The Ricochet Podcast - School of Hard Knocks

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

We’re back! For the most part anyway–Peter’s out, but Ricochet editor Bethany Mandel is a fitting sub for today’s education-oriented podcast. Our guest is Andrew Gutmann, the man who stood up to CRT pushers in his daughter’s school and became last year’s overnight sensation. (He’s also the co-host of Ricochet’s new podcast “ Take Back Our Schools!“) We go through the pandemic of cowardice which... Source

Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambitions. With over 450 partner organisations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitisation and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Hey, we'll be with the show in a second, and it's going to be great because there's a lot going on in the world, right? There's a lot going on in your life. I don't know what you're excited

about. I happen to be excited about the fact my daughter turned me on this television show, and I love it. I'm going to watch another episode tonight. There's stuff I wouldn't like to think about. I've got to make a dental appointment today. But we'll deal. You can't always control the vibe of your day or the vibe outside the world, but you can control the vibes in your head. How? With a pair of Raycon wireless earbuds in your ears. Now, whether you use them to pump up or wind down work or workout, Raycons are the go-to for the on-the-go audio, right? They allow me to enjoy eight hours of playtime and a 32-hour battery life. I've tried others. I've never gotten that kind of life before. And that's great because I know when I'm heading out, I'm not going to have

to recharge. They're going to play. And the new everyday earbuds, when they look and they feel and they sound better than ever. Frankly, I've got this space between my car and my office. It's where I go. That's where I listen to things. And that's where I get myself in the mood for what I'm going to do. And when I'm coming back from the office, it's where I unwind and recalibrate my brain. And that's where the Raycon earbuds just come in because they help me set the mood, set the vibe. And you get three new sound profiles to make sure everything you're listening to sounds its best with just the right amount of bass. There's pure mode for your podcast listening, blues and instrumental mode, balanced mode to get your rock and your heavy metal fix, and bass mode for your favorite hip-hop, EDM, reggae, and more.

And yes, I am an EDM guy. Really, I love that stuff. Boom-ch, boom-ch, boom-ch. Anyway, there's also an all-new awareness mode for when you need to listen to your surroundings. Instead, there's a built-in mic, and you can take calls in your earbuds at the press of a button, so you've got everything you need in earbuds covered. They start, these Raycons, at half the price of the other premium audio brands, but they sound just as good.

Best of all, Raycons come with a 40-day happiness guarantee. Right now, Ricochet listeners can get 15% off their Raycon order at buyraycon.com slash ricochet. That's buy, B-U-Y, raycon.com slash ricochet to save 15% on Raycons. Buyraycon.com slash ricochet. And then we thank Raycon for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast.

And now let's go. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs. You understand? You've got to get off my back. 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. We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before. 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. Welcome back to 2022. It's the Ricochet Podcast

with Bethany Mandel sitting in for Peter Robinson. Rob Long's here. I'm James Lylex. This time we talk to the infamous rarely dad, Andrew Gutman.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody. It's the Wicca Shade Podcast number 575. Starting 2022, we're happy to be back and we look forward to the year. You being with us and being around for episode 600. I'm sure we'll have some details on that coming up. I'm James Lylex in Minneapolis, where right now it is 10 below,

but it's a dry cold. We've got Rob Long. Peter Robinson is out this week, and sitting in is Bethany Mandel. Bethany, hello. Hello. It's so sad that Peter is my favorite person on this podcast, and yet I'm always sitting in for him instead of with him. Isn't that weird? Yes, that's right.

I'm just quickly scrolling through Twitter right this minute right. I'm just quickly scrolling through Twitter right this minute, just so I'm up to date on everyone that Bethany is currently at war with. Well, I was just going to say, if I was Troy McClure from The Simpsons, I might say,

you might remember her from such Zoom calls as I've got a baby in my lap and a gut full of grievance. That was a piece of work that was a peroration that was a philippic we'll get to that in a second uh we'll just tease that and let it sit there which person did she peeve off well which person didn't she first thing though we got to get the sixth out of the way i didn't pay any attention to be honest what the dems were saying and what the Republicans were

saying. I let it all wash over me and moved on with my life because because it was it was not an attempt to take over the government. It was also not just a harmless little thing. It's somewhere between the middle. And I think we can all agree that the people who walked in broke windows, crapped on the floor, stole things, should suffer consequences for that. But I'll ask you guys, what do you think? Do you think that the Democrats' desire to portray this as the defining anti-democratic coup moment of our lifetimes is a little bit oversold? Democrats have a lot of things that they would like to shift attention from. Everything COVID,

Omicron, inflation, you name it. So, I mean, I think it behooves their political interests to obsess about this thing that happened a year ago, that you're right. It was, you know, not a great thing that happened, but also not Pearl Harbor or 9-11. But I think ultimately, you know, they're trying to shift the focus from all of their multitudinous failures nationally. But they're they're kind of they're they're overplaying this hand, this January 6th hand, because the end of the day, they're making-11 when they're I mean, they're dealing with inflation and covid and so many other issues. This is this was a mistake. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, in a way, it's too bad. Right. Because, I mean, in a year ago. It it must have seemed if you're I mean, a cynical political operative for the Democrats, it must have seemed like we're going to ride this bus.

This is going to be fantastic. Americans will never forget what happened on January 6th, at least until the midterms, maybe until 2024. This is fantastic. But like all these plots and plans you lay politically or otherwise, in the ensuing year, so much has happened. And Bethany is right. There's so much going on that, you know, you'd have to be willing to give up what you thought was a juicy plum and go

to something else. I mean, the unemployment rate in the country today is 3.9%. It's pretty good. But if you're constantly talking about how democracy is, that democracy hangs in a balance. I said, somebody said something yesterday. It was like, we are in between autocracy and democracy right now. I just was like astonished. Like I, how, where? I mean, it astonishes me that people in politics and people who follow politics and people

who obsessively watch cable news are unable to take yes for an answer. The Democrats have control effectively of the Senate and the House and the White House. And this was after four years of what they consider to be, you know, fascist dictatorship. That's not an autocracy. If your government keeps changing hands and keeps going from one party to the other, that's volatility. And that may be insanity. That may lead to a lot of political chaos, but it is not autocracy. And I just find that so bizarre. There's so many other things you could complain about. The only way we can prevent autocracy in this country is to hand power to one party in perpetuity. Right, right, right.

The benevolent dictator. That's what we need. Because there's a variety of opinions in the Democratic Party right now from the squad to squad light. That means you have the full panoply of that's all the political spectrum that you need. So, yeah, autocracy. It doesn't work, as Bethany said, when people are looking at the pump at what they're paying and they're looking at the little package of ground beef at the store. That's what matters. That's what matters the most. And you mentioned COVID. Remember, this president was not going to shut down the economy.

