The Ricochet Podcast - Take a Bromo

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Moving concentrates the mind on the old days (good or otherwise). And who better to reminisce with than a good ole pal? James Lileks and Rob Long are back together, and they brought family heirlooms... Breezing through current events (a blockaded blockade abroad, a goon running Gotham, a papal-sovereign scrap), the duo takes in another week's worth of madness with the calm of mind that comes from grateful reception of some inherited wisdom.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And you hurt. Even a little bit. Time counts. So why wait? Take a bromo when you don't have the time to feel bad.

It's the Rickusay podcast. Stephen gone. Charles gone. Peter gone. But I'm James Lillick. I'm here. And so is Rob Long. let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the R ricochet podcast episode number 785.

You can join us at, I know, you can join us at RICOC.com and see why we've gotten to 785, because what's at Rookishay.com? Well, the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. And that interjection you just heard there was from one of the founders who was here at the episode number one. And that's Rob Long, who, if you are looking at the video stream, seems to be wearing like a leisurely rugby player who's in Peru. Yeah, I just suddenly remember that we do this, and there's a video, which I don't recommend. I am sitting outside, anybody who's been through the winter,

knows why I'm sitting outside. It's a beautiful day. But that means I have to wear a hat, and that also means that I can't work, I can't figure out how to make the microphone work on the iPad and the mic, the big, nice mic, and then use earbuds to hear. So I have to have headphones. and the headphones are from the back now.

So I kind of look, I look very weird. You do. You do. And this is why we advise people to look at the video feed because you can see, not only does Rob Long look like he's some sort of, you know, astronaut from a country that hasn't quite figured out how to put a booster together.

But you keep blurring in and out, which is also interesting. Why is that? Well, it's because your phase shifting me between this dimension and the other. And you are in the dimension of New York, I believe, correct? New Jersey. I'm in Princeton, New Jersey. Lovely Garden State. But do you live in New York now or do you still do because you're...

I do not. I live in Princeton. My life has changed radically in the sense that what I did was I radically and crazily and I think probably without any planning. This is something that you cannot relate to because I know that you are a obsessive planner. I just, I went from a, basically the past 10 years, went from a big house. in California to a fairly large apartment, but not, you know, but still an apartment in Manhattan, to a large kind of townhouse in Princeton. And then I decided last year that that was ridiculous that I'm, I need to downsize radically. And I radically downsized in my mind,

which is not, um, in my will. I wanted to and I, I, I decided to. But what I didn't do is I didn't go through everything and then do the work necessary. And so I basically crammed into a very small kind of graduate student. It looks like a person going to Divinity School, how they live, surrounded by books. It's great. But it's small. And I have a storage facility down a few, you know, not about two miles from here. And my goal is by October to get rid of it.

So I'm giving myself until October to kind of get, get, get, uh, get, uh, get, manageable. And I just did a very bad job. You're living in a monk's cell and you want to get it down so you have a single gladstone that you can use to go from place to place. I'm living my foot, my physical footprint is a monk's cell. But my actual number of possessions is considerably more. And so what I have is like, look, if you went into my apartment right now and you looked at it, you would say to yourself, let's call the cops because we found the guy. There's just a lot of stuff there and I need to get rid of it. And what the upside of the stuff is that you discover that, you know, for instance, I have this,

you know, from the rugby sevens rugby shirt, which I hadn't looked at for a million years, and it's in one of those boxes. And, you know, this is this shirt is 30 years old, 35 years old. It's from 90, I don't know, or, yep, 93. So it's, so it's 36 years old. And that's the time was at the Rugby Sevens in Hong Kong. Well, two points about this. One, the Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday a couple of days ago about storage

facilities and how they're exploding. The industry is just absolutely taken off because people have too much in the words of George Carlin stuff. And a lot of people don't like them. They push back on them because they are fairly inert contributors to the civic landscape. There is something hulking and silent about them, though they're they're forced to keep secrets unwillingly that they do not wish to. There's a concentrated stillness to them that is part shame, you know, part, you know, silence, part. Yeah. Apparently there's four Ds that, that caused people to get a storage lock.

There's dislocation, death, divorce, something, I can't forget the fourth D. Some places are actually trying to make them look like they belong to the neighborhood. They're putting on facade of me, shall we say. They have, looks like houses. Or they put a little strip mall touch to it so it doesn't look so bad. But the article was linked to something that somebody else in the Wall Street Journal had written about how he had spent $100,000. over the course of the years to rent a storage locker,

simply because he dumped the contents of a house in there and kept throwing things in there. And then moved to New York, didn't have a car. A hundred. I'll go back and get it. All that stuff you save yourself, yeah. Right. But you, unlike most people who just say,

all right, I'm going to concentrate it down, I'm going to move, I'm going to put it in a storage locker and I'll leave it there. You actually, your goal is to get past that so that there's no more storage locker. Yeah. I mean, when I look for it, I decided to not do,

one of the nice ones because they're nice. I mean, some of them are like, have this kind of mysterious, clean, antiseptic quality. I drive by this is when I'm driving back from Manhattan into New Jersey and they're on sort of that route one wherever I am. And they're beautiful. They look and they're all lit up on the inside. It looks like a sci-fi movie. You know, they look like the, you know, the woman in the weird jumpsuit walking down saying, you know, commander, we found the whatever. But I am in one that looks like sadness. It's the corner of sadness and the Princeton Airport. And it's fine for me. It's cheap. So I just, but, but what I really should have done, maybe I should have spent more money

so that I would have felt stupider. But what's my goal anyway? So the upside is I discover that I have these cool, uh, old, like, items of clothing. And the downside is that I think, oh, well, I don't want to get rid of this. And that's not, uh, that's not, I know I think. I know exactly what you mean. The one to which I go, grudgingly, uh, smells a fish occasionally. It makes me wonder whether or not somebody's storing something in there for a business that they're running. The other day, somebody moved out, and the floor was speckled with glitter. And I thought, well, a stripper had this one for a while or, you know, some fancy toys, the rest of it.

