The Ricochet Podcast - Sloppy Works!

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

It's the Hayward and Long Hour this week, meaning it's TheoBro-PoliPhi time. Since this duo was away for our recent episode featuring questions submitted by Ricochet subscribers, we asked for a new batch of inquiries catered specifically for our blithesome professor and the jocular seminarian. As ever, Ricochet members delivered a surplus of material for us in the chatty corner of showbiz. Care to get in on the conversation? Join us at Ricochet.com! 

Good cool. Yeah. Well, excellent. Ask not What your country can do for you? Ask what you can do for your country Mr. Gorbachev Tear down this wall It's the ricochet podcast number 738 today is Stephen Hayward sitting in James Lilacs host chair and joined by some stranger named Rob Long. We're going to kick around the news and some reader questions.

So let's have a look. Was James going to do this and then he found out I was going to do it? He thought, no, you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, ending so I think I should probably do that again Perry. Well, we can make it sloppy. Sloppy works. Welcome everybody to Ricochet podcast 738 and sure enough it's me and Rob Long today taking your questions and finally and finally we're alone. Well, that's one way of putting it. Look, we've got some great reader questions and as you are our resident theologian in training, we do want to ask you about the papal succession that's currently getting underway, even though, Rob, you should know that high-trick Episcopalians like yourself, I always refer to as non-union Catholics.

So pick that for what it's worth. But before we get into all that, I'd like to get your thoughts on, and I know you've been at a monastery for the last several days on retreat, so you may have missed all this, but there's quite a lively debate going on on the right intelligentsia in the last week, started by a new story in the Wall Street Journal called Meet MAGA's Favorite Communists. And it's mostly about how people like Chris Ruffo have decided, we need to emulate Gromsky's famous long march through the institutions and contest the left for power. And there's been a lot of people, as you may know, who are saying, you know,

some of what Trump's doing with the universities, I'm not too sure this is a good idea. It may come back to bite us someday. Is it this really an abuse of federal power, the kind that we normally object to on principle? And all that is yes. And I think that, you know, genteel friends of ours like Jonah Goldberg, I think represents the point of view that the right has always been at its strongest when it emphasized ideas. You know, the famous phrase, Richard Weaver, ideas have consequences. Pete Slauson Right. Jared Slauson And, you know, my counter to this is I've always agreed with that.

I think it was true in conservative history, going back to, you know, the rise of Reagan and so forth. But, you know, the other thing that has consequences day to day are votes on hiring and tenure committees in universities, and we ain't got any of those. And so my own view is I've been kind of tilting toward the Rufo direction saying, you know, if the if the left says it's all about power, then maybe we're gonna have to play their game. It's got its obvious hazards, but I don't know if you follow any of this at all, or even if you haven't, you can give me yours first thoughts on that brief summary I just provided you. Well, I think I, I divided in half. I mean, not actually in half. I mean, I divide it in terms of the national

interest and national lack of interest. In the national interest, I think it's hard to argue that government funding in science research technology has not had a force multiplier in the national product and the economy. I mean, it hurts to argue that for me because I'm a Milton Friedman guy and I think no, but it's just hard to argue that that did not happen just looking at the past four years, 50 years even, of massive government investment in research and technology and science, hard science, theoretical science, rocket science, all sciences. There is zero national interest in the country supporting taxpayers supporting or even the country supporting English majors, right? Which I won. Absolutely zero. And there is cascades of money out there that is private that could

basically fund that. And so when you find people, I think, I mean, everybody thinks the science has been corrupted too. I'm just going to set that argument aside for a minute. When you look at argument aside for a minute. When you look at how much money is sluiced into higher education for stuff that is absolutely, at least at the best you can say it's irrelevant to the national interest. That's got to stop and that should stop. But I would say to conservatives that the problem isn't to spend federal money the way you want to spend it. The problem is to not spend federal money at all. And right wingers, here's the problem with the right wingers and I know them all, right?

I know, I've been raising money from them for a long time. They are not building a useful alternative. Like if you go to a conservative billionaire philanthropist and you say, I want to publish say seven books, I want to do a project or I want to do a podcast or whatever. They will ask you, hey, do you think that you could, that you would get on Sean Hannity with this? Do you think you could do this? Oh, yes. So, conservatives in general tend to be obsessed with stardom within the conservative bubble,

which is, I understand that. It's a great business. But it does not move the needle. Whereas you find liberals are much, much more creative and strategic about the audiences that they're going for. And I just think we just need to do that on the right. And instead of arguing about where government money should be spent, I mean, I think it should be spent on STEM and I don't think it should be spent on anything. It's not STEM. We should be arguing about, okay, well, if you're all these rich guys, build something. The idea that Harvard and Yale and Princeton and all

the sort of these big brands are inviolate and eternal and have some kind of aristocratic privilege is anathema to a conservative viewpoint. We should be saying, no, no, no, no, we criticize, as Michelangelo said, criticize by creating. Where is the new Harvard? Where is the new Yale? These are institutions that are out of gas and out of energy and out of innovation. What they're not out of is money, but there's plenty of money. There's so much money. Build a new Harvard, don't need anything else. Build a new high school. Right. Well, there is, I mean, there are a couple of examples. I mean, one, of course,

