The Ricochet Podcast - Summer of Love

Episode Date: August 26, 2017

This week, a special edition of the Ricochet Podcast. Peter Robinson and Rob Long (Lileks is cruising the Atlantic) are joined by The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson and the great P.J. O’Rourke. You’ll definitely want to check out P.J.’s new venture AmercianConsequences.com. As you would expect, this show a wide ranging ramble through the culture, but past and present, including but no limited... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. This is the Ricochet Podcast. I'm Rob Long, along with Peter Robinson. Our guests today are Andy Ferguson and P.J. O'Rourke, so let's get started.

Bye-bye. Welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. This is number 366. I'm Rob Long calling in from New York City. On the line with me, as always, is Peter Robinson in Palo Alto. Peter, how are you? I'm very well. Actually, I'm not sure how I am.

My wife, after raising five children, joined... My wife has joined CrossFit, and she's at a CrossFit competition today. She's working out all the time. The good news there is they come home fit. The bad news is that they come home cross. True. She came home. I said, sweetheart, where's dinner?

She picked me up and threw me across the room. The good news is she comes home, I think. That's the good news. So you kind of heard some laughter in the background and a few witticisms. I better introduce our guests today. We are very lucky to have on at the same time, which will either be matter, antimatter, too much laughter, our old friend Andrew Ferguson, Andy Ferguson. How are you doing, Andy?

Are you down in the swamp? I am in the swamp, up to my neck in alligators. We got to join them. Yeah, I'm here in Arlington, Virginia. And also joining us, old friend PJ O'Rourke. PJ, how are you? Where are you? Are you in New Hampshire? I'm fine. I am up in New Hampshire, as far away from those

alligators. Those alligators wouldn't stand much of a chance up here. They'd be shivering. They'd shiver to death. The flinty New Hampshire Yankee would... Are there any? Are there still flinty New Hampshire Yankees? There's

about one left, I think. The rest of them are all at yoga class. Yeah, it's a decline of everything. It's too bad. Nothing ever got great. And we are brought to you by fine people at LendingTree. Rates always go up and down, but regardless of what is happening with the rates, you can always get the right offer when you go to LendingTree.com.

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If I had read that copy 10 years ago, that would have been, it would have been nonsensical. I mean, I kind of read it in a nonsensical way, but that's my fault. But it would have been texture? If I had said texture, you can subscribe to all these magazines on your tablet. Would we have known what that meant? Would we have known it? Yeah, I'm asking you, and I'm asking anybody who wants to answer. Peter, feel free to jump right in.

The answer is obviously not, but what I would like to know is P.G. O'Rourke, who within his very person, so to speak, he inhabits the whole arc of magazine journalism from National Lampoon to American Consequences, is the ability to read and write

and produce magazines online an advance in the art form, PJ? Well, it's a holding action at any rate. I mean, you can still do an actual magazine on the web. I mean, we'll never return to the golden era of, like, the great big Esquire of the 1960s. There just isn't a physical budget for that.

But back to the original question, the whole idea of, so who was it that played second base for the Pirates in the 50s? Look at your phone. The whole idea of

look at your phone. What would that have meant just a short time ago you know standing look go you know we've been you know go jump in the lake or take a powder i i will look at your phone i once thought that the reason that we as a as a as a culture seems so divided by anger and rage over these giant things is because we no longer argue over the little things which you had to look up, which was laborious. The next time I'm passing a library, I've got to pull in there and look up

that number. Now it's all on your phone so we've kind of dispensed with all the little things we used to yell about. It's ruined all the great bar arguments. Right. You know, I mean, first place, too many people have quit drinking, so that kind of ruined the bar. Too many bars

have, you know, now become tapas joints or coffee shops. But the real decline in American culture is the bar argument, which is where everybody once got their knowledge and opinions, and now there's always some jerk that jumps right in and says,

oh, look that up. Right. Let me look at my phone. Yeah, well, you know, one of the reasons. No, no, go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, I was saying we were talking about the phones. So I was saying what the phone's done for me in my own experiences, I've just stopped learning things.

I've just stopped to even try and register information. If I'm, like, reading something or, you know, and it says Maria of Romania was born in 1732, I don't even bother to try and remember that because I know all I have to do is just look at my phone. Oh, I totally agree. My research skills have degenerated so badly due to the Internet that I now have to sing the ABC song from kindergarten in order to look anything up in the dictionary. I don't even know what age comes before. Just to outsource your entire intelligence, or at least that part of it,

what's left of time that actually stores information, because it's all sort of... The theory there was that you would outsource all that stuff, which would give yourself time and space and extra mental energy to think bigger thoughts yeah or look at porn yeah well or tweet which is part of the same thing i suppose slightly semi-serious question here i had this is peter talking as you know it's pj will remember dimly andy and rob know this i live and work near stanford university and i found myself in a conversation with a very eminent Stanford physicist the other day, and he was talking about artificial intelligence. And he had studied the results of the computer that plays the game of Go, and a couple of years ago defeated a champion in this complicated game of Go.

And he said, it's not the defeat of the champion that's so fascinating. What's so fascinating is we have records on strategies for go going back centuries it's a very well documented old chinese game and the computer is now developing strategies that no human being has ever conceived of before it's an entirely new kind of knowledge and he concluded by saying and this is a very close paraphrase, if you define the problem well enough, there is almost nothing that a human being can do better than a machine. Okay, I beg to differ. I beg to differ on a couple counts. hobby job is as an automotive journalist. And so I was just down at MIT for a meeting of the New England Motor Journalists Association, and we were getting lectured on self-driving cars. And, you know, somebody said, well, you know, this is a long presentation.

I was like, really, how amazing these things are. And somebody said, well, especially here in New England, when we get these horrible snowstorms, and the MIT guy stopped, and he said, that's what they can't do. That is when things are completely unpredictable. This is your self-driving car. At the moment, you want it to self-drive most. Blinding rainstorm, hurricane winds, horrible blizzard,

that's when it will come apart on you. And I would take as a more sort of day-to-day example, getting married. Now, there's this period when you're getting married where you're planning a marriage, okay? And your wife to be, theto-be, will come to you continually with questions like, should we have red flowers on the table at the reception or should we have blue flowers? Now, there is no algorithm. You have to look into her eyes, figure out what she has already decided, and affirm that confirmation. A logical computer would say whatever you want, dear.

That is the wrong answer. And it starts with the flowers on the table. It goes to the cocktail napkins. It's like what song should the band play? There will be thousands of these between your proposal and the actual wedding ceremony. And every one is a landmine. So tell me the computer that could walk through that. Driving in snow and lying to women.

