The Ricochet Podcast - P.J. O'Rourke

Episode Date: October 30, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week, a guest we’ve been chasing a long time finally makes his Ricochet Podcast debut: the great P.J. O’Rourke stops by to discuss on the health care debacle, improving the GOP’s message, making a living as writer, Lou Reed, and New York City in the (so-called) Golden Age. Also, the return of Rob Long and Dave Carter reminisces on (what he can actually remember of) the... Source

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Peter Robinson is out. Rob Long is back. I'm James Lilacs, and we're going to start out with Dave Carter discussing the Las Vegas Ricochet meetup, and then it's one of the greatest humorists of any political stripe, P.J. O'Rourke. Finally, let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Welcome, everyone. It's the Ricochet Podcast, and it's number 187. It's brought to you by Encounter Books, and our pick this week is The Black Book of the American Left,

the collected conservative writings of David Horowitz. You can go to encounterbooks.com slash ricochet for 15% off the list price of this book, and we'll tell you a little bit more about it later. And we'd like to remind you that Peter Robinson is off shooting a television show this month, so he's not here today. But Rob is back doing – what? You weren't in on this? No, Peter was – Peter has just gone doing his little Uncommon Knowledge webisodes. Oh, no, no, no. It turned into a sitcom.

That's the thing. I've been pitching that for years. He's refused. Anyway, you're back. So how was the show? How are you feeling about your return to normalcy as I believe Mr. Hoover put it? It was great. It was great.

It went really well. Very pleased. Can't complain about really anything. I think it was except for the hours. It was long. You shoot on location and you're running around and you only have five days to do it. It's a brand new crew. The cast has never been

the characters before. So there's a lot of finding it. It all ended as these things do you know you push all the late stuff to the last day so if a night shoot you want to do that the last because you have this what they call the turnaround time which is you get 12 hour turnaround means you can't start work sooner than 12 hours um after you wrap the night before the day before union fang Fang? Is that what it is? Yeah, they are, in fact, rather enforced.

So you want to do that last day, whatever that night shoot is, you want to do it then, otherwise you kill the whole day the next day. We had one night shoot, and it wrapped at 5 a.m. on Sunday morning. Well, congrats. And there are a lot of people I know right now in the chat room or who are listening to this at home, wherever, saying, get to the news! Yeah, shut up.

They don't care about anything else other than. Sometimes we talk about politics. They say start talking about something else. Exactly. Well, here's the let's let's blend these two together. Then a nice zesty smoothie of news and personal insight. Everybody that I know who's on the right side of the news media has been had has had their head just full of bees in the last couple of weeks over the Obamacare debacle and what it means and how the administration is poorly performing. There's so much there.

Did this penetrate a millimeter into the world of Hollywood? What are you doing? Well, mostly no, obviously, because these are union members and union members are exempt. They got waivers. They don't have to worry about it. It's for another year. So Obama cronyism and the general dishonesty and corruption of that administration trickles down to a movie set. Of course it does.

But in general, I do find that our side and I know I'm a broken record. I know people are going to say I'm wrong and that I'm just self-interested, whatever. I think we should quickly make peace with the rhinos

and the true believers should come together quickly. Even if they disagree on some stuff, they should just come together quickly because we got them on the run. Oh, there are bales of political hate to be made. Bales. This is an administration,

whatever, let's forget about what you thought about Ted Cruz. Forget about what you thought about the shutdown. We now have a gigantic, big, fat turkey dinner to enjoy and that really is – that is unrelated to those two things necessarily. We don't need you to – if you're an independent voter, we do not need you to like Ted Cruz. We do not need you to like the shutdown. We do not need you to like any of the other things. All we need you to do is focus on one thing. This administration is arrogant, incompetent, and corrupt. The Democrats are arrogant, incompetent, and corrupt. They need to be turned out. They need to be turned out soon. You are all going to lose your health care and his health care plan. Nancy Pelosi lied to you. They are liars. At the very best to say they're liars. At the very worst to say they are brain damaged. They could not see the train coming on the other side. They need to be crossed out.

Why are we – let's agree to fight on the White House lawn when we own it. You make a good point there. You also seem to think that it's – that lying and being brain damaged are mutually exclusive, that it's not possible that they were both lying and failed to apprehend the train wreck that was coming. That's entirely possible. But can you tell just from my own – the excitement in my voice that I haven't really talked politics in about a week and a half? Well, we're glad to give you the opportunity here, especially since this is such a wonderful opportunity. And you're quite right.

I believe, however, that everybody in the party should come together, waving his particular issue over his head, and that we all have to give everybody the chance to, well, if we can't agree on pushing eight issues right now, all at the same time, as strong and hard as possible, then we never will. So we can get the Senate back. I mean, this is a really big moment. If we get the Senate back, I mean, you know, my theory, I don't really care who's president. As long as we have the Senate and the House, we can and we have it for a while.

We can really, really set an agenda. You know, we've had the White House before and not much has happened. Let's let's let's concentrate on on on on getting on spreading the base of the pyramid wide in the House and the Senate. Well, when you mentioned the train wreck, of course, one of the things that you know if you spend any time on the road is when the crossing gates come down and the ding, ding, ding starts, that means you don't advance across the tracks lest

you get hit. And one man who knows that, of course, is our own king of the road, the poet of the big rig, Dave Carter, who's with us now to tell us about the meetup that just went on in Las Vegas. Dave, welcome. Did you drive the 18-wheeler to Vegas, or did you take some less exotic means of transportation? Good morning.

No, I wasn't able to take the big truck to Vegas. The freight didn't quite work out with me, so instead I had to fly in from Denver. I didn't even use an airplane. I just flew right in. I always knew you could do that. Hey, Dave, it's Rob Long in New York. I'm so sorry I missed the meetup. It sounded like a blast.