where sort of our billionaires, so to speak, have funded quite adequately this new startup University of Austin down in Texas. Yeah, that's right. And I think it's off to a great start and I think it's going to be a great success. And then maybe someone will say, we should do five more of those. Specifically on the Harvard question, you know, I think people were shocked to learn that Harvard is, you know, getting something like $8 billion from the federal government when they have a $53 billion endowment. And a lot of endowment is tied up with restrictions because donors like that

but you know to the extent that they're losing two or three billion immediately for scientific research supposedly uh you know Bill Gates could write a check for that although he dropped out of harvard so he may not think it's worth it but that's another story right so it works that can hurt right yeah i'll mention and then there's also these schools of civic education popping up in red states at the public universities, and that's a long story. I'm close to several of those efforts and know a lot about them. And they're explicitly wanting to hire more conservative faculty. They're doing cluster hires for conservatives for a change. And we'll see, there's faculty resistance going on. That's a long story. But the last thing I'll tell you about Rob to cheer you up, which you may not have heard the news, is

over a hundred faculty at Yale put out a letter a few weeks ago, didn't get any press, calling on the administration, sorry, calling for an independent audit of administrative bloat at Yale. And apparently, administrators outnumber faculty something like five to one at Yale. I mean, I've heard it's bad, but that's way off the chart. And my favorite line in the letter is, students don't come to Yale for the administration. Anyway, it's a very blunt letter. It's fabulous. And, you know, we'll see if this happens.

But I've been waiting, wondering for a long time when are faculty going to revolt against all these administrators and deanlets, all of whom are paid way more than faculty usually, who do nothing useful at all. And anyway, so let's keep track of that because I think that is a fun story to watch. I totally agree. The administrative bloat is, in education, starts in pre-K and it goes all the way up to graduate school and there's been no stop to it. But this is why, right? Where are things, where are we getting good stuff?

What products are in the marketplace that are good things and innovative and cheap and getting cheaper? And they are all to an industry, they are industries that are not subsidized in any way. A higher education is subsidized and the price of a higher, of a year at a college is absolutely mapped on top of the amount of money you can borrow. If that money went down $100, the cost would go down $100. If it goes up $100, the cost goes up $100. It is the same with healthcare.

Everything that is subsidized costs more because you, and we essentially are covering the hard stuff that places like Harvard and Yale used to do. I mean, Harvard really, really, to be fair, as an entity, Harvard is a healthcare company with a university attached to it. I mean, just financially, it's what it is. The same thing with Yale. It's a hospital network with a university attached to it. I mean, just financially, it's what it is. The same thing with Yale. It's a hospital network with a university attached. So we cover, it's a classic government gambit, right? We're gonna cover all of the hard things

and important things that you do. And the rest of the money, you get to hire, you know, Marxist French deconstructive faculty. And that is kind of how the government works with everybody, right? We're gonna, you know, Marxist French deconstructive faculty. And that is kind of how the government works with everybody, right? We're going to, you know, if you're a socialist, you're like, I want the government to pay for everything important in my life. And the money I have is going to be like my little allowance. And I can go and, you know, buy a latte if I want.

And it really should be the other way around. But we've allowed it to sort of, you know, it's much easier to say, I want the government to do my healthcare because healthcare is hard and it gives my head hurt. So somebody else do it. Yeah. So, all right, let's shift gears because I think the biggest story in the world right now is not what's going on between Trump and all his enemies and whatnot. It's that we are now facing the succession of the Pope and even for non-union Catholics like you

and me that's an important story. I mean it has been for decades, right? An important institution and we have several reader questions from Ricochet. The first one is from Arahant. I'm not sure how he says his name on his handle. Do you have any, are you handicapping who might be the next pope or are you leaving that to the, you know, our truly Roman friends? I am not handicapping it. I'm just, you can outline the considerations, right? I mean, the fastest growing population, even Christian population in general, but definitely

Catholic population is in Africa. Yes. What they call the term the global South, also South America. And while those people tend to be on the left economically, they tend to have very, you know, that liberation theology has really taken roots in a lot of those places. So we call them conservative. That's not quite, it doesn't really sort of overlap with our sense of politics, but they tend to be very socially conservative. So if you're a Cardinal in the now real life reality TV movie of Conclave, which is happening, This is so great. That's what you're thinking about. A lot of these people were elevated by Francis. So it's presumably they are more

aligned with his modified progressive politics, which are, they're not quite, he's not quite the wacky red that we think he is. But you can only go so far. You can't lose Africa. You lose Africa, you lose the church. And the Catholic sort of thinkers and strategists I know or I've been reading, you know, when you read an article by them, you skip the first three paragraphs because the first three paragraphs are just throw clearing about, you know, the fourth

and fifth, when you're in the middle of it, it's a pure marketing play. Like if we do this, we lose Africa. If we do this, we can get Asia, is Asia growing faster? Where are the opportunities of growth? And it reminds me of the sort of ecumenical councils that happened in the early 20th century and also the sort of the Catholic councils that happened throughout the 15th, 16th, 17th century, where they didn't have the MBA language that we have now, but that's what they were really talking about. It's like, where are the people for us? We're losing this group.