At least American males are still good for that much. That's right. You can have your game of goal. For now. All right. Joke is over. Let's talk about politics. Yesterday, in the middle of a probably, I think,

it's getting redundant now to say a couple of bad political weeks for Donald Trump, President Donald Trump. But let's say it again. It's a couple of bad political weeks for President Donald Trump. But in the middle of that, which I think is the middle or maybe it's at the end, he pardoned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It's Arpaio, right? That's how you pronounce it. Arpaio, Arpaio. He pardoned the sheriff who had been suffering under a contempt of court order and punishment, and everyone went crazy. Smart move or dumb move? I'll start. I think it might be, it's the wrong thing to do, but I think it was a smart

political move because now we're talking about that instead of talking about Nazis. And anytime we're not talking about Nazis and Donald Trump, it's a good, it's a one step up for him. So what do you think? If you separate it between politics and just the sheer rightness or wrongness of it,

Peter, where do you land on that? Rob, I am numb. I sort of like, look, I haven't read a single full article on Sheriff Joe Arpaio because I got sick of him about a decade ago, to be perfectly honest. My instinctive feeling about it is purely personal. I sort of like the act of defiance that Arpaio has engaged in for this decades and a half that he's been famous, and frankly, that the President of the United States just engaged in in pardoning the guy. It seems to me they're putting their thumb in the eye of

people who need a thumb in their eye, but that's nothing other than a visceral reaction. PJ and Andy will now tell us what we should think. Let me look at my phone real quick here. I'm with Rob. I think it's probably, I mean, the guy always struck me as a real creep. Which person are you referring to? Oh, good point. Our pile. Cast a wide net, Andy. Yeah. Which person are you referring to? Oh, good point. Arpaio.

Castle-wide net, Andy. And so it's probably not a good move. It's not a good move to pardon creeps is the general rule. But, you know, politically, I hate to use the word base, but I'm going to use the word base. Trump has this base of like, you know, I don't know, 68 people or something, and he keeps trying to do things that will make them happy, which is what all the Charlottesville stuff is about, and this will make them happy again.

And the problem is that he keeps making the base happy. He infuriates everybody else. Well, the problem with Joe there is he's an actual bad guy. It's not just his attitude about the illegal immigrants. If you were, say, to give an example from the Reagan era, my friend Willie Von Robb was Commissioner of Customs back then, and Willie said any vessel that comes into the United States, by air, by sea, by land, and comes under the authority of the customs saying, is going to be confiscated if any amount of illegal drug is found on it. And this means a roach in the scuppers of the richest guy in the world's yacht

that he had nothing to do with, that one of his teenage crew members smoked at the Taft Rail in the middle of the night. And people, that was a big deal at the time. I mean, Willie got a lot of heat for this. And Willie said, look, I don't care if drugs are legal or illegal. It doesn't matter to me a bit. I feel I'm kind of a libertarian. I feel I'm not even sure that marijuana should be illegal. But that's the law, and you have entrusted the enforcement of the law to me.

It either is the law or it isn't the law. If that were Joe, fine. But he turns out to be like a brutal, sadistic, power-hungry, fat slob who shouldn't be pardoned, who should probably be shot after he's in due course of law or whatever means of execution they use out there. And so, you know, you can't, even if you are satisfying your base, you can't be right by being that wrong.

You know, this is not like a situation of choosing the lesser evil, of allying with Stalin, even though you don't want to, or if indeed Franklin Roosevelt didn't want to, not so sure. But Churchill sure didn't.

No, this is like doing a bad thing concerning a bad person, plus it brings the Nazis back, because old Joe ain't far off from being that kind of person. And it just reaffirms all the Nazi haters. And frankly, who doesn't hate Nazis? Well, apparently there are a lot of people who don't. I guess my question

is sort of more, was this a, I mean, obviously part of it was the president is genuinely fond of the guy, generally supportive of his actions, but is part of it can can part of it be this idea that you got to do something for your base after i mean you had a week of nazis pro nazi stuff and then you had a very very short 48 hour discussion of enlarging the afghanistan war which is something that he ran against and something that he's been talking about being against more consistently than any other the other issues for years,

you know, an about-face of that, and then has to do something for his base to remind them that he hasn't gone all soft. I mean, is that, am I looking, am I trying to see too many political moves here, or is this just kind of the... For sure, for sure, for sure. Do you really think there's anybody in that White House who's engaging in that kind of close caliber calculations? I don't know. Yeah, I think there's a on a strictly on a gut instinct. And I may be too high in the intestinal tract when I'm calling it a gut instinct. Andy, you're down there in the swamp.

You're a D.C. insider going to Georgetown cocktail parties. Thank you so much. Is there anything to that? Put it this way. Is there anyone in that White House that you could attribute this kind of political calculation to? No, absolutely not. Nobody would think of it like that. It's one of those things that smells to me like it came right from Trump, and Trump probably didn't ask anybody about it. You know, he was sort of teasing the crowd in Phoenix when he gave that ridiculous rally-type,

you know, psychotic 70-minute ramble. And, you know, he said, I'm not going to do anything today, but he's going to be okay. He's going to be okay. And I can just imagine the thrill that went through Donald Trump's body when he heard all these people screaming in joy that Joe was going to get off. And so he just did it, you know? The thing about him is, you say gut instinct. I think that's right.

But his gut instinct is to be against whatever the establishment, as he defines it, is for. And he's for whatever they're against. And by the way, that's what I am not even, this does not rise to the level of argument. I'm just telling you that at the level of gut instinct, I'm with that. You know, I was just thinking, as Andy was saying that, that's a temptation that's so easy to give in to that one can... I mean, we're looking for things to hold against Trump, and there are plenty of them. The instinct to be against everything that the liberal establishment is for and for everything they're against is something that takes me about a drink and a half before I give in to it.

What's the half for? is something that takes me about a drink and a half before I give it a look. Really? What's the half for? Exactly. Go ahead, Andy. You were going to say something. No, I was just going to say he doesn't drink. I know. I know.

That's why he has no excuse. Well, there's a tradition on these podcasts for whoever the nominal host is to do some kind of elaborate segue into a commercial, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to tell you that depending on where you get your mortgage, you could save $20,000 or more, but 80% of the people get only one mortgage offer. So if you just go to your bank, the chances are you're getting taken. LendingTree.com does not want that to happen. The average LendingTree customer can save $20,000 worth of life with their loan. That's the average savings. So whether you're looking for a new mortgage to refinance or a home equity loan,

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That's LendingTree.com slash Ricochet. That's LendingTree.com slash Ricochet. And I have to say this stuff, LendingTree.com slash Ricochet. LendingTree, LLC, NMLS number 1136, terms and conditions apply. And I've always loved that part of the commercials. Remember FDIC? Some miles may vary. All that really fast stuff at the end.

