The Ricochet Podcast - Time For a Grilling

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

From time to time we eschew having guests here on America’s Most Trusted Podcast® so we can turn the tables on our hosts and allow the membership to ask the questions. (You are a member, right?) After reviewing the President’s trip to Europe and the state of Euro-American relations, Rob Long and James Lileks field your inquiries from the 2020 race to the future of their full time professions. Source

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Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson isn't here. He's in Italy. I am, James Lallex, however, here. And Rob and I are going to do the whole podcast ourselves. Let's get going.

It's important to say 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 you missed his time. Please clap. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, and it's number 451.

That's right, you missed perhaps the extravaganza last week, the big 450. Well, this is a little different. It's intimate. It's the after party. It's 3 o'clock in the morning, and that's when the hair really comes down, as they used to say, when people had their hair up, I guess. Here with his hair always in the median position, I assume, is Rob Long. Rob, where in the world are you today? I'm in New York City. I'm in New York, sweltering New York City at the beginning of summer. It's always nice. I do have a soft spot for it. I love New York in the summer. I really do.

It's less populated. If you avoid certain areas, it doesn't stink that much. And Manhattan at sunset is a fantastically dramatic place. Do New Yorkers such as yourself actually go up to tall buildings and look out and gawk and do that Gatsby thing where you're... Yeah, but I think they do more. Here's what they really do. Since the glory days of the Giuliani administration and the Bloomberg administration, I must say, the city has reclaimed whole parts of itself that used to be sort of, for some reason, just derelict, like the riverfronts.

So there's a whole part of Hudson River that you can kind of stroll along and park-like setting and watch the sunset over Jersey City. But, you know, everything looks good in the sunset, even New Jersey. That's just it for some people. Watching the sunset over Jersey City isn't the sort of magical enticement you might think it was. London, more so. London has got vistas and when the evening sunset light hits the houses of Parliament and it bursts into gold flames, it's a beautiful thing.

But they hate Trump, don't they? Is there anything that Donald Trump could have done twixt his election and today to make the Brits like him? Or is this just spasmodic leftist rote hatred that would be dialed down but still present

if anybody conservative went over? The problem is that demonic leftist wrote hatred that would be dialed down but still present if somebody, anybody conservative went over. The problem is that it isn't just leftist hatred. If it was leftist, just leftist hatred, he'd be in good shape. It's actually more than that. I mean, not that it really matters. I mean, Donald Trump is exactly the kind of American that the British especially hate. But he's actually not that far from the kind of American that the world loves, right? I mean, you think about it.

He's a brash. He's from New York. He tells it like it is. He's got a lot of money, and he's not afraid to flash it around. This is the archetypical, stereotypical American got a lot of money and he's not afraid to flash it around. This is the archetypical, stereotypical American for a lot of people. And they actually have come to love it. They've come to sort of like, oh, you typical Yanks, right? This guy's a little different because he's been shaking up European unity and European establishment. He's been soft in many ways, sort of alarmingly verbal about NATO. And he's kind of, you know,

that's the one thing that's in the DNA of certainly Great Britain is America firsters are not popular, right? I mean, you know, America firster, the America first philosophy was not popular and has not been a popular written for about a hundred years. So he's,

we was destined for this. The problem with Trump is that there's no, it's not like he's going to wait a second. Did you say that the America first idea has not been popular in great Britain for a hundred years? Well, maybe not a hundred. What is it?

A little less than a hundred years. Yeah. I would say that that perhaps may have been the sticking point at the very beginning of the relationship. Yeah, that's a very good point. But go on. I mean our whole relationship with him is kind of based on that whole America first, if you don't mind, and then America first. Sorry, that's the way it's going to be history that we've had. I was sort of referring specifically to World Wars I and II. Yes.