He was going to shut down the virus and we were going to get testing kits. Anybody tried to get a testing kit recently? Anyone? Anyone? We used our last one to diagnose ourselves. Yeah. We had a last one and I put it under a glass case with velvet ropes around it and 110 decibel alarm that would go if anybody went to it. And when somebody wanted to,

I really wanted to interrogate them to find out if their symptoms were test worthy. Here, let me give, I'm going to pour some Tabasco on this here. Can you taste that? You can taste it.

You're fine. Is it sponge worthy? That's my favorite. That's the truth. Can I fry an egg on your forehead? No it you're fine is it sponge worthy that's my favorite that's right that's the truth can i fry an egg on your forehead no you're fine but the problem we don't have anybody there's nobody in america right now except for maybe some people who appear on this podcast but there are no measured normal voices so you know say what you like about sonia sotomayor or elena kagan although i didn't hear anything like kagan today but you know justice Sotomayor or Elena Kagan, although I didn't hear anything like it today. But, you know, Justice Sotomayor is a smart person. I mean, she's smart. She went to law school. She got there. She didn't do anything. She had Supreme Court. I mean, she's of average or above average

intelligence at the very least. And what she said about covid today from the bench of the Supreme Court was so stupid, so stupid and ill-informed. I mean, absolutely unforgivably ignorant. It was fake news. How many kids did she say were on that thousand kids, she said, and many of them on ventilators. Yeah. Meanwhile, three thousand children, here's the fact check, 3,300 children nationally are hospitalized, either with or from COVID. And we can tell from the kind folks in several small jurisdictions that are actually making the differentiation of kids that are showing up with a broken arm who happen to have COVID, the majority of the kids don't have COVID. Like

they're not there for COVID. They just happened to find out they have COVID when they're there because they have a broken arm. This is infuriating as a parent, the conversation revolving around school closures and revolving around forcing kids to get vaccinated when no one seems to be able to make a risk analysis when it comes to kids. It was clear from, I vividly remember laying in my kid's bed in February, March of 2020 and just trying to reassure them. And I looked at the sort of the risk stratification graph and I said, things are not great for people over 80 in China and in Italy because it had hit Italy really hard. But the kids that are your age are fine. And where we were already hearing they were fine. And mommy and daddy are healthy. We're fine too. Our family, our little nuclear family is fine.

I vividly remember telling my child, and I have my eight-year-old sitting right next to me, and she can verify this, vividly remember saying that to them. And Marcia, she just said. Yeah, we can't see her nod. Your children are called a county. Can you verify that, child? Did I say that to you? Yeah. Well, yeah.

It's under duress. But everything, I think, that is wrong with COVID policy in America, maybe the world, is contained in Matt Sotomayor idiocy. She is wrong by a factor, a large factor. She is hysterically wrong. So she's not even underplaying it. She's overplaying it.

And she is one of the handful of most powerful people in America right now because she is going to decide whether mask and vaccine mandates can be federally imposed by OSHA. So she is a she is now has her finger on the regulatory button. She can push it if she wants and she doesn't know crap. Is anyone else terrified? Yeah. I think it's shocking. Okay. I'm terrified by what I'm reading right now. I feel like I live on another planet and everyone else around me has been hypnotized because I'm looking at the numbers and I'm looking at my own family. We all had COVID over Christmas. What are we doing? What is happening? I have done nothing but mainline data on COVID from the start. It's reassuring. I don't understand why people don't want to be optimistic. We've just reinstituted a mask mandate here in Minneapolis. And it'll probably be with us for

another 40 days, 50 days. I have no idea what the metric is for when they take it away. But when you go to the Minneapolis subreddits, you find all of the people just look just luxuriating in the return to this, but they're so happy about it. And even I mean, and now the they'll sort of admit that cloth doesn't work. And so they're all going for N95. they all believe that everybody should be walking right things strapped to their face like an alien face hugger everywhere that they absolutely go i read a twitter thread this morning from a doctor um a who is one of those people who said um we've done everything right and he went on this long long list of everything they did which essentially was staying home for two years. His family. Yeah. Yeah. And they ordered everything in. They didn't go out when they did. They didn't linger.

They took a plane trip, but they never took everything off. They never took it off the airport, not even to drink. They did everything right for two years and still got Omicron. And his message is essentially is you've got to be really, really do even more than we are. Yeah, right. If you possibly say it, but if you possibly can put on an N95 and then take some super glue to draw a bead around the edges so you know that it's absolutely secure and they're fine. That's it. And they're, you know, they get a little for a couple of days

because they're trouble. We got another line on our test. And that means, yeah, by the way, that is the most James Lylex thing I've ever heard. The phrase, if you go to the Minneapolisneapolis subreddits that's that's pure unadorned mainline china white of james lilacs right there pulse on the common carotid that's me yeah you know but but if you if you but really if you you will find this hotbed of scum and villainy on the coronavirus of all sorts subreddits which tell you how many people out there are permanently psychologically,

neurotically rewired to live in absolute fear of two lines. What I find amusing about all of this is we have done nothing right in our family, the Mandel family. We've done nothing right. We've been doing things, you know, and we got COVID the same week as all of these people that got COVID. And I just, I want to know, like, do you, do you think it was worth giving up two years of your life for, I mean, you're all fine, by the way.

It's a cold. We're all good. What's really terrifying is, you know, I've been screaming about how stupid cloth masks are right from the start, like May, June of 2020. And finally, people are starting to come around to it. And I've made it, I miscalculated, and I should have just kept my mouth shut. And all of us should have kept our mouth shut. Because now, we're talking about putting 95s on toddlers. And all of these parenting boards now are like, my preschool is now requiring 95s. And here in

Montgomery County, they're going to distribute them for the children that want them. It's all optional. And so now cloth isn't enough. Now they're going to put a year after vaccines became widely available for anyone at risk. And how many months after vaccines became available for ages five and up, now they're putting N95s on three-year-olds. I am blown away. In the beginning of this pandemic, we were told we had to be so careful to save our healthcare capacity because look at these dramatic pictures of our healthcare workers who their faces are red and raw and bruised from wearing 95s all day. And now, two years later, the moral of the story is we have to put those same masks on the three-year-olds?

Well, Bethany, what you don't understand. Come on, come on. Kids are resilient. As we keep hearing, kids are resilient. You can duct tape them to their chairs. You can put an inflatable bubble around them. You can forbid human contact for seven years and they'll be fine. The other interesting thing, though, is when the people who are currently in college who are 21 years old are so unresilient that a collection

of phonemes that strikes them as offensive will induce trauma that requires a professor to kowtow and probably resign. But kids are resilient. But kids are resilient. Meanwhile, the people who are saying kids are resilient talk about how traumatic their childhoods were in their 300 weekly therapy sessions every week. Right. Because they can't handle that. Their professor didn't give them their pronouns. They didn't accurately describe their pronouns correctly.