People have been sending me pictures, posting pictures. It sounds like a lot of fun. Was it fun? Oh, it was fantastic. You were missed. No doubt about it. You were missed. No doubt about it. You were missed. But I'll tell you that these folks can have a wonderful time amongst themselves, and it's a pleasure to be around them. It really is. to the next down the Vegas strip, you have to go through a gauntlet of panhandlers and people handing out adult entertainment

paraphernalia. Somebody handed me a card with a noble young lady on the card. If you had been there, Rob, that thing would have ended up under your dinner plate, I promise you, just for the fun of it.

What was the card? What was she advertising? A strip club. Oh, yeah. And so somehow... The lady on the card was very cute, and it would have ended up under your dinner plate somehow. I would have seen to it. So maybe it was... Possibly. Possibly was mine longer.

Nice deflection, Dave. Where did the card end up? That's what I really want to know. I'm sure what would have happened had I been there. Where did the card end up? That's what I really want to know. I'm sure what would have happened had I been there. Where did the card end up? Gosh, I don't know. I don't know. It just sort of flitted away somewhere.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Dave, here's the question. And the card stays, too. Having walked up and down the strip, I remember the last time they were building Century City or City of the Century or something like that. It was this huge development that dwarfed everything around it, hotels, casinos, apartment buildings, part of this new wonderful expanding Vegas that everybody wanted to live in because Vegas was the city of the future. Then crash, right? Then the real estate boom goes dead in 2008 and Vegas is left with all this unsold inventory. When you were walking up and down the strip, did you have that feeling that this is a place that reflects the return of prosperity to America? Or is this bread and circuses for the people who took the $69 shuttle? I think it was the bread and circus thing.

But you have to keep in mind that this was my first trip back to Las Vegas since 1985. Whoa. The last time I was there, I was active duty and I was in machine gun school, which was kind of cool because they didn't have room for us on base, so they put us up on the strip so we could drink at night and fire machine guns during the day. It was really cool. But I hadn't been there since 85, so it looked to me like everything was trying to dwarf everything else.

Right. And it was, it was, I was walking around like a slack jawed dummy, just staring up at all the opulence. They're tall. So what was the mood? What's the mood among Ricochet members?

You know, I had a meetup a few days before that in New York city and it was great. Lots of fun. And of course the New Yorkers are all depressed about de Blasio, the next mayor, the becoming mayor. What was the mood there in Vegas? You know, there wasn't – people would branch off into little groups kind of spontaneously and discuss political issues. And it was more like we against the world, and there were not a lot of differences among each other. But it was more of an opportunity for people just to enjoy the friendship.

And you walk into a room full of people that you've been reading and writing with for however many years now, and it's like you're meeting friends that you haven been reading and writing with for however many years now. And it's like you're meeting friends that you haven't met yet. Or it's like reconnecting in some respects. So there was a tremendous amount of fellowship and a lot of fun. Now, I like that.

A lot of laughter. And a lot of people getting face cramps from laughing so much. But the political talk was, every now and then we would branch off into that. There wasn't a lot of I don't want to use the word bickering because there was none of that.

I like that. People expressed some difference of opinion, but it was all a very respectful sort of deal. That sounds a lot like Ricochet, frankly. A lot of laughs, a little political talk, but mostly fellowship, a lot of fun. If you are listening to this podcast for the very first time, we welcome you.

This is produced by Ricochet.com. Ricochet.com is the fastest-growing, most interesting, most influential conversation on the web among and between our contributors on the center-right. We would like you to join. You are getting this podcast for free, but if you join, you can have access to our member feed. You get to post and comment and contribute and have conversations with our contributors and fellow members, and you get these great meetups. We had one in New York. We had one in Vegas. We got one coming up before the end of the year probably in California, the Ricochet Winter Solstice Commemoration.

We can't call it Christmas, or maybe we'll call it Christmas meetup, and we would like you to join. We'd like to meet you. We'd like to meet you. We'd like to shake your hand and say welcome to the club. Join the club. If you're listening to this, you're listening to it for free. We understand it. That's the way the web works. We've got to do that, but we've got bills to pay, and the winter gets cold.

And when we say join, we want you. We really mean join. We need you to keep this business alive. So if you're listening and you like what you hear and you want to talk to Dave Carter on the site or James or me or Peter or any of our contributors or you want to meet up, please join. Please join today. Thank you.

And Dave, thank you. That sounds like a lot of fun. I'm really sorry I missed it. We should plan another one. Oh, I look forward to it. It was a tremendous amount of fun. I really enjoyed it. All right, Dave, we'll see you on the site, and as ever, love your writing, and can't wait to read the next installment.

Thank you, sir. Take care now. Thanks, Dave. As we've promised for the rest of the week here, we have a guest to you. It's possible you've heard of this guy. I don't know. You'd have to read some obscure magazine like Rolling Stone back in its heyday, or go to the bookstore and find something, or maybe even pick up the Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and note that he's got more quotes in there than anybody else in human history. That's exactly right.

Now, here's a guy who appears on Fox News, made a fool of himself as a socialist egalitarian. Not making a fool of himself for either reason, neither socialism nor egalitarianism, is our favorite humorist of the conservative side, P.J. O'Rourke. We welcome him to the podcast. P.J., how are you? This is Rob. I'm well. I'm looking at you from New York City. I think we met a couple years ago,

but I was too nervous to tell you this, but now since we're not face-to-face, I can tell you just how big an influence you've had on my writing.

I'm incredibly thrilled and honored to be talking to you right now on this podcast. I hope that's a good thing. It is a good thing. Well, you know, I make my way in the world.

