The Ricochet Podcast - Taking Trips

Episode Date: June 22, 2019

This week, we reunite the cast and they tell us a bit about their summer trips (or swanky conferences). Then, the EPCC’s Henry Olsen joins us for some rank punditry® on 2020 and Trump’s re-election chances, as well as keeping the Senate and winning back the House. Also, Iran, China, Italy, and yes, Costa Rica. Music from this week’s show: Volare (Nel Blu Di Pinto Di Blu) by Dean Martin... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long. He's back.

And Peter Robinson, he's back too. We talk to Henry Olson about Trump 2020. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. 2020 let's have ourselves a podcast welcome everybody it's the ricochet podcast number 453 and uh the first few weeks so where the the entire gang is assembled as you like them to be rob and peter hey guys how you been well we've both been traveling haven't we you yeah i mean different different you've both been on trips yes well my mind was entirely conventional i attended a conference in florence firenze italia and uh so i just went to europe at the beginning of the summer the way many people do i came back and got sick which not so many people do but i'm all right now

rob however has had a far more interesting trip i believe he's still coming down from it we'll get to that in just a second here probably at the end of it what rob will show with us sorry i was i literally was on mute and i and i had very witty things to say but uh forget the thing about being on mute when you're doing a podcast is it's sort of antithetical to the idea of being on a podcast true but it's a it's it's helpful uh it reminds you that other people need to speak that's the only thing but what i was going to say was that i like i like the idea that peter just says i was just merely at a conference in florence you know as one does yes in between conference sessions i was for the first time in my life able to get down to see a little bits of Florence. And, of course, what one thinks of when one thinks of Florence is the Uffizi Gallery.

And I got there and saw Michelangelo and saw the birth of Venus by Botticelli, saw the early Cimabue, the early, the medieval. Fantastic. But what I hadn't expected to be sort of born in on the ordinary tourist, which I was, was the violence in the history of Florence. Those buildings are made, the palazzos, the old palazzos are all really what they are is fortresses. And that town was at war with itself for several centuries. Republic gets declared. The Medici come back in and the Guelphs and the Ghibellines and the Guelphs seize power and knock down all the Ghibelline towers. And that and Savonarola gets executed, burned at the stake right there, says the tour guide pointing to a spot 20 feet away it uh we've we you know we here we are with iran shooting down drones we it's easy to forget how violent everyday life everyday life in the

midst of all this fantastic savonarola and uh what was in michelangelo no who was it savonarola and d, as I reword. Dante, right. Were essentially contemporaries. So here, in the same city, at the same time, you have political unrest that leads to a man with two companions being burned at the stake in public. And at the same time, Dante Alighieri is in his house writing one of the most beautiful poems in all of human civilization. Fantastic. Mooning over Beatrice, who, of course, is remembered for not having done anything to him,

but all the other innumerable peasants and citizens of Florence have passed into the mystery of history unremarked. It's only the big names we remember, isn't it? It's only the ones who built the towers or took them down. Sure. The quotidian lives are the things that we really wish we knew a little bit more about. I do, at least, anyway. No, no, that's true. That's a perfect, totally true. The other thing, the Medici, I didn't quite realize this until I got there.

It turns out the Medici ruled for an almost even three centuries. So there were a lot of members of this family. Anybody remember any? Well, Cosmo, maybe, Lorenzo, but really what you remember are the artists for whom they were patrons, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Long after the Kennedys are forgotten, we will remember Dandy Warhol.

No, I don't think so, perhaps. The Kochs, the Koch brothers. That's what you're going to say. There you go. Well, gentlemen, and I do want to hear about Rob's vacation. We're going to save that. Do you mind, Rob, for the end? No, no, of course.

Of course. We've already been in the evil period. And we've mentioned Iran. We should probably get right to it. Well, here's the thing, gentlemen. Do you think, and I think I know probably where you're going to go on this, that this was cold feet, that this was strategic pulling back, that this was a show of confusion, that this was a carefully calibrated measure. It could possibly be a little bit of all of those, couldn't it? I mean, we always think that we know what's going on when we hear about these things in the past.

I mean, when the president decides to attack, we're always rolled, the story's rolled out about how the decisions were made, and he sat in the Oval Office with a stern brow, the rest of it. And who knows how much of that is manufactured by the handlers what we get now is a an interesting picture of what seems to be this humanitarian spasm that arose in the president's breast and kept him doing something but still sent a message to iran no or yes peter rob you know i may anticipate rob a little bit on this one because this is the one my first thought on this is vaguely anti not vaguely anti-trTrump, it's just, he sends out a tweet, 10 minutes before the missiles were to fly, I said, how many people will be killed? And the answer was 150, casualties, that is just astounding. Attacks like that don't

happen in 20 minutes. It's not as if he gave an order and then said halfway through, well, wait a minute. They had to move, I don't know what the attacks were going, what form they were going to take, but planning is involved at a minimum. Many hours were involved in all this and the chief executive does not ask should not ask 10 minutes before apparently missiles were going to fly oh by the way are we going to be killing some people here that's the question you ask first or that's the or it's the cover story uh well who knows who knows who knows but the cover story is coming from the president himself, and it does not cast him in a good light. To you, Rob. Yeah, now I'm in a weird position of disagreeing with Peter about Trump.