How do we know? We're losing Catholics in Europe during the Reformation. We're going to find some more. We're going to find some more in the new world. And I think that's part of what's going on. So Joseph Stanko asks, and I'm going to amend his question, what would Rob do if he were elected pope? And I want to add, what papal name would you choose? And what steps would you take as pope to revive the old Hollywood studio system? Well, I mean, all I can say is that I just steal from a famous Bill Buckley joke. What would Rob do if you were elected pope? Demand a recount. Right. And I wouldn't be the only

one. I don't know. I don't know that Roman Catholic Church is so bananas and bizarre and wonderful to me. I don't know what I would do. I think you have to, and I think it would be healthy for them to come if you're going to maintain, I think, which they, you know, I totally understand why they would do the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, all that stuff. If you're going to maintain those, you refresh the arguments for them. Instead of doubling down on tradition, you double down on a real doctrinal or even, you know, theological argument and make them. I think people make them. Well, you know, what you do hear today is there's a lot of press about people going back to traditional churches, both Protestant and Catholic, I think, especially young men.

I mean, I've seen some data recently that young men are now outnumbering young women going to church. I think it's an aspect of what's sometimes called bro culture and all these sort of young, not necessarily alt-right, but people who are into weightlifting and yeah, right? It's the so- You know, Theo bros they call them. Theo bros, I love that, Theo bros. That's great. There's a lot of it happening and I never saw this coming, but so I don't know, I mean, you know, it could be an interesting thing

where it's the old folks who turned out to be the post-Vatican to, you know, left-leaning culturally and theologically, and it's the young folks who are going to lead back to tradition. BF Yeah, or at least the young folks are going to lead back to sort of a more solid ground. Clearly, there's a hunger. I think the story of, I mean, I'm just speaking purely on a Western and European level, right? So American European level. The story of young men returning to the church, I mean, 23% of young men, I just read this in the UK, say they're churchgoers. That's like 18 to 24 or something. That's a giant, giant number. And now, I mean, and they outnumber, and the Catholics outnumber the Anglicans in the UK,

which is kind of astonishing. So there is a hunger for something. A lot of it, I think, is that this lost generation of young men. The question about, you know, the sort of absent fatherhood, I think, or a different kind of fatherhood. I think we decided the young men were evil and bad and needed to be whipped into shape. And we guess what? We whipped them into submission. And they, every impulse that a young man has pretty much, that's biological impulse, has been outlawed. Yeah. And we don't know what to do with them.

And the great story, I think, and what should make us all happy is that there are things to do and they, and those, some of those young men are finding it themselves. And that is kind of, you know, kind of, but dangerous. Right. Well, you know, the contrast between the two popes back, Benedict XVI, very conservative, and then Francis, who much more liberal, I think in many ways, not always, it's very confusing for an outsider. And so who knows, this conclave could go on a long time and really it's too bad that the Vatican doesn't have bamboo HR available to them to help them with this process. Nice, very well done.

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show business way of looking at things, um, is always sort of show business related. Uh, you know, when there's a, I think somebody told me once that they were in a meeting, um, someone, you know, they were talking about a couple of movies and some studio was releasing a movie and a, so, oh my God, there's a school shooting. Oh no. What about this? And the argument, the tragedy was the movie about to be released has a shooting scene.

Well, you know, yeah, but there's other tragedies happening in a school shooting. But the first thing that the show business people do is they think about themselves. There's an old story about two guys meeting about two agents meeting for lunch and one gets there early in the restaurant and he's just standing at the bar, he's having his iced tea, he's looking at the news and it's been a terrible plane crash. Some plane went down, 300 people died and his colleague arrives a little late and says, what's going on? He goes, there's a plane crash, 300 people died. And his colleague says, oh my going on? He goes, there's a plane, a plane crash. Three people died and his colleagues says, Oh my God, is there anybody on it? And you know, so that, so I know the people who have conclave the minute they woke up

on Monday and said, Oh, Francis died. They're like, yes. I mean, terrible tragedy, but yes, right. Right. It's going to, you know, watch the conclave rentals go way up because people want to know what's going on. And the movie's really good for that as a procedural, it's fantastic. I haven't seen it but it's on my list. So before we switch gears here to a different subject track, I will mention that I did see a great meme the last couple of days and it's a split screen and the first one is Catholics when they've chosen a new Pope and it sees white smoke coming out of the Vatican chimney and then the bottom panel is Baptists when've chosen a new pope and it sees white smoke coming out of the Vatican chimney

and then the bottom panel is Baptists when they picked a new pastor and a couple guys huddled over a steak on the grill in the backyard, which was about right. I thought, yeah, that's perfect, right? All right, we'll go back to politics here for a bit. Dr. Bastiat, who, by the way, published his 1000th ricochet post yesterday. Wow! Congratulations! who by the way published his 1000th ricochet post yesterday. Congratulations. I know. I mean, does he get a prize for that guys?