I had to go to it yesterday to remove a very large object that I was going to write about something that I found in the course of emptying out the house. A family Bible that was purchased by my great-grandfather at the end of the 19th century, these elaborate, incredible compendions of knowledge. They're just stunning. They have, for example, all the coins of the Roman era. And there would be biographies of all of these people who had nothing to do whatsoever to the Bible, except one of them. One of the biographies was it was noted here because he, because Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth, which they also said about Paul. And there's a reference to Paul in being here. I mean, I mean, the illustrations, the plates, the woodcuts and then also the writing in it.

So does somebody keep you, sometimes they keep family records in it? Absolutely. I love that. I love that. Genealogy, there was writing. There was, and I noticed the marriage is stopped at one point, but I noticed that my cousin Bruce, as a very young boy, probably 12 or so, had written that he was going to marry a certain woman in 1979 or something in the future. That's hilarious. He added this sneakily to the Bible. So I found what my grandmother had pressed wondering why this glassene bag of leaves, why this, you know, the Diamond Jubilee Celebration Bookmarked pictures.

rest of it, can't throw it away. I cannot throw it away. What I have to wait and do is die. Because I'm the last person who remembers my grandmother, right? And my, well, my cousin, too. And so when I'm gone, there's no living person who can lay his hands on this book and know that hands that he knew and held. It's a big deal. It's a big deal to my daughter. My daughter can take it. So my goal is to reduce my storage facility down to half the size and have it be pretty. much my personal archives, the stuff that I don't need, my old clips. That's really you and me. I mean, you, I mean, there's an argument for you because you are an incredibly detailed and thoughtful and careful archivist.

So your stuff isn't all jumbled, as my guess is it's got some, I mean, I'm sure you look at it. What an incredible disorganized mess and the rest of us think, my God, what kind of weirdo has this organized by whatever? But there's something valuable about that, especially the books and the things that people touched. I think the things that people touched is kind of amazing. I mean, I have a silver baby cup that is, for a long time I just thought it was mine. I just because it has my name on it, except for my, but I didn't really look at it carefully.

But it's actually my uncles and my uncle who died when he was, I don't know, in his five or six. he was very young. My mom's family, they were living in Mexico. And my father, my grandfather was in the mining business. He had gold and silver mines. And so I don't know what he died of. He died of something. And then my grandmother, my maternal grandmother died, I think a few years later.

No, my uncle died at two. I think it was childhood leukemia. And then my grand, my maternal grandmother died when she was when my mom was like five or six. Because that's what happened back then. and I've had this baby cup and I realized that I've been hanging on to it because I always thought it was mine but in fact it's not it's my namesakes

and there I know that there are three people who touched it my grandmother my namesake uncle and me and more than that but at least those three touched it and that's sort of a I mean you can't get rid of that you got to I got to buy the bed

at some point probably this summer at James Lilex at subsdack.com I'm going to be doing small videos very short videos I know people hate videos that longer than 90 seconds, you start looking at your watch. Called small things. I bought a light box, and I've been photographing a lot of the small little objects that I've managed to accumulate over the years. They have no great value. Nobody really needs a Matt Mason action figure at this point.

But there's a story behind every one of them, and I try to tell that story as quickly as possible. One I recently did was a little hatpin box. It's at 1893 Columbian Exposition. My great-grandfather had gone to the Colombian Exposition, and he came back with a ticket for it. too. And I know that he went to the Republican convention in Minneapolis in the 90s as well, because he came back with a ticket for that as well. So it's this hatpin that sat on my grandmother's desk for decades. And I don't know what she, you know, did he buy it for her? Did he slip it in his pocket and think of his little daughter when he was going to get her? All of these things that you can

glean from it, that you can intuit, that you can guess, that you can build. And no, I can't get rid of that. But what I find interesting, and you might too, the audience probably doesn't, is that a lot of the things, when you remove them from one context to the other, they lose significance. Things in your house that you had on the mantelpiece, when you take it elsewhere, all of a sudden, it's homeless, it doesn't belong, and it goes in a box. And you find the smaller your unit gets, the more the things that you have out, the more potent and concentrated their meaning is, like a Matt Mason action figure. Well, that's enough of us reminiscing about downsizing and the rest of us. Yours willingly, mine, not so much. We should probably do with the Rikoshae podcast.

does, and that is speak with complete confidence about things that we are completely ignorant of, generally. Yeah, that's our secret sauce. That's our moat. I have been of the opinion that virtually nothing that I hear about what's going on in the strait and the war in Iran is something about which I can base a conclusion. And that's not because we're being lied to or fog a war or the rest of it. Maybe we are being lied to.

But part of the cycle that we've had is, what did I see the other day, a political headline, political headline, House fails to curb Trump's war powers as war in Iran drags on. I think that's what they said, drags on. Hour 72, yeah. So the latest has to do with the straight. And I don't know why we even bothered to talk about it, because by the time this is posted, there would be something else about the straight. We were closing it to Iranian ships.

They couldn't get out. Anybody else could come in. We were telling the NATO people to come and get it. The other day, I think today, as a matter of fact, I saw a tweet that said leaders of Great Britain and France that Macron and Starmer have gotten together to talk about the Strait of Hormuz situation. And the tweet commentator said, this is like me and my wife getting together to discuss the optimal landing site on the moon.

Yeah. That is kind of point. So let's take this in the absence. of Charlie C.W. Cook. Where does this leave Europe? And is that a question that nobody really cares what the answer is one way or the other? I do, but let me take your take. Get your take. Well, I mean, you know, everybody decides, you know, decided 20 years ago that we were going to not rely on fossil fuels. So what they did was they said, we're not going to rely on fossil fuels. What they didn't do is not rely on fossil fuels, right? These pronouncements they made that they

didn't actually fall through on. Which is anyone. could have told them was going to happen because actually fossil fuels are fantastic and fuel the world and productivity right you know they're portable they have so much concentrated fantastic um and there's tons of it so and tons of it is still in the north sea apparently um and certainly the nor regions so so there's that problem right so there's that slow i'm looking more glacier moves right slow moves and then there's the the slow move of nato which is not in addition to the sort of the their their unwillingness to fund their fair share, which I think, you know, Trump is absolutely correct to point out and to point it out many

times. It was also this kind of sense that, well, what is this do? What is this for anyway? Right. The end of the Soviet Union, what are we doing here? Like, why are, why are there American servicemen in Hamburg, Germany? It just doesn't make any sense, right? And so we petered out of that, of the, you know, the 20th century in the early 21st century. Now we're trying to figure out what it is that we do. And I suspect that part of the problem we have right now, now is that we have not decided as a country really what what steps we want to take in the world to shape the world the way we want it to be shaped what things we're going to protect and what things we're not going to protect what we're willing to pay what we're not willing to pay