I think it was the right decision to make. And first of all, I mean, one of the problems with the Trump administration is that it's very – he is very transparent and emotional and open. We kind of know what he thinks because he tweets it and it's disgusting most of the time. We have no idea how many times this has happened to a president where you get the go, you get the go, you know, it's go fever. You're going to, you're going to do it. And then you pull back. We don't know. The histories are only written about the strikes that, uh, are undertaken. So it's, it's highly possible that they said to him, there'll be no casualties. And then they came to him 30 minutes before it said, Oh, actually, no, it turns out from our surveillance are going to be 150 casualties. Well, that would be different. Yes, yes. There's a million things that happen.

But the issue here, I think, is that he was ready to do it, and he has an incredibly logical reason, at least stated, for not doing it, which was that it was a disproportionate response to the shooting down of

an unmanned piece of machinery. That is true. That is costly, but not human cost. So there is something to be said for that calculation. There's a lot to be said for it. My point is very simple and very limited. That calculation should have been made at the beginning of the process, not 10 minutes before the missiles were supposed to fly,

unless there were circumstances such as you just outlined that he has not told us about that yeah that's impossible none of those values are ever static you know you start planning and you start planning an operation and by the time you are finished your planning phase the beginning assumptions have changed that happens all the time so we don't know if we don't know if a school bus is pulling up for a tour yeah i, I got no idea. And it seems to me that this is exactly this. You guys have been watching a lot of television, by the way, but go ahead. What I find so strange about this is that this is exactly, this is the most normal and reassuring thing, to my mind, that has happened in the Trump administration in a long time. It's a citizen president who is the citizen commander-in-chief who ultimately has a decision, yes or no,

is clearly not being pushed around by his advisors, clearly not being pushed around by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the NSC or anybody, and he's making a decision that, at least on the face of it, by his own admission, based on a political calculation it's a bad idea to kill 150 people just because they shot down a flying you know iphone essentially so uh now i think he's in i think he's in i think he's it has less flexibility and less leverage as a president because he's been such a jerk to our allies. True. It's very important when you're doing a mission like this to have everybody aligned and everybody behind you.

But that's the given, right? That's who he is. This seemed to me like, okay, makes sense. The ancillary effect is it also puts the ball back in Iran's court without demonizing the United States because the story would have been, of course, Trump bumbling his way into war. As Schumer put it after he didn't go to war, that would have been the narrative. Trump is trying to get us into this, et cetera, et cetera. Now, having done nothing, it's sort of up to Iran to behave nice and to not do anything and suffer the sanctions and shut up and take it, which if they don't, then you can sort of wash your hands and say, well, look, we gave you an out here.

You didn't take it, so very well. Here comes the hammer. I mean the hammer has to come next. You can't keep doing this again and again and again, right? And does anybody think that Iran will stand down after this? Well, it's unclear what standing down means. I mean it's also unclear what the final – as the area in dispute whether we were within the international airspace of iran or four miles to the west it's like i mean it is possible that that information could have been wrong we could be wrong that we could have been within the national airspace of

iran that we're cutting it awful fine there if we say we're four miles out. So lots of things could have happened. I think it's smart for him to show restraint. I think it was smart for him to be – I think it's smart for him to be tough on Iran. In a lot of ways, I feel like this was – look, the only problem with this is that he talks too much if he had just been steely and silent and not been such a he not been such a blowhard that we wouldn't be psychoanalyzing him so so deeply now he would be saying oh he just president x was going to do something and then decided not to do it because he wanted to save 150 lives but he reserves the right to press the button at any time we wouldn't have known we wouldn't have known that probably not yep okay i'm agree i agree

with you guys that this was the right decision, the right outcome, all of that. I've already said it's – on his account, he doesn't include extenuating circumstances. He doesn't include changing data. Maybe information did change at the last minute. On his account, he waited until 10 minutes before the missiles were to fly. That just strikes me as crazy. The other thing that gives me the queasies is can either of you name the secretary of defense exactly we don't have one this is taking place first of all he jim mattis should

still be there as far as i can tell he's not going to find anyone more capable or more respected in all the military shanahan stands down with shanahan is acting secretary of defense once jim mattis resigns shanahan has now withdrawn his name from consideration and the next in the chain it's not even a chain of command because we're talking about the civilian side but the next successor so to speak to the secretary of defense is the secretary of the army who is now i believe acting secretary of defense i can't even remember his name what we have here is because of the way donald trump operates we have a department of defense without anybody in charge that also is

that also strikes me as not good here's another thing that strikes me as not good but this is not donald trump's fault um we're not getting much reporting at least that i have seen correct me if you've seen anything please tell me about it we're not getting much reporting on the military aspects of the problem and it's a pretty interesting problem the straits of hormuz are only a few miles wide at the narrowest point. 40% of the world's oil sails through the Straits of Hormuz. And if what Iran wanted to say in damaging those two tankers, what was it, 10 days or so ago, if what Iran wanted to say was, you get tough on us and we are capable of shutting down 40% of the world's shipping, as far as I know, they can. Now, we have drones in the area. We have ships around.

What are the military calculations that the professionals, our guys, chiefs of staff, the commanders involved, what are the military calculations that we're making? What could they do to us, and what could we do to them, short of right casually to keep that street open and i haven't seen anybody addressing that question even though it's been

one of the biggest questions in national security for the last 10 days oh well well we'll find out and i'll tell you what if we if we are it's the dog that didn action, though, we're going to point to what the president is doing as the old wag the dog scenario, right? That's exactly what those are. Oh, he's taking his mind off of a domestic crisis by fomenting a completely specious international crisis. And all the way the dog thing goes back to the Clinton era and the, you know, distracting from Lewinsky, but bombing an aspirin factory and the rest of it, you know, the tail wags the dog, they're saying, okay.