It's a good thing. I hope that's a good thing. You know a good thing. Well, you know, I make my way in the world. It's a good thing. I hope that's a good thing. You know, I mean, like, Carolyn had a great influence on Lou Reed's writing. Hey, now, listen, did you know Lou Reed? I mean, I assume that you knew all the hipsters, so. No, I didn't. I was in New York around that time, but it's weird.

I was way too poor to go to the Dome and whatever the discotheque was. It was upstairs from that. And also, there was something creepily non-hip about the whole Warhol thing. You know, I mean, the way that it focused on fame and the whole superstar thing, to me as a 21, 22-year-old hippie back in those days, those were exactly the things you weren't supposed to focus on. Right. Well, now, when you say you were a hippie, I have a hard time believing that. Were you a hippie?

You must have been the funniest, most sharpest hippie around. Other hippies must have been hippies. Well, I never was really a hippie. I mean, the whole barefoot spare change man, something that didn't work out. I actually belong to slightly... Hippie was originally a diminutive term. It was something

that you said back in the middle 60s to indicate that somebody was like a kid trying to be hip. It was very much like newbie. It had the same connotation. I was much more of the filthy blue jeans dressed as though I were about to go out and do physical labor,

although that was, like, the last thing on my mind. But, you know, so I belonged more to the, like, the sort of, so, like, folky leftist work shirt with hip chick embroidery on it. Right. So when did you wake up? When did you say, wait a minute, this is just, this is BS.

Well, you know, I usually say that my road to Damascus moment was the first time I got a paycheck. I was working for like $75 a week. I was a messenger in New York, and $75 a week got paid every two weeks. So I'm really looking forward to this $150, and so is my landlord.

This is a big event. And I get the check, and I net out at $82.65 after federal tax and state tax and city tax and Social Security and pension plan, union dues. And I go, wait a minute, wait a minute. You know, I've been screaming and yelling for communism. I've been protesting for communism. You know, I've been smoking pot for communism, whatever. You know, I've been supporting communism.

And I get my first paycheck from a big capitalist company, and I find out we've got communism already. I not like a fellow that just put half my money so that was kind of it you know but but really um you know the truth of the matter was as I got into my 20s and I started to look around at my fellow hipster friends I thought you, these people are like, some of them are beginning to develop bald spots, and not just the guys. And they're like pasty and haven't been outdoors in a long time, and they're kind of vague and can't remember things. And it's like, you know, where's this going? Yeah, not a future.

You know, you write one of the most moving parts. I mean, you know, every book you write is hilarious and funny and brilliant and trenchant, but there's an incredibly moving moment in Parliament of Horrors where you go back to your – you look through some family receipts. And I mean, I really, it's a beautiful, beautiful passage. It really like, it's one of those things where I, I, I, I send people there, you know, you laugh. Thank you. Thank you. Cause that's, you know, I forget that humorous have a heart too. Yeah.

Well, I mean, or you, or you could fake it real good. Yeah. But what you discovered was that you guys growing up were poor. Yeah, we qualified for welfare. We actually qualified for welfare. And I had no damn idea. I was, you know, before I got into, like, being, like, hip and, like, my hair grow. You know, I was, like, this perfect, you know, white jeans and bass wigeons and a madder shirt, you know,

just like the 60 kid. My sister's ditto. We lived in a perfectly nice neighborhood because it so happened that my dad died when I was nine, and my mother married this bum of a stepfather, and he in turn got sick. He got cancer. He was in the hospital. And we owned the house. So we had one thing going for hospital. And we owned the house.

So we had one thing going for us, that we owned the house. And we had some better-off relatives that I think were helping my mom out. I mean, my mom never talked about this. She was a school secretary. She must have been earning about six grand a year, three kids to raise, and sent to college. And I'm going back to, I find my college application, my mother's applying for financial aid at the college. I had no idea. And I was just writing the essay about how the world should be a better place.

And I look at the figures and I check back on, we could have qualified for welfare. And in a couple of years when they existed for food stamps. I didn't know we were poor. I just thought we were broke. Yeah, right. And it is so much better to be broke than to be poor. Right, right. Isn't that the problem?

I mean, you know, Detroit is poor now. Detroit is poor, you know, when it should be as broke. It's kind of a contrast between, I grew up in Toledo, it's kind of a contrast between Detroit and Toledo. You know, Toledo has gone through the same, you know, rust belt economic catastrophe without the social breakdown, mostly because it's just a smaller city. And it's a little tighter, a little more coherent. It didn't have the riots in the 60s. It lucked out compared to Detroit.

But Pluto's poor. Excuse me. Pluto's broke. Detroit is poor. It's the same group of people. It's the same demographic, racial, ethnic profile obtained in both cities. It's not who lives there.

It's almost a matter of public attitude. PJ, James Lylek's here in the rich, fat nougat of Minneapolis. We're at least 15 years away from complete urban collapse. Let me guess. You moved there for the weather. Yes, because I was born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota. So this is tropical compared to what we have. Oh, yeah.

So you've got the Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops. Absolutely. So you've got Detroit as an example. You have the New York of your youth where you could see all the wonderful great deal, big deal, great society policies leeching away your paycheck. Is there any way that the GOP can use these object lessons to inform people as to what eventually happens when you build your society around taking other people's money. Well, F-word yes.

And of course, we've got Reagan there to prove it, but I'm just reading right now a book that I really recommend to anybody who's like wrestling with like the morality of free markets and the morality of sort of minimal government interference and so on. And it's by a Catholic priest. It's Father Robert Sirico, whose brother played Pauly Walnuts on The Sopranos. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's called Defending the Free Market. It's from the Acton Institute, which is this great operation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is one of those Rust Belt cities that's escaped the Rust Belt that actually doesn't look devastated.