Especially this week. But there's a slight difference between a president who's loathed by Britons – by a lot of Britons, I should say – and a president who's loathed by them in a way that Trump is. It's that people hated – they hated Reagan. A lot of people hated Reagan. Reagan was actually a little bit more popular than that. And they hated George W. Bush, but they hated him because they had policies that they did not like. That was the reason why George W. Bush was loathed in America by the people who loathed him so intensely was because he had a policy, a war, that they did not think was right um it's harder with trump to know exactly what it is you know what's the specific beef they have with him except a kind of a collection of like

disquieting statements he's made about the relationship between the two countries and nato and all that stuff xenophobia racism islamophobia three things which have come to characterize the modern left's way of looking at the world. The more Corbyn-esque you get, the more you're required to hate somebody like Donald Trump because he's a prima facie racist based on all the things that he's done. And also, unspoken, I haven't heard a lot about this, is the fact that he's pro-Israel, which is also a very big no-no because it's full of jews and it's hard to be on the left in britain and be in favor of the jews oh i'm sorry israel big distinction we're going to make we're not anti-semitic we're simply anti-zionist shut up yet bleeding but you know it's dating brits as if there isn't a tradition going back to the old fine clubhouses and the and the

universities there of anti-semitism but you're champ're champing at the bit to say something else and conclude. No, I was just going to say that interesting things happen in Europe and also in Britain has been a resurgence. I mean, Americans, it's such a weird thing to think about, but a resurgence of the moderates, that resurgence of the sort of liberal Democrats. And that's kind of an interesting – Where? In Britain. In Britain.

Definitely in Britain in the recent elections and also in Europe. I mean European elections. They really weren't a triumph of the far right despite the hysterical media. Well, where are we talking exactly? Are we talking Poland, Hungary, France? What? Because I mean you can say that there may be a rise in France of a moderate element. But then again Le Pen did pretty well.

You can say in Poland and Hungary. But those guys did pretty well for the nationalist side. And over here, I'm a little – I question exactly how they're being portrayed. I want to know more. Well, in Hungary, it's pretty – in Hungary, it's not fake news how they're being portrayed but in germany and places like that there's a there's a definite move towards the you know what we would call the a clintonian left right the clintonian democrat um or clintonian liberal in in european terms and that that is a sense that maybe europe it's not 1933 or 32 or 34 in europe it's uh it's it's we're we're well a ways from that and um and we don't and we don't need to push the panic button here well how is this moderate element addressing issues

like national sovereignty national character immigration so forth because unless they get squarely around it um they're going to wither and splinter and fail because there still is a national appetite that is not based on racism or xenophobia or Islamophobia, but a national appetite simply for maintaining some sort of national culture, which I think people have a right to do. It's not the American idea. I mean, we're protean. We are expansive. We take it all in.

We absorb. But it's different over there. And it seems to me that the whole transnational European project founded when they failed to take into account the fact that people like the culture and the language and the money and the songs and the rest of it. You can't remake it. There are two things happening here.

One is that a lot of European countries and self-described countries within countries are reasserting their national identity the cultural identity their language identity but they are no they have zero interest in leaving the eu the european union as a federation is absolutely strong there isn't no one really wants to leave it they want to join it i mean they may want to break up their country i mean for instance in spain there may be two at least two but two very very strong separatist movements in spain but those separate separate movements

they don't want to not join the eu they want to separate from spain and join the eu because the eu is actually a really good deal for them really a lot of course it's possible to belong to it without having your national identity subsumed into this mix i mean yeah that's ideally what the people would probably want what the bureaucrats have seemed to want is something else right i mean i can't remember who exactly the guy was whether he was the president of the veep the eu parliament or i forget the exact title it's it's meaningless it's meaningless it has no power except when it does who was expressing his exasperation with these stupid nationalists, his words, who love, you know, who love

their country. And he says, I love people from other places, and I want them to come here. Okay, well, you're perfectly welcome to open your individual doors of your house to whoever you want, but making that decision on behalf of a continent, as Merkel found out,

as Italy found out, is not a wise move it just isn't um well it's this is also a slight difference for for um it's a slight difference right in between what between between people who between people who come to a place because it has opportunity and like they come to america right they dream of it they want to be here it's got opportunity and a way for them to rise up and a way for them to raise a family in peace and prosperity. And it's different when you're coming to a place – and're attracted to it because you just can't wait to like steam into new york harbor or come into chicago or wherever you're trying to come into because you you the idea of america is attractive and it's another thing to flee the civil war or the genocide or the political oppression in your country in which pretty much anybody,

the closest thing around that's civilized is a respite, right? So, you know, Syrians want to be in Germany not because they love Germany so much, because they would go to Denmark or Belgium or wherever because it's not Syria. Whereas in America, we have a little bit of that, but we have mostly people saying, no, I want to be there. I've got to be in America where it's the land of the free. Right. So is your point then that these countries are obligated to take these people in based on their circumstances? No.