and a lot of that has been this sort of astonishing amount of failure that you know I'm I'm skirting the issue the Trump issue that happened before Trump which is really the Iraq war we had a war that didn't really accomplish much and was kind of there were no weapons of mass destruction i think we can say that now safely um um this one don't say well okay but but okay but whatever whatever the the the this is where i sort of agree with trump right that in 2016 the general understanding was that it was it was it was it did not unfold the way we were told it was going to unfold and the second thing we were told in later is that that doesn't matter anymore because we have these precise weapons that can get right into this thing and can actually these bunker busters and we can just

you know six months ago we said oh well Iran's their nuclear programs been sent back years well apparently it hasn't so apparently that was a failure um so we we just have to decide what it is we want to do and who is we want to do it for and who is we want to do it with and who we want to do it against um and none of those dots have been connected and none of those there's no there's no there's no strategy, your understanding. So if you're the people and you're watching this thing unfold, it does feel like 72 hours is forever because I don't know what the plan is. The plan is to open the strait. It's to blockade the street. The plan is to secure the strait. The plan is to protect the, the protect oil. The plan is to destroy Iran's oil exporting capacity. We don't quite know.

It's to change the regime. It's not to change the regime. It's all sorts of things. And in absence of a very clear plan, what happens is a lack of confidence. And I think that's what you're seeing from people. Not that it's not specific to Trump necessarily. He inherited a lot of it. But you know, you play the cards you're dealt. And he's not playing them very well, it seems to me. And mostly because he's an erratic person and he's driven by polls and he speaks erratically.

And he doesn't project confidence. And then we have sort of Colonel Kurtz, the Secretary of Defense now. none of that seems like these are people who are the gray and colorless leaders we expect. But on the other hand, the gray and colorless leaders took us into Iraq. So we got to figure this out, right? I think it's three things that work here. One of them, which may be sound incoherent, but is actually probably basically it, is just we are going to remove your capacity to bleep with us.

You just don't get to bleep with us anymore. We're not putting up, we're not buying, we're not sending you a pallet to money. We're not sitting down at tables. It's just not really because that's all there is to it. Before we went into Afghanistan, and there were nice pictures of women holding up a blue-fingered. Outside of Kabul, the culture was as barbaric and medieval. That's actually cruel to the medieval. It was irredeemable, and we wasted a lot of time and money.

We should have just got out and said, okay, well, do what you're going to do. We would like to make you like you used to be in those pictures we see where women are walking, run, scoves, and go into university. That'd be great. But if you're not up to the challenge, okay, just, just, just. just so you know that it's a moab anytime anything happens and we trace it back to you. And even if we can't trace it back to you, it's a moab. Iraq, same thing.

I mean, we debathified. There was no culture to come in and do it. We should have put in in retrospect. One of our guys, you know, somebody who ran in the difficult, schismatic fractures. Right. Put that guy in and if they don't end up as a model of European parliamentary democracy, I guess you didn't have it in you guys. Sorry.

Just don't bleep with us. We're going to have to do this again. And the next time it might be bigger and bigger and worse. That's it. So the guys who were bleeping with us for 47 years, it's not going to happen again. Second, China. China is not going to get to run the table. It's not going to play with us.

It just isn't going to happen anymore. They're out of our hemisphere. They're gone. We now have the ability to choke off the oil supply. Well, not the ability, but we have in place with the strait of Hormuz, which apparently we're going to run, I guess. And then in the agreement that we just signed, the other route through which 80% of their oil goes China. We've got our hands on the carotid artery there. And that's great. And we're not doing

it because all of a sudden we want to be, you know, I mean, we are the guardians of the sea, but we're not doing it because we have a great love for this part of the world. No, it's a simple strategic move that puts China on the back foot. And that goes to the third point, which is Europe, you're nice, you're great, you've got fantastic museums in great cities. You're killing yourself with your economic policies and your migration policies and there's nothing you can do about it and you're basically over. We're going to concentrate on a North American co-prosperity sphere. It's going to be us. It's going to go down to the equator and a little bit past. We got Panama. It means Greenland. It means Canada. If they want to play, if they don't, screw them. We'll take Alberta.

And it means that's our neck of the woods. And China doesn't get to play in it. And any attempt that they have is going to be pushed out. So that's that. Oh, and we'll take Cuba too. That seems to me to be the three things that are in Trump's head. You can't believe in the United States. He's been saying that about Iran for forever. He's been talking about China forever. And the story's coming out about, I mean, 80%. I think now the iPhones have been moved out of China production, which is great.

And talking about our backyard, the Don Row doctrine, as they call it, all these things seem to me, they don't require a great deal of brilliant thought. And somebody coming out of Georgetown with a George Kenon, Mr. X, white papers. something like that. It's just basically now, as America first and the rest of you, hope you like the ride. Yeah, I mean, I wish, I mean, that's an interesting game of risk you're playing. I don't mean that, I mean that the actual game of risk. I'm not sure. I think this administration is incredibly soft on China. I mean, amazingly soft on China. They don't make strategic choices when they have easy choices. They tend to make the easy choices really hard. They tend to treat

the hard choices like they're really easy. So, you know, if you're looking at the malfactors in the world, you'd have to say it was Iran. You'd have to say it was China. Well, China, maybe not so much an alfactor, just a competitor. You definitely have to say Russia. Russia and Iran were together. The idea of not weakening Russia when we have a sort of a willing partner in that was kind of a mistake, I think, strategic mistake, born of some kind of weird, murky desire not to, I guess,

I guess excite Putin. On the other hand, you know, China economy grew up 5%. China is doing great. And they're doing great because we have a president, and we've had, you know, not just the only president, who makes a lot of noise back here. And then he goes to Beijing and gives them whatever they want. There is nothing that they want that we have not given them.