And anyway, he was a leftist. He's about a little younger than I am. He was a big leftist out in California, a friend of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden's. And he campaigned for Hayden when Hayden was running for, like, the Senate out there. And he talks about, like, you know, his conversion not only back to free markets but back to Christianity, is it that much? I mean, enough that he went to seminary and became a priest but it's just a wonderful he addresses this flat out he says you know our Christian morality tells us we have

to help the poor and and and he said but welfare keep doing it you know and he any he says that the Acton Institute, we never ask the question, what causes poverty? We ask the question, what causes wealth? That's, you know, I was just going to say, I mean, here we have three people probably here in this podcast, well, maybe not you, Rob, who had that road to Damascus moment. And it'd be great if I could actually find somebody who had that moment on an actual road to Damascus moment. And it'd be great if I could actually find somebody who had that moment on an actual road to Damascus. Actually,

you don't want to go there at the moment. You don't want to be on that road these days, but yeah. It would be amusing. Or a Hope movie. But here's the thing, PJ, people are going to look at you and say, you just admitted that you grew up poor, that you qualified for welfare. Why then do you want to turn your back on all the people who need assistance?

Every time the argument is phrased about what we want, it's always that we're being accused of wanting to deny somebody something. We want to deny the poor health care. We want to deny the poor education, all the rest of it. But when we talk about wanting to expand opportunity and expand liberty, it doesn't have the same soundbite ring to it, does it, BJ? We're always in a position of defending ourselves.

That's definitely a problem. You know, that's definitely a problem. And the answer happens to have been there all along. I mean, the greatest cure for poverty that we have ever seen is the growth of wealth, not only in the United States in that post-World War II period, but all around the world really since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And the thing is that when we were broke, not poor, but broke, when I was a kid, we did get assistance. And we got assistance before all these great society programs existed.

I mean, I suppose we could have just gone on welfare. My mom wasn't actually very well. She probably could have gone on disability and welfare. But we did get assistance, and I'm not against society giving people assistance. We had my dad's veterans benefits. I had a little, cobbled together, little scholarships from my dad was a Freemason and I had

a Shriner and I had a little scholarship, like $35 a month from the Freemasons. The university helped us out. This was all before Pell Grants and all. It's also before universities cost $100,000 a year to go to. My tuition was $600 a semester.

All in, I could get through a year of college on two grand. And so if I worked in the summer and my rich uncle gave me $100 and the Freemasons gave me a little of this and I used a little of my dad's Social Security and veterans benefits, you know, you can make it work. Nobody went hungry. Nobody went tattered except on purpose. I went tattered, but that was a look. That was a look.

It was a choice. Yeah. I could have been dressed like anybody from the Sigma Chi house, you know, in a kind of Robert Hall way, but nonetheless. Many listeners are not going to remember Robert Hall, aren't they? Well, you know what? We'll put a link. It used to be where poor white-collar people went to get their suits.

Like cops, plainclothes cops wore suits from Robert Hall. You scratch together a couple of nickels and get some Floresheim shoes. $600 for a pair of shoes. I mean, you look presentable, you know, at least from a little distance. Well, when you talk about college education, how expensive it is now and how we've subsidized it, and for some miraculous reason, subsidizing it seems to have increased the cost and elevating the status quo. Well, you knocked me over with a feather. I know. And who in our government didn't take Econ 101?

Answer, everyone. We'll get to that in just a second because Rob and I were talking beforehand about whether or not there's the Obama administration's actions in regards to health care can be regarded as mendacious or economically illiterate. And I don't think the two are mutually exclusive at all. As a matter of fact, inability to comprehend what the left is about is a constant theme of a writer we all love named David Horowitz. And this week, Encounter would like you to buy the black book of the American left, The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz. The preseason is as follows. The book's a powerful chronicle of David's odyssey from the progressive communist left to the right. Hey, there's another one.

He reflects on how he went to war against his own country with friends like Huey Newton and Bill Ayers. Yeah, the gang's all here. And how his life in the new left came to an end after the Black Panthers murdered his friend, Betty Van Patten. It will make you angry. Oh, David's got an amazing story.

Oh, I know. He was the real thing. He was a red diaper baby. His parents were communists. Right. So he's regarded as a turncoat, and with glee he writes these books. And at counterbooks.com, you can get this one for a special price. Enter the coupon code RICOCHET at the checkout for 15% off this or any of the title.

Black Book of the American Left, The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz. We were talking then about how they bungled this health care. Do you honestly think, PJ, that they had absolutely no idea that economic reality was going to come and shape the decisions that they made out of their wonderful fantasy of what health care they could provide? Yeah, is it evil or is it stupid? And as you point out, the two are not mutually exclusive. You know, there's Nazis to consider. we've got not that i'm not that i'm calling the obama administration nazis they're commies to be considered too yeah it's wonderful the way that self-interest and wishful thinking

intersect uh the wishful thinking part here is uh we need a political platform to essentially buy votes. So we need a political platform where we give away a lot of stuff for free or for cheap. And miraculously, we have found an ideological theory here that makes that not just a form of public bribery, but that makes us people who are promoting the common good. So we're doing well by doing good. We get elected, we get powerful, and we get famous, and at the same time we're doing good for society. Well, this is a very alluring idea.

One of the things I've always loved about Bill Buckley is his first response to any harebrained scheme like Obamacare was, that's a nice idea. It's going to have to be Bill Buckley to pull that off. He'll have to have his accent, but I love that. And so it's very easy for these people to convince themselves to be evil and stupid. But how do you compete? I mean, how do we compete? Here's what they say about us, right? Yeah, we're being and we're hate speech and we don't care about the world, care of the planet.