I mean, you're right. Some people come for opportunities. Some people want asylum because they're fleeing a horrible situation. But the end result, if you let the latter group in in unlimited numbers, is to swamp your systems, for one thing. You can't have a welfare system and open borders. You can't.

And you also can't have an incredibly narrow idea of German-ness or French-ness if your country is essentially founded on ethnic principles rather than philosophical principles, right? Aren't they? But we got to be kidding ourselves when we say that they're not.

They are. That's what I mean. Right. I didn't think you were contradicting that. I mean, there's a universality to Frenchness that they like to think about, that they have universal human rights, you know, right? We can speak for the world when it comes to holding up the best philosophical idea for the humanity.

And there's a certain universality to Germany in that they probably think deep down that everybody should be listening to the Germans and doing what they say. There's a practical universality to British that they can civilize the world and give them laws and courts and the rest of it. But in the end, it's all based on blood and language and song right and it's not here you know uh jacques pepin who's sort of a hero of mine he's a wonderful chef and i think moved here in 1951 or something hold on before you get to mr pepe are we arguing i'm trying to tell no no i agree with you arguing between there one of the reasons I think that they have a hard time with American presidents in general is because America is an attractive idea that is more expansive and ultimately more successful than – and they know it – than anything they've got. And I suspect, maybe just my own patriotism, that part of the reaction formation from these countries

is that a part of them wishes they were also American. And as I said, the Jacques Pepin thing is, he's been here forever, and very successful, very successful chef, very successful restaurant owner, very successful author, and all sorts of things. And he just won a James Beard Lifetime Award, I think it was Lifetime Award, a few weeks ago. And his acceptance speech for the award was really, really sweet.

He thanked his wife and kids and stuff and his mentors. And then he said, but you know who I really have to thank is I have to thank America. I have to thank this place, which took me as a young chef. These guys, the great chefs, they started at the 15, 14 or 15, working in kitchens. Then I somehow worked my way up and I got to the United States

and then my life took off. He has a very, very thick French accent. He cooks in the French style. He is not snooty, but he's proud of the french cuisine and the culture but he is i mean he is a true blue american and you just never see it the other way you just never ever see it that somebody goes i came here to france because of the incredible opportunity for me to like no one ever says i love france but no one ever says

that no my french brother-in-law i think he's on his fourth or fifth job here you know he'd be Incredible opportunity for me to – no one ever says that. I love France, but no one ever says that. No, my French brother-in-law, I think he's on his fourth or fifth job here. Not because he gets fired, but because he keeps going up the ladder. He keeps finding – He keeps succeeding. He keeps succeeding. And I ask him, what are the chances that I could go over there, get my way into journalism and work my way through four or five magazines in the course of 15, 20 years? It's just not going to happen.

No one's going to look at me because I didn't go to the proper school. And instead I'd be sitting there absolutely shivering underfed in some cold water. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival,

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Well, that's, I mean, everyone has that experience, James. There's just no way to. I don't think so. I really don't think so. The problem is that I couldn't actually get to sleep after a while because I was so saggy and the thing was so noisy and I could feel the bed parts poking into my back. You can't sleep if you're not comfortable because the three most important words for getting a good night's sleep are comfortable, comfortable, and, Rob, you want to say it with me? Comfortable. No, you don't. Comfortable.

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Promo code slash RICOSHET. And our thanks to Boland Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, Rob, good for Chef Pepin. Should we explain that Peter, speaking of European jaunts, speaking of Trump supporters going on European trips, Peter is in Italy, or as they say in the South, Italy, and he will not be joining us. Yes, I should have mentioned that at the very top, that either Peter has been uncharacteristically silent in letting us rant um or just uh or gone but you mentioned chef papa who's french uh which brings us to another matter of the david guy and what seems to be now the the biggest split in the on the right is whether or not you hate david french or whether or not you feel compelled to defend him it's the it's the damnedest thing um when it just i think i said in a comment ricochet

some at one point when you're when you're writing George Will, John Goldberg, and David French out of the conservative movement, something has gone amiss. Is it because of their insufficient Trump fealty or adoration or inclination to praise? Or, in the case of French, is it this sort of idea that we have to behave and be nice, which some people on the right are saying, no, no, kill them all and let God sort out the rest. This is no time for civility.

