves clicking around. What are we going to watch? By the way, the great thing, one of the many great things about being able to click around and start and stop a movie when you want to is that you can start one if you've only got 20 minutes before you really ought to go to bed. You can just do movies in bits if you want to. And we stumbled upon a movie we'd both seen X times, and we watched it all all over again. How can it be that The Hunt for Red October, which dates from the 1980s, this film is 40 years old. How can it be that it gets you from the first frame and you don't even look at each other, is this good enough to watch?

Do we want to invest the time in this? We've both seen it. No. The movie starts. You're tight on Sean Connery's face. And he's got you. And the movie has got you from the very first moment. And while we were watching a 40-year-old movie for the fourth or fifth or sixth time, we were not watching this year's Best Picture nominees. Right. That's what Picture nominees. Right. That's what I can tell you.

Well, I think that's also part of the problem. These are not problems. These are sort of issues, right? Issues for the long-form cinema business, which is not the same thing as Hollywood. It's not the same thing as the entertainment business. It's something that the music business experience was where the in the you know late 90s or from the 90s to the 2000s where everything was being digitized so your record collection which used to be this physical thing you had to get up off your ass and put the things

and even if you had a disc changer um you never you bought music you listened to it 20 000 times and you put it away you never listen to it again but if everything is available equally new music old music the music you love the music you haven't heard everything's available um it makes it new music is now competing with every single other piece of music which is a brand new sort of physical thing people forget just how the physical act of choosing what to watch or listen to how important that was. It was so important for there to be a remote control because nobody wants to get up off their ass and go and change the channel. And then you give them a remote and then you give them a remote with 50,000 channels. And then suddenly some people thought of watching TV as simply turning on the TV and flipping for an hour. That behavior we now

see is, you know, we call it TikTok, but back then it was just flipping through the grid. So I think Ross is basically right, although it is a natural outgrowth of the entertainment universe. You know, you have one zillion things to watch on TV that you're already paying for, Netflix, Apple, Hulu, etc., plus YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. Remember, the average daily use of TikTok, for instance, is one hour.

Are you kidding me? And when TikTok was introduced, yeah, the average daily use of TikTok, for instance, is one hour. Are you kidding me? And when TikTok was introduced, yeah, it's a little bit more than YouTube, but TikTok did not steal YouTube's time. YouTube still grows. TikTok still grows. And the workday, obviously, now extends well into the evening hours with emails coming in past

6 p.m. or 5 p.m. So all those things are demanding and sucking up your time you go to the movies kind of a hassle right and remember like no matter how rich you are poor you are you all have we all have 24 hours in a day and with more temptations on our time something is going to get squeezed right you know you can invent more streaming services but you can't invent more hours in a day um and then i think the second thing that's happening i think is this and ross writes really beautifully and i think he's right about those and i think you're right about the hundred

red october but it's not exactly that we've lost interesting adult entertainment it's just now somewhere else in slightly longer form right right you know i mean you you the reason you know we gave up one hour we gave up uh theatrical film adult films but not adult films but you know films for grown-ups and what we got instead is um better call saul you know we gave up out of africa but we have fleabag um and and out of and better call saul and fleabag are a lot closer to the way people entertain themselves before movies came along you know i mean they read jane austen. They read Dickens installments aloud to each other by the evening fire, or they sent letters back and forth, which is basically instant messaging back and forth. They gossiped, which is sort of Facebook and Twitter. They did all these things. So maybe we're not changing so much. Maybe we're just changing back. That's my theory all right there we go there's a second optimistic note yeah um and i'll also provide you with this bit of optimism good health starts with good habits and quip makes those things easy by

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They are real supporters. Yes, they have. I also want to say one thing. I haven't had a cavity. Not one since I started using Quip. Not one. Good for you. Also, on April 8th, just if you're a Ricochet member, April 8th, we have another No Dumb Questions.

It's going to be me and Glenn Lowry. I'm very excited uh please join us bring your questions i basically moderate it it's not i don't it's not an interview thing i just moderate questions from our guests no dumb questions you can ask them anything it's a ricochet members only event so if you're not a member this is your chance to join go to ricochet.com join get 14 days free along with the past of this event we want to see you there uh. This is just a lot of the new stuff we're doing here at Ricochet for members only. So please join. It's cheap. And thanks to inflation, it's getting cheaper every day. That's true. That's right. Yeah, that's like, thanks. Thank you, Joe Biden, for making it cheaper. So how long are you going to be partying down there in the Caribbean? I will be here until I'm coming back Monday noon.

Got it. Have a wonderful time. Have some fun, Rob. Thank you. New York has been a strange and difficult place for these last two years. Go wild. Well, not that wild. It's funny.

Pina Colada wild. Only that wild. Only that wild. Every day down here is French have uh they they are they're done with it they're this culturally the french are you know they they give you kind of they roll your eyes when you try to show your vaccine card you're supposed to i guess i don't think you i think you still are but they're like yeah put that away you're ruining everybody's time. Something good about the French. This podcast was brought to you by Ball & Branch, Fast Growing Trees and Quip.

So please support them for supporting us. And please join Ricochet today. Go to ricochet.com slash join. Take a minute to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. If you would, your review does help us a lot. It raises our profile and it keeps the show going. And of course, join Ricochet and we will see you in the comments. Peter, next week. La semaine prochaine. Oh, pretty good. Spange, Spench.

Exactly. Oh, wait, did I get it wrong? Spanish. No, it just sounded like Ricky Ricardo speaking French. Yeah, no, I can't. First of all, I have trouble with English, as you know, but French, it's all hopeless. All right, next week, Rob. Take care. Next week. I'm every woman It's all in me If anything's wrong, then baby

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Then instantly I will appear I am every woman It's all in me Anything you want done, baby I do it naturally I can set your knees Like plane unto the seas I can set your knees like plane unto the seas I can make a rhyme of confusion in your mind

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