There's no concession to trade that. we have not offered nothing. So, I, if that's a strategy, which is to say, okay, China,

guess what, you get Asia. All right, that seems fine. But the idea that, that, the idea that we're going to do anything to stop their expansion,

if they choose to expand, anything to stop their, their takeover of Taiwan, if they choose to, it's just, we're not going to. And that's, okay,

that may be fine. We may call, we don't know that. Japan sailed a war ship through the streets the other day. China was absolutely furious about it. I can't believe that they did that. It's a provocative move. Japan all of a sudden seems to have gotten its mojo back in a way that you wish that European cities, European states would.

So we don't know. I think the point is to be unpredictable. And the idea that, as I said before, about being able to severely influence their oil amounts and removing their influence from Venezuela, which is a good thing to do, I'm more concerned about stuff like that, which seems to be broader stroked, than whether or not we let their TEMU crap in in the same quantities as it was before. Again, I look at iPhone production reshoring of technology, fabric, you know, chip fab, all that stuff counts more than, you know, what the tariff is. The chipfab thing has not happened.

That's just on paper. And that's less about training. That's less about trade and for us and more about our willingness to put up with. I mean, chip fabs are incredibly dirty. They're incredibly dirty and they don't, nobody wants to have one in their backyard. So you do want to go to one of those countries where you can build anything and dump anything into the rivers. That's one of the reasons why we don't have chip fabs in this country is because just there. Until Musk built one, until Musk build one, build one.

Well, you know, you can build one or two, but the amount you need to build. I mean, the numbers aren't there. I mean, they just aren't. I mean, my problem in general with this administration is that's leadership by anecdote. So you tell a funny story and everybody nods, oh, that's great. And we send in the drones and the missiles and we destroy Iran's nuclear research facilities. But actually, we don't. It's a story we're telling, and it lasts for a couple months that we've got to tell a new story.

And that works in politics, certainly works in American politics. But I don't, I mean, I think that when we're talking about real three-dimensional things moving through a straight, and actual real oil prices. I think it's time to get serious and I just don't find, I'm just not confident in their leadership that they're serious.

And I don't see anybody on the horizon who's serious either. I think it's, to me, and I don't think, I certainly know I'm not alone because I am, you know, 60%, 70% of the country thinks the same thing.

That is a leadership failure in a time of war, which they keep talking about, it's a time of war. that is a leadership failure that needs to be addressed, and I just don't see anybody in Washington addressing it. Well, yes, the Democrats, of course, would be worse. One of the things that I'm sure horrifies them is the site of all those oil tankers that were steaming towards the United States to fill up. The United States is now just pumping out a lot, selling a lot.

That's great. The Democrats would shut down, you know, construction or even the existing LG export plants in the Gulf because they don't like natural gas going to Europe. They don't want anybody to use it. We've got to use renewables. And yes, that piece of American prosperity would be crippled under a Democratic administration. As we see in New York, where the Mandami administration is going by the playbook, and I kind of would like to go there because you're close to it.

And I'm sure that you don't regard Mandami with a particular enthusiasm or affection. Or do you? Are you secretly thrilled that he's finally going all full? old DSA and everybody, because that's the thing to do, you know. We won't vote for a Republican because we'll get a Democrat in there. And then when people see how bad it is, they'll vote for it. That never works. Tax Day, he was doing, he did a little real on Instagram or somewhere, TikTok.

He leaned into the camera and said it's taxed state. We're going to tax the rich. And he taps the lens. I find it one of the most abhorrent, repellent people on the political stage. But he's got that big, broad beaming. smile. So he's got to be good. It's weird because I actually, I mean, I've never met him. I mean, just like seeing him, it's a strange politician because seeing him in the news or seeing him on the news,

I find him less annoying than the people who support him. Like it's a very strange thing where I find his supporters to be absolutely, I mean, and pretty much everyone around him. I mean, everybody in the corridor is power in the city to be. absolutely, unacceptably terrible. And his policies are terrible, too. When I see him, I don't, I don't get that, like, I don't get the kind of rage I got with de Blasio.

So maybe that's just, that's just a personal thing. So the weird thing about all these guys is they seem to think they're entitled to rich people. Like, well, rich people are going to be here, right? It's a very New York thing to think, well, I mean, where are you going to go? Well, where am I going to go? I mean, like a million places rich people can go. Princeton. Yeah, they go Princeton.

They can go to Miami. So there's this attitude that, well, we're going to tax people who are rich. Well, the problem in New York City, if you're a New York City resident, is that only rich people can afford to live there because the taxes are so high. Most, you know, young people have to move out because they have the payroll taxes, the payroll taxes on your, in your, in your, if, if, you're a city dweller are incredibly high. You know, you get rid of rich people, but what do you have left? And then I heard just this happened just yesterday. I was listening to his housing policy being described and unfolded on public radio.

I like this WNYC actually. And it just felt like, wait, this is stuff that, you know, Mayor Lindsay talked about. This is a housing policy from the early 70s, late 60s, early 70s. this is that we already know how this movie turns out this isn't even rebooting it it's actually just rerunning it and we know how the ending is which is like there's a housing collapse none of this feels like which is very strange to me I mean not strange really in New York City because there's no appetite

for change but none of this feels like a regeneration of the left which is kind of what the marketplace seems to demand I mean I was watching an interview with Rahm Emanuel and and he you know whatever he did in Chicago is sort of separate but he he he understands the problem right you know he understands what the problem is for the left for the Democratic Party I'm not going to do anything about it but he understands he can articulate it and and I he even he has this kind of he's incredulous that there hasn't been there hasn't been a movement to do this

there hasn't there's nobody on the on the horizon that the biggest star right now in the Democratic Party is Bernie Sanders. That tells you something, whereas it should be somebody, it should be Bill Clinton, find a Bill Clinton, find a Southern conservative Democrat governor and run them and you'll win. But then you've got to find a Southern conservative Democrat.

And that, to me, is what I find astonishing. I mean, what I found weird, I guess I understand that. This is a free market argument I'm making, right? I mean, if you're Milton Friedman, you're like, well, this is obviously market failure. So the market will correct itself. There's an addressable market in the Democratic Party for people who are basically patriotic, basically pro-business. You know, basically normal, right?

Normal Americans. And why is there nobody selling a product to those people? And you can say the same thing, Republicans in a way. Perhaps they don't have to. Perhaps because they know that these people will vote Democratic no matter what, because to vote the alternative is to vote for a bunch of xenophob, Islamophob, phobes, transphob, troughs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Lindsay may have tried these things, and it led to a housing collapse, but I don't think that Lindsay intended or wanted a housing market collapse.