I feel like traumatizing an entire generation is not going to make things better. Well, I think you're right. I mean, just two things. One, I think anybody listening, we should put this on the show notes for sure. So go to ricochet.com and join ricochet.com, become a member, but also check this out because we're going to put in the video of Bethany at the school board. No, at our county council. At your county council, which is, here's what I think when I saw that, I think we're looking at the first real or the first minute or two of the Bethany Mandel for president campaign in like, you know, 20 something. And because that's what that's what I would use. Like she's been a fighter, you know, and it's great. It's very inspiring. I should say your birth of a tea party moment. Yeah, it's really inspiring. I'm going to do it again in a week.

OK, well, you should let us know because we all want to watch. You know, I want to watch it live. But I just think one thing I've been struck is that the the the the generation you're talking about, the college generation and the young adult generation. I am is really struck by just how overwhelmingly, insanely neurotic and terrified they are, how willing they are. That young generation, which is supposed to be just traditionally that generation at any given time is rabble-rousing and making trouble and acting risk, doing risky, stupid things, all the stuff you're supposed to do when you're in your late teens and twenties. They are terrified. They're wiping down their groceries still they are absolutely they're the young people i know are a lot more terrified than people who are 80 plus like my mom interesting the

young people i know aren't like my daughter and her cohort aren't they're cautious that makes me that makes me that makes me happy they shouldn't be yeah. But it's the idea of then inculcating that fear and that terror in little children who just need to go to school and play and are going to have to go to school and play at some point and learn something at some point. is that as much as the Democrats have lost, I think, because of the incredibly baroque panoply of events that have happened between January 6th and today, much they've lost their ability to turn that thing into a political cudgel. I think Republicans and the right in general should laser forget everything. Everything else, but laser focus on schools, because this seems to me to be a potential Prop 13 moment. If you remember, if you're old, if you're ancient, you remember in 74, 75, 76,

there was an anti- or a property tax cutting movement that started in California, Prop 13, because property tax are insane. That proposition passed and we really started the wildfire that ended up with a two term Reagan presidency. And I feel like that's that's where we are now.

I mean, the right could fumble it. Of course, the Republicans easily fumble it. They tend to fumble everything. But it does seem like. This is a special moment right now. Yeah. No. Did you see the video of Lori Lightfoot, the Chicago mayor talking about the schools? Her internal polling must be off the charts for her to be so outspoken. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. So if that's what she's hearing in Chicago, I think you're right, Rob. It's one thing to pass a law that says that property taxes can go no higher than this. It's another to pass a law that says we're going to, in a stroke, disassemble the American public education system. It can't be done. But what you can do is what some organizations, what some municipalities, localities are doing, tying the money to the student and let a thousand charter schools bloom. I mean, this is the moment and whether or not they

seize upon it, I don't know. The great thing that we've had, I mean, the clarifying thing that we've had for the last two years is the failure of nearly every single institution that we believed was rudimentarily prepared to deal with something that would be an assault on their, they've all failed. They've all failed and fumbled and garbled and stumbled and the rest of it. So, yes, from this, we have a compelling need to address replacing those institutions with something better. For example, you've got all these financial institutions springing up online, which are changing the way that people do their banking and their investing and the rest of it. I got a little message the other day from one of the places that I signed up with, this online app saying, hey, we saw that you signed in from California. Is this you? Yep,

it was me. And the reason that I was signed in from California, not Minnesota, is because I use VPN. That's a way to keep yourself safe online. It's also a way to keep yourself more entertained. What do you mean? Well, take Netflix. Watching Netflix without ExpressVPN, that's like paying for a gym membership with only being able to use the treadmill. Did you know that the content available depends on where you happen to be, your location? Of the tens of thousands of Netflix shows, you only get a fraction. But with ExpressVPN, you can change your online location. Voila!

I am in London. I am in Brussels. And you can control what you want to watch based on what Netflix thinks where you are. You can take advantage of their nearly 100 different server locations and gain access to thousands of new shows in other countries, other cultures. That's incredible. Now you can see Modern Family, which is only available on UK Netflix, spirited away on Australian Netflix. All you do is open the app, select your new

location, tap one button to connect and refresh the refreshes the page, and there you go. You got access. It's not just Netflix. You can enjoy a wider selection from BBC iPlayer, from YouTube, and more. We're not short on reasons here to pick ExpressVPN over the others. From the encryption that keeps my browsing secure, their blazing speed, which allow me to stream in HD without buffering, thank you, and the that their services are compatible with all my devices, iPad, my iPhone, my,

my, my Mac is a no brainer choice for people with brains. So be smart. You got a brain, be smart, stop paying full price for streaming services and only getting a fraction of their content. Get your money's worth at expressvpn.com slash ricochet.

Don't forget to use this link expressvpn.com slash Ricochet to get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. brings us to our first guest, Andrew Gutman. You remember him. He's the accidental educational activist known as the Rarely Dad. He's the founder of Speak Up for Education, co-founder of the Institute for Liberal Values, and the co-host of Ricochet Audio Network's newest podcast, Take Back Our Schools, which he happens to co-host with, hmm, who would that be?

With Bethany. I don't know. That sounds like a weird podcast. I know, but I can't wait to hear it. Welcome, Andrew. Thank you. It's all right. I just cut off James. You did here. I'm trying to do my job. I'll get out of the way. I know you want to

interrupt James. I do this to Andrew too. Don't interrupt James. Absolutely the rudest thing in the world. Interrupting James. How dare you? Andrew, if I may have this moment here before I'm swamped by my co-host. We were fortunate to have you after you became the overnight sensation of the

education revival and readjustment movement last year. For those who missed that show and who haven't had the chance to hear your excellent new podcast, tell us how you became this Brerly. And I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Brerly, Briley. Brerly dad. Brerly dad. That's what I go by. Brerly correctly. Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brearley, Brear And after almost a year of trying to get those parents to speak up, because I knew that most of the parents were not happy with the direction of the school and not being successful in getting those parents to speak up and object to what was going on, we decided to pull our

daughter out of the school at the end of that year and not re-enroll her. She was in sixth grade. And I wrote a letter to all of the parents of the school, which was, I think, almost 700 families. And that letter went viral. I never expected that letter to be read by more than the parents of the school. And it got picked up by journalist Barry Weiss and many others and was read widely. And I became known as the Brearley dad. And this was really the very beginning of when critical race theory became a national issue and a big political issue.