No time for civility, yeah. And was it First Things or Human Rights or Human Things or whatever? The editor-in-chief, who used to be Breitbart London, wrote a piece about National Review and how it's stupid and it's way past its expiration date. And in the very first paragraph said that National Review had been going on about, muh, free trade. Anytime somebody uses that, muh, I automatically assume that everything that's going to come afterwards is just bullshit.

You're writing in dumb speak? Yeah. Yeah. It's a way of taking an argument and making it automatically stupid, and the people who hold it just as stupid by making it meh. And so I read the article with interest, and he mischaracterizes a dozen things, all kinds of stuff that David writes. I mean, out and out flat tells the people who are reading the article something other than the linked article actually is.

But it's okay to him because this is how you win. This is how you win. This is the new style. What is winning? I guess my issue with all that stuff is like, I mean, what is winning? I mean, it all sounds like old Soviet style stuff where if you scream loud enough,

you'll get people to say, okay, yeah, two plus two is four – or two plus two is five. But it isn't. I mean winning is when you persuade 51, 52 percent of the people to follow a certain course, and it's hard to do. And because we live in this crazy, unruly country, it's actually hard to get 52 percent of Americans to agree on anything. And everybody's got their own sort of pet priorities, which is sort of the normal chaos of representative democracy. So if you aren't actively persuading and trying to sort of identify people who don't agree with you and get them over to your side, you will eventually fail and fail utterly. And that doesn't seem like – that doesn't seem – how hard is that? Recent history tells you that.

Well, here's – I forgot this is question time here. We've got some questions. Oh, yeah. Yeah. From the readership Omega Paladin, and Drew has both talked about this, the French spat. Right. And they asked, are these a signs of disarray in the right or a sign of robust intellectual diversity?

And how do we bridge the divide between the populist and the non-populist? Where do we go from here? So first of all, is this a good sign in a sense that we're having a big tent debate about who's going to come out on top here or, as I suspect, this is more about people who

just are jazzed up about owning the libs not all of them but there's a lot of well but i mean i mean i mean owning the libs everybody wants to i mean i i want conservative policies and ideas to win i just probably have a different set of them than other people who also consider themselves conservative and the thing about being conservative is that it there's no conservative police on whether you are or you aren't. I find it hard to believe that people who don't want to cut entitlement spending and reduce taxes and the federal government, I have a hard time believing that they're conservative. But they insist they're conservative.

Tucker Carlson did a very, very cogent, interesting – I mean people screamed and yelled about it, but I found it really interesting. He's a very smart guy, and he was essentially endorsing Elizabeth Warren's economic program. Now, I mean Tucker considers himself conservative, and I consider myself conservative. I don't think that I would endorse Elizabeth Warren's economic program. On the other hand, there are a lot of people on the conservative side, David Adler among them, who have written really well and persuasively about maybe in a global marketplace you need some kind of dirigiste kind of organizational market economy. He's a conservative. He's been a conservative for a million years. So, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm against it. I don't think you can. I don't think it works. I think it they say, there's a lot to say grace over it now.

Oh, that's fine. It just seems to me that ultimately the argument between the – that sort of erupted today was all about tactics and these tiny little mini trophies that you win if you're – we won the Twitter war. We won the this war. We won the that war where in fact there's only one war in America that counts, the politics, and that's election day. And Trump is president and he came with a razor-thin majority in three important states that he's now underwater in. So I would be – I'm not saying he's not going to win. I'm just saying, boy, I'd be a little bit more nervous and a little bit less confident about how you own the libs or how you own the dems or what the American people want

when you're looking at – I mean, it's just math. So the argument – i will always be more sympathetic to the argument that's about persuasion than the argument that's about uh we all we need to do is to shut up uh you know don lemon and and we'll be ascended that that seems to me to be um um foolishly suicidal well the argument is that the cultural institutions arrayed against conservative principles and a restoration of American virtue, etc., are so strong and unrelenting

that unless you adapt their tactics and their force and get in their face as much as they get in yours, that they're going to win. And I get that. I agree with that, too, by the way. Well, in the public sphere, arguing with them in a non-Romney-esque fashion is admirable.