I mean, he should get some kind of a ribbon. It's the right thing. It's the deep appreciation. Yeah. All right. So he's asking, I guess both of us, but I'll give you first crack in 2025. What is the fundamental difference between a Republican voter and a Democratic voter. And we don't want to take the rest of the show for that because that could be long. Oh my God. I don't know. I honestly don't know. And again, I don't, I mean, look, it's volatile and

hard to figure out. And we naturally, especially conservatives, naturally, well, I mean, everybody's a conservative in this respect, naturally loathe and despise all change and calamity and, or at least tumult. But I think that we are in the middle of a transition. And I think we're in the middle of new parties being sort of created. They may keep the same names, but they are morphing and becoming unrecognizable to their, you know, whatever came before them 20 years before. And that I think is a part of American history that we have just decided we just didn't pay attention to.

And I think this is going to be, I don't know about 2025, but I think in 2030, those two parties, I don't think they'll both be around. But if they are around, I don't think they're going to resemble what they used to do. I mean, I really don't, I think they're going to be different. Well, you know, I think that there's one way in which the parties resemble each other, not on their level of ideas and what their policy objects are. They're quite different there. But I'm starting to pick up a party dynamic that you can trace an arc of over the last 20 years. So, you know, what explains Trump? And one of the things that explains Trump is that Republicans, a lot of the grassroots, the conservative

base, they were tired of conventional Republicans losing to Barack Obama, right? And so people, I mean, I'm sure you've heard all the rhetoric of people dumping on, you know, first Mitt Romney and then John McCain for not being tough enough, not fighting hard enough and so forth. Or the people who dislike Mitch McConnell, which I think is gravely mistaken. I think he's been a very effective, maybe the most effective Senate leader since Lyndon Johnson, because that's a job that requires a lot of skill to do what he's done. And I don't, you know, okay.

So people take out their frustrations on him. And so, you know, Trump came along as a breath of fresh air and something new and different and breaks all the China and so forth. Now I think Democrats are about to go through the same process. You know, they've now lost to Trump twice. I think there's huge buyer's regret that they settled on Joe Biden in 2020 and then stuck with him in 2024. And so suddenly I am watching, as I'm sure you may, Bernie Sanders, who is the sentimental

favorite of a lot of the party, is handing off the mantle obviously to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And I mean, right now, I don't like to make these kinds of predictions because they're usually wrong, but right now she's my front runner for 2028. I think you're about to see the Democrats lurch to, they want their Trump or something like it. And they think it's going to be her or somebody like her. I still think they're better off with, you know, Andy Beshear or maybe even Governor Westmore of Maryland or, you know, Shapiro, Pennsylvania. They're more conventional figures. And I think the party base wants a brawler. They want their own Trump. And I think that may lead them into disaster and I think the party base wants a brawler. They want their own Trump.

And I think that may lead them into disaster. I think they can be heading to another McGovern in three years, depending on everything else. That's what some people said about Trump in 2016. I mean, I think both of these groups are wrong. I mean, I think the idea that Republicans were losing and that Trump turned that around is just fundamentally wrong. I mean, when Barack Obama won a 58% popular vote majority, I think, or 53% of the vote. It wasn't 53. It wasn't quite... That was still ample, but yeah.

It was a giant, giant victory in 2008. And it was so big that in 2012, when he got a real run for his money in the box office, in the box, the broadian slip, um, he had so many votes that he could still lose a lot of votes and still win. Um, but in 2010, the Republican, uh, took over the House and Senate and stopped him in his tracks. Yeah. And I think sometimes these parties believe that if they win the White House, they win everything and they get everything they want. And that is not the way American politics works. Sometimes I'm talking to my friends who are Trump supporters or even Democrats when they're

projecting on the future. And they Democrats have an important thing for Republicans to remember is that this psychosis about defending and protecting a president, even if he's weak and ineffectual, we saw with Democrats and Obama, you were not allowed to criticize Obama. You must protect Obama at all case. And you're seeing the Republicans do that at the same time. So they had this kind of distorted view of the successes of these presidents. You know, Trump is under, was it 40% popularity barely at this point.

So, so if you're, if you're AOC, you're like, well, I could be 40% popularity. I could probably do that. Um, and we may be setting up more volatility, uh, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth with these parties, which is one of the reasons why they're out of gas. I don't, I mean, I guess what I would say is, to understand American politics, it's not a show. It's designed to not be a show. It's designed to be a weird, slow, complicated process.

And if you win, the best you get, even if you have the House, the White House and the Senate, you get like a C plus B minus version of you want, what you want. That's considered success. That's built in. That's the DNA of this country and the DNA of this governance. There's no way to change that except to change the government. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, that leads me to my one last point on this, which is thinking as a constitutionalist, one of the things I've been saying to liberals lately, and it really upsets them, is says, look, what Trump is doing, this is the presidency you have always wanted.