My favorite one was the one, an ad they had for agoraphobic cure, and they had to say all the side effects really quickly, and one of them was frequent bowel movements and the inability to control them, which seemed to me to be, stay in, stay inside, don't go out.

It defeats the purpose. I want to go out. I'm no longer afraid of going out, but inside, don't go out it defeats the purpose, I want to go out I'm no longer afraid of going out but I really can't speaking of that you guys, you're here I want to talk a little bit about the Summer of Love because I think

gosh grandpa, what happened in Summer of Love, but also before we do, I want to talk a little bit about AmericanConsequences.com, which is a project you both are working on, and under the ruse of talking about it, we have brought you here today.

So, what on earth is it, Andy? I think PJ's the one to answer that, since he's the big boss. He says it's his editor-in-chief under his name. So you have to know. All right. EIC, PGR Work, what on earth is it?

Okay, well, let me back up for a moment and say that for a couple of years now, I've been writing an investment for an investment newsletter. Now, I'm not giving investment advice because the best investment I made lately was I took my wife out for dinner a couple of months ago. And this morning while I was on my way to the dry cleaner, I found a $20 bill in the pocket of that suit jacket. And that is my investment expertise. Wow. Right there. But no, I would do, I've been doing a column for, I'd say Stansberry Research is the name of the overall organization.

They've got all sorts of newsletters for investors, everything from like pretty simple stuff, you know, to buy golden berry in your lawn. But too much more sophisticated stuff having to do with puts and calls and options and things. I don't understand any of it, actually. But it's a good, solid set of investment newsletters. And for their sort of lead newsletter, the Stansberry Digest,

I've been doing a column about political effects on the economy and stuff, bringing a touch of humor to the grim world of money, et cetera. And so they said to me at Stansberry, they said, well, we've got all this high-power analysis, all these guys and girls who work for us, who do all this great stuff, but their stuff just shows up much of it anonymously in the newsletter as a how-to, do-it-yourself. I mean, these are the kinds of stocks you should buy. These are the kinds of bonds you shouldn't buy, so on and so forth. Good, practical, solid, rather conservative advice.

And yet they're thinking much deeper thoughts, and we'd like a venue to get them out there. And so they said, let's try and do a web magazine, and we'll make you editor. And that's where American consequences come from. It's mostly to do with economic stuff, but it's big-picture economic stuff. What are central banks up to? What's Bitcoin, and what's it good for, and what to stay away from. It doesn't have like a really set policy. It's nonpolitical, or not completely, but basically it's libertarian. It's small-L libertarian look at politics and economics, and this is where Andy comes in, and me too,

is we're doing it with a sense of humor, especially a sense of humor in the larger definition of humor, which is to stand back from things and see things as they actually are, not take life too seriously. Yeah, I can give a good example of that, actually. Since slug rolling is one of my specialties, I decided I'd write a little plug for American Consequences in the scrapbook section of the Weekly Standard, so I pointed out that this is the first magazine that PJ has edited since he left the National Lampoon a long time ago.

And so I said, but there's a difference where, as the Lampoon specialized in sex jokes and profane cartoons and pictures of topless women, American consequences, deals in business, finance, economics. And then I said something like, no topless women so far. And so our ever-diligent fact checker comes to me and says, we have to cut that line. I said, why? Well, they actually have had topless woman in there already. It wasn't

really a topless woman. It was a pole dancer in silhouette, and there was a very good reason for that, because we had a wonderful story that a guy out in Las Vegas that works

for the paper out in Las Vegas did about a strip joint that has created its own Bitcoin currency. Wow. And stick that in the panties. Here, honey, it's a blockchain. By the way, you just provided another beautiful example of something a computer couldn't do.

It wasn't a topless woman, dear. It was just a pole dancer in silhouette. And boy, do we get an angry woman subscriber letter that I had to base myself answering and saying. Boys, and I do think of you still as boys, PJ and Andy. I guess that shows how long we know each other but i'm just wondering about the title here is there something about the arc of your careers here uh you both uh you both these uh prancing impish in your in the original phases of your career frankly i still think of you that way, National Lampoon. The whole point of National Lampoon was to defy consequences, and now we have American

consequences. Is this, is this, there's so many things that are catching up with you. Yes, yeah, too true. But it also takes me back as a, back in the 60s, I was the editor of an underground newspaper in Baltimore. And I guess I've come full circle because actually Stansbury Research is in Baltimore also. But it was an underground newspaper named Harry. And not H-A-I-R-Y either. H-A-R-R-Y.

They couldn't figure out, the people who founded it couldn't figure out what to name it, and they had a toddler in the house from some hippie girl's mistake during the Summer of Love, and he was named Harry. No, his grandfather was named Harry, and he was going through a stage where he was calling everything Harry, so they asked the two-year-old, in the spirit of the 1960s, they asked the two-year-old what to call the newspaper, and he said, Harry. And so Harry it was. And meanwhile, I had a friend who was also editing another underground newspaper, and his newspaper was called the Chesapeake Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts.

And I said to my friend Dennis, I said, Dennis, that is the most L7, the most Squaresville. I mean, come on, you know, man, what's with the name of your, and Dennis said, you know, 40 years from now, you'll have been the editor of Harry and I will have been the editor of the Chesapeake Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts. Hey, PJ and Andy, I just want to make one note here. I have the magazine up on my computer screen at this moment. You have so far neglected one of the critical facts about this thing. It's free!

It's not behind a paper. Oh, yeah. I was facts about this thing. It's free. It's not behind a paper. Oh, yeah. I was going to say that. It's fascinating. It's new and free. It's a real magazine. It's laid out beautifully. And the writing, if you have any interest in economics, skip the economics.

Just go for PJ and Andy. It's a wonderful thing, and it's free. No paywall to mess with. Yeah, we've got a terrific terrific art director named erica wood and she just uh has made that it started out a little punky looking and um she she just um yeah really i mean but yeah i mean it's fun i mean when you the the the thing about years ago i, I realized, I have this fascination with economics because I started out

as, you know, after the Lampu and I was not a foreign correspondent for a long time. And I began to realize that there was

a really big economic element in all these foreign wars and so on that I was covering. And it dawned on me that,

ooh, there must be a very big economic element to our politics back here in the United States. And gosh, there is. You know, it's about to knock me over with a feather. I'm sorry. I was an English major.