And I don't mean insulting, and I don't mean calling them names and the rest of it. But actually being very, very clear about what these things mean, about what the future for America they present looks like, how it's inconsistent with our American principles and who we are, how identity politics are ruining. All of that stuff needs a good spokesperson. Donald Trump isn't it. Donald Trump is remarkably inarticulate when it comes to describing any of these things. But you look at people like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. Those people are thoughtful and persuasive, and they have huge followings.

I mean, I guess what I would say – oh, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, what are you trying to say here i mean well i'm trying to say that i agree with the idea that you need i mean i guess here the headline of what i'm trying to say is that conservatives uh uh are lazy um and that what they do is they see and they want a shortcut they see what the what the left is doing and what the left wing and sort of far left culture is doing. And they say, I want that. So I'm going to yell and scream on Twitter and Fox News. No, actually, the way that you if you really want to do this, it's going to be hard and it's going to be expensive. You have to do it. There is only one conservative college in America, and that's Hillsdale. There are lots of conservative billionaires in America.

There are lots of conservative people in America who want to skim – just do the easy stuff at the top, the tweeting and the shows and a movie here or there. Nobody wants to build a university. No one wants to build a high school. No one wants to build places that cost money to actually slowly turn this battleship around. They all think it's going to be really easy. A hit movie will change everybody's mind. That is not true. There's a lot of work to be done, and it's going to be really, really hard.

How many conservatives are putting their money behind newspapers? How many conservatives are putting their money behind newspapers? How many conservatives are putting their money behind actual reporting? None. How many conservatives are starting schools or starting universities or funding important research that matters? Few to none. We just don't do it. There's no shortcut to a long march.

Yeah. In order to, I mean mean they've got the right lapped in so many ways and of course from their perspective they're going to say no no no we don't we don't control the media and the colleges in order to produce leftism that's no we could we have influence in those our ideas have influence in those areas because our ideas are objectively correct and are the norm. That's the thing that we have to counter is the idea somehow that their collectivist statist vision is not empirically proven to be the finest way to organize society. And in fact, when coupled with identity politics leads to a balkanization of the country that prides itself in e pluribus unum.

There's all kinds of arguments to be made. And you're right. We're not making them. But it's not because we don't have the institutions necessarily it's because we don't have the right kind of spokesman now you talk about ben shapiro and jordan peterson the great i love them but look what happened the minute these guys get out of the gate they were the idw they were the intellectual dark web with a term itself which practically says that they're living on tort access servers next to child porn and hitmen, mafia sign-up pages. The intellectual dark web, instantly disreputable.

So we have to climb out of that. You've got to climb out of the fact that anybody who has any idea whatsoever that has to do with nationalism, however you want to define it, is an alt-right person. Anybody who questions the identity politics of the other side is an alt-right. Anybody who calls Antifa fascist is an alt-right person. We have so much work to do simply getting the terms of the debate back to a place where we're not always on the wrong

foot from the beginning of the argument. Laziness is part of it, but there's also this sort of institutional adolescent desire to be – I'm right how? Adolescent desire to be what? No, no. I mean I get where you're going, I should say.

Okay. But I'm just – I'm saying that in agreement and kind of – I was more like saying amen, preach. Like I wasn't actually trying to get – Okay. I mean, if the other side has, you know, this sort of adolescent desire to be, I forgot what I was going to say. Well, anyway, it doesn't matter. We have another question. John 1979 asked, can any Republican politician in 2024 try to run as aggressively as Trump and not be hit with the old mean-spirited Republican label?

And will it stick? Rob? Well, I mean, the mean-spirited Republican label? And will it stick? Rob? Well, I mean, the mean-spirited Republican label sticks for everybody. I mean, it's hard for me to believe that anyone's going to run as a Republican in my lifetime and not be called basically a mean-spirited Republican. Except, I mean, I don't know. In terms of what Republicans stand for, right now the Republican Party seems to stand for entitlements and industrial policy and subsidies. So that doesn't sound that mean.

Who knows? You know, the problem with the Republican brand is going to be... At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting.

Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie We don't know if those people are going to stick, right? I mean, a lot of people who voted for Trump had voted for Obama.

So we don't know whether those people are going to stick around and vote for the Republican Party. They may not. They may be, you know, they may, for some reason, be persuaded otherwise. They have been in the past. The question is whether a Republican can win a primary again by being a more centrist appealing candidate. And that's a question that I think actually the Democrats have too, which is how much of primary or dissatisfaction with the needs of a national political party

and how much of it is strategic voting. I mean, it's been strategic voting, was strategic voting for 50, 60 years. And now it seems a little like Trump is the first protest candidate to win the nomination to be the party. They've always had protest candidates, Buchanan or Reagan in 76 or Jesse Jackson, all sorts of people like that, upstarts. But the idea was the primary is time for the bloodletting of it you let everybody you know get exhausted and then time come times come to choose an actual nominee

and everybody kind of comes to the table and this is the first time that hasn't happened so i have no that that's a really good question i don't know yeah i mean even if you're as sunny as a romney they're still going to look at your policies and they're going to find something that that hurts in the general, yeah. Right. Because the basic idea to them, which they believe, is that if you were a good person, you wouldn't be a Republican. If you're a good person, you'd be a Democrat. If you want to hurt people and take things away under the guise of constriction, you know, some sort of plutocratic thing, then you're a Republican.

It's a mystery to them why anybody is on the right unless they've come to terms with their own evil. So even if somebody's sunny, it doesn't matter. They're going to find something that pushes grandma off the cliff. And they're always going to be able to point to their own people magnanimously waving the money wand in Congress somewhere and coming up with a bill that conjured from the ethers all the shekels and dollars and dimes that they needed to pay for the wonderful things that we all want. Question from the other side of the aisle. Occupant CDN writes, Considering that the Democratic presidential race started about four months early, wonderful things that we all want question from the other side of the aisle occupant cdn writes considering that the democratic presidential race started about four months early is there still a

possible disrupting candidate that might yet announce i'm thinking of somebody like mark cuban or maybe exactly mark cuban does it matter if he announces late in june or july and misses a few of the early debates with the zero percent crowd. I don't think so. I think if somebody walked into it right now, all the flavors of the gum lose their intensity on the bedpost overnight. Beto is over, right? They've all come to terms that he was a rather silly thing for them to affix all their hopes and dreams upon. Right. And Mayor Pete, I think he's saying some things that you say when you really feel full and confident in yourself and don't really understand how strange they may sound to the rest of the country. Is that your impression, or do you think he's just – I think he's – is Mayor Pete being well-managed, shall we say, or is he floating along on too much good PR? There's so much time now and there's so much time left.

The benefit of the Mayor Pete strategy, or I don't think it's strategy so much as it's the Mayor Pete situation, is that he started strong and seemed viable enough that he could take a month and travel around the country raising money. So you need money. Money is the most important thing because you need money. Money has got to get you all the way to, I don't know, I think New Hampshire, probably South Carolina. The money you're raising now is not going to get you there, but it's going to get you. It's an early, it's not a primary,

but it's an early indication know it's not a primary but it's an early indication of how what your expectations are so that turned out pretty pretty smart if you're looking at an upstart candidate to come in the problem is that there's like not that much room you know you're looking for the market opportunity i mean okay far left is pretty much taken care of we know that um uh wonky policy center left you know maybe you're looking at me you could say it's hick and looper but edge edge um i'm probably uh uh howard schultz i guess if he's if he does it like you're looking i'm just looking for the markets that that that democratic that Democratic primary contenders go for. What's Mark Cuban?

I mean, he'd be an interesting candidate, I think, but what's Mark Cuban's thing? What's he going to say? I'm a billionaire, and we need a billionaire? I mean, there you have it. He's outside. He's outside the process. The process is corrupt. He needs an outsider to come in.

Open up the hood. Fix it. Well, I mean, you could say that, but you could also say, you know, who's more of an outsider than Howard Schultz? Who's more of an outsider than the mayor of South Bend? I mean, it's possible to be – I just don't see the oxygen in the room. If you're a self-funder, if you're Mark Cuban, it won't matter, right, because you don't need to go on the Pass the Hat tour. You have it. But the problem with people like Mark Cuban is the longer they wait and the less of a message they have. Think of it this way. Donald Trump had a message.