And I give all the precedents going back to Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. So what's your problem? What's your argument? And keep in mind that what do we hear from Democrats the last few years? When something's in their way, change it. Pack the Supreme Court. Let's abolish the filibuster. That's not in the Constitution, but it's still an institution they want to get rid of because it's in their way. I do think, to answer Dr. Bostia's question, I do think Republicans are more constitutionalist in a serious way than Democrats are. I think the Democrats are, the Constitution is a matter of

convenience when it suits them rhetorically. And by the way, you know, Trump has made these attacks on judges, you know, in tweets and so forth. I tell people go back and read not Roosevelt's court packing proposal, but read the speeches he gave in 1937 attacking the court with amazing ferocity and it's way beyond anything Trump has said about the court. Oh yeah, the idea that everybody was all well behaved and yes, right. American politics in its long, long span resembles Trump more than in Ronny. Yep, I've been telling my liberal, I did this at the University of Colorado Boulder a couple

weeks ago to gasped in the audience. I just said, take these statements from Roosevelt, put them in the mouth of Trump and see how you like it. And they wouldn't. Right. So, so I don't know if there'll be a rebalancing. Well, if Congress will, I mean the terrorists, for example, I mean, regulating commerce with foreign nations is a power of Congress and article one section eight. And they delegated it wholesale to the president 40-50 years ago. And now I mean maybe that was it maybe fits

with some older cases that said Congress can't do that which held up Roosevelt briefly in the 30s and it would be nice if we actually got some restoration of proper constitutional balance out of all for that I think you know Trump maybe he's doing the Lord's work inadvertently I mean we'll see yeah well definitely inadvertently but is that argument I mean any any gloss of the US Constitution is pretty much you know you can be summed up by saying don't do anything don't you dare government don't you dare. The constitution, we've distorted over the past, especially the last 50 years, as a document that enshrines the rights of citizens, which it does. But mostly what it does is it restricts the powers of government. And that's what they started by

saying that we're not going to let this get out of hand. And it's like, well, you know, so much easier, as we said before, so much easier to have government do all this stuff. I don't even want to do it. I mean, I'd rather sit here, you know, on my phone, play on my phone. And I think we're discovering that government not doing things is a very, very good, very good strategy. You know, one of the things that annoys me about this administration the way it has annoyed me about past administrations is how quickly they act like if I, with my executive orders or my sort of, you know, counseled economic advisors, I can bring manufacturing back. I have a time machine and it's all just this sort of nonsense MSNBC slash talk radio boosterism that isn't connected to reality.

And shouldn't be because the truth is that I don't want the government to start planning the economy. I want free movement and capital and entrepreneurship and innovation to do it. Chris McNeil Okay. So let's keep going on the issue list. Chris Williamson asks about illegal immigration. So we have this peculiar circumstance, and here I have to say I'm on Trump's side about the problem here, a little fine point's not to share about, but you know, the Biden administration simply opened the borders and let millions of people come in. Without any due process, by the way, if you and I had tried to bring a suit saying,

our rights are being violated by having an open border because it's distorting, you could make the claim it's distorting the municipal finances of where I lived, like in New York City and so forth. Yeah. Right. But that lawsuit would have been tossed out of court immediately for lack of standing. Okay, now we're told that we can't deport anybody without full due process hearings, which would take years. And this seems on the level of common sense to be perverse. And I think I fully agree with all that.

Maybe Congress needs to change the statutes. I don't know. But I don't know if you're following this closely, Rob, or not, because there's something new about every five hours on the subject. Yeah. But do you have a quick take on it? Yeah....what it seems like. But do you have a quick take on it? You know, my quick take is that, you know, this is the problem with letting a, letting a, a untenable situation get even more untenable, right?

I mean, the fundamental problem with open borders is this, you can either have open borders or you can have a welfare state. You cannot have both. Right. Right. And if we're not willing to make these decisions, and this was really kind of a scale problem because I was, you know, I'm living in California for 30 years. And when I moved to California in 1988, there was illegal immigrants everywhere and nobody

thought it was a problem. It was not a problem. Nobody crossed the border four in the morning to sleep in the bus station. They were all working. Over time that like a lot of things, a lot of things you can ignore gets very bad and starts to immediately... If you're a black man, black American citizen between the ages of something and something else, probably at this point now almost retired, you can genuinely quantify the harm that illegal immigration or total lack of border enforcement has had on that particular population.

That's, like, you can't even argue that. So that is just absolute economic truth, right? And so now we have to figure out a way to sort of build out of that without losing our sense of due process, right? It's very dangerous because you don't really want to go, you don't really want to cut those corners. The smartest thing for us to do is to focus less on deportation and focus more on border enforcement and immediate deportation. So get those things done. So start like, I mean, obviously it's like low hanging fruit, start the emergency stuff first and then do the deportation stuff. And that's like, I mean, it's definitely a priority, but it's not number one. It's got

to be number five. Well, now here's an interesting figure that you may have heard. Barack Obama, during his two terms, deported 3 million people. Yeah. Now, our immigration friends like Mike Corian like to point out that those numbers are kind of phony because they were counting as deportations people they apprehended at the border and turned back. Ah, but point number one there is, at least the Obama administration intercepted people and turned them back, and the Biden administration did none of that.

And what Trump has proven is that if you're determined, it's actually pretty easy to secure the border. I mean, the numbers have fallen to an infinitesimally small level, smallest in 40 or 50 years, I think. And now maybe some of that is, and here I don't wanna deprecate it, is maybe they've actually made people afraid

to cross the border. That's not entirely a bad thing in my mind, even though it sounds kind of ugly, perhaps. I think also some of these deportations, because there's so many people who I think could be eligible legitimately to be deported, the numbers are too large to actually do it as a practical matter. So now we're getting back to, you know, Mitt Romney is the one who used that phrase that cost him dearly, self-deportation.