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The farm had a dog. That dog was the happiest, best-fed, shiniest dog I ever met. Thefarmersdog.com. And now we welcome to the podcast Henry Olson, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, columnist of the Washington Post. You can follow him, of course, on Twitter, at Henry Olson, E-P-P-C. Welcome, Henry.

Everything we're hearing, of course, the Biden juggernaut will swamp Trump, or the Warren juggernaut, or the Klobuchar juggernaut, whatever. People are just desperate for a change. Trump's chances are awful, and put a fork in him. I'm not getting that feeling at all, and I'm not exactly one of those guys you can believe if he does no wrong. Chances for 2020 aren't nearly as bad as people think. Malcolm?

Well, because, first of all, he doesn't have to win the popular vote to win the Electoral College, and people keep forgetting that. Yes, he's down eight points or nine points in the averages on his job approval rating, but the way his coalition is split, he can lose by four points in the popular vote and still win the electoral college.

And then you've got the Democrats, you know, that last time Trump won because people who didn't like either candidate backed him by nearly 20 percent. Those people are the sort of squishy Republicans who voted Democrat last time, but may not want to put a real liberal Democrat in the White House. And Trump is positioned to make that contrast just like he did with Hillary Clinton. Henry, Peter Robinson here. A pleasure to speak to you, even if it is over the line. I'd love to meet you at some point. I've admired your writing, and you also have a wonderful radio voice.

This is a pleasure. Listen, how can a guy – I have a wonderful radio voice this is a pleasure listen how can a guy how can a guy who even when the economy is roaring along even when unemployment is at the lowest point excuse me in half a century cannot get his approval rating above the mid-40s for more than a day or two. How can such a man even hope to be re-elected? Well, again, because what we have is a different system. If he can get his job approval rating up to 46% or 47%, he'll probably be at or above 50% in all of the swing states he needs to win.

I know coming out of California, it seems strange, but people like him in the Midwest. And if he can move it up a couple of points, he can win just the way he won last time, drawn inside straight in the Midwest or enough of the Midwest state to get another majority while he loses by 4 million votes. And what about the question of polling for Donald Trump? Is it possible that part of his lower than you would expect with a booming economy approval ratings are because people, when asked the question, do you approve of the job the president is doing, say to themselves, or what they're saying in effect is I can't stand the son of a gun when in fact they'd be happy enough to this this distinction between noise all kinds of people and his policies which are really basically fairly straightforwardly republican is that hard to pull is that hard to

pull it's not as hard to pull as Republicans would want to believe. Look, there is a slight understatement of Trump's support. I think that was true in 2016. We had polls in 2018 in Iowa and in Ohio, and it wasn't Trump. It was Republicans. You took a look at all the state polls in Ohio, and you would have thought that Mike DeWine was going to lose by three or four points. Well, he won by three points. It just didn't have good polling. But when you look at good quality national polls, you see that if they ask, do you personally like him, he scores lower on that than on his job approval rating.

And you ask, do you like the job he's doing on the economy? He scores higher on that than his overall job approval rating. So even with potential polling bias, it shows that people do distinguish between those different types of questions when asked. And I think the polls do understate him a little bit, but not by enough to discount the fact that he's still underwater. Got it. I've got another couple of questions for you, Henry, and I know Rob wants to get in. Which of the Democratic candidates, I'm not talking about policy here, I'm talking about sheer politics, who is the greatest, who would represent the greatest threat to Donald Trump and whom should he most wish to run against? I have long thought that Amy Klobuchar was the perfect candidate for them to

nominate because she is about as close to a generic Democrat, blank slate, inoffensive, white bread, wilt toast, use the adjective that you want, who will keep the focus on Donald Trump. It's very hard to point at her and say bad temperament, far left and so forth. And that's what they should be shooting for. Who's the worst person? I would say the person who combines poor discipline with extreme left positions. And that there's a number of them who compete for that prize. So it's hard to say who's worse. But I'd say a mixture between Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris, that Harris has a number of times committed unforced errors in the primary by not seeming to know the details of her own policy proposals.

And she'll, I think, be very tempted to go tit for tat when Trump, if she were the nominee, when Trump inevitably put fire on. And the fact is, she's never had a tough race against a Republican. Of course, she's from Massachusetts. When would she have had a tough race? No, no, no. San Francisco. I said Harris. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I misspoke. I misspoke. One last question for me and then over to Rob. Hispanics. We've been hearing since he was a candidate, actually we've been hearing this from some Republicans, Republican strategists, that Trump is the worst possible president for Republicans because he's going to spend all four years alienating the Hispanic vote. Has that happened?

No, it has not happened. Here's what the data show, that Trump did drive some turnout and some votes away and consequently got in some areas, particularly among Mexican Americans in the Southwest, did worse than Romney. But overall, he did not drive away other Hispanics to the same degree. And in 2018, non-Mexican Hispanics came back to vote for Republicans, despite four years or two years of Trump on immigration. That's why we have a Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida and a Senator Rick Scott. And Mexican Hispanics did not move against Trump or turn out in higher numbers, unlike white college-educated liberals who did. You know, you take a look, and Hispanics do not behave in the way that white liberals want to believe they behave, and it would not surprise me at all if Trump slightly improved his standing among Hispanics overall, especially among non-Mexican Hispanics. Hey, Henry, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. So I,

it seems like the, maybe it's nothing's totally obvious, but it seems to me that someone running a basic winning Democratic campaign, the way the last two winning presidential candidates in the democratic party have run would be the smart one run to the center you kind of shrug and lack moderate and you basically say i'm not a crazy person you look for a couple sister soldier moments the famous moment where bill clinton went and uh wagged a finger at um an african-american female rapper and wagged a finger at an African-American female rapper, and it was a code to American moderates and a lot of white moderates that, hey, I'm a normal guy. Running to normalcy and to the center seems like the way to win the general. Is the Democratic Party capable in 2019, 2020 of nominating a winning candidate the way they have the past two times?