Duh. And so I became interested in economics, and I consider it like, you know, I mean, the getting and spending of stuff is what we spend most of our time doing, and it's more interesting than we realize and more fun to write about than I had thought it would be. Well, since you mentioned it, you brought it up, let's talk about materialism, and let's talk about the last big social movement against materialism, I think, maybe, I could be wrong, the Summer of Love. Andy Ferguson's got a terrific cover story piece in Weekly Standard this week about the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

So that already clears up one thing, because most people, when they think of San Francisco in the 60s, they put it later in their head. I mean, it's like 68, 69, but actually it was 67. And sort of people thought about it as the end of the 60s, the 67. And now they're celebrating in San Francisco, turning it into commerce. That sounds like progress, Andy.

Yeah, it's mostly a creation of the marketers and the tourist bureau in San Francisco. Although, I've got to say, when you talk to people out there, everybody has a really, really positive view of the Summer of Love, and they kind of fell for the marketings uh... themselves and it's uh... you know the only idea of the here we go with populous women again but you know process women with flowers in their dancing through golden gate park and that kind of stuff but actually when you go back good and you read it is really pretty kind of

uh... appalling what was what was going on in Haight-Ashbury and the whole hippie movement there. But, Andy, was it appalling to you at the time? You weren't there in 68, but you were there not... I wasn't born then, Peter. No, of course not. But you did study across the bay at Cal Berkeley, and there were still plenty of after effects. The afterglow, if you want to put a positive spin on it, of the Summer of Love was still taking place across the he pointed out that decades don't really start on the zero year.

Like the 60s really started with the death of Kennedy and the arrival of the Beatles, and then it kind of ended with Watergate. And so when I was old enough to enjoy all the advantages of the summer of love, it was already deep into the 70s. But it was essentially the 60s. So it did last a long time. Well, as I say, San Francisco never really stopped. But it did stop, don't you think?

And what you write about it in the piece, it did stop in San Francisco in sort of a remarkable way. Now it's only kind of a pose. San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the country. I think its real estate values and rents are higher than Manhattan. Right, right. It did. I mean, what's remarkable, I think, is how compressed that time is.

From 1967 to, I mean, 13 years later, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. 13 years is nothing. Well, speaking of somebody who actually was there, he wasn't in San Francisco. We were waiting for you to elbow your way into this one. Yeah, I know. I mean, Grandpa here, serious Grandpa. I mean, I'll be 70 this year. I was right in the thick of it, and it was horrible. It was absolutely horrible.

I didn't know that at the time because violence and squalor and immorality and so on are, you know, they're catnip to an 18-year-old. But it turned ugly so fast, almost overnight. I mean, there was like a little sort of glimpse of happy times with Peter, Paul, and Mary, I mean, you know, how quickly Altamont happened was the real. Altamont was four months after Woodstock, which is a really, that's a really good time. Yeah, yeah, so the 60s lasted four months. Yeah. Yeah, and I'll tell you what scared me out of the hippy-dippy life was the weather underground.

When they blew themselves up in the Rich Kids Townhouse in Greenwich Village, and what was that, Andy, 71? 70, I thought, 71, maybe. Yeah, I think it might have been 70. Hold it, hold it. Yeah, quick look at your phone. I think it might have been 70. Hold it, hold it. Yeah, quick look at your phone. Anyway, they were building bombs, and fortunately, badly.

What happened to them was I had a friend in ATF who told me that what they call that is a self-criticizing exercise. You know, I was walking that house, I forget the name of the woman, she blew herself up in that house, on 11th Street. Kathy Bodine. Kathy Bodine, yeah, between 5th and 6th on 11th Street. And I was walking past there once, and I heard someone point up to that townhouse, which is now, has a new facade on it,

and they kind of like made it sort of a 70s, it sort of spits out a little bit, and they had an architect come fix it. She looked at that house and said, you know, I really hate what they did to that house. They really ruined that old, the wonderful old Greenwich Village federal style. Little did she know. Little did she know.

Little did she know. They didn't do anything to that house. It was probably somebody on her way from a free Kathy Boudin rally that she thought, well, she blew it up. Here's a bad segue. Obviously, the 60s were a time of great

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It's all one word, thegreatcoursesplus.com, slash Ricochet. Start your free month now. Sign up at thegreatcoursesplus.com is all one word thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet start your free month now sign up at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet that's thegreatcoursesplus.com all one word slash ricochet and we thank the great courses for being a great and loyal sponsor of the ricochet podcast um but i want to pick up where we left off we could we started talking about the 60s and we segue really quickly into crime and terrorism and Andy writes about a specific group, what would you call the diggers, were they terrorists?

No, no they were just sort of anarchist, hippie, nihilist types but when you go to San Francisco there's tons of exhibits, I mean there's like six or seven different exhibits. There's at least three at the library celebrating the Summer of Love.

And the diggers come off as the heroes of the whole story. And the most famous digger is still around, a guy named Peter Coyote, who does all the voiceovers for Ken Burns' documentaries. And he's an actor. He's been in a lot of European movies and Law & Order. So talk about the mainstreaming of The Summer of Love. If you ever saw the movie Jagged Edge. Yeah, right.

He plays the prosecutor. They tried to get him to be a romantic lead for a while, but I don't think he probably ran against his leftism. He's still quite an activist. But anyway, so I started actually looking into the Diggers and reading what they were all about. And Coyote has actually quite a good memoir of his time as a Digger. And basically it was a criminal enterprise, all dressed up as kind of free love, hippie. You know, they had these things called free stores that they would open up in Haight-Ashbury.

And everything was free. And there was no manager, no customer. It was all supposed to force people to rethink the whole capitalist arrangement between customer and commodities and all that crap. And it turned out they got a lot of the free stuff by stealing it from other people and from other stores. Some say the same on Amazon. And they did the same. They were celebrated for putting on free meals every day in Golden Gate Park. And it turns out, again, they stole the food from grocery stores and stuff.

So they were trying to do away with capitalism by essentially feeding off the surplus of capitalism. They thought they were going to build a society without money. And then they realized that, you know, if you were going to build a society without money, it was going to take money. You have to actually have money to do that. That sounds like a column for the AmericanConsequences.com. But if you were, there are four old dudes on this podcast right now. And if you were a four, yeah.