For Republican primary voters, the message was very clear. None of these candidates are going to win. They all seem the same. They all are weasel word kind of guys, and I'm not. And that's a message. And then in the general, he had a really simple message. Make America great again. And I think to be an upstart like that, you need to have that kind of message. I don't know what Mark Cuban's message is.

The Democratic Party isn't diverse enough. I mean, he has 27, 000 candidates there's like there's plenty there's not that much room and it's not the women and the the uh the women of color who are dominating i mean you would think that if democrats actually believed everything that they say that they do that kamala harris would be number one that uh elizabeth warren with her cherokee heritage would be up there in the top instead it's bern Bernie and Joe, two old, senescent white men, which is amusing, which shows one of two things. One, they like Bernie because Bernie is a pure, pure old-style leftist with a message.

He actually believes in this stuff. I mean, the problem with the administration that they see today is not that they colluded with Russia. It's that they colluded with the wrong Russia. That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, and Bernie, Bernie was so pure, he went over to the, he went over to red Russia and got along and sang the songs and all the rest of it.

And it's funny, now he's trying to portray himself as somebody who was actually against it, and the democratic socialists were the ones who opposed the communists. Get out of here, you. Get out of here, you. Get out of here, right. Yeah, you ancient, wispy-haired, useless Leninist. And then you have Joe, who's the return to normalcy, the idea that we can, all of this madness, only part of which has been, I mean, yes, Trump is a chaos agent,

yes, you bowl China shop, et cetera, yes, tweets, but it's the amplification method, the amplification mechanisms that's made everybody on the left and on the liberal side so twitchy. Because Trump will say something stupid or he'll misspell a word or kerfevi or whatever. And they're all convinced that this tornado of madness that has been surrounding their heads since his election is going to twist and turn and get tighter and bear them up to the little land where the munchkins come out and say welcome i mean honest to god they if you have been living in a state of absolute trump panic since it started and every word and every phrase and appearance and the rest of it makes you gives you a full body shudder then yes you're going to you're going to dream of the day when joe biden comes back because no matter what joe biden says the media is not going to make fun of it fox is is not going to have a chyron that strips across the bottom of

the screen for six hours that makes you feel nervous. Remember, do you remember that we're almost going to have war with Iran? Do you remember that for a while there? Yeah, it was like last week, right? Yeah, it was like last couple of weeks ago, right? All of these provocative moves that he was making and all the bumper stickers and the lawn signs were going up again, because Trump, warmonger that he is, never mind that he ran on getting out of them, was going to do this crazy, stupid thing because he's a crazy, stupid guy. So they yearn for the Clintonian days where things are a little bit normal. If you lived in Washington during the Clinton years, it's a different story. But I see their point. point so if trump gets in again it'll be four more years of the media amplifying the strange things that that emanate and fizz and effervesce from his brain and by god i don't know what the

end result of that is going to be well i mean it's good do you think people will be calm rob do you think that people will know they'll be wanting something called they won't be calm it's it's impossible today to be calm. There's literally no way. What? Do you actually have the script in front of you? I do. You do? Okay.

Why don't you read it? Because I'm going to go get myself a cup of coffee. Got it. All right. Because I choose Rob Long. I enjoy the – so I'll do my own segue. Yes, it may be disquieting. We may live in a disquieting, disquieted and complicated and stress-filled world, although I'm not sure we do.

It's any more than it ever was. But there are ways to unwind. If you're struggling to sleep these days, you're not alone. One in three U.S. adults don't get enough sleep. And if you're not sleeping enough, it can affect your cognitive functions during the day, like learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. And that's why we're partnering with Calm, the number one app for sleep. Sleep deficiency does serious damage, not just to your brain, but your body as well. The sleepless are more prone to accidents, weight gain, and depression.

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Calm started with sort of meditation kind of stuff, which I think was really, really great. And then they're sort of opening up to sort of wider, broader sort of like, you know, sleep stuff. And I think it's really, really smart. The meditation stuff is really, really great. And it is actually, for some people, hard to sleep. I actually had that once. It's never happened to me. Insomnia?