We're not funny. They say that about us a lot, too. How do you compete? Well, you know, it isn't easy. It isn't easy to compete with bad, simple ideas, you know, because the truth tends to be complex, shaded, difficult to wrestle with. Otherwise, all of us would have been A students in college, right? Because, you know, leaving aside the larger capital T truth, you know, we were supposed

to know our material, right? And if learning botany or biology or economics uh or or or even the english lit courses that i took that you had to actually read the books you had to like work through the ideas you had to remember the facts you know what a bummer you know wouldn't it be so much better to just go in and like put in put down nice right wonderful, imaginary answers. How do plants create chlorophyll? By magic. Yeah, right, right. There we go.

And A for you. So, you know, how do we do this? Well, we've got to go back to the beginning. I mean, one thing, we're not explaining ourselves very well. We sort of had to wait for the websites to crash and explain to the public what we hadn't been explaining, how this kind of interference in the market is going to lead to chaos. Then we have to come back with a plan of our own. We've really flunked on this, because some of these ideas behind Obamacare

were originally conservative ideas. And at the core of this is very simple. We're a rich country. Nobody in America wants anybody else in America to be beggared by their medical expenses. Nobody should have an accident or get sick and lose the house, you know. The boat, maybe, but not the house. Yeah, right.

The second half. We don't want anybody to be beggared. And it shouldn't be too hard, especially if you were to means test and trim a little at the other end where, like, I'll be 66 in two weeks. You know, I am on, whether I like it or not, I am on Medicare. And, you know, and I should be means tested. You know, I mean, you know, maybe I can't afford to pay the whole bill, but I should be means tested. Wait a minute. You saw a lot of books, PJ.

What's going on? Yeah, you should be means tested. Means test minute. You saw a lot of books, PJ. What's going on? Yeah, you should be means tested. Means tested is what I say. Would to God there were money in selling books. That's right. We say we're very successful in a dying industry. Yeah, very. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. I am like the best studebaker that's out there it's like i always say you know what do you do for a living i'm a content provider you know and in the world uh internet world where where the the the key underlying message is content is free uh so you see the problems with the economic model. I used to be a writer. So we still have communism. It's just on the net. Yeah, it is. Has there ever been an industry that was founded by people who say,

let's make some steel and the heck with money. If we make a lot of steel and it's really good steel and it's hard and it's heavy and it rusts attractively, the money will come. I'm sorry, that's not how Mr. Bestmer... Yeah.

We lose a little bit on every deal, but we'll make it up in volume. That is the Twitter business model. So we have to come back with something you know where we say look uh you know the you know in a society like ours we should be able to provide you know for for emergencies and then we've got to like like remarketize uh uh the the whole of medical care damn it we want doctors to get paid well. I mean, do you want to go to a cheap doctor?

You want to go to a doctor who's making $35,000 a year? I don't. Right. You know, maybe for Band-Aid. Skinny, maybe. Lasix and, you know, elective plastic surgery. We could chop hard for that. So you just mentioned Twitter.

I mean, just speaking of being in a dying industry, you write books and essays. Do you tweet? Yeah. I am about to start tweeting because my publisher has been doing it for me. And they've actually been doing it for me and this is what they, and they've actually been doing a pretty good job with one small problem. They can't,

they're in publishing, you know, so like they never took any math classes, so they can't count to 140. So they leave off the punchline. It's all setups. Yeah. Yeah.

So I've got all these, like all these jokes out there that my publisher's been putting out on Twitter, which you get to the point where the rabbi and a nun and a Buddhist priest walk into a bar. Who knows what happens? Click for punchline. Twitter's worth $11 billion, according to the valuations. Hasn't made a dime yet. Wall Street Journal had a piece a couple of days ago,

but all these new high-flying things are coming out. A little froth in the web industry, a lot like we saw in 2000, where you were talking about steel. Let's make some steel and give it away. I mean, in 2000, you would have guys setting up bankvault.com, where they would free shipping on bank vaults.

Anybody who wanted that. Brought to your door. Right, and it went and it just died a hard death and everybody lost a lot of money. Now we're going through that again. But when you talk about... Yeah, it's like, you know, you cannot live, you know, those who...

Doug Kenney at the National Lampoon always had a great take on that George Santiana thing. Those who fail to learn from history are fated to repeat it. And that goes double for chemistry and algebra. I always thought that those who forget the past are doomed to bite again at the gap when it comes around again as a new style. But here's the thing. Just to clarify, Twitter actually does make money.

Twitter has revenue. You're breaking up a little bit over here on my end of the way out here. On my end too. I'll take up his point. He's saying that Twitter has actually got some money coming on the street. Twitter's got advertising. They are in the black? Well, I'm not sure if they're in the black or not.

It's not a big operation to run. I mean, it's not like healthcare.gov. You can actually do this with a skeleton crew. It's a service. In fairness, Twitter is probably not our best example. But I'm not enough of a business page reader to know what the best example is. But I do remember Peapod.com where we were getting all these groceries delivered, discount-priced groceries delivered to our apartment in Washington. And you weren't even supposed to tip the guy.

I mean, I think we did. But, I mean, he's dragging these things up like 10 flights of stairs. And my wife and I are going like, this is the dumbest business model we've ever seen in our entire life. We're going to take advantage of it, of course. Yeah, of course, yeah. That lasted about six months. Go ahead, James. You go.

I was going to say, PJ, you're in books. You talk about a dying medium. I'm in books and newspapers, so I've got double the dying mediums behind me, right? Yeah. But on the other hand, though, I'm enjoying watching both of my industries adapt to the digital age. The newspapers, not so nimbly as I would like, but publishing.

Publishing is an industry that absolutely could not continue in the form that it was, where you would have guys who were paying an awful lot of money, who took four-hour lunches, went to Gallagher's, had steak, got drunk, came back, looked at a Breslin manuscript, passed it off to some 20-something who was living five in a room in Williamsburg.