I'm sorry. I guess it's bad news, Andrew Ferguson. If the four old dudes here, if we were four old dudes somehow doing a podcast in 1967, we'd probably be saying something like it's all falling apart. The country's coming apart. Everything's horrible. We have terrorist groups

that lasted three, four, four more years. People throwing bombs. Townhouses blowing up. Rich kids robbing stores and bank robberies. The Manson family. Where does it all end? It's all going to go on a deep slide.

As I said before, 11 years after the Manson family murders, Ronald Reagan was sworn in. 11 years. That's nothing. That's 2006 from today. And then 12 years later, Bill Clinton, one of those diggers.

Right, right, right. So do we take comfort from that when there are four old dudes on the podcast right now saying, man, things are looking bad bad everything's kind of crazy is there a is there a lesson a good lesson here uh i'll ask pj first since you're you were responsible for certain no no i think we got 12 years of uh you know they did we got 12 years of breathing space with uh with reagan and george hw and then it was right back to resumption of 60s values penetrating every aspect of society until we're in the hole we're in today.

You know, I think people really do forget or underestimate people who weren't there how really awful things were in the mid to late 60s. I mean, you know, we have this riot in Charlottesville, and this awful person runs over this woman, and it's all we're talking about for a week. When the Detroit riots happened, there were like 90 people killed, you know, and there were more than one of them. Every city in America was getting burned down.

You know, nothing like that is happening right now. And, you know, your point is very good. I mean, we got through that somehow. And, you know, we had a war going on where we were losing like 150 guys a week. Compare that to Afghanistan where we have, you know, 11 guys get killed in a helicopter crash. It's front page news. So, you know, we're kind of spoiled, actually. Andy, I might, so, okay, no violence in the cities aside from that horrible but small event.

Try from Chicago. Yeah, okay, and Chicago is a special, okay. Still, we take your point that the country is actually in pretty good shape by comparison, it seems, with the 60s. On the other hand, PJ just mentioned the penetration of 60s values into every nook and cranny of society what comes to my mind is charles murray's coming apart where it's been a a cliche to note to for years now to note that what was a kind of upper class affectation among kids long hair is now a blue collar thing but it's almost if you read coming apart what's happened in the non-college educated, that's the phrase I guess, America, is a total embrace of 60s values. Family breakdown is total and catastrophic.

Drug use has become so casual and accepted that now we have, now opioid overdoses is the largest cause of death in Ohio, surpassing car accidents. Largest cause of premature death in Ohio, surpassing car accidents. Largest cause of premature death in Ohio, surpassing car accidents. Is that, am I drawing a line that doesn't really exist? Or is there, the 60s are still with us and they're even worse? Well, excuse me, Grandpa. That was my walker collapsing. Yeah, that's a good point, but it's really hard to trace the lineage of all these things. Basically, what's happened, I think, what Murray is talking about is that the people he's writing about

didn't embrace the values of the 60s, they embraced the awful consequences of the values of the 60s, like not just smoking dope but actually getting addicted to opioids. I'm not sure that there's a direct line between the two. The other thing I wanted to say was in defense of 60s, is it's not only how awful things were in the general socioeconomic political sphere, you have to remember what American culture was like before the Beatles came. I mean, I say in the piece, if you really want to see why the hippie revolution was absolutely necessary. You just turn on an old Bob Hope special from 1963, or you listen to a best-selling number one album by the Ray Conniff Singers.

You know, put on some Santa Bell polyester pants. Hey, you just described it by weekend. You can get your walker put back together. I mean, the Beatles arrived and the hippies arrived and all that stuff and swept all that away. I mean, Bob Holmes... Yeah, the real motto of the 60s should have been,

America, you had it coming. You invented Wonder Bread. Therefore, we are going to destroy your culture. That's right. You know, I laughed at that little passage in your... I mean, mostly I was laughing with you, Andy. But in the Wonder Bread passage, because I spent my entire hippie existence

living on Wonder Bread, peanut butter, and jelly sandwiches. So I had to fault you on that one. Well, does Wonder Bread still exist? Does anybody know? I believe it does, yeah. Well, see, that's just showing... It's not the wonder that it used to be. It's very...

Yeah, I was going to say, it's a very DC insider thing to ask. Oh, does that Wonder Bread still exist? You may need to reconnect with the thing. And, you know, we wonder why people are angry at the elite. Yeah, you're why we have Trump, Andy Ferguson.

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And thank you to Texture for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. One more question before we wrap up our 60s post-mortem. it was sort of funny it's this sort of fun the funny part when you take out all of the uh uh the actual mayhem and robbery and murder and uh bad stuff that happened the way of looking at the 60s is this kind of like uh or certainly the summer of love hate ashbury's this kind of means you mentioned bob hope like a bob hope hippie sketch you know when he would put on a hippie wig and he'd go hey groovy manovy man. And that was kind of how American, that's sort of how the hippie movement became sort of funny.

And then we thought, oh, it's kind of funny that the hippies, there are a bunch of movies like this that's set in the 70s, the hippies sort of morphed effortlessly into disco people. And suddenly they were outside Studio 54 in their white suits. And five years before, they were hippies

with incredibly radical politics, and now what they really want to do is just dance with Liza and Halston. And then we have, coming up this weekend, next weekend, Burning Man. This week, it starts tomorrow. Starts tomorrow. Well, I didn't realize you were an expert.

We should hurry this thing up, Peter. You have to get there. Better get out my gasoline and my bick. Exactly. So Burning Man is a festival in the desert, in the Nevada desert, that seems to encompass most of the spirit of Summer of Love, or at least the ostensible spirit of it. Everything's free and everything's cooperative,

and you can kind of be yourself. A lot of drugs, psychedelic, but it's sort of contained. The idea is that everybody needs a little 1967 Summer of Love and this one is Burning Man happens once a year. Is this kind of an airsat sad little post-60s for people who didn't really want to pay the price and actually run the risk? Or is it kind of a natural thing that groups like to kind of goof off every now and then?

At least we're not making it a generational event. I mean, put it this way, Andy, if we sent you to Burning Man, would you write a lot like? I probably wouldn't come back. One of the things I saw when I was in San Francisco, I mean, this whole business of 60s nostalgia gives me the creeps for all that was good or bad about it. It's just, you know, there was a little visitor's book at one of these museum exhibits I went to see. And the day before, somebody had written in the visitor's book,

if you're nostalgic for all this, you're under 50. Because anybody who was actually there, I mean, PJ has written about this. I mean, they don't really look back on it all that fondly. I mean, even Peter Coyote, who's celebrated as this sort of ultimate hippie, finally gets around to the fact in his book that, you know, there's a lot of really gruesome stuff going on there. Hey, PJ, are you in touch with any of your friends from that era who still have those values?