And there are lots of anecdotes of people who are leaving on their own because they don't want to be swept up and sent to a prison in El Salvador or any other place, right? So, I don't know, I want to let this play out. I give Trump the benefit of the doubt on this even though they're going to make mistakes, just as law enforcement does always on everything. And by the way, I mean, you know, again, I'm a bit of a cynic, but getting the Democrats to defend a guy who pretty much looked like he was an MS-13 gang And by the way, I mean, you know, again, I'm a bit of a cynic, but getting the Democrats to defend a guy who pretty much looked like he was an MS-13 gang member and right. I mean, what a work of political genius that is.

Yeah. I mean, like the Me Too movement must be twisting itself into pretzels because that is, he's not a, he's definitely a me too violator. I'm a down the line squish, not a squish, but down the line completely uncreative thinker. I get my immigration advice from Mark Rekorian. He was like, here's your apps. On the podcast recently. Right.

And his argument seems to me to be right, which is that, okay, the deportations are crazily hard and incredibly impossible to scale. That's a self-deportation one and you enforce that on the e-verify side. If you can't get a job here, then you go home. Yeah. It's not going to be everybody, but it's going to be, it's going to reduce a huge number of people you have to. And then you just, you, and you have border security and that sent that, that's not the way the problem is getting worse. And then the organism kind of digests and ejects and then processes the people who are left. And I think that is a doable solution, an actual solution.

It just doesn't sound very good. Yeah. So now here's an interesting question that's directed to me, an actual solution. It just doesn't sound very good. Yeah. So now here's an interesting question that's directed to me, Rob, but I'll bet you have some insight and thoughts on this since you lived in Venice for such a long time. It's from Sandra Blondie Bright in North Carolina. And she says, you know, we're here in North Carolina.

We're trying to get back to normal after the hurricane several months ago blew through. And there's lots of great volunteer efforts going on. I've heard all that. I think there's a lot of social capital in that part of North Carolina. The question is, is what type of things have you seen or heard about rebuilding out here

in the LA area after the fires? And now it's maybe relevant that I'm actually coming to you this morning as we're recording from Malibu. It's graduation day for the School of Public Policy where I'm a faculty member now. And so I wait so you're are you that's Pepperdine right? Yes that's Pepperdine correct. So this is your office at Pepperdine we're looking at? Yes it is yeah I just I

don't have shelves are not full of books but it's brand new for me so but the point is I'm a lion. Lousy office I gotta say I don't want to interrupt you but it's how lousy. Well I have a nice view of the mountains out my window so you're looking at so you got a view. So like I'm saying, Pepperdine has got to be the most gorgeously situated university in the world. Oh, it's ridiculous. I joke it's like teaching at Club Med and I always ask the Dean, please don't give me

a classroom with windows out on the ocean because then I'll be competing with the ocean as well as all the kids' smartphones, right? But look, I'm only a mile north of where Highway 1, Pacific Coast Highway, is closed to general traffic because of all the still the excavation work or the demolition work, which is going to take forever because a lot of those houses when they burn down, you might have some of the oldest bestest sort of lead paint or this and that. And plus just the fire creates lots of toxic residue and it's going very slowly.

What I've heard is that I think the city of LA, it may be a little more now, but as of a week or two ago, they'd only issued four, four, one, two, three, four, four building permits for rebuilding of houses that burned down, which is pathetic. I mean, they keep saying, oh, we're going to, you know fast-track the process. Well, it's really not happening And as for volunteer efforts, good luck I don't think they will let anybody in who wants to volunteer to clear out lots and I know two people who lost their Homes at least one in Pacific Palisades and one in Pasadena and you must know some people Rob Yeah from your long time so many people in your industry were there in Pacific Palisades and yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I mean, I actually have not. I only know one anecdote, which is

decide, you know, don't, it's not a data point, but I know, and I don't know this person personally, but I heard the story was on a crew, a member of the crew, a usual member crew called below the line there in the budget. There was he, I think he was a focus puller. He had a job, a member of the crew, a usual member crew called below the line there in the budget. There was, I think he was some focus puller. He had a job, right? Was on movie crews and lived in a part of town called Mar Vista, which is, you know, it's a nice part of town, but it's like, it's not fancy. And had a house there.

He bought a house with his family, like in the late seventies, early eighties. And he was going to lose the house because there's no work in LA and there's been no work in that, in what he does. And so he was thinking that I'm going to lose his house. We're probably going to lose the house and leave. Um, and then the fires happened and, um, somebody offered to rent his house. Somebody from the Pacific policy, it's offered to rent his house in Marvista. Um, so there's always, you know, and apparently he's filled with guilt about this because,

you know, it's like, I get to know I've saved my house, I get to rent it out at a very high price and I get to, you know, like he and his wife, I think are moving just out of town somewhere for, for now. Anyway, they're almost retired. I should, I feel guilty, but it saved my life. So I don't know, make it that way you will. Yeah. Doesn't really answer the question, but.

Right. Well, now I do have a show business question for you from Gary McVeigh. Oh, Gary. Yeah, and he says, well, he points out that, you know, you started out in the TV and film business, and in those days, film was art and TV was furniture. Is that one of your phrases? It's quotation marks.