Well, the thing to remember at the Democratic Party is that the left wing, the progressive left, has been an open revolt against this strategy. A number of them resigned from Bill Clinton's administration because he governed from the center as well as ran from the center. They put up Bill Bradley to run against Al Gore to try and campaign from the left. And they backed Barack Obama in 2008 because they believed that he was a left-wing challenger more like them and less like the establishment. And, of course, became immediately disenchanted with him when he proved to be more Clinton-esque in his policies than they wanted. They will do everything they can to prevent the Democratic Party from making what strikes you and I and most members of the Democratic establishment as the rational choice.

They may not be able to do it if somebody like a Biden or somebody like a Klobuchar can't unify the near half of Democratic voters who are not far left crazies behind their candidacy. So I'd say it's a 50-50 shot whether the progressives can pull it off. So right now we have this past week, we have a lot of, you know, infighting and, you know, Democrats eating their own and all sorts of things that happen in a Democratic primary that frankly were new to the Republicans in 2016, but Republicans managed to do it too. They have a huge field. Pretty much everyone who's ever been elected to anything in a Democratic party has at least had a cocktail party or raised some money, put it that way.

And you're saying that – and you think that it's sort of a biden klobuchar uh that's the sensible choice for the democrats um yeah it seems to me like they but right now biden's doing a sister soldier thing isn't he kind of well he's trying to but the part of the problem with biden is biden is that um he is committing unforced errors at a prodigious rate in a basically unscripted format. Biden on paper looks good, but Biden in practice may be out of step, out of touch, a little bit too old. And that's basically what gives somebody like a Klobuchar or Michael Bennett even an opportunity or Cory Booker if he were to return to his roots as a new Democrat rather than Senator Spartacus from Secaucus. spotlight, right? So it was Buttigieg a while ago, and it was Elizabeth Warren last week, and everyone's got their two-week bubble. Who's next? I mean, when you said Klobuchar, frankly, I thought to myself, oh, right, Klobuchar. I mean, don't you think that's part of what the Democratic Party primary voters are doing? It's like, oh, wait, I forgot about her. She's in this too. Look, if this were a baseball season, what we would be doing is entering the end of the training camp. The spring training games

haven't even started. That's what the debates start. So if you're a baseball fan, you know everything about who's pitching well in Yankees camp and Clearwater and so forth. And the rest of the world doesn't have a clue because they don't care. And that's what we're entering is the beginning of the phase where the real world, the voters who are going to decide this are going to start to focus. And that provides enormous opportunity, not just for a two-week surge, but for a sustained surge, lots and lots of time. Put it this way. In 2011, we were about five months away from Rick Santorum beginning his famous month long surge and becoming Mitt Romney's famous challenger. He was an asterisk in the polls at this point in 2011.

Henry, Peter here one more time. The Republicans in the Senate hold the majority, pick up a seat or two. Republicans in the House, who are down, what, 37 seats now. Prospects for each? Yeah, I think the Senate will largely be determined by the presidential campaign. If it is, as I expect, a close race win or lose, then that means that they should look good at at least holding their own in the Senate. You know, better chance of getting a seat or two if Trump wins the popular vote or not wins popular, but wins the election, because that's somebody like a Martha McSally or Joni Ernst in better position to carry their state. The House Republicans need to gain, I think they're sitting at around 200 seats, so they need to gain 18 to win. There are ample opportunities for them to do that, that there are more than 18 seats that Trump carried that the Democrats hold right now. And that means that if Trump holds roughly what he did last time, Trump should carry it again. The question is whether the Republicans know that and whether the Republicans know how to run campaigns in those areas. And this is one thing that's really unclear, that the House Republicans still seem entranced by this suburban strategy that can only get them so far.

They have to learn how to win less suburban areas that Democrats were able to pull back if they want to retake the House. Henry, aren't you impressed by Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House now? I thought his general reputation, of course, I'm out here in California. I've met him a few times. I can't say I know him, but I thought his general reputation for the nuts and bolts of politics was very, very good. Is that so? Kevin is a political animal. He lives to win. And I think it's a problem that he seems to have somebody in the NRCC, Tom Emmer, who is getting a lot of flack from internal members because they don't think that he's as good as the leader. But Kevin has positioned

the Republicans reasonably well, in part by keeping them unified and playing as a foil to Nancy Pelosi, which is an excellent strategy for someone in his position. But ultimately, it's going to come down to can they recruit the candidates in the right districts and know how to talk to Trump voters who may not always be Republican voters? And can they talk to people who are Republican voters, but not necessarily Trump voters? I'd say that the jury is out on that. Henry, absolute last question here before the lawnmower consumes somebody there. This is James Lylex in Minnesota, home of Amy Klobuchar, as a matter of fact.

And I've been touting her for a long time as somebody that they should run. Tom Ember is home as well. But let's talk about the people who may not be statistically significant, but were certainly noisy in the last election, the never-Tr's talk about the people who may not be statistically significant, but were certainly noisy in the last election, the never Trumpers, the people who voted third party. They went for Evan McMuffin or they went for nobody. And I think they thought perhaps that even though they didn't like Hillary, that there wasn't going to be a massive upset of the status quo.