Everything about publishing was, they knew how to pick a book, they knew how to publish a book, they had no idea how to promote a book, ever. I mean, I've never seen any industry that was so mystified exactly by the very market that they were supposed to command. Now people can actually... It was an industry, forget the web, this was an industry that had yet to move into the mystified exactly by the very market that they were supposed to command. Now people can actually... It was an industry, forget the web, but this was an industry that had yet to move into the 19th century.

Yes. Yes. So isn't it good, really, that we're having the creative destruction of these industries and new forms of publishing emerge? It is good in the larger sense of capital G good. It is not so good as my book publicist explains why I should go address a group of 25 people in the last independently owned bookstore in Arkansas. It's great to be here in the hot springs. Yes.

And thank both of you for coming out tonight yeah this delicious coffee i was just talking to dave barry dave barry and i were were emailing yesterday because i was asking him about an event which will go unnamed that was being proposed out on the west coast which he had done more recently than i and i'd done it like for my last book, and it was held in a warehouse in an industrial park in Santa Monica. Now, who knew Santa Monica had an industrial park? The answer, no one who reads books. And I said, Dave, I think Whitey Bulger showed up because he was looking for a place where nobody would see him.

So they got him. They got him. So it is a good thing. They needed this shot in the arm. And they also need to go to work, like, oh, I don't know, five days a week from, oh, say, to five, you know, with like just an hour off for lunch. You know, Dave is one of those. He's a great writer and he's a great guy. He's writing children's books.

He adapted to write a couple of young adult novels, as they called them, with a co-writer. Who was he writing those with? I can't remember. Have you ever thought of doing anything? Oh, an old friend of his, and I'm blanking on the names. He's a nice guy. Yeah, he is.

Ridley Scott, is that right? Ridley Pearson. Ridley Pearson, Ridley Pearson. Yeah, I'm sorry. They were doing them for Hyperion, and because Hyperion is a Disney imprint, I remember, apparently if you work at a certain level,

you get the magic card that allows you to go anywhere in Disney World you like and to jump at the head of any queue. You're showing me this special card. It's like when they have the parade of joy. Any place you like includes leaving?

Personally, we've taken the kids a couple of times to Disney World, and I'm sorry. I hadn't really felt the need or the desire for powerful drugs in 40 years, maybe, until I passed through the portals. Oh, could I go back in time and get some STP or something? Well, peyote and the small world, after all, are a potent combination. I was going to ask you. Oh, that one is neat.

I got out of that one. My three kids, ranging in age at that time from about three to nine or something, I forget what they were, they said, Dad, that was stupid. That's good. You just raised them right. That's the thing. That was a moment of great parental pride.

If Disney was smart, they would quietly pipe the Small World After All song into all of the rooms of their hotels at a level that's just barely perceptible. So it's just as people fade off at night, they would hear the song playing and wonder whether or not insanity had actually crept in and taken their brain for good. Right. And then run off and visit something interesting like the NASA Museum at Cape Canaveral. Right, right. But not to say that you should do this for the Disney card, but have you ever considered writing a novel for a younger audience to surreptitiously and very carefully and subliminally inculcate them into some ideas that'll keep them from becoming

the little liberal dour sourpusses that we fear our teens will all become? No, I haven't, actually. And the reason has nothing to do, I mean, it's a good idea, but the, or as Bill Buckley said, that's a nice idea. But I didn't mean it that way. I have no capacity as a fiction writer, period, for young people, old people, people in between, dogs and cats, whatever.

I'm a reporter. I'm all about what happens, like why it happens. I mean, I can give you the theoretical whys, but what a novelist does is get inside people, and from what little biology and anatomy I took, it seems to me to be all icky and bloody in there. I'm not going there. I enjoy reading fiction, but I don't think I would be able to produce any.

Hey, if we could just – I know we're getting to the top of the hour here, so I don't want to keep you too long. But I do want to talk a little bit of politics while we have a moment. Sure. You've got some – you've made common – you've broken bread with the left. These are people you recognize. Will they ever turn on Barack Obama? Will there ever be a moment where they say... Yeah, but not until he's out of office. They'll do what they did to Carter.

The minute he's out of office, he's going to be so marginalized. I mean, he's not going to mind because he's going to be making $8 trillion, giving public speeches. But they will turn their back on him, but not until he's out of office because having the presidency in your party, even if the president is doing a dorky job of being president, is so much more important than letting the other party have the presidency. So they won't turn on him until after he's rolled out of the White House.

And do you think they will then? There won't be this weird juggernaut of justification? I mean, with Clinton, there was plenty of negative press about Clinton from the left. This guy just seems to skate. Well, you know, there is a little racial element in this, less evident now than it was right at the beginning. uh... a and claim any any particular credit uh... for this uh... uh... other than you know sort of of of of eight moral support you know uh... but but for a person who was around for the worst of the civil rights no ascension to uh... you know i was old enough

to know just how bad the situation civil rights situation in the united states was and i'm the anger the hatred the killings was, and on the anger, the hatred, the killings, you know, the violence, the threat of violence, the violence of opinion from one's own members of one's own family, Uncle Mikey Mike, you know, I mean, you know, he's out there using the N-word, and I actually had this, like, Irish relative took me aside one night years ago in Toledo, and he said, PJ, you know me aside one night years ago in Toledo, and he said, PJ, you know the Jews run all the banks in Toledo.

I'm going, poor Jews. I thought they were smart. So, you know, having witnessed, you know, the hatreds and the anger and the fury, I've got to say that when, although I voted against Obama and I was, you know, I was opposed to his ideas and his candidacy, I was proud. You know, I thought, this is amazing. In my brief lifetime, America has gone from this race-driven country to having a black president. And not like a sort of off-the-map black war hero Republican president.