No, that is one of his phrases. That is very much a Gary McVay phrase. Oh, okay. Well, he says it all changed radically and today it's prestige TV is on the top of the heap artistically over theatrical films or as his phrase, I guess, is TV is hot, movies are old. Now I've heard you talk about this a little bit on the GLOP podcast and a couple of your three martini lunches. I'll give you sort of my theory. I'll add on to what Gary asks. Is long form TV allows you to tell stories at greater leisure,

develop the characters more. I don't always like that, by the way. I think I'm with you. When someone, I'm exactly with you. When someone tells me, oh, it gets good at episode five. I'm out. Say I'm not even get through episode one me oh it gets good at episode 5. I'm out. Say I might even get through episode 1 right? No, this is ridiculous

But I do think there's something to that and I don't know maybe I'm not sure if the pace of production is actually Longer because you have more time to set up shots. I don't know but movies these days is gosh It must be I'm just guessing here because I've never done it. But for directors and producers, you've got the budget, you've got a schedule, expensive actors, you're, you want to get it done expeditiously. And you may do 15 takes of a scene, probably do. But the TV shows, I don't know, I, they do seem very lavishly produced. Whatever I see in a rerun from a show from even the 80s, I'm just kind of amazed. It's so cheap. Oh yeah.

Right? I mean, you know, an old Magnum PI rerun, I just laugh and giggle at it. How bad it is. In the 70s, you know, the 70s cop shows, if you watch them, pretty much every episode there's boom shadow. Yeah. And somebody goes, ah, I got some boom shadow in that, meaning when the boom mic comes in between the lights and you can kind of see

it, the shadow, and then the answer is like, that's fine. Everything has gotten easier. So everything is easier to shoot. All movies are easier. Everything's easier. They used to be, you know, you used to have like cable pullers and people like in TV, if you watch live TV, especially shows like Today Show or the Shining Library and those things in New York City, the number of people they had to employ just to carry cable around. And then there's like 20 years where they didn't carry those people. There was no cable to carry, but you still had to hire those people because the union

rules were such so that every one of these sets you'd find there was a room with a table and donuts and just guys sitting around because you couldn't fire them, but they had nothing to do. Um, a lot of that is, I mean, so it's gotten simpler. But the thing is, I would say that, um, and I would say this, you know, Gary is a film historian at film buff. He's like ran the American cinema foundation. Uh, that's how I've known it for years. And I, you know, here's the bad news for Gary. It's that everything is TV. It isn't that one is, one has moved up in prestige and the other's dropped.

There isn't the other one. There are movies that have a theatrical release for weirdos the way they still press vinyl, but it's all TV and that is because inexorably for some reason, the screen wants to get closer to the customer. So the screen was first it was downtown in the big downtown movie theater and then the screen moved to the suburbs and then the screen moved to your pocket and I don't think that's necessarily an improvement, but I think it's a movement. Well, all right now it does strike me that there are still a few Movies or directors who manage to produce movies that you really want to see in the theater So you think of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer?

You really wanted to see that in a big theater the The Top Gun 2 movie, I think, same thing. No, totally. And then, of course, the big hit right now is the Minecraft movie, which is just torn up the box office, right? That seemed kind of obvious to me that that might be a hit. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. But it looks like it's still possible. And is that replicable or are those one-offs, you think? I think that they, well, the irony is that they are one-offs, I think. But show business has always been about one-offs.

It's only recently that we believe that, oh no, everything should be a franchise and it should be the Marvel cinematic universe. That's just completely bananas for most people in show business for almost a hundred years. You had to come up with a story and make a movie. So I think that could return because it's still kind of fun to go to the movies, but you've got to give me a reason to go that isn't... But I would just also say that the TV shows that are serialized that seem to be working are the ones that are kind of remind you of old fashioned TV or old fashioned movies. Reacher. I don't

know if anybody watches Reacher. Right. Yeah. You know, it's a huge hit for Amazon. Right. You watch that show and it's like, it is super, super low rent. That show is cheap. I mean, I'm watching that show and I'm thinking, I have seen that car before, that set before. You guys rented a house and you're shooting, you're shooting out the house, like all the scenes of the house and and there's no extras.

The town square is always empty for no reason. It shouldn't be, you know, like, and they just don't spend any money, but it works, it's fine. You don't need that much money. All right, so I have a general question for the Ricochet podcast, and then I've got a couple of exit questions for you, Rob. So, Stad asks, have you thought about putting

together an activity book titled, Where's Peter? Where are you, Peter? Peter is taking a break and I think he's going to return in triumph. But he might also be doing, I think he's doing some writing too. So I mean, and also I feel like, you know, look, we love doing this and I love doing it when I can. As you know, I'm a humble cleric now so I don't have much time between my devotionals. But you know, refreshing the voices in the format is always a good thing. It's always a good thing. Yeah, it's been fun to do, I have to say. So, all right.

You're natural. Well, it's nice of you to say. But look, I'm similar to you. I'm a professional talker. I've been doing this for a long time, right? It comes from Professor Itis and so forth. Yeah. All right.