She wasn't going to break anything in the China shop. And we'll see what happens after that. I think it's different now because the resurgence of the left the way that the left has had a full-throated embrace of socialism and every single other discredited idea down the pike leads one to believe that whoever gets nominated and on the democratic side is going to carry with them this enthusiasm for fundamentally radically transforming and nationalizing the hell out of everything. So those never Trumpers may find themselves saying, well, look, I've had four years. I don't mind what he's done. I don't like the tone, but I'm used to it.

And I'm not a never Trumper this time. Is that something to consider? Are there a lot of those people or are they just chattering nabobs in the media that we can ignore again? There are a lot of them in the media. They're actually at this point, very few of them in the general electorate, is that the sort of person who was a moderate Republican tended to go, or a very soft conservative, tended to go all the way over to Hillary Clinton last time. They stuck with the Democrats this time. They're not going to

come back to Trump. And the people who were hardcore conservatives who voted third party last time, they're the sort of people who are in that camp of I don't like Trump, but I like his policies. And they're part of the people who are in the soft part of that 44 percent job approval. They're already back. The key people that the Trump campaign needs to focus on is the reluctant Trump voters, the not hardcore never Trumpers. They did vote for Trump last time, but they didn't like him. A lot of them, particularly men, voted for the Democrats in 2018. They're a different group. They're not the sort of people who caught into the Bill Kristol-Maxboot view of the world, but they also stuck with Trump because they thought of the policies.

That person needs to be focused on. Just reminded, in 2016, effectively, what Trump did was say, never Hillary is worse for you than never Trump. And they agreed with that. This time he needs to say, never socialist is more important to you than never Trump. And that'll give him a shot with that. Somewhere in a room, Max Boot just sat up with his fedora quivering, saying, there's a Max Boot view of the world, and it was just referenced by somebody. I applaud you for that. Thanks, Henry. It's been fun having you on.

Thank you for having me. Henry, you are the best political tutor going. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Henry, for joining us on the podcast today. Hope to talk to you down the road again. Thanks a lot. Well, we could have gone on longer with that piece. I'm sure we could have. We could have talked for hours with Henry,

but we got the time to do it today, too. It's the longest day of the year, the day we're recording this podcast. After this, it just gets shorter. So what are you going to do with those extra hours that you have today? Hmm. How about you brush your teeth longer than you did yesterday?'s an idea chances are probably you don't brush your teeth as long as you should and that's why you need quip just two minutes a day twice a day can help pave the way for a healthier mouth and mind and that's what quip does for you now the whole

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And now that I'm feeling all spendy and the rest with consumer enthusiasm and raw animal spirits, what do I do with this other money that I've got here? If only Robert Long could come along and tell me what I should do with my money. Rob, I believe you have something to say to people who are absolutely flabbergasted that there's no place for them to put this money that they want. They want to do something with it. What can want to they want value for it what you can do here's what they can do they can join ricochet that's the thing you're listening to a podcast the podcast costs money and we appreciate the fact that you're listening um but look uh i say this all the time um i i know there are people listening to me right now who have said

to themselves i'm gonna i'm gonna themselves, I'm going to join. I really promise I'll join. I'll join. And then they don't do it. If everybody who thought that did it this weekend or Monday, Ricochet would be able to grow. And that's the most important thing for us is to grow. Our goal, our vision is to be the center-right NPR, to have 24-7 programming anytime you want to listen to it, not just conversations but reporting and all sorts of things.

But in order to do that, we need your help. So please come to Ricochet.com and join Ricochet. You get to join the conversation. You get to join the other members. You get to have all sorts of conversations if you want or you get to have none if you prefer. But you will, no matter what, be helping us grow, and we really need it. So please do.

So I'm naked on the beach, and I got a starfish on my head, right? Okay. So now the reason I said that is because if people sped ahead in the podcast, they wanted to skip all the commercials. They're going to land on that, wonder what they missed, and they're going to go back, and they're going to hear Rob's pitch. And then they're going to spend money, and Ricochet will flourish. That was my general idea that's actually brilliant i've been meaning to do that often just throw in things after the ads that make people say how did i miss that setup of course having announced that's a strategy it's now useless

going forward in the future speaking of going forward in the future hong kong was riven by some of the greatest largest protests ever in its history with people singing christian themes songs which something didn't seem to be reported too much what do we make of this some of the greatest, largest protests ever in its history with people singing Christian themes, songs, which something didn't seem to be reported too much. What do we make of this? I always thought that handing over Hong Kong to China was a mistake. This was bound to happen. Eventually they would be consumed and it would be a showpiece for a while,

but eventually China would want to do what China does to it. Is this just a break in that process or did something actually happen this weekend? Oh, well, 25% of the entire population of Hong Kong turned out and filled the city streets. Yeah, something happened. Actually, I have to confess it took me by surprise. into the argument that Chinese people, and people in Hong Kong are Chinese, Chinese people don't really care so much about democracy and human rights as long as the government in Beijing is producing economic growth. And of course, Hong Kong has a history of economic growth.

If anybody you'd think wanted to cling to growth and avoid doing anything that might endanger that growth in the current circumstance, standing up to the regime in Beijing might cause trouble for the economy of Hong Kong. Not a bit of it. Not a bit of it. Those people in Hong Kong were standing up for human rights and democracy. And it was just thrilling. And do you know what they did? They backed down Beijing. The story isn't over. Beijing isn't going to take it lying down.