I believe that Mondami and the rest of the idiots around him, the Democratic Socialists of America, want a housing collapse because property is theft, because landlords are evil, and the whole point is for the state, I'm not kidding, the point is for the state. It could be right. Because, I mean, somebody has to sit down and say, all right, if you tax the piettares of these people who live out of town. Here's what's going to happen. First of all, they're just, you know, they're going to sell them.

You know, the price is going to go down. And whoever buys them, if somebody does, will pay less in property taxes because you crash the market on that. Secondly, these people are a net gain to the city because they pay taxes and they don't consume services. The cops aren't coming to their house. They're not going to the food shelters. They're not going to the hot.

Kids aren't going to public school. Yeah. Right. They're no school. They pop into town. They spend money on Sacks Fifth Avenue. They walk up and down. They go to the restaurant and they go back to my am.

me and you get the tax revenue. If you get rid of those people, you have like, but what they seem to believe magically is that once these units are empty, into them will flow the deserving rolls. Now, if you... Once the Tina and her family will move in. Precisely. Rent control means you've got, I don't know what percentage of rent control departments aren't occupied in New York, but it simply isn't worth it for the owners to fix them

because they can't make the money. So they sit unoccupied. They want to get rid of that so that eventually the city can put people in there at their will. If you sell a building, the city will not. have the first right of refusal and the city will be able to say well we want to buy it for this and the next step of course is to crash the value so the city can take it cheaply somebody takes the offer because nobody else is buying and then 50 60 70 percent of the housing stock ends up being in the hands of the state which hands it out to its patrons at little or no cost

whatsoever and secures itself a permanent voting base this is not crazy talk this is this is like well this is many boroughs of manhattan yeah i mean yeah this is if like what happened i mean the This infuriated me yesterday when I was listening to this. I was listening to somebody talk about this is Hockel's tax, is the Piaetottax. And it was NPR and I don't know what show was on. And somebody, the woman who was doing, who was the anchor, who was interviewing the reporter,

had this tone of voice that you just instantly hate and you don't even know why. It just, oh man. But then she said something that really, really got me. She said, so, you know, what is a pieda tear? I mean, I hear that. What is one?

I mean, I don't even know if I know what one is, she said, questioning what a pianitaire is. Now, I will pay you $1 million in gold if that woman did not know what a pieter was. And that is a definite problem, I think, with people in the media. And, I mean, in general, probably on the right, too, but on the left for sure, which is this pretending to be somebody pretending this sort of like awshucks just us folks quality.

And that is what gets up my nose with Mom Dani is this kind of, hey, I'm just like a normal New Yorker. Well, no, your mom's a filmmaker and your dad's a junior professor and they're all on the far left and you grew up in this very, very, very, very, very, rarefied atmosphere. I mean,

Bloomberg actually made money and built a business and had employees and made zillions and zillions and zillions and zillions of dollars because he had a better idea, not because he was a rich kid. And there is something that just sticks of my craw about that, about people who've been, for whatever reason, in whatever way, the benefits of a great country and a great culture and a great economy and free market capitalism, which managed to generate enough money.

There was so much money generated by a country that it built a great, university in the upper west side of Manhattan and in doubt it was zillions enough to pay a guy a lot of money to do nothing and to raise a kid who's now going to mess up the cities like there's something really wonderful about that right and that to not wake up every morning in absolute sheer gratitude that there was an economy and there was a country that did that I just find and then to pretend that oh well you know it was all terrible like give me a break come on that's the word in gratitude. Yeah.

And I get it from Omar here in Minnesota as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'll go into a record to say this. As I say, as everyone who listens to this podcast, even on the semi,

on irregular, knows not a fan of our president, not a fan of the administration, not a fan, not a fan, not at all. But if he goes after Illinois, if he goes after her,

I will be cheering. I mean, if he, if he really goes, to the you married your brother stuff, which he mentioned, like I saw him like a couple weeks ago, he just kind of been passing. If he digs in on that, man,

I, you're all for him. I might actually report his third term. I don't think I'll buy, I don't think I'll buy an Obaga hat, but I might, I might, I might price them. Well, also in the news, there's the Swallwalled Downfall, which I'm pleased to see, I guess,

but I don't know exactly what there is to say about his actions, the media's actions. are more interesting to me. Everybody's striking their forehead V8-like and wondering exactly, boy, boy, is this, gosh, when it seems to be also common knowledge amongst a lot of people that this fellow was a creep. There was one guy I remember on Twitter who was saying, well, it wasn't my beat to, you know, I've been hearing these things for years. I'm glad it's finally coming out. And Stephen Miller over at NR. said, why didn't you tell anybody? So it's not my beat. I cover international affairs. Well, he was sleeping with a Chinese spy. Did that account?

So, and a lot of people are saying, who did this? Who exactly executed this particular hit and why? And that's the sort of palace intrigue and the likes of which I suppose some people are fascinated by, but I'm not. So I don't know what to say about that. I don't know what to say about Trump versus the Pope, except you as a man who is taking studies in that nature, might be able to speak on exactly the relationship. I mean, I thought that Francis is being poised, but the Pope should stick to talking about issues of morality. It was silly, given that war often involves a panoply, kaleidoscopic number of issues about morality.

But people have criticized the Pope for not realizing the Marshall Spirit that exists in portions of the Bible, and also for being silent on what many are saying is a concerted effort to remove Christianity. from certain parts of the world, be it countries in Africa where there have been constant schisms, or in Algeria or Egypt, when you can look at the map and say there used to be 800,000 Christians living in Lebanon and now there are five. And why is that? Is that not something that the Pope should speak up about, or would that be too divisive in the spirit of ecumenical handholding?

Well, I mean, I think that the Christian world is waking up to the fact that there's world, there's a great big parts of the world where that are not hospitable to Christians. And there's also a lot of Christian, I mean, there's huge Christian growth too, by the way, in Africa. So it's hard. I mean, if you're the Pope, it's like hard to, you don't really see Africa as a problem as a place where Christianity is on the wane. It's actually, that's the fastest growing place.