It's not Colin Powell. It's like a regular old Democrat from Chicago. And he's black and he's like a regular old Democrat from Chicago. And he's black and he's president. And it's pretty cool. So he skates a little bit on that. And, of course, then he just skates on all that stuff we were talking about earlier, all that wishful thinking. And we know the makeup of, of, uh, of the media.

It's not that they're, uh, hard laughter that they really think about these things. I've had this, this, this conversation with, uh, with David Brooks, for instance, I say, you know, you guys over at the times and like, I'm giving David a little grief here too. I said, you know, said, you've internalized these to such an extent you even think about this. So the average reporter, television, radio,

newspaper, whatever, average reporter is like now this college educated quote professional with all these sort of like easy upper middle class nice opinions about everything. Man is good, and we should all get along.

Maybe if we just treated North Korea with a little more care and consideration. I'm old enough to remember when reporters were blue-collar guys. The way you've got to be reporters, if you were like a poor kid who liked books and didn't like getting up early in the morning and lifting things, you had two choices. You became a newspaper reporter or a priest, you know? So you said to yourself, you know, basically, is it going to be whiskey and women or just whiskey?

And so these guys, you know, they weren't speaking truth to power. No, they were trying to find out how many people were dead in the apartment fire. Right. And they assumed everybody in government was kind of corrupt. They didn't really have a partisan. They were that reporter guy in the movies with the hat and the press badge. Yeah, you know, with the press badge and the hat band and the free hockey tickets and all night poker games. I remember walking into the New York Daily News newsroom back when I was a kid. I worked on a weekly paper, and we had some deal to use their photo archives,

so I'd be over there in the newsroom sometimes. It was like blue black with cigarette smoke and all these guys with their hats on indoors you know banging away at manual typewriter shouting copy exactly that was the first that was the first newspaper that i worked at too was in college the minnesota daily and all the people who were down there smoking and drinking and and and having sexual affairs with each other on a random basis. All of those people came from other disciplines. The people who were in journalism school were upstairs in the classes getting degrees,

but not actually going downstairs where there was a real newspaper and practicing journalism. They were actually working. Right. And I blame it on the movie All the President's Men. Yeah. Yes. the movie All the President's Men. Yeah. This is when all the people, all the little perps who would have normally joined

the Peace Corps decided to become journalists. Because they thought Robert Redford was one of the reporters. But they had to go to school to do it. So we've nailed what it is here. If you come out with a... But they thought Robert Redford was going

to play him. Never mind that everybody in the news business looks like Dustin Hoffman, including most of the women. Ann Coulter accepted. So that's the problem. They're the credentialed class and the credentialed class will have sympathy and fellow feeling

for the other people in the credentialed class, which are the politicians, the staff members. Everybody in D.C. who works at a newspaper generally has a spouse who works for a lobbyist or a politician. Of course. I mean, it's, you know, or is a lawyer at Sidley Austin, you know. Right.

Right. Hey, PJ, do you spend any time in D.C. now, or are you mostly in the wild? Well, yeah, we still, we tried to split our time between D.C. and New Hampshire. I've had a place up in New Hampshire for 30-some years. And so when, like, the kids were, you know, before the kids came and the kids were babies, we would split our time. We'd come up here when the weather got stinky down there, and then we'd go down there when the weather got stinky up here,

which was a great life, but then school raised its ugly head. And I guess we could have homeschooled, which would be interesting, especially after the cocktail hour with Dad going, Because I said so! That's why I'm talking to you, because you always flog me, because I said so! It's a nice slosh in this triangle, right. You can't even say that after two drinks. Stop it with the questions.

So when it came right down to it, we were going back and forth and back and forth. The final tiebreaker was 9-11. I was still a foreign correspondent. I was working for The Atlantic then. We had a baby and a toddler. I said, if we're all here together, that's fine, but I'm going to have to go somewhere because I have a feeling that the response to 9-11 is not going to be, you know, just a lot of memorials down at the bottom of Manhattan. I think we're actually probably going to go someplace and kill some people. And I, of course, my job will be to be there in case truth needs to be spoken to power.

And so we did stay that winter after 9-11 in Washington, but we could see the whole of the Pentagon from the roof of our apartment house. But that spring when we came up to New Hampshire, per usual, we decided that we would stay. And, of course, the next year, indeed, I did have to go to Kuwait and Iraq. Well, it's D.C.'s loss, although now it has a reputation as the most prosperous city in America, a real boomtown. I wonder why.

I can't imagine why the only industry that's expanded wildly since the financial crisis would be in D.C. Why would you have an office there? Yeah, boomtown. And we couldn't afford to live in our old neighborhood. We still live right next door to the zoo. There's no way on earth we could afford that apartment.

We even looked at houses in that Cleveland Park neighborhood, and we were going, this is back in, when we were trying to decide whether to stay or leave. So back in 2001, we're going,

do you want $600,000 for that? We are nuts. I know. I lived in Woodley Park, and for $600,000, you've got a two-little bedroom apartment with carpet from 1974, and the ghosts of cigars going back to the Hoover administration in the hallway.

Exactly, exactly. They want to have them. And now, you know, all those houses that we looked at, which we were simply morons not to have bought one, even if we never lived in any of them, just move that decimal point about two places for the price. So that's your advice for young people? Go into government. It seems to be booming.

Yeah, I guess it is. Well, we have to let you go here. But the one thing that I do want you to do, and this is almost foreign correspondence material coming from an East Coast perspective, and that's go to North Dakota because the other boomtown besides Washington, D.C. is Williston and all these places. Yeah, I know that. Where it's the Wild West. There's 50 men for every woman. There's no place – there's camps springing up on the edge of town. It's like going back to Deadwood, 1865.