But at least for now, ordinary people filling the streets. James is quite right, I believe, to identify the specifically Christian element in it. One of the protesters was Cardinal Zen. Other protesters from various evangelical churches, which are very powerful and robust, I suppose may be the word, in Hong Kong. As best I can tell, they represented a central element in the protests. And for now, they have backed down Beijing. Just amazing. parts of China, certainly the non-government aligned enterprises, that there's a thick going on, that government enterprises are getting extra stuff and extra attention and

sweetheart loans. And if you're in Hong Kong, that is just antithetical to the Hong Kong attitude, which has been since – I think since even before the British took over, that rock has been a rock that was built out of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman's spirit animal. It is the most capitalistic, the most free market, the most property rights-obsessed rock on earth. There's nothing quite so capitalistic as a somebody in hong kong um so that said that's that that's part of the problem is that when growth slows down you see now whether it's that warren buffett famously said when the tide goes out you learn who's swimming naked uh when growth slows down you you start to notice things like authoritarian um maneuvers what's interesting about china in

general is that you know we think of china as this great um you know enemy or cold war taking a cold war uh the position of the cold war they're in trouble and they're in trouble on the east and the west and the north and even in the south i mean the han chinese believe that who are the people who run it, they believe that there's a racial reason, really. It's a form of racialism. I won't say racism, but it's a form of racialism. But they believe that the Han Chinese path is unified and the Han Chinese people don't need democracy

because they all agree. What's the point of having democracy if I know exactly what you want you know exactly what i want why go through the why go through the the uh the the kabuki theater of voting right problem is that han chinese are in the center but to the north you have uh koreo chinese so basically korean they look korean to the west you have the uyghurs they're muslim chinese and they look a lot more central asian than they do east asian and to the south you have southeast asians and it you know the in mandarin there is a word they use which is their equivalent of the n word here to describe those people the translation of the english translation is roughly jungle asian

but it is not a nice not a compliment not a compliment and so uh where their greatest fear is is that this entire country will break up uh and we think that can't happen but it can it's a little bit happening to the west it could easily happen in the north um in the south the rise of vietnam is a real problem for the chinese. What if the people clustering on the other side of the border in and now they have this little rock to the east which is very important to them flexing its independence and its muscles and um i mean i gotta say it's a beautiful thing to watch what it is what if what if the korean i mean if that situation destabilizes and you have people flooding over the border who in their own way culturally ethnically more identify with the chinese and the others i mean that that's again, that the central government doesn't want.

Oh, I've been saying that for years. To me, you strike where your competitor is the weakest. And we scream and yell about China and how cheap the labor is there as if we could possibly compete with a country that is still a third in poverty. We can't. But on the other hand, we can certainly encourage our spiritual and philosophical partners in North and Manchuria and in the West to reconnect with their ethnic identity. That would drive the Chinese crazy. Look, if it all hits the fan in North Korea, those people,

23 million of them, they're going north. They're not going to go through into Seoul. They're going to cross that river. Rob, you just made a point that I didn't follow. What is the kinship between the West and Manchurians? Well, it's not really kinship. I just merely meant that we as Americans

prefer liberty and self-determination. Oh, I see. And so if you're like a – And in Manchuria, they're more open to that than those who are directly under control of the Han Chinese. They're not Han Chinese. They're Korea. They look Korean. And on the West, they don't look Han Chinese either.

So I mean I think it's mischievous for us to do it, but I think that we should do it in the same way it was mischievous for us during the Cold War to celebrate every Soviet dissident we could get our hands on. That was powerful. That was a powerful weapon we used. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal the other severed formal relations with the Republic of Taiwan, he was doing so to establish relations with the People's Republic of China to further Nixon's policy of playing China and the Soviet Union off against each other. The Soviet Union no longer exists. China is a problem unlike anything else we've faced. And the time has come to begin reestablishing, perhaps not formally, but begin to reestablishing our relations with Taiwan and becoming closer to Taiwan and that we should begin by selling them the airplanes, the fighter jets

that they're requesting. And Rob Long says? Absolutely. Oh, really? Absolutely. Look, I mean, our argument with China, I mean, I don't believe in a China that's expansionist. I don't believe that China is the Soviet Union of the 2019. Soviet Union wanted to get big, big, big and want more and more client states. The Chinese have shown none of that. Even when they do their business forays into Africa, they are excruciatingly and explicitly neutral they don't care they do not care you can that country can be aligned with any country they want what they want are rare earth minerals that's my understanding they're very contractual we will

pay you this much for those rare earth minerals and that's all we're going to do here that's all we're doing we're not building your thing we're not going to build a well we don't care uh and in many ways i think that's exactly the way exactly the way – they will probably do more good in Africa than all the NGOs, whatever. But that's a separate issue. I don't think they're expansionists. I think what they are is nervous about their own unity, and I like that. I like them to be nervous about their own unity. I don't know why we want – I don't want to make their life any better. I don't want, you know, President

Xi to wake up and think to himself, oh, I got this licked so I can figure out how to buy myself Rob's iPhone. I'd rather have him worried about two poets in Dongbae writing pro-Korean poetry. I want them all to be also to be nervous

about the fact that we're regarding them with increasing suspicion for good reason. I to be nervous about the fact that we're regarding them with increasing suspicion for good reason. I mean, one, for the fact that the IP, they hover up the deals that they make our companies go into so they can steal our IP. And the fact that my phone here, I would prefer this phone with a little bit more expensive if the parts came from a place that I trusted more. And I don't trust anything that comes out of China, especially their computers. No, I don't have zero.

I mean this, my, my phone broke the other day, right? I dropped it. It shattered. It was horrible. And I felt really stupid because I've upgraded my family for doing that.