So, of course, if I'm hearing you correctly, critical race theory, as we all know, is not taught in schools. What you were opposing was the teaching of actual history and that you want a white supremacist sort of thing. That's right. We shouldn't mention slavery, no Jim Crow. These are things that should not be mentioned. You should also mention that this is sarcasm. That's right. This is sarcasm. I love when they say that critical race theory is never taught and that, you know, Ibram makes candy. They say, well, that's not, he's just said that the critical race foundation, critical race theory is the foundation of everything that he believes. And if you don't think this is infected academic discourse, I mean, the other day I was looking at a tweet from a guy

who was talking about critical sports theory. Then need to take CRT and invest now our study of sports and the rest of it. So that'll be coming to your high school as well. When the gym teacher starts teaching you about battle ball and how it's really a reflection of what it looks like. So, yeah, sorry. The article, the academic was saying at the death of John Madden. Yes. was saying at the death of John Madden. Before we eulogize him too much, we should remember that he was the voice of a video game

that didn't glorify violence, but also video games in general and sports in general are patriarchal and racist and all sorts of things. And he was inspired to write this little, you know, tweet, I guess, or mini obituary at the death of John Madden. So before we before we mourn him, let's remember what evil he did with a video game that actually is extremely popular. They commodify the video game, commodified black bodies in the rest. Right. I mean, exactly right. Yeah. So the idea that that doesn't infect schools these days is nonsense.

And you pulled your kid out of it. So but what's the next step after that? You got a podcast. Let's talk about that. You and Bethany discuss exactly what you're going to do and how what is your strategy, Andrew, for getting a word in edgewise? We alternate questions. I mean, no, I thought we've done five or six episodes. I think it's been pretty good, right? Yeah, the key is to have my baby so I have to mute myself. And so that's when you get your words in, when my baby is babbling. Exactly.

Now, we've done five or six episodes and we've covered a lot of ground on schools. And I have heard you guys talk about it before I came on, how we can try to fix this very, very broken K through 12 education system. Because there's a lot that needs to be fixed, unfortunately. Let's talk about how. Give us some ideas as to, for example, your daughter now is, she's going someplace else in New York. What are they doing that's better? The school that she's at. So our plan was we were going to homeschool her and being the 12 year old girl, now 13 year old girl that she is, she decided she really wanted to be with other kids, which I understand. And we actually found in right outside of New York city, New Jersey, a very small Montessori school that has absolutely zero CRT or DEI. So we were very fortunate to find that. And that goes to eighth

grade. So we have one more year. We were a week from moving to Florida, like an awful lot of New Yorkers. When they announced new COVID restrictions and measures over the summer, and then we came to an accommodation with the school on those, which we were happy about. So they have no CRT, no DEI, and she's not wearing a mask. Not bad. That's huge. So, Andrew, can I just start with my premise here is that, and I've been sort of in and out of the school choice kind of political movement for a long time. So I've seen people succeed, I've seen people fail, all that stuff. And I sort of sense that this, and I think the school choice movement would be a boon for

conservatives, but also most importantly, would result in much better education for many more Americans at a better price. And I think, and better education for poor americans at a price because you know rich kids are going to do fine in in in the world even rich kids with critical race theory will do fine because the society works out that way but i'm more concerned with the kids who aren't as privileged right so we i feel like we're at a great big moment here where the absolute ludicrous behavior of the teachers unions in places like Chicago, so that the Marxist Che Guevara, mayor of Chicago, was arguing that she wants to basically she had her Reagan's Patco, his air traffic controllers moment. You'll be fired if you don't show up to work. Seems like this should be a moment for you, right? Isn't this? This has to be a moment for school choice, especially in blue states. I mean,

there's been a lot of progress in red states and almost no progress in blue states. This has to be the moment, but it is really, really hard to get parents to speak up and fight on these issues. I mean, the immediate issue now in places like New York city and is Chicago's keeping schools open is getting masks off the kids. You know, so there are a lot of issues and then we can get to, you know, really disrupting the teachers unions and the public schools and the school choice issues. But there are so many issues now. Are you finding that you're galvanizing parents? I mean, I guess the way that

you're the only way to have big fat change in the country is when you get people who ordinarily disagree with you on a whole bunch of other things to agree with you on this one big thing. So my question is, how many liberal Democrats and liberal Democrat parents who really aren't that concerned with CRT, how many of them are now receiving the school system for what it is, which is this bureaucratic oligarchy designed to silence their kids and mask them and do all sorts of weird, superstitious things? I think more and more. I don't know what the numbers are, but more and more. I mean, I see this talking to people. I see this on Twitter that people who said they are lifelong Democrats, they are lifelong progressives who will never vote

Democrat again because of these school issues. We saw it, obviously, I'm sure you've talked about it in Virginia with the election, a little bit the closeness in New Jersey. So I think it's happening. I don't think it's happening quite enough. You know, I'm hopeful that it happens in places like New York and in New York City. In the private school world, which I know is not as important, clearly, for a number of reasons as the public school world, it is still almost impossible to get parents to speak up for a number of reasons. But I do think it's happening in the public school world that people are seeing the teachers unions for what they are, you know, not having the kids anywhere near, you know, the priority. So, yeah, I do think it's happening. We'll see in November. I mean, hopefully,

and this is the thing that comes up all the time. People are saying, well, November, but November 22 is still a long way to go. And it's a very damaging next, whatever it is, eight, nine months, if the schools aren't open, if the kids are still in masks. And so if a it's a very damaging next whatever it is, eight, nine months if the schools aren't open, if the kids are still in masks. And so if we're only waiting for the next election, that to my mind, that's really, really too late. We've got to have people start to rally and protest and get much, much more aggressive on this. And I haven't seen it all that much yet, at least in places like New York City. Have you been watching Bethany's appearances? I have. So here's the thing. I agree with Andrew.

I think that there are a lot of people who are upset. And I don't live in an echo chamber. I used to live in New Jersey in a deep blue area. Now I live in Montgomery County in a deep blue area. And I have friends here that are lifelong liberals. And I'm heartened by how many of them come to me and say, this is messed up. I totally agree with you. But the difference is none of them have any guts. None of them are Andrew who will just walk away and say, you know what? My kid is more important than my reputation among people who I see sometimes at soccer practice. And this is just a complete lack of courage. And it's an epidemic of cowardice.

I don't understand why people can't sort of sit up and say, my number one priority and my obligation is to my child. And this has to end. end, or I don't know, I don't know how we live here anymore. And I don't know how we function in this area anymore. And what's happening also, which is scary is that a lot of the people that are the ones with the courage are the ones that are most incensed about this are leaving. They are going to Florida. So we've lost a lot of the people that are willing to fight, but Bethany is exactly right. I mean, there is so little, whatever you want to call it, whether it's a little courage or so little willingness to fight for their

children. It's, it's astonishing to me. I mean, I'm so disappointed. Well, I mean, I just say from the, the, this, I'm just the ancient history, but there was a California proposition school choice proposition a million years ago. And, was supported and part of it was written and could have crafted by Rose and Milton Friedman when they were both living. And I had dinner with them after it lost. And Rose was very depressed. She thought it was all over. And Milton, who's much more a sunny optimist, said that what he was interested in was that the number of the polling suggested that it would pass.