Algeria is part of Africa. Yeah. Yes, Algeria, it may not be. Algeria is a complicated place too because the Algerians, I mean, a little bit of Algeria the Algerian government has have been fighting Islamic radicals since the early 90s it's a it's a it's a not a democratic government but they their argument is if it was a democratic government it would they vote in al-Qaeda it would be an Islamic Republic so we put a stop to that so you know there's huge portions about I mean Algeria is the biggest

country in Africa is the biggest country in Africa and most of it is just desert sand and warlords. Algiers is a beautiful city and it's a French city and they grow wine and they drink wine. And the idea is that they are sitting on a powder cake. So I think to, I mean, Algeria is, I mean, I were the Pope, I would go and be friends with them. I wouldn't go and make trouble for them

because they have trouble enough. And I suspect that they would say, yes, we know, trust me, we're here. We know we have trouble. But do you go to a country like Tunisia? Well, you know, actually live in Egypt. Egypt's harbor, Egypt's been really tough on the Cops. It's, you know,

Chinese has a, it's not a thriving Christian scene, even though it was the home from St. Augustine. But it's, it's not, it's not unfriendly. And Morocco is very, very friendly. So those North African Arab countries aren't where, aren't really where there's trouble. There's trouble in China.

I think there's trouble for Christians in China. I think there's trouble in parts of the Middle East for Christians. but I think if you're looking for the country right now that is the most anti-Christian, it's got to be China. Well, the country where they're burning down the churches, dozens and dozens of torched churches. Godless Canada. Yeah, well, that's right.

I mean, which has been going on for a while now. And people generally assume that it's people who are reacting to the false story of the, you know, hundreds of thousands of indigenous children were buried. beneath church schools, eventually debunked by sounding the ground, but the story still persists. Or it's people who just don't like

the apparitions of Christian, who don't like the manifestations of Christianity. Did we ever exactly find out who burned Notre Dame? I don't know. I don't know if we did. Was it a donkey that kicked over a candle into a pile of oily rags? It might have been. I don't

know if it was a person who did it. It might be. I'm not qualified to say. Or an Islamist immigrant who decided that this totemic symbol of the Western of Christianity was an affront. The problem is that you can't, I mean, in Notre Dame, I'll go with a thought experiment that it's Notre Dame. The Notre Dame was like it was arson. The problem in France is that the people who believe, who are believers, who have faith are Muslims. The people who are secular and who do not believe are the French. is an incredibly secular country.

You can't beat faith with no faith, really. You have to, there needs to be sort of an awakening of faith. And that seems to be happening. I mean, anecdotally, I'm not sure it is really happening statistically, but it's happening in some places. I mean, I see it in the news and people talk about it. I think there's a little too much happy talk about it. But look, that, you know, look, we've been running an experiment.

I'm 60 years old, right? And we've been running experiment as for as long as I have been a lot. Pretty much it started in the 60s, maybe late 50s, early 60s, in this country, which is what would be like? What would a culture and a country be like if it was entirely secular, right? So what if we had lived in a secular world? And so America just kind of secularized itself for the past 30, 40, 50, 60 years, took, you know, religion basically out of the curriculum. I mean, I don't mean just prayer in school. I mean, just out of the curriculum, you can get a prestigious,

degree, get a fantastic education in America and never ever read the Bible or read a part of it or even a piece of history. It's just kind of, it's been siloed off for some weirdos

on Sunday morning. But the problem with all that is that we haven't managed to secularize the human life. Your life is not secular. Your life is whether you like it or not, is deeply embedded in moments faith of your birth, of your death, of your marriage, of your children, of your life choices.

The human life cycle is anything but secular. And so, you know, you're now fine. You see, I mean, I'm looking to talk about young people a lot, and I'm fine, but you're a lot of 30, 40, 50, 50, 60 year old people in America anyway, who are 100% unchurched, totally unchurched, but are now curious. because they've been going through enough life and have had some knocks and some things to celebrate, some moments of Thanksgiving and moments of intercession

where what happens on a Sunday in church is suddenly interesting to them. And so I think if there is a movement back to church, maybe it'll look like young people, but I think it'll be middle age people who were raised without this, wondering how, and the problem with middle age people is when they go

to church, it's embarrassing because they don't really know anything. And so they have to learn. And most people who are in their 30s or 40s just don't want to be embarrassed anymore. Anyway, that's my, that's my rant.

So I'm less concerned or less, I go to where I can find moments of optimism. And so I find optimism in that. I think that is that, that's what I would focus on. And where I, the Pope, that's what I would be operationally be absolutely

laser focused on. It's like, how do I get people to know what it is that we have here? Yeah, the people who go in their 60s and the middle age who didn't go before don't know when to stand and when to sit. Yeah, right. The whole thing is, if you grew up in a church and you went through all of that, it's in your bones, in your marrow, and your DNA. And yes, there is a lot of that, and it's not just however old folks. I know some young, I know some young people

who are actually, and I don't want to They return with a Roman V, but they got pretty trad. They actually went from Lutheranism to Catholicism because they appreciated the rigor. And, you know, imagine how many you could get back if you started doing it Latin again. And I get that. And it's wonderful to see that in people who are absolutely normal. And it used to be absolutely normal for people to do that period. It was just simply part of the culture.

Now, you know that a lot of people were culturally Christian in the sense that they, you know, grew up in it. They knew the basics. They went, you know, Eastern Christmas. But they didn't particularly grapple with Christianity. And they probably, you know, if you pressed them to it, they might not really believe it. But it was just, it was the, it was the atmosphere. It was the water in which we all swam. Now, in France for a long time, was culturally Catholic as well.