It's fascinating. Yeah, I'd love to see that. Actually, I, you know, I write for Weekly Standard, and Matt Labash beat me to the punch when I went out there and spent some time, wrote a really good piece about that. But yeah, the only time I've been to North Dakota was to go phe pheasant shooting oh there's lots of them yes that's that's my father's

best time as well i assume fracking like probably puts you probably don't even need a dog anymore you know you just frack a little bit and up up up jump the pheasants that's exactly right subterranean explosions are great for flushing them out yeah so it's all good yeah we look forward to anything you write, even though you're probably not credentialed like all the serious people at the New York Times. I'm not. I'm neglected to go to J school. Well, draft the luck,

and yet your work will last for generations beyond that which they're pounding out today. Listen, it's been a pleasure and an honor to have you here at the podcast. Absolutely. Hey, it's really good to talk to you guys. Thanks for doing this. All right. Talk to you later have you here on the podcast. Absolutely. Hey, it's really good to talk to you guys. Thanks for doing this. All right. Talk to you later, BJ.

Bye-bye. All right. Funny guy. Oh, absolute American treasure. I remember reading him in Rolling Stone back in college when I was a good little liberal and thinking that there was something about this guy that I wasn't – I mean it it's like, he gave liberals in those days permission to look down on other funny cultures.

He'd go to some place and it wouldn't be, oh, the fascinating cuisine and the wonderful culture and the interesting people and the great music that they have. I mean, it would be, no, I am in a hellish place. And I'm going to look at it with an unabashedly Western perspective and make fun of it and pick it apart.

And it was a nice print. The body of work of the books, the books are – they all hang together. Like if you start reading, they take on a different subject with a sort of coherent philosophical perspective but also really beautifully written and very, very funny. So all in, I mean it's an incredible – the books are an incredible sort of primer to – if there's somebody you know who's on the fence politically, this is where you – you send them to a PGR work shelf. They still work. I mean humor is a perishable quality and there are not too many American humorists

whose work actually hangs together after 40, 50 years. But I think he's going to be one of those who does. I think people will – Speaking be one of those who does. Speaking of coming back, the diner's coming back. Oh, shucks, gosh, yes. It came back last week, as a matter of fact, and I'm wrapping up the Halloween show today. It's fun to just settle right back into my usual place at the Boomerang Pattern for Mike O'Connor

and just talk off the top of my head and play bad songs. So that's essentially what it is. And I know that's a kind of killer selling point. Talking off the top of my head with no idea where it's going and bad songs. Well, it's this but with bad songs. Yeah, there you go. And if you need something while you're working out or driving or the rest of it or just tired, God, don't you –

I mean, you've been away from this, Rob. I have been listening to talk radio and news for just three weeks about this, and there are times when I just realize that it's not natural to spend so much time marinating in this nonsense. I have a new theory. I don't listen to talk radio anymore and not because I don't like those guys or respect what they do. It's just that I'm tired of hearing one person talk. I like conversation. I like to – if I'm going to have to listen passively, I like to hear either someone tell me a story

or two people have a conversation that I can kind of like in my brain think I'm joining. It's not the one-way stuff I'm not as crazy about, which is of course why I like British Shite. Right. I feel the same way. That's why I prefer a show where there's lots of calls and there's not interminable monologues and lots of guests. I mean, that's the – right.

It's just one guy talking his monologue about – I mean, I know – Even a great guy, you know. Even a great guy. I know where they're going. I know what they're going to say, and I don't take any particular nourishment from having that fed to me again. So, yeah. Anyway, that's, of course, as you write, why we like Ricochet, because we have guests here and lots of palaver and the like,

and then we can talk about it together in the chat room later. Exactly. All right. Well, Peter is off. I don't know when he's coming back, but, you know, Peter would have been fun to be here today because I would – wouldn't you have loved to know what Peter would ask P.J. Rourke? Yeah.

Let's just imagine. P.J., you've loved to know what Peter would ask PJ Rourke? Let's just imagine. PJ, you've been to many places. Where is the place you remember best? And then he would get a great answer out of it, as he always does. We would have interrupted him, and yeah, I would not have answered. That is what I thought he would say. All right, great. Fine, Dandy.

End of the show. See you later, Rob. Take it easy. James, as always, pleasure. Oh, but wait a minute. We have to mention, of course, that Encounter Books, how did we ever forget?

Encounter Books wants you to go and get this now. Black Book of the American Life, the Collected Conservative... Sorry. Let me try that again. The Black Book of the American Left, the Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz is available at Encounter.com.

That's right, EncounterBooks.com. Coupon code RICOSHET for an additional 15% off this or any other title. That was my best... That's pretty good, by the way. All right. Now we're done. See you later. Hey, pretty good, by the way. All right. Now we're done. See you later.

Hey, I'll see you next week. See you later. Jackie's in his course and Jane is in her vest And me, I'm in a rock and roll band Ha! Riding in a studs, bear catch him You know, those were different times All the poets, they studied rules of verse And those ladies

They rolled their eyes C.J. Oh C.J. Oh C.J. I'll tell you something Jack He is a banker

And Jane She is a clerk And both of them save their monies And when they come home from work Sitting down by the fire The radio does play the classical music there jim the march of the soldiers all your protest kids you can hear jack say get out of here CJ! Come on, baby. CJ!

CJ! Some people, they like to go out dancing. And other people say... Ricochet! Join the conversation. Some evil mothers. Ricochet. Join the conversation. And the children are the only ones who blush And that life is just a dive But anyone with a heart

Oh, they wouldn't turn around and break it Anyone with a heart Oh, they wouldn just out of hand CJ Whoa CJ CJ CJ

Every day Wine and roses Seem to whisper to her When he smiles Heavenly wine and roses