I mean, is there any unreconstructed hippie somewhere in that dusty Rolodex of yours that every now and then you hear from and you're like, dude, get over it. No, I know some people who definitely stayed at the ball too long. But a surprising number of my hippie friends

turned seriously Republican as they got older. And a number of them turned into gun nuts. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I was going to say, including you. Including me, yeah. you um including me yeah what what i what i find so interesting about that is that is that nobody nobody's care nobody who was really there is carrying the torch it's only people who weren't there right who seem to be to seem to be nostalgic for those those times and um i don't know if you guys are for but there's a um series about a detective named Moses Wine,

actually written by Roger Simon, who now is a very conservative columnist and commentator. And Moses Wine was a former 60s radical who is now a private eye in L.A. in the late 70s. But still, the fact that it's only a decade seems to me to be something that I'm not quite sure I understand how so much changed in only 10 years. He is a detective and he's nostalgic for the 60s and there's a moment where he's looking at

old videotape of a civil rights rally and he is crying out of nostalgia. What struck me about that was that the hippie movement and the Summer of Love had nothing to do, really nothing to do with civil rights or any of the big struggles of American culture, really, from the 50s to that point.

It was really about rich white kids having fun, right? Right. Oh, totally, yeah. And then when it spread to non-rich, and in some cases non-white kids, the results were disastrous because you had to have mom and dad back home writing checks, you know, to pull this off. Yeah. Otherwise, you wound up, you know.

You needed mom and dad to underwrite your existence if you were going to live without money also you needed a sort of background of middle class restraint if you were going to survive the drug fund or the sex fund for that matter you had to know RIP a whole bunch of people I was depositing my daughter at college,

and my daughter was saying, ah, you know, she wasn't going to pledge a sorority like her mother did because that's like Squaresville and stuff. And I said, you know, I was a hipster. Your mom was square. I said, I ran through all that stuff. I had a great time. None of us joined fraternities and sororities or any of them played sports

or were in student government or any of stuff. I had a great time. None of us joined fraternities or sororities or any of them played sports or were in student government or any of that completely out of it, totally unhip stuff. And your mom did all of that stuff. And I said, now you know your mom's friends. They're great people, right? Absolutely great people. You don't know my friends because they're dead. So I said, join the young Republicans, at least. If you can't join Kappa Kappa Gamma, join the young Republicans.

There's an old line from the Lily Tomlin, her first one-woman show, where she's playing a child of the 60s, and she's just heard that the Beatles are going to sit with the Maharashi, or the Maharashi, Maharishi, whatever that is, in India.

Maharishi, Maharishi Yoga. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you've got to have enough bread for plane tickets to India to go and give up material things like plane tickets to India. It kind of summarizes it. So,

neither one of you guys is going to Burning Man? There's zero interest? Even as kind of a comparative tour, Andy Ferguson? I hate the sand. I hate the sand. It's like the beach without water in the desert. So, why would anybody

who hates sand want to go out, even if there's going to be... Well, I happen to love the desert, but one of the reasons I love it is there's no people in it, which Burning Man kind of wrecks. And so my suggestion, but my suggestion to me, if Burning Man really wants to capture the spirit of the 60s, what they need is some napalm dropped on them.

Well, yeah, that would be a different kind of story. So I know we, I don't want to keep you guys too much longer, I just have one more thought. I walk home, and I park my car in a garage here in Venice Village, and I walk home, and I walk Wow, are you that rich now? You car in a garage here in Venice Village, and I walk home. And I walk. Are you that rich now? You can afford a garage in the village? Hey, listen, it's a Sony can. The Sony Corporation can afford to park my car in the village.

All right. And I walk up 6th Avenue, and I've seen there are more homeless people than there were under the previous two administrations, the mayoral administrations, Julian and Bloomberg. And there seems to be a little bit more stuff going on in the street, more like the old New York. Last week, as I was driving out of town for the weekend, there appeared at the entrance of the Holland Tunnel a squeegee. Oh, no. Oh, no!

Yeah. They're back! They're back. For people of a certain age, a squeegee man represents something about the decay of a great American city with these guys at the entrance of bridges and tunnels

as you're kind of inching your way through traffic would offer kind of menacingly offer to clean your windshield, which they would do usually in a horrible way, and then demand money for it. And it was a symbol, before Giuliani, of the decline of New York City, decline of city life in general, that they were

basically extorted on the way in and out of the city. And it's the first one I've seen in, I mean, 30 years. I'm not exaggerating, 30 years. But I did find myself listening to Andy Ferguson earlier today, saying to myself, okay, well, you know, I mean, come on. I mean, I see the squeegee guy all the way to Holland Tunnel, and now I'm surrounded by hotels and apartments and nice restaurants where that used to be a war zone.

And the city's gotten nicer. Yeah, 6th Avenue, there's much more homeless people, but 6th Avenue, there's a Chipotle now, and there's life here that there wasn't before. Put it this way, are we going back to a more dismal time? Are we going,

seesawing between smaller polar opposites? Yeah, I think that the... I think we are going back. I think that the currently popular populism on both the left and the right is sort of the in New York that took place in the 90s under Giuliani is partly because of excellent policing and so on. It's partly because there was this huge stock market boom, and all of a sudden, even by New York standards, New York was unbelievably rich.

And you see the same thing in San Francisco, where there's really no middle class in San Francisco anymore. There's nowhere for them to live. So what you have are armies. I mean, armies of homeless people living in the park and along the streets and in Haight-Ashbury and abandoned buildings, and then you have people who live in unimaginable wealth. And I did notice, I went by, I was up in Pacific Heights, and I went by Senator Feinstein's old neighborhood, and Nancy Pelosi used to live right down the block. And amazingly, there are no homeless people there.

Right, right. I don't know how that happened. and Nancy Pelosi used to live right down the block. And amazingly, there are no homeless people there. Right, right. I don't know how that happened. Maybe they can't climb the hill to get up to the Olympic Heights. Homeless people aren't in the kind of good shape they used to be in. Back in the 70s, they were figures. They were fit. Man, I don't know what to make of all of this. My oldest son, Pedro, just moved to Manhattan two weeks ago. He's got a now everybody's downtown, and he's right on, what is he,

on 15th Avenue and 17th Street, terrific apartment, he has a great job, his roommate has a great job, the city is safe, it's thriving, and yet, if the squeegee men are making a reappearance, I can remember waiting in car lines, waiting to get into the Holland Tunnel, and having the squeegee men come to. And they were malicious.