Can't you take, it's an expensive piece of equipment. Can't you take care of it? And there I am breaking it. And I, you know, when I took it in, I had this day of like zero communication with the outside world.

And it was not pleasant. I'm not glued to my phone all the time. But no Twitter news to come to, no text from my wife, no calls from my daughter, none of that stuff. Zero phone interaction with the outside world. I didn't like it. Not at all. Zero of anything, actually, when you think about it isn isn't really that very good, unless we're talking about Zebit. That's Z-E-B-I-T, because they will change your whole perspective on zero forever.

What is Zebit? Well, let me tell you. Zebit is a better credit option. Zebit provides better credit options for those who need it. They allow you to buy what you need and pay over time, interest-free. Sounds good. There's zero cost to join, too. With Zebit, there's no cost to join,

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They have more than 50,000 products in their marketplace. Brand names, we're not talking about some knockout stuff you never heard about. No, Xbox, Sony, GoPro, Fitbit, electronics, barbecues, furniture, more. Zebit has everything you need when you need it. Now, Zebit has a five-star rating on Trustpilot. That's important because they've earned the trust of more than a million customers who shop on Zebit. Sign up for Zebit today at Zebit.com slash Ricochet and get a $2,500 credit in the shop.

The Zebit Marketplace with zero interest and zero cost to join. $2,500 credit to the shop. That's Z-E-B-I-T.com slash Ricochet for $2,500 in interest-free credit. Zebit.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Zebit for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now before we go, we need to talk about Rob's trip to inner light. Before we do, I just have one thought I wanted to say about China, which I forgot to mention, which is that it's something that they know that we don't. Because I think we tend in America to sort of focus entirely on the disaster ahead for us.

But here's what they know, and that sort of speaks to your iPhone problem, is they know that we're not that far away from your going into an Apple store and saying, I need a new iPhone, buying, paying for that iPhone, and then having that iPhone be essentially printed in the back of the Apple store. And when that happens, and it's really not that far away, when that happens, the entire advantage that China has, which is that it costs two cents to pay the worker to build the iPhone, disappears. There are no transportation costs.

There are no container ships filled with heavy iPhones and iPads coming from China. There's none of that. Their advantage is zero. Their only advantage really is for the Chinese market, which means they need richer Chinese people to buy iPhones. So they know this. We tend to forget it. But essentially, that kind of manufacturing that they really excel in right now is going to be decimated or more in the next two, three, four years. If they were doing so great, I wouldn't be getting spam emails from these guys in the Shanghai Industrial District asking me if I wanted to buy rubber bands or door closers.

They're spamming a newspaper guy in Minnesota, the market might not be all that great. So, Rob, just to return this to politics for one moment, all that you said about China, about their quite, their entirely justified nervousness about their own system, does that imply that the President of the United States is pursuing the right policy by keeping them constantly off balance? Yes, yes and no. I mean, he isn't really. I mean, he had a, he had a, he started that way. I really do. I think he started that way. His first meeting with the president of China was brilliant in which he said, this Korean problem is yours, not mine.

You solve it. Why are we – I don't – I'm not interested in it. And then, of course, because he's an undisciplined maniac, he decided he wanted to jump right into it and has produced precisely zero results. In fact, has set it back. His initial impulse was correct, but he's just not disciplined. In trade, I lovery kudlow every time we have him on he talks about how well we're just about to get it we had a really great meeting we're about to let and it doesn't happen meanwhile i think american manufacturing american consumers are

going to pay the price for that um what you know trump is great by the way i'll tell you one thing that has happened i can give you a little report from silicon valley chinese money into silicon valley has stopped i don't mean it's slowed i Valley. Chinese money into Silicon Valley has stopped. I don't mean it's slowed. I mean in the last 18 months, it has stopped, full stop. So we all got used to it. I heard a VC who knows a lot about this say that he thought values across the valley were between 25% and a third higher than they would have been other absent Chinese money, and that's gone now. Wow.

Well, that's – maybe that's not so bad. There's plenty of money sitting on the sidelines in the United States. No, that's – I would just – I just think that for the – I wish that I believed that the Trump strategy was a blueprint for the future rather than simply immediate responses to whatever itch he needs to scratch that minute. Um, that's, that's, to me, that's the great criticism of Trump's policy to China. It isn't really even the tariffs necessarily where the saber rattling, although I'm tend to be against that. It's that I don't believe he's, he's, I don't believe he has an absolute vision for the relationship that America should be having with China, you with China in 2025.

Well, if he wanted a vision, perhaps he should go down to some nice, lush, tropical place and stare at the fronds and bake in the sun and find inner enlightenment in that fashion. And Robbie would be a good guide for that. Would you like to take the person – That's a segue, my friend. Would you like to take Donald Trump down to Costa Rica and give him a taste of – what would you give him a taste of exactly? Well, I don't know. I mean these are powerful plant medicines, James. I don't think you just want to – I don't know if I really want to see what's inside Donald Trump.

Some hoods you just don't want to lift. You know what I'm saying? But yes, I went to – last week Ia rica um at this place where you go it's kind of a nice little sort of resortish thing with a pool and nice rooms and and two um peruvian kind of healers from the chapibo tradition and you sit in a four nights in a row pretty much you sit in a circle a big circle under in a giant thatched hut and you drink ayahuasca which is their plant medicine only the only thing they had for centuries and centuries and uh it's it's a powerful very powerful psychedelic but it feels very physical too

so it's not you're not just kind of sitting in your own head um and uh it's uh pretty amazing i mean one of the things you discover at least i discovered is as a person who was pretty skeptical and it's pretty amazing. One of the things you discover, at least I discovered as a person who was pretty skeptical about the early 20th century psychoanalytic giants Freud, Adler, Jung is that they were right about a lot of stuff and it's kind of fun.