Because people, when they're asked if they like school choice, say yes. But then when they vote, most parents are like, well, I figured out the crackpot bureaucracy in my school district. I figured out who the good teachers are. I figured out where I want to be. I figured all this stuff out for my kids. I don't want to change that. I mean, because I don't know what it will look like. And people are afraid of change.

Yeah. And I think Milton Friedman, I sort of identify the idea is that if you don't know what it looks like, you don't want to change it. And for up until that point, and I think Steve is still now in the school choice movement, there was this argument against charter schools because the charter schools seem like half measures. It seemed like, well, this is this is not what we want. This is this would be the end of the reform. But I think Milton Friedman kind of rightly then saw that maybe charter schools could be this beacon for what school choice could be, make it a little less scary. Are you finding

that at all? Or is it still kind of this scary thing? Like, well, I don't know if I want to give up what I have, even if what I have makes me mad. I think there's a lot more recognition that charter schools have been an oasis for a lot of children, especially in lower income neighborhoods. So, yes, I think there is movement on that. I think, again, people are recognizing, you know, what the teachers unions and the power they have to shut down in a lot of ways charter schools, which they've done. They've kept them in places like New York. But I want to throw cold water on what I fully agree that we need school choice. We need all sorts of different models of schools, homeschooling, which Bethany can speak to very well. But to throw a little bit of cold water on this, we've got a bigger problem here. Charter schools have closed because of COVID. They are doing CRT. A lot of them, they're some of the most woke. So this is not a panacea. And we've got a teacher problem. We've got, you know, for decades now, 30 years, maybe, you know, teachers who have gone through the ed schools have been indoctrinated into this very woke progressivism, whatever you want to call it.

And so private schools now are even worse, you know, 1400 private schools in the NAIS, which are, which are awful. So we talk about school choice. We talk about the money following the children. Absolutely. That needs to happen. But that in and of itself is not going to fix K through 12 education until we address all these other issues. Right. But I mean, in a future world

that has school choice, we are you are going to have super woke. Schools and you're going to have super unwoke schools and you're going to have a choice. And isn't a choice better? Choice is better. To me as a parent, yeah. I mean, when you have the choice between a woke and a non-woke school, Carol Markowitz, one of my best friends, says this all the time. Every minute that you spend on CRT is a moment you're taking, a minute you're taking away from reading instruction or math instruction. The quality of the school suffers when you focus on something else. It's the same with literature. Rob, you can talk to this probably until you're

blue in the face about Hollywood. When you have an agenda, it takes away from the art. And when you have an agenda in a classroom, it takes away from the instruction time. So I think that the opening of school choice will fix some of these issues because parents are going to have a choice between schools who spend 60 minutes on math versus schools that spend 30 minutes on math and 30 minutes on how they're racist. Yeah, Beth, they don't need to spend a lot of time on math because math is itself is an arbitrary construction that probably comes from colonialism that that imposes a way of looking that ignores other cultures ways of doing math. I mean, this is what I hear all the time, that that it's essential to focus on CRT because that's really all you need to know to apprehend and understand the world. The conversation that we're having here, we're having because of COVID,

obviously, but we ought to be able to have this outside of it. We'd like to think that we would have this conversation if COVID hadn't hit, but it has. And it has, and it's added something else, which is the mental health. Nothing you can do about that though. We're all stressed out and we're crazy. It's all going to be, you know,

neurotic messes, but nothing to be done. Okay. Well, I just wanted to say to Andrew, when you do commercial spots in your podcast, you will be blessed with somebody who will actually let you do them as opposed to seeing where you're going and inserting himself like a right

there. Hippopotamus in front of a speeding train. That's exactly right. He's do a big thud and a splatter and then on the train goes. Yeah, this is a friendly reminder that anything that costs you your mental health is just expensive. It's too expensive. Now, this year, it's time to invest in yourself and finally relieve your ongoing stress, your

anxiety, your sleeplessness. Learn how you can easily improve your mental health and well-being with Headspace. We all say, I'm fine, but we don't really mean it. Fine isn't really an emotion, is it? Now, how many times have you told yourself, I am fine, but all you've really felt is anger or sadness or just, you know, jangly nerves? That's why you need Headspace. Headspace is a scientifically proven way

to help you manage your feelings and your mental health. In fact, a recent study proved that in just two weeks, Headspace can reduce your anxiety stress by 14%. Whether you want to relieve stress and anxiety, sleep better, or improve your focus, Headspace is your everyday dose of mindfulness for real life. And we are blessed with a mindfulness expert himself, Rob Long, who will give us an example of what he likes. What's your mindfulness routine, Rob?

Well, I do meditate. I meditate every day. It's great. And mostly that's just breathing. And I'm not good at it. So my mind races as it does. And that's okay. The greatest thing is just to sort of notice that you're doing it. So I imagine when you started it and you were concentrated on your breathing, you got nervous about your breathing and your heart rate went up and you thought, well, this isn't working. Yeah, but I have to say that's all okay. But Headspace guides you through getting past that.

Yeah, it does. But it's also all okay. What Headspace does is it lets you do it and lets you just keep trying it and it has a beneficial effect even if you don't do it perfectly, which is, I think, where the benefit of something like Headspace

is that the practice is the most important thing, not achieving some kind of weird higher consciousness. It's just the practice that does it. And having that app there guiding you is part of the benefit of the practice. Helps you have it happen. Yeah. However, you may happen to be feeling it. It's the post-holiday

season. Maybe you're let down by it. Maybe you had some stuff happen. You're still processing. Try Headspace at headspace.com slash ricochet, and you get one month free of their entire mindfulness library. This is the best Headspace offer you're going to find. So go to headspace.com slash ricochet today, headspace.com slash ricochet. And we thank Headspace for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Anyway, so in the, I mean, we should be having this conversation anyway, but now that we are, we see there's something else. We have the kids who are doing remote learning and that's fraught, right?

But we also have a group of kids who have been completely hosed by this, the lower-income kids who do not have the technical ability to sit around and do their classes on a laptop. They don't. And who is speaking for that group of kids who, this even hit were tasked with bad teachers, bad schools, bad curriculum, and bad discipline that frankly would make it impossible for those kids who wanted to learn to actually learn because the schools declined to keep a civil atmosphere in them. Who is speaking for them? And is there any chance that the Republican Party can speak for them without people just saying you're just being opportunistic?

You don't really care about them at all. I don't know who's speaking for them. I mean, nobody's really speaking for them, I think. I mean, you guys know probably the Republican Party better than I do in terms of is that a look. I think we've seen more African-Americans, especially in the last election, move Republican. We've seen other Hispanics move Republican. The education issue in the Asian community, because they're really hit by the anti-meritocracy, especially in places like New York City, aspect of it and really fighting strongly. And I think the Republican Party needs to speak on these issues clearly and needs to, you know, broaden the tent in a lot of for a lot of these groups.