And to a certain extent still is. People will take their kids to, you know, their newborns to be christened, to get married into church, et cetera. But yeah, the faith is dead. And the people who believe it, the people are coming from elsewhere. And that wouldn't be a problem. except that those people are profoundly antithetical to the fundamental underpinnings of the society in which they now find themselves so they want to transform it same thing in Britain and at a certain point it happens it happens there's just enough of them and they use the advantages of a democratic system to gain power and and then that's it and then the call to prayer is played over loudspeakers in what was you know a C of the neighborhood you have a king who was the head of a religion who a lot of people think is actually you probably more inclined to Islam than he is to Christianity. You know, conquered without firing a shot at the last thing that Charles does and say,

oh, by the way, Allah, you know, Akbar. So that's why, I mean, I feel for Europe simply because it made a suicidal decision to replace it not to, well, replaces that a loaded word, to augment its population with people from another place. believing in this preposterous post-Christian, transnational, everybody's fine and equal thing, that if you just simply transplant people to the society that took thousands of years to construct, they will absorb in a trice its institutions, its beliefs, its guardrails, and the rest of it, and they will become like us. I'm not one of those people that say that culture matters is what I will say,

and people from a culture steeped in it are not going to fit like a Lego piece into another one, period. Sorry, unless they really want to try. And unless it's America, America, which has a different sort of civic identity than Norway or Ireland. Yeah, it's a funny thing, though, about the sort of national identity and all that stuff. Because, you know, you can't beat something with nothing, right? I mean, that's sort of my larger, like, going back to the foreign policy issues, like, you know, we can't want something more than they want it. And I think that's what's happening inside Iran right now is that we've been told and we promised for the past 30 years that there's this big independence. I mean, a revolutionary movement, they want to kick out the Islamic radicals who run the country,

and yet it never quite seems to happen. It's like we want it more than they want it. And I feel like that may be, that is the question for Europe. The European monuments, the great European cities, the great European monuments, the great European cultural artifacts are entirely religious. Or they are based in, if not religion, religious war. you know like when they were fighting religious war until you know 19th century so um once you throw that out like you don't you you you you you can't replace it with sort of this neutral

you know intellectual shrugging you it gets replaced by people who believe something so the if you if you if you if you don't like the call to prayer um and you don't like that stuff um well what are you offering and then and what what what European Western intellectual values offered was this kind of shrugging nihilism that we put up with for 100 years. And a lot of that was maybe after World War I. It seemed nihilism seemed like a pretty good option. But at some point you have to decide if you believe any of this stuff. And it can't, you know, I mean, I like all this return to church.

I mean, that's, you know, listen, it's my job now. You can't go back to faith out of spite or because you're going to show the other side or because you have some partisan belief. It has to be drawn to it. And I suspect that a younger generation, and I think an older generation is looking for something, may go back to it. Look, there's a reason why these things last. You know, there's a reason they last because they're true. Yeah, because they're not on a spite part, but there's a certain energy that combines religion with nationalism too.

And I think you saw that a lot in Great Britain when all of a sudden the old flag started coming out. I don't think that was necessarily a return to religion as much as you as much as I might like in the culture. But it's all bound up. It's all part of it. Well, in England especially, right? It's like you could. But I would just say like the Dutch had a very, the Dutch who were super, super rational, have a very complicated relationship to religion. I mean, I've had a complicated one for 500 years.

They had this great, you know, they have trouble. they are they are out of it now they are there their their their cultures a little i mean they every now that are flare-ups but as a as a northern european or european nation they seem to be having they seem to have a policy now about immigration it's a little bit more um a little more sane you and i would think it's sane not perfect but it's on this way and they made a video years ago that if you you wanted to come to holland yeah you want to be a dutch citizen you had to watch this video and the video was like people eating bacon and cheese sitting around the park, women bathing

topless. Dogs. Yeah, dogs. A guy smoking weed and two men making out. And if any of this stuff bothers you, Holland is not your place because we are

tolerant about everything. And although the Dutch are weird about tolerance too. I love the Dutch for that reason. And I think that was a statement of values that the Dutch people could get behind because it that is kind of their modern way

right and I think that needs to be the unapologetic full-throated assertion of your great values is perfectly legitimate and I just think you spent 100 years trying to make it not legitimate and some of those

countries are just exhausted for more and I understand it I'm not going to point fingers but there there is nothing to be ashamed of in saying hey you know we've you know We were Norwegians. We were like the Vikings. We were marauding like the Danes. We were pagan warriors. We were tough. You'd think, but that video that you just described, you say that that's a sign of tolerance. It would be viewed now as a sign of intolerance because it specifically suggests that people who do not share these cultural values are not welcome and cannot become Dutch, which is true. But it's a ridiculous idea now because you have this arrangement between, between,

Islam and Marxists, which is just makes you scratch your head, but it's a temporary Alliance of Convenience, I guess, where the more you are in this country, the more you're on the left, the more you side with Islam because you believe somehow that it's a race. I mean, the tenets of it are irrelevant to you? What is it, what it is done to the various societies along the time, how it was spread by the sort, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You could almost call it why a colonialist enterprise. Decolonized.

Was Spain ever decolonized? I believe it was at some time, the reconquista. So you have this arrangement whereby it's progressive now to side with these people because they are viewed as the victims of your preferred oppressor. So you can't say, in the name of tolerance, the Dutch would insist that people follow these values because it would be intolerant of the people who are primarily now holding to the top of the intersectionality pyramid. And it's just, it's bizarre.

Yeah, I mean, the Dutch, poor Dutch, like, I don't want to dump on them. I read this thing last night, and I didn't have a chance to check it. So it may not be true. It may not be accurate, although it has all of the ring, all the ring of truth and the ring of accuracy. It was this sort of history of sort of the church and church movement, ecumenical movements of the, you know, 60s, mostly 60s and 70s. You know, the world counts of churches happen after World War II, all these things, And a lot of them happen as a result of World War II, as a result of a European Christian churches wondering how it was that they let the Holocaust unfold.

So that's where it's kernel is. And by the 60s, it was kind of nutty fruitcake stuff. But there was a paragraph that was simply a characterization of the sort of moral world, the broader church movements in the world. right so and I mentioned Malcolm X and Malcolm X it was characterized as saying so I don't know if he said this though boy it sounds like he did a Malcolm X said that he was drawn to Islam because in Islam he found um none of the racism that he found in the Christian West and I just I kind of laughed it was like it can't be true I mean he couldn't have said something so dumb about the people who invented slavery,

African child slavery based on race and actual skin color, like the actual, not just skin color, but the precise, you know, the value of the dark, you know, whatever it is, the intensity of it. But I think, so I didn't have a chance to look it up, but I, I'm almost 100% certain he said that and thought that. And I'm also 100% certain that people,

they still think that. Because everything must be seen through the prism of my personal animosity towards the blessings of my life, right, to get back to gratitude again. So, everyone who hates my, you know, forbearers must also be an ally and must be free of sin. And I just find that so weird. And that's, I, it's the, I wrote a piece for my weekend column for NRO. There was a story saying that Germany will now forbid 17 to 45 year olds from leaving the country because of, military service. And I looked a little bit deeper into it. And it's like, no. Now, actually, you just

have to tell the military you're going abroad if you're going abroad for more than three months. And the top of it was 45. 45-year-olds could be conscripted. And I thought, so they're going to cut right to the stage of taking the shopkeepers and the accountants and putting a sharp stick in their hand. They're going right to that fit. But the idea is, is that, you know, the, the, the conscription and the, the, the posture now having to increase their militaries. It's like, Our culture is bad. Our history is racist. Our values are wrong.