I mean it's... My friend Rob Long is a gamer. He'll try stuff and i've known you for a good long time now you're always curious you're always game to give it a try so to what extent let me think how to frame this to what extent did you go down to to costa rica out of out of sheer animal rob long curiosity. Let me just try it. And to what extent are you now, do you think that something,

how to put this, serious or meaningful or genuinely useful to you took place? I would say both of those things are true. I went down because I thought I was interested in this. I've been interested in it for about a year and a half, two years.

I've sort of been interested in these new things that are happening in this realm. I've been interested in it for about a year and a half, two years. I've sort of been interested in these new things that are happening in this realm. I've been interested. I was originally attracted to it by reading just a history of psychedelics. And maybe this could be one of these things where Freud and Jung are correct, where it just seemed to attract me because the great villain in psychedelic research is the government. The government needs to regulate everything. The government needs to get in there. And even though there's really no particular – there's no evidence that these things are harmful at all, the government still needs to be a big foot about it.

And so I naturally think when the government wants to do something, it tells me I can't do something. I really want to do it. So there's that. And the curiosity to the fact that when you reach a certain age, you're carrying have not reflected on. So part of the beauty of these – certainly of this plant medicine, but I think also just the other things, is that your ego kind of disappears. So you're able to – the compartments in your brain kind of open up, and you zip back and forth in memories. Look, for some people, it's very painful. And there's a huge amount of research right now being done, not just with ayahuasca but with MDMA and psilocybin, for people who have been through genuinely specific traumatic events. So there's a guy who does – who's got a veterans organization where he does this with veterans. And there's MDMA research now that the fda thank and this is predominantly a big part of the trump administration's move to open up the fda which i think has been great right um they're doing a lot more research on mdma and if you

take md you know if you're if you're suffering from ptsd which is a genuine problem um three courses four courses of mdma with two therapists can be enormously, enormously healing. And compare that to like just being, you know, anesthetized or on antidepressants or any anxieties for the rest of your life. I mean, I think, I think we know which is preferable, right? I mean, well, this is serious. This is a little more serious. This is a little more meaningful to you than I had supposed, to be honest. So we need to stop talking about it right now because we're running out of time and we can't – our impulse, I know all three of us, we're going to make two jokes and be done, and that's not the right way. Look, you can make – I mean the jokes are fine. would not recommend this for everybody but i think it's really interesting every now and then to just get inside your head and see what's there and see what you don't need to carry around

anymore well i'm now i'm now going to reduce the two of you to sheer awe with my segue back from this segment back up to dante and then tossing it to james the open lines of the Inferno. Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Dante Alighieri in 1260, 1270 or 80, and Rob Long in 2019.

James? I believe it was in Nostra Camina Can you do it in Italian? Better! Do it! Do it! But it wasn't in Nostra Camina della Nostra Camera. Can you do it in Italian? Better. Do it. Do it. But it wasn't in Nostra Camera della Nostra Vita. Nostra, our. Yes, it's our.

It's in the middle of the journey of our life. Right. Yes. Strange thing. I mean, it's one of the things that gets your attention in the first line. It's not just a personal account. It's all of us. It's you.

It's me. It's Rob. It's the people at Zebit. It's all of us. It's you, it's me, it's Rob, it's the people at Zebit, it's the people at Quip, it's the people at Farmers Dog, all of whom get together to make your life better. Go to Zebit and Quip and Farmers Dog and use that coupon code Ricochet and you will have better food, better teeth and

credit and you know what? You'll be supporting them and that supports us as well. If you enjoy the show, I always tell you to go to iTunes and leave those five-star reviews but you don't, do you? One of these days you will though because I will have guilted you and that guilt will accumulate in your heart and carry with you forever unless you take the therapeutic

advice of Rob Long, Costa Rica style, and start to unhurt yourself with all of these things. I'd say that Rob had visions that knocked his socks off but he doesn't wear any so that's probably not the metric to use. And it is hard to square sort of our cosmopolitan, civilized version of Rob Long, who will go to Zabar's and gently judge the figs on their ripeness one moment, and the next he's in a hut somewhere. I'm just worried that he's going to take too much acid.

The next thing we learn, we find that he's been arrested and he's been, you know, there he was standing in the bar saying acid is groovy, kill the figs. And the next thing you know, very good, very good. That's very, very good reference, by the way. And there we go. And there we have it. Really, honestly, this is a podcast on its own that Rob ought to do. I'll listen to it for that matter. I'll just sit back and ask questions and maybe, you know, book a flight myself. Who knows? I don't. You don't either.

But you do know that this is the Ricochet Podcast. It's been number 453 and that you'll listen to the number 454 because you love it. And we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Ciao, amigos. Alla prossima settimana ha ha ha volare oh oh

cantare oh oh let's fly way up to the clouds away from the maddening crowds. We can sing in the glow of a star that I know our world lovers enjoy peace of mind. Let us leave the confusion and all disillusion behind.

Just like birds of a feather A rainbow together we'll find Oh, Lottie Oh, oh Eganthiotti Oh, oh No wonder my happy heart sings Your love has given me wings Penso che il sogno così non ritorne mai più

Mi dipinge con le mani e la faccia di blu. Poi d'improvviso ho tenito dal veretto rapito. E incominciavo a volare nel cielo infinito. Volare. volare e cantare nel blu dipinto di blu e chiedici di stare lassù e volavo volavo Ricochet! Join the conversation.