And I think I've heard that, you know, that they're doing it or they're trying to do it. But I think to your point, I don't think there's a whole lot of people speaking for that constituency at all. And they're clearly getting the short end of the stick in terms of education. And some people will say that if you do create a charter school system, if you do have school choice, you're going to have the kids who come from families that have structure and have morals and have behavioral codes. Those kids will thrive in this, but we're abandoning all these other kids who right now at least have a chance in the public school system. They say you're going to get a two-tier system where the public school will be entirely composed of the people who are disruptive and not interested in learning, and there'll be a completely and utterly lost generation. And there are other people who say, to be frank, well, if that's the price you pay for letting the kids who want to succeed, succeed, then maybe that's the way we ought to go. That's a cold way of looking at it. And I don't see how that can possibly fly in anybody's prescriptions for how things ought to go.

It's not it's not an election winner, but isn't that sort of kind of what people think? If the schools are being made rotten by people who do not behave and simply don't want to be there, what do we do? Well, I don't know anyone has that answer. I mean, if you have a disruptive kid in a class, it disrupts everybody. Now, you know, the criticism that the teachers unions and the left says about the charter schools is, well, because they can be selective, right? They can weed out those kids. And that's the only reason that they have better performance and the regular public schools can't do that. And that's the reason that the performance, you know, isn't there. I mean, to some extent there's truth to that, obviously. You know, if you can weed out

the disruptive kids, you can have a higher. Can I be a little bit of an optimist pie in the sky for a moment? Please. I don't think that there's anything that a bad child does not exist. It's just a bad situation. And I think that our education system is very cookie cutter and it's very one size fits all. I grew up in, I didn't grow up. So I went my junior year of high school to Belgium and my school had, you know, sort of a traditional school and then it had sort of off ramps. And so kids starting in middle school could go to culinary classes and they could go to shop classes and all of those things. And the kids who were in a lot of those sort of offshoot programs, I recognized them from back home. And I was like, oh, you were the kid who

would have been doing drugs right now. And instead you're like doing work on a car and fixing the principal's car at two o'clock in the afternoon. And that child is finding purpose. And you see a kid with severe behavioral problems, and often those have sort of a medical component, but often they also have a home component. And I think that we think that a lot of things can be fixed by schools and by teachers when it's just not the case. Teachers are not that talented to be able to fix a kid who has a really, really messed up home situation. And you're right. The solution is not to say we've got to figure out a way to get you to college.

That's not going to work. Exactly. A trade, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a trade school. We need people who can weld. In often cases, it's more financially advantageous to the kid. Like, you want to teach French deconstructionist literary theory for some tiny sum at some community college? Or do you want to actually make real money and drive around and fix people's houses? I mean, try to find a plumber, by the way, it's not easy and they are paid very well. My cousin is a plumber and he's one of these kids who had a really troubled upbringing.

And then he kind of, he put himself on the right path and he became a plumber and he lives in Arizona and his cost of living is a fraction of ours and the outskirts of Washington, DC. And he makes by, by multitudes more than we do financially. And, you know, he's, he's really successful. And if he had been given the opportunity to be an apprentice as a plumber, when he was 16, his life would have been really different. And he was he's he's one of these people that is able to sort of he righted the ship when 99 percent of boys and his men in his situation at 18, 19 would not have been able to right the ship. Andrew and Bethany. The way we have treated school, one size fits all, mandated from the top. You are assigned a school based on weird criteria like what zip code

or what neighborhood you live in rather than what you're interested in, what the school, what kind of child you are and what kind of parents you are. Let's not forget the parents. And that is precisely sort of where we find ourselves today in our current.

Social wrangling about covid. We want mandates. They want mask mandates. They want a vaccine. They want all of this sort of scaffolding of a regulatory structure in this totally quixotic and doomed attitude, which is that, or the theory, which is that if we do all these things, COVID will disappear. If we create these schools and these school systems and teach these things, then bad things won't happen. And that we will somehow eradicate social ills. And isn't that kind of our problem is this weird utopian attitude that is,

is not represented by real life around us. And how do you fight that, if you agree with my premise? Well, look, I think a lot of this is the Marxist attitude at its core. Yeah, I agree. And how do we fight that? I mean, we have to fight it. I don't know that there's an easy way to fight it. I mean, again, going back to the school choice issues, the private schools, which were supposed to be independent, they went even further on the COVID

restriction. So we can say, well, if there was choice, you could choose schools that, that, you know, were less severe. It's actually the opposite. They've gone further on the CRT, DEI, gender Marxist stuff. So, you know, the monopoly of the public school systems has to be fought. And I think so much of it is, so my friend in Boca was just telling me this sort of funny story. There was a group of loud people at his synagogue and they were all demanding masks. And so here, if that had happened and it is happening, the answer is everyone has to wear a mask because of these people. And for my friend in Boca, the rabbi said, OK, you know what? We'll make a special service for people who want masks.

And in sort of Jewish law, you have to have 10 men to make a prayer service. They couldn't make a minyan. They couldn't make it. There were not 10 men in the entire synagogue who wanted to wear masks. And so much of this, again, coming back to the epidemic of cowardice, people don't want to stand up and say, no, I will not acquiesce to your ridiculous demands. They are not based in data. They are not based in reality. Your risk analysis is flawed. No one is able to say that anymore. And so everyone in COVID times is saying, absolutely, your feelings are valid. Everyone's feelings are valid in this moment.

And that cowardice is how we're here right now. There's a New York Times reporter, Dana Goldstein, and she was tweeting the other day asking about how she could find N95s for her four-year-old. And people were hitting her on Twitter. And she was like, I'm just doing what my kids' teachers want me to do. I don't understand what you expect of me. And she's like, you should be more concerned with how Chicago schools are shut down. And I said to her, I was like, this is exactly why schools are shut down. Because you, the mother of a four-year-old, are not standing up to the people you're paying. You're paying these people to demand that you put a 95 on your kid. It's time for you to stand up and say something.

Because the refusal of anyone to stand up and say something is why we're in this moment. But people don't know what to do because I'm on a Twitter group of a lot of people in New York City public schools trying to fight on the mask issue, but they don't really know how to fight. And I think what has to happen is you got to keep the kids home and you've got to call in sick to work. This is a parent strike. People are saying, well, to have the kids take the masks off, the kids can't do that. It's too hard for the kids to go against the grain. It's the parents that have to fight. Can't put that on the kids, but the parents can fight this. And one of the things I loved about our podcast, Take Back Our Schools on Ricochet Network,

we had Jen Reisman, who is a parent here in Montgomery County, and she talked about how she stood up to the school board and she demanded they started meeting in person and how she did that and how she sort of marshaled her advocacy, which by the way, she's a lib. We have this intersection of people who are passionate about these issues. And I think that COVID has really, I think that people are afraid of upsetting the apple cart, like what you were saying earlier, Andrew, people are afraid of change. Well, change is here. And do you want it to stay? Do you want this moment? Do you want this experience to be your children's childhood? Because if not, you have to, you have to stand up and you have to say something. And I mean, it's put up or shut up right now. We need to organize.