Everything that we stood for is soaked in blood. We are uniquely equals being part of the West. Here, go defend us. They fail to construct anything. No one is going to go to war for bike lanes or for wind farms off. They just aren't. They just aren't. And eventually that's-

this 45-year-old German infantrymen, you know, where they're looking like German tourists, like the little incredibly short shorts, those like dangerously short shorts, and then the Birkenstocks with socks, like, oh, no, like you're not going to win the world. But on the other hand, I mean, the problem with all that is that, like, over that I see, is that the opposite of thinking

that your culture is the worst thing in the world is, unfortunately, the reaction to that is thinking is the best thing in the world. And rather than what you really should be thinking of, which is that it's yours. And it's a mixed bag, like everybody's legacy, like everybody's inheritance. It's mixed bag. And we all try to be better. And we try to be proud of the people who are grateful for the, I think grateful is better

worth and proud, grateful of the people who sacrificed to get us to this place. I mean, I'm sitting in Princeton, you know, in Prince and New Jersey. And, you know, this is a great pivotal, you know, depending on, I mean, everybody who lives near Revolutionary War battlefield always says, this was the pivotal war. war, but people, you know, this is the pivotal war. And all these things are true. And so the opposite of, or I should say the proper bromide or proper response to your culture is drenched in blood and sin is, well, it's mine and it's not. And it's not perfect. And, um, but I'm grateful for the things that brought me here. And I'm hoping to make it better. And so I, so I, so I, I, sometimes,

I find the reactions to it even, you know, like, not this, right? But on the heading of, well, actually, you know, slavery was good for the, you know, slaves, which is sure and ridiculous and not necessary to say, to make the argument that flawed people at a flawed time belatedly realized the mistakes they had made. And, okay, it's 2026, you know, got to move on. Three quick points to wind up. One, I agree with you to be proud of your culture. I also would note that there are hierarchies of cultures.

Some are worse than the others. And we actually don't have much to learn from the ones that are demonstrably worst. We have much to learn from the ones that are better. But you always got to keep your eye out for the one that is completely secure, that absolutely it is the best, and they're going to show it to everybody. So, yeah, there are hierarchies. Two, you said the word bromide. And I think we would all be happier if you could get commercial bromides like you used to be able to do.

There's something called nerveine. I never saw it. But Bromo-Seltzer, for example, was Alka-Seltzer with a little bromide in it. And so now the term bromide has come to mean sort of, you know, a cliche to, you know, to call them somebody or something like that. No, it actually sort of worked on the nerves. It worked on the nerves. If you could just guggle, you could grab your afternoon soda, diet-free one, you know, and it had bromide. Going up in Baltimore, right?

I was born in Baltimore. There are two famous factories in town, in the center of town. Was Domino, one of them? No. No. That was across the harbor. McCormick, the McCormick Spice Factory was in downtown Baltimore. And the Bromo Seltzer Tower.

And the Bromiseltzer Towers, I think, might still be there. This long, sort of big, big, tall. sort of Italianate-looking, you know, Polsa-style skyscraper of the time with a kind of a light blue clock. You know, when they all had clocks, and it said Bromo-Seltzer on the clock. And I remember, I don't even know

if you could buy Brom and Seltzer, I guess you probably could buy it. But, you know, these are great patent medicines. And then on McCormick, if you were downtown, you knew what spice they were packaging that day because you could smell it. And that was just, normal. I mean, I don't know. I know. I know I'm playing the James Rylix violin here, but it was pretty

amazing, you know. It was great. I mean, you would tell people, hey, buddy, take a promo, and the promo siltser ads on the radio had the sound of this, of a train. Promocils, a promisos, which actually made you more nervous and made you want to take a promo. And McCormick, McCormick's were the biggest spice companies in the country, and they later bought Schilling. And so for a while, it was McCormick in the East. Schilling in the West. That would be their ads. I don't know why they had to tell us that until they eventually combined it. But they sort of had split up the country the way companies did in very odd ways.

There was Hulmans and Helmins, right? Right. There was a chain called Cress. There was a chain called Cresky, and they managed to split up the country nicely. You find Cress all over the south. You'll never find a Cresky down there. And, yes, well, we could get into retail history. That's another podcast I'd love to have with you.

The third thing I was going to say in this list was that you should go to Apple podcast and give us five stars. Give us six because Rob's back and say, more Rob, more Rob, it's kind of odd. Everyone drifts in and out, yet I'm the only lodestone here. You're the week after week after. I am the circus tent pole,

around which the elephants and the monkeys caper. I would consider yourself the ringmaster. Your top hat, your whip. Somebody has to keep an eye on the clock and pretend these an old radio hand. Anyway, Rob, it was great to talk to you. It always is, don't be a stranger. Come back more off.

I love to. Yeah, and I apologize to listeners who wanted us to talk about current events, but aren't you exhausted by current events? Like, I've talked to you in a long time, so it's nice to catch up. I also want to remind people in the comments that if I don't respond necessarily to a thing that Rob has said or an assertion, it is not because I agree with it. It may be that I don't agree with it, but I cannot refute it instantaneously with the amount of information I need, or I want to move along, or such and such and such. So you can argue with Rob all you like in the comments. Believe me. The rest of it. Next week, I believe it will be Stephen Hayward and Peter Robinson. No, it'll be Charles C.W. Cook as well. The gang back together. I don't know where I'll be. It could be my last from here.

Who knows? It's uncertain. Off we go. Off we go. Things in storage and eyes to the horizon. Rob, it's been great, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Rookashay 4.1. 1.7.5.2. Anyway, bye-bye.

Good to see you.