Oh, yes. Either you let me take this bar of soap and scratch it across your windshield and then pretend to wipe it off and you give me 10 bucks with a newspaper, or I will break one of your windshield wipers. That's what was going on. I can't recall ever in my life feeling quite as angry as I felt rolling down the window to give the guy $10 because you just feel utterly impotent. Where are the cops? What is all the New York City taxes going? And so if that's creeping back in,

it has to be because somebody has made a decision to let it creep back in. Mayor de Blasio has told the cops to back off down there around the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. And so these kids who don't know anything other, that they grew up during, what, a quarter of a century of growth and wealth and fundamentally safe cities. i just have to believe

they're until they're what what is that what are we saying here every generation has to let it get all screwed up so they can learn the fundamental lessons about what makes for a decent society again i don't know now i really am sounding like grandpa rob wrap this show up will you please yeah i know well may i just say say that my interpretation of it is that it is a small sign that you have to be ever vigilant, and that if you have a little tiny little, I mean, broken window theory applies both physically and also sort of metaphorically to a culture at large. And so my question to our evident gentleman is, are we on the upswing or the downswing? I mean, what are the next? Actually, I don't even care what you really think.

Are we going to say something optimistic and uplifting? Well, I'm very optimistic about the Glock 9mm, although there's a lot to be said for the Smith & Wesson 38 Special. I call them both the Visa cards of the future. Would you really? Are you that? Do you think it's going to get to that again? No, I really don't, but I have a room in my house

carefully locked that would argue otherwise. You're in New Hampshire. And it's not a room to hide in. It's a room to hide from. You remember the line

in Bonfire of the Vanities, which of course was written right in the middle of that terrible period where the rich guy lives up on the Upper East Side, the word that keeps running through his head is insulate, insulate, insulate. And so whenever he thinks about making more money, it's because he can insulate himself from the people in the outer boroughs

and all the unpleasantness of New York as it was then. And if you've got a lot of people with a lot of money, they're just going to keep insulating and insulating themselves, and there's not really going to be a move to reverse the kinds of downward trends that you're seeing as represented by the squeegee men. Is that optimistic enough for you there? No, that's not optimistic at all, and I think you knew that. Rob, Rob, you're one of the people who can insulate himself. You should take heart.

But you don't think there's something irreversible about the social or societal progress that we've experienced, if we have experienced it? I mean, obviously there's been a certain amount of decay, but there's also been a certain amount of like great stuff that's happened, uh, not just in cities, but in suburbs, um, in the past 20, 30 years, how tenuous, how fragile is it? What, or was our climb out of, uh, the total bananas of the sixties? Very, very fragile. I think the best part of Andy's piece on the Summer of Love is when he

draws it all back to anti-nominalism. This is something that's been going on. Andy, fill me in here. Who was it that wrote Dover Beach, the poet? Matthew Arnold. Yes.

I mean, this is visible as early as Matthew Arnold's poem, Dover Beach. This has been going on certainly since the 19th century, possibly since the Protestant Reformation. Well, back to antinomianism was kind of coined to describe a heretical sect in the second century. So it's got a long... Say it again for antinomianism. It's not a word I ever say out loud. Antinomianism.

Antinomianism. I learned that from Paul Johnson. Well, our listeners right now are probably looking that up on their phones. I already have it, but now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the light wind. Wait, wait, wait. Let me get up on my phone. Or are you going to... ...alarms of something and slight flight where ignorant armies clash by

night. I know that's the last couple of words. Swept with confused alarms of trouble and struggle and fight where ignorant armies clash by night. Are you reading it off the phone? I am not reading that off the phone.

I am. I'm reading it off the phone. Well, that's the problem with our information age. You have to trust me. If I was reading it off the phone, I would have pretended to know more of the poem. No, I think you threw in the errors there just to throw it out. Well, that would be very clever if I did that, but no, that is not. If you go from there to Yates, this gloomy conversation has been being had for quite a while. Yeah, that's right. And Robbie yourself said it's reversible.

It is reversible. I strongly believe that. You know, as Giuliani comes along and you have a brilliant social theorist like James Q. Wilson, and they get together and things get better, and I, you know, that's optimistic. From your mouth to God's ear, Andy. Yeah. There we go.

Even just mentioning God is a step forward. If you have enjoyed this podcast and you are thinking about joining Ricochet.com but for some reason are hesitant because you don't think the $5 a month is worth it, you will love our new John Gabriel tier. Our editor John Gabriel is a beloved figure and so much so that we give him his very own membership tier. Go to Ricochet.com slash exjohn and join for only $2.50 a month. We need your help.

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And thank you for letting me make the plug. Will you send me a link to this? We'll do all of that. And we'll send you a link to this, and we'll link to that on this. All right. And a link to that. It's not log rolling anymore. It's link rolling. That All right. And a link to that. It's not log rolling anymore. It's link rolling.

That's right. By the way, as we say goodbye, I would like to let the world know the real reason I am in awe of P.J. O'Rourke. It's not for his brilliant, insightful humor

over lo these decades. Although he did write, to me, the Parliament of Horrors is still the best book anybody can read if he really wants to understand how Washington works. The real reason I am in awe of P.J. O'Rourke is that maybe 10 years ago, something like that, he wrote a review of the new Rolls-Royce, the Rolls-Royce convertible, and he had the guts to pan it. You know, and funnily enough, I didn't get a free one from Rolls.

Well, maybe they taught him a lesson about how to roll. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Fellas, thanks again. Talk to you soon. All right. Bye-bye. Bye, Andy.

Bye-bye, PJ. Talk to you later. I don't know whether anybody heard Peter. I think we're probably going to cut that out. But there's a period where Andy Ferguson's phone was bad, his cell phone was bad. And so we called him back on the landline. He was trying to figure out the landline number. And it's giving us the landline number on his cell phone, kept cutting out.

And finally, PJ broke in and said, here's the number. I just looked it up by Rolodex. And I kind of felt like that was a great moment. I wish we didn't really play it, but I just love the idea that Andy Ferguson and PJ O'Rourke talk on the phone all the time. Yes, exactly. Here's the idea I like.