This is not just a few people speaking up. A few people are, not very many. I think there needs to be a real organization. Yeah, I agree. So in Montgomery County, I started a group called Revive MoCo. And it started as a conversation between me and two other sane people. One of them is Jen Raisman, who we had in our podcast. Another one is Marjory Smelkinson, who's an epidemiologist with experience with COVID.

And we said, we have to get Montgomery County back to normal. And so we started this group. It's after I scream, the county council, we get a number of day. And all we're doing is just pinpointing our activism and just every time there's a town hall with the county executive, we show up. Every time there's a county council meeting that no one wants to sit on county council for two hours in order to give two minutes of public testimony, we're filling up the slots. And so this is,

I think, what we all need to do. You need to just band together a like-minded group of people, put a name on what you're doing, and do it. The cowardice ends when every municipality, every school district has their own Spartacus moment where somebody stands up and says, I am rarely dad. Andrew Gutman, thanks for joining us today. The podcast is Take Back Our Schools, which sounds violent and insurrectionist, might I add. Maybe it is. So yeah, okay.

All right. You'll find that at the Ricochet Network with Bethany and Andrew, and we thank you for joining us today. And I hope we'll meet in the flagship in a year from now and see whether or not after the election things changed. I have to hope that they will. I hope that they do, too. Thanks for having me. Not while I'll be in Florida. That's right. Bye-bye. I should note here that any second now, I'm going to have probably the sound of a madly barking dog because where I live right now, we've had a change. All of a sudden, the mailman is showing up at noon-ish

instead of five-ish, which is great. We have a new mail person, which means that the mail is actually delivered. The old mail person would just sometimes just not even show up. I knew I was getting mail, wouldn't get it. It seems like one of those things that happened since everything hit. Everything seems to fall apart. Even worse,

though, what I'm going to do, I'm going to go down to the post office and I'm going to complain. I'm not getting my mail. No, I don't want to go to the post office. Nobody wants to go to the post office. And I say that as somebody who likes his local post office. Well, the mailman will probably be bringing back some Christmas cards that, you know, had wrong addresses. And I look at that and say, oh, shoot, well, I have to change that address for next year. Next year. Oh, that means that I'll have to not only print out the labels, I have to go find the stamps in the last day. I always have to find the stamps in the last day before I mail the damned cards. Except next year, I won't. Why? Because next year I'm going to have stamps.com. Look, if you are looking for ways to skip the trip to the post office and dodge all that, you know, that traffic and all the standing in the line, save time and save money with stamps.com. Stamps.com lets you compare rates, print your labels and access exclusive discounts on UPS and USPS services all year long.

It just makes sense. I mean, especially if your business sends more mail and packages during the holidays, like we just had, right? Whether you probably have a little side hustle where you're doing Etsy stuff, or you're selling online, or you're running an office, whatever. Stamps.com can save you so much time and so much money and stress during the holiday period, or frankly, during any period where you got the crunch and you got to mail stuff out. Access all of the post office and UPS shipping services you need without taking the trip. And you get discounts. Mention that?

Yeah, discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 40% off USPS rates and 76% off UPS. Well, if you spend more than a minute a week, a few dealing with mail and shippingstamps.com is a lifesaver. You'll save so much time and money, you wonder why you didn't start'll save so much time and money. You wonder why you didn't start sooner. So save time and money this holiday season, which, you know, for some is still going

on. I got Ukrainian Orthodox friends. It's still holiday season for them. And I'm sure that they're going to love the details you get at stamps.com. Sign up with this promo code ricochet for a special offer that includes a four week trial trial free postage and a digital scale no long-term commitments no contracts just go to stamps.com click on the microphone at the top of the page and enter the coupon code ricochet and we thank stamps.com for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast well on the way out we've uh lost a couple more greats sydney potty ages past 94 peter bogdich died. And I was talking about that with my daughter and she sort of drew this blank look.

Yeah. She studies film. And then I mentioned a couple of things that he'd done and she was watching, it was germane because she was watching The Sopranos. Peter Bogdanovich later comes on to play, basically Peter Bogdanovich. But his whole role in cinema is, is interesting.

And, and in one of those careers that just, well, Rob, you'd probably know better and could describe it better than anybody else. Such momentum, such. Yeah. And bang, they all laughed and all of a sudden the career just goes into the ether and wanders around or never really comes back to earth. Or is that really the truth? Yeah, no, that is pretty cool.

I mean, he started as a, as a writer, really not, not as a journalist, as a film student, basically writing about movies and then interviewing directors. He became friends with Orson Welles and then he made in Orson Welles. Did he know? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He, he, he wrote a great, I think a great treatise on Orson Welles? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he wrote a great, I think a great treatise on Orson Welles. Oh, he dined off that for 30 years. I mean, I'm surprised he didn't work it into his appearance on The Sopranos.

Well, I mean, I think that was his entrance into the business. But then, you know, in four or five short years, very short amount of time, he made three, really some of the greatest movies, American movies ever made.

Certainly the last half of the last century. Last Picture Show, brilliant, brilliant movie. Great, great performances. Paper Moon, which still is one of my favorite movies ever, which is just a masterpiece. If you haven't seen Paper Moon, treat yourself. It's just wonderful. It's funny. It's moving.

It's a great piece. Great look at Depression-era America. It's just. It's moving. It's a great piece. Great look at Depression era America. It's just a masterpiece. And then he made a classic screwball comedy, What's Up, Doc?, which is still very, very funny and has great performances in it. And then he kind of went off the rails, not off the rails, but it does happen when people tell you, when you start believing that you are a genius and that the definition, and he was, but the definition of genius is you're never wrong and your instincts are always right. That's when you kind of go off the beam. And he went off the beam. You know, he started, if you want to know the Peter Bogdanovich story, actually, it's really interesting. There's a pretty good movie actually about it.

It's sort of tangentially about it called Irreconcilable Differences. And it stars, I think it stars Ryan O'Neill and Shelley Long and a very young Drew Barrymore. And the story is that Drew Barrymore is the child trying to sue her parents, trying to divorce from her parents. She wants to be divorced because they're ridiculous. And it's really the story of Peter Bogdanovich and his first wife. And it's great. And the most amazing thing about him is that, you know, you don't have to keep making movies.