So, let's do this. I'm going to sort of combine a few different questions into this one, which is you have just finished or in the process of finishing right now your first year there at seminary. How long is the whole process? Is it three years? Two years? Three years? Three. Okay. Three years, yeah. Right. And do you have one or two takeaways or main takeaways or and or surprises from your first year? The surprises I find from my classmates and colleagues who come from non-denominational traditions, you know more kind of costal some of them but even more non-denominational and how more pedacostal some of them, but even more, not a non-initial, and how fun and funny they are and how smart they are and how passionate they are about renewing their faith and their

church and learning from other people. And I find that really, really refreshing and their lack of pretense, which is something that we in the sort of Anglican cohort have to remind ourselves because Episcopalians and Anglicans tend to be super pompous and tweet and precious about everything. And it's nice to be around young people who are filled with faith but are not that. That's been really kind of glorious. The second thing you discover, I mean, you know, it's a funny thing. I don't know why I should know this as a conservative, but you know, St. Augustine, St. Augustine, he was really good. Yep. Yeah, he was really good. Like that's really good stuff.

And if you read it, you're like, oh man, damn, that's really good. And then something a professor said early on in the semester in our New Testament class, he's a wonderful, wonderful writer, wonderful, wonderful guy, said, you know, the people who translated the Bible from the Greek, we're not idiots. So when you go and you do a word study, you don't expect to discover something or don't start everything with like, you know, actually it's the more accurate translation from the Hebrew or the Greek is this. It's like, the people have been doing this for a thousand years. So have a little respect for the people. Assume for a minute that the reason it's lasted a thousand years, the reason that word has lasted a thousand years is because it's the right word.

Um, it may not be, but don't start from the premise of like, I'm going to find out where you guys are wrong because you're just going to waste your time and look like an idiot. And I thought, oh yeah, that's a very good point. That is not something that we say to people in when they're, um, beginning inquiry and say something, we kind of say, you know, think anew, but partly he's like, oh, you think anew, but don't, don't say dumb stuff about Greek because people have been doing this for a long time.

Those old words have a lot of staying power. It's something you just said, it strikes a chord with me. You actually have some people there from a Pentecostal background? Oh yeah, well Princeton has like a very, very broad appeal. So there's interesting, they you know, the Anglicans and there's some Anglo-Catholics and then there's some Roman Catholics and some Pentecostals and some non-denominationalists and there's some, it's lousy of the Presbyterians because the Presbyterians started it. But yeah, you have this kind of cacophonous group of students. Well, in a certain way, that doesn't surprise me, especially if, and I'm going to run an

idea by you and see if you detect this at seminary also, but I belong, my own experience at graduate school a long time ago now, but also from when I talked to faculty and meet other graduate students is conservative graduate students, let me put this way, I had liberal professors who said they loved having conservative students in the class, not for a gratuitous argument, but because the conservatives took the material more seriously. They didn't have the mentality, do we have to memorize this because it's going to be on the test? No, our view was always like, why did Madison say that? What's his reasoning? Maybe it's right. And a lot of professors,

even if they were, you know, New Deal liberals in my case, they liked that disposition among students. And I am guessing that something similar happens at seminary. You might have, you know, non-denominational people, Pentecostals, people from a culturally more conservative background than you'd think of for Ivy League, who bring to the seminary a seriousness about the subject matter and not a modern historicist condescension. Is that a reasonable proposition? I think that's true. I think they probably like anybody in these theological institutions, Harvard Yale, Princeton, Virginia, Duke, they're liberal. But there is this purposefulness

of the study, the idea that it's kind of a weird elevated trade school, right? I mean, you're supposed to be doing it. Right. And you're encouraged to share that in class. Absolutely. Pretty much every exam I've ever taken or every paper I've written has had a section that says, please think about these issues and apply them to what you think they would apply to in the ministry, future ministry. And so I think that part of that purposefulness, you just don't have a time or inclination to get too weird with it, or to be incendiary, or to scream at somebody

in a class who disagrees with you politically, because we're here for a higher purpose and that purpose isn't to tear down, it's to sort of figure out where to go next. So I suspect it's one of the reasons why the politics that are very liberal on the campus, which I enjoy, these are all smart people, I enjoy talking to them, they don't seem as furious as they seem other places. They don't seem as furious as they seem other places. They don't seem as divisive. Yeah, yeah. So all right, let's get out with this, Rob.

So you, one takeaway here is St. Augustine, he was a really smart guy. Turns out he was good. Yeah. Yeah. So next year we'll want to find out if you proceed on to the other St. Thomas Aquinas, but also Duns Scotus and Selm. I'll bet that'll be the... BF Yeah, I've done some of that before. It's not entirely new, yeah.

CB Yeah. Right. Well, that'll be fun to take up with you next year. BF Yeah. CB But for now, we want to thank all of our readers for sending in questions. We want to thank Bamboo HR for sponsoring the Ricochet Podcast. Please go to Apple, Spotify, whatever place you source your podcasts and give us a five star review. And we'll look forward to seeing you in the comments at Ricochet. Is it four or 5.0 now? I've lost track of what we're up to. But anyway, hope to see you again soon, Rob.

Yeah, this is fun. Let's do it again. Okay. Bye bye, everybody.