I just did a podcast with three of the half dozen people whose every word I will read, there are only half a dozen people who all I need to see is their bottom line. And I will read every word they write. Tom Wolfe is another one. Rob Long,

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the less precarious that becomes. I think we have one minute, Peter. I guess just you and me. James Lilacs, we should say, is on the NR cruise. Unreachable on the high Atlantic. Unreachable on the high Atlantic. Unreachable on the high Atlantic. What do you, I mean, the National Review Cruise is sort of an interesting crucible because it has some old-line NR readers,

so it has a bunch of the old-line NR conservatives, Buckley conservatives. It's got a bunch of, like, conservative agitators, people who, like, are activists in the trenches, and has a certain group of, I'm'm sure i don't know where they're right right now but i'm sure disgruntled trump supporters who feel that nr kind of um is missing the boat on that what do you what do you suspect the atmosphere is like on that ship right now well let's see it's been a two or three years since i was on an nr cruise myself everybody's extremely genial and everybody so of course there are the nr regulars but then

the people who are long time in our readers pay to go on these things and everybody so of course there are the nr regulars but then the people who are longtime nr readers pay to go on these things and my experience of those readers is that they're readers you get people from the all across the country many different walks of life but they all read the magazine they read the newspaper and they have thoughts to think So the arguments are actually good arguments. I think we've now got a workable position among conservatives. And the position is, look, Donald Trump has very serious failings, and he's not really one of us. And I think conservatives, pretty much all conservatives grant that. And they also grant the follow-on point which is on the other hand neil gorsuch on the other hand serious people in charge of the pentagon and jim mattis and the

state department in rex tillerson so let's support the guy where he's good and uh remain utterly fearless and calling him out when he does dumb things so i think there's a sort of workable position. I think. I think. There will be some people who still want who still want NR to support Trump more, but it just seems workable to me. We've figured out how to muddle through this current period. I think. What do you

think? I suspect that's one of the reasons why I was disappointed that I couldn't go on the cruise, because I kind of wanted to find that out. Just want to see it, yeah. Yeah, I just want to see what the feeling was like. I do think that after a certain amount of scrambled eggs,

which is what it is, we kind of have to figure out what it means to be a conservative and what it means to be what those things mean. Oh, for sure. Maybe they didn't mean any... Maybe they weren't as clear as we thought they were. But in any case, that's,

that's our, that's our challenge, I think, for the future. I mean, as I said to a friend of mine, who's a, an executive at a,

at a large television news cable channel. Okay, Fox. You know, in a weird way, presidents have a short-term political strategy, which is both really short-term, next four years, next eight years, and then bizarrely long-term, you don't think in those terms. You think in life cycle terms, which is what's going to be like, what's the next 15, 20 years going to be like? And Fox News, I think, is a good embodiment of the problem because they think they jumped on the Trump bandwagon too hard because their business is lasting a long time.

They have shareholders. They don't want an eight-year return. They want a 20-year return. Trump only needs a four-year return followed by another four-year return. They want a 20-year return. Trump only needs a four-year return followed by another four-year return. He doesn't really need that much. His are the most short-sighted goals, by definition.

And so conservatism, I think, needs to sort of figure out what a long-term goal is and what a short-term goal is and what you're willing to pay to get your long-term goals. And I'm not sure. This is sort of a meandering way to put it, but i'm not sure we've done that yet but so you can

keep your eye on fox news the place the the institution i find fascinating right now i haven't seen anybody writing about it in detail stories are going to emerge is the senate where you've got ted cruz these are there's a generation of senators who are highly intelligent, really motivated, impressive people. Ted Cruz is one kind of conservative. Tom Cotton, highly intelligent man. He's the one who's come out with an immigration bill that President Trump has supported. He's trying a different strand of conservatism. You've got Rob Portman in Ohio, much more moderate conservatism, a major figure, however. Donald Trump carried Ohio by eight points. Rob Portman carried Ohio by 21 points. He's a major figure. And these people are jostling and banging into each other and having conversations and trying to figure out what works for, because of course at some level all of them want to run for president. Trying to figure out what works for the country. That's the place

where on Ricochet and at National Review, you see people working out the intellectual arguments. In the Senate of the United States, you see people working out the practical politics of it. It's all fascinating.

It is. It is. And we'll be here to watch it. And we hope that you will join us if you're listening. And we hope you will continue to listen. And we hope you'll continue to support RickShay.com. Peter, that was a pleasure. That was a fun podcast. Oh, it was lovely.

It was lovely. Those two guys. And you, Rob. It's been a while since we had a chance to talk. I know. I know. We have to. By the way, are you a Neworker now um in your mind in your head are you a new yorker uh i depends on who's asking if you're asking in my mind in my head i

am i've been here for a couple years and that's what that is uh if you're asking if you're a member of the uh new york state franchise tax board um it's unclear we're still working that that those issues out um my my only goal is to not have to pay taxes in both new york and california that's my goal yes yeah and so i'm trying to figure out a way to to avoid i have a team of attorneys and tax experts figuring out a way i suspect what's going to happen is i am going to oh oh i'm gonna owe uh owe New York State this year. Really? Yeah. Do you feel somehow more creative?

Do you feel better able to do what it is that you do in New York than in California? Is New York the place to be for a writer? No, I don't think so. For what I do especially, the quality of life in la in in los angeles to do this do this kind of thing is much higher because as i tell people like i i could write in a late rewrite at 7 p.m in a script um a funny little midget enters the scene of course it's politically correct language, but I could write that on a Tuesday night. The script will go out, it gets distributed,

the casting will get that information, and I would walk into my office at 10.30 the next morning, and there'd be about 20 little midgets there ready to read for that role. Because it's L.A., you can get anything you want. How many do you want? We have thousands of them. If you're a little person and you're funny, and you want. How many do you want? We have thousands of them. If you're a little person

and you're funny and you want to make some money being a little funny person, you've got to move to LA because eventually you're going to get a casting call. Here it's really difficult. In LA we say, okay, this scene is set in the late autumn in New York State.

And then there's a guy who shows us, will come in with a giant binder and show us pictures of greenery. What color kind of do you want? What kind of autumn do you want? We have it all. It's all stored out there in some warehouse in the valley. We'll bring it in. It'll be here at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning.

In New York, you're like, well, we don't have any spring greenery because it's not spring. It's winter, so we only have dry sticks. And we're like, well, we don't have any spring greenery because it's not spring. It's winter, so we only have dry sticks. This is not a place where you do show business, but I love New York because I love New York. I love the city.

It's a trade-off. As the great and brilliant Thomas Sowell has said, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. Exactly. Peter, let's do it again. Let's do it again. Take care, Rob.

Take care. If you're going to San Francisco be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. If you're going to San Francisco,

you're going to meet some gentle people there Although you come to San Francisco Summertime will be a-loving there And we'll be alone in the dark In the streets of San Francisco Gentle people with flowers in their hair All across the nation Ricochet! Join the conversation.