If you make three great movies, in a lot of ways, he resembled Orson Welles, right? Orson wells made these like two or three astonishing great movies and then it's like i don't know maybe maybe you're done maybe you peaked you know it's okay take your money go home all right then there was the uh you mentioned the wife his second wife was dorothy stratton right did he i think his third second was, I think, Sybil Shepard. Maybe I could be wrong. Okay. And then the peculiarity where he was dating, I think, Dorothy Stratton, who was murdered by her husband, a subject of a gruesomely unbearable movie by Bob Fosse, a really, really creepy movie called Star 80.

And then he started dating. And I think he married Dorothy Str stratton's sister which struck people as peculiar it's like you know going back backing up your files from your mac time machine but no a fascinating man i mean he would say he he recorded a lot of his conversations with orson wells and it's mostly just orson talking about things but i think doesn't bogdanovich appear as a very young man in that reconstructed Wells movie, the last one, the other side of the other side. I think so. Yeah. I think he was writing the book at the time.

We're writing whatever he was writing on. But I mean, his argument, I mean, the reason that he's connected to Orson Welles is because he was one of the first American younger American film critics, historians to remind people in this late sixties and seventies, especially the late sixties that Ors, especially the late 60s, that Orson Welles was, you know, had done these two great American masterpieces on film.

And probably the best B-movie ever, A Touch of Evil. And the business had kind of forgotten about him. Business never forgot about Bogdanovich. He was still, you know, around and doing stuff, but it's interesting that he, that in many ways he peaked early like Orson Welles. And then, you know, there's a couple of things that probably aren't that weren't that great and then kind of lost his nerve. And I think the business changed around it too.

The business, you couldn't make paper moon today you couldn't make what's up doc today what are you doing what's interesting about paper moon is that there was a time in the 70s which i remember very well this nostalgic race all of a sudden we were fascinated with the 20s and the 30s which themselves are very distinct eras i mean the the 20s and the 30s are right you know the boom time and the bus time but in the 70s we just all of a sudden were just just compelled to look back and why was that was it because somehow the site you know the the psyche of the nation realized that we were in a pit of slough to spawn and that uh it was more interesting to look back and see when we were

stronger and then also look back and see how we had weathered another downtime. I don't know. We might. The point is that back then, in the 70s, our ability to look back was limited by the source material. I mean, there was a Liberty magazine. They came out with reprints of Liberty magazine so that you could actually look at the entire thing, start to finish with all of the ads and see what the culture was like. You could watch a movie from the period, but there wasn't that much stuff. We had to deal with the primary sources that we have and then reconstruct from other things. Now we have

everything. And now everything is available to us. We don't know where to look. And it all becomes this big sort of mishmash that we've thrown into the blender. And we don't have an era that we can specifically look back and, and focus on anymore because we're all just living in this timeless remix culture. So you were going to say in show business, it tends to be when you're about 30 or 35 or 40, you tend to be interested in the era from your childhood or pre-childhood or

the era that you think you woke up, you, you, you, you raised up in. So, you know, if you're 30, if you're 1970, you were 30, 32, 35, which is right around, well, I think what Bogdanovich was. And I think the people who decided they were going to remake or make great Gatsby, which was also part of that whole movement and the Sting. Those are people who the 1930s were kind of the part of their memory, if not their childhood memory, then their recent childhood memory. And I think it's the same thing you saw when the 50s craze happened in the 70s. I think you're right. There isn't anybody celebrating the 1990s now, but I do see kids actively Def Leppard shirts. There were shirts from the 80s.

Yeah, so, I mean, it's there. And I get that. I mean, I was born in 58. And so I was keenly interested in the stuff that went before, but I had no memory of it. I was interested in the 20s and 30s simply for reasons that I can't, that had nothing to do with its proximity to my childhood.

But no, yes, there is the T-shirts, the vinyl, some of the glorification of what they regarded as a better age. And in many respects, the 90s, I think, are going to be, when they're re-evaluated, are going to be seen through a fairly different prism than those of us who experienced it at the time. It's going to look, I think, pretty good.

Pretty damn good. Well, i think pretty good pretty damn good well it was pretty good actually we don't want to leave poitier away we should mention betty white as well who seems to have caused great gnashing of teeth amongst all generations yeah she was funny she's funny and but sydney poitier died this morning i think so i mean or at least we heard about this morning and um i mean kind of i mean it's, you know, everything's going to be said about him and it's all true. Cliche stuff. Um, but one of those characters who managed, one of those guys who managed to go from this, from in front of the screen to behind the screen, um, really, really well. And that, that is not, that is not, um, an easy transition.

And he did it. Well, the, I'm just trying to figure out a way in which the podcast will work in the title of a Sydney pointy movie. They call me Mr. Gutman. Probably. They call me,

they call me miss Bethany. I think it's, I think that's going to happen. Look at that clip. Meanwhile, I've been muted for most of this because my baby is like, well, that's pretty much what we've been doing.

He has opinions about sitting. Well, we should just release an entire podcast of your baby going, wow, wow, wow. And see exactly how it performs compared to the rest of ours. I would like to think that people would note at some point that Rob, Peter and James were being a little less on point than usual. But who knows? Maybe it's just background noise for some. That does it. I would like to say, of course, to everybody that we've been brought to you by Raycon, by ExpressVPN, by Headspace, and Stamps.com.

Support them for supporting us, and you get great stuff for your life as well. And as Rob mentioned earlier, join Ricochet today. Why not? It's cheap. You get access to the member feed, which is where the real community forms, and that's where the fun stuff happens. Every Saturday night, for example, we talk about old radio shows. It's one of my favorite things to do on a Saturday night is to go in there, see what was posted, see what Jenna S. wrote in response to it. There's just dozens and dozens and dozens of posts like that scattered throughout the site, whatever you're interested in.

We're probably talking about it there. Also, you should leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. I don't know why you haven't. I'm stewing about this, but do something now. Why? Because the reviews help other listeners find the show, which keeps us going, which keeps Ricochet going. And of course, don't forget to listen to Take Back Our Schools with Bethany and Andrew, one of the many, many podcasts in the Ricochet Audio Network. Peter will be back next week. Rob, best to you. Bethany, thanks for stepping in.

I'm James Lylex here in Minneapolis where the temperature is now seven above. Days looking better and better. Thanks. And we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Thank you.

Okay, roll them. Me, what's up, doc? What's cooking? What's up, doc? Oh's cooking? What's up, Doc? Oh, you're looking for bugs, bunny bunting. Doc is gonna hunt them just to get a rabbit skin. But now the rabbit's gonna get... What's up, Doc? What's cooking? Hey, look out! Stop!

You're gonna hurt someone with that old shotgun. Eee, what's up, Doc? We really mean it. Watch. Up. Doc. Ricochet. Join the conversation.

That's awful.