Insomnia. I was in a couple of years ago. Now, not a couple of years ago, but about 10 years ago. And I went to see my doctor. I'm like, what is going on with me? And he looked at me like, well, how much caffeine do you drink? I said, not much. A cup of coffee in the morning, and then in the afternoon, I'll have a giant latte.

He goes, yeah, maybe not drink coffee at 4.30 in the afternoon anymore. I looked at him like, what are you talking about? He goes, you're in your 40s. Everything's going to start to happen like this i'm like oh you're right so now like i just know and i always find it amazing that people like you know you go out to dinner like can i get you anybody any coffee and people go oh yeah i'll have a cup like really yeah i can do that ah my brother it's like churchill and liquor doesn't have this it's yeah i mean up in these parts the idea for one thing, the coffee tradition up here is a little lighter.

I mean, Lutheran coffee back in the farm, Fargo, Harwood, you could see through it. It's translucent. So the really heavy stuff here. I mean, Mom would make some butternut and pour in eight cups of coffee and a couple of scoops of grounds. So it didn't have the same jolt and the same kick that it does here. But, yeah, I still drink my coffee in the evening and fall asleep with no problem. Of course, it's 2 in the morning when I do. Maybe I should get some more sleep stories.

What I love is one of the things that I use to take a nap, and I nap every day, I have a little sound generator that makes white noise or pink noise or brown noise, whichever you choose. And one of the settings on this thing is airplane. It's got that sound of the jet and just the sound of the ventilation and all the rest of it. And there are times actually on an airplane itself where I will put in my sound-canceling, noise-canceling headphones and then try to get to sleep by playing the sound of interior air cabin airplane cabin which is a little meta but that means that i can get the effect without having the bong and the baby and the rest of these great ways well let's talk about um the fact that uh oh gosh here you know we got sponsors and the rest of

it but it does cost money and rob at some point here is going to make a member pitch before he does though i'm going to let you know that his member pitches are so spectacular and fantastic. They work. They absolutely work, and here's proof with brand-new member Kelsey Schranke. That's usually where we start. You're expecting me to play a little clip of her voice. Sorry. No.

Here's what she writes. Gentlemen, let me start by saying I finally broke down and joined. Years of Rob's member pitchers wore me down i joined because i appreciate the podcast content and want to talk ideas i began listening to the ricochet podcast while exercising and let me say if john potthorst ever gets tired of being the editor of commentary he could probably find gainful employment as a strength and coordinating coach his breathless soliloquies on glop while jonah goldberg pets his dogs or on his own niche

podcast while Noah Rothman scrolls through Twitter inspire me to new athletic achievements. Basically, it's a great podcast so you can listen to people do something other than pay attention to John Potthorne's, if I'm reading this correctly. But seriously, I should have just joined long ago. People here differ greatly, and their opinions cover just about everything you could imagine, right of center. There's genuine civility, even when there is deep disagreement. Numerous times in disagreements, I have received the dreaded

Kelsey, uh, you know, you're new here. As best as I can tell, that's Ricochet's version of swearing. The people here are great, really. That also makes me wonder if everyone on this site is secretly a lilac's neighbor. Because they're nice, Minnesotan. And now to my question, which is for both James and Rob.

Ready, Rob? Yes, he is. What is your favorite cigar and whiskey combination? That's a really good question. First of all, we should just clarify that Kelsey Shockey is a he. Oh, I know. I said she for some reason. He identifies as a male.

Yeah, my mistake. I knew that from the top, and I thought there's a guaranteed way of getting a comment in the comment section, though. Oh, well, there you go. I don't know about combination because, again, I'm such a lightweight now that I tend to smoke cigars in the afternoon with a Diet Coke. Make of that what you will, but honestly

since I smoke in the afternoon and I like to remain conscious, I try not to drink until later. My favorite whiskey, of course, is bourbon. I'm a bourbon drinker, and I will drink pretty much any bourbon. I love... I'll drink

Maker's Mark. I'll drink Old Weller, if I can find some. Old Yeller? I'm a fan. And my favorite cigar is, again, lightweight, so I'll go light. I'll go like if And my favorite cigar is, again, lightweight, so I'll go light. I'll go, like, if I'm celebrating, I'll do a Davidoff, sort of the double R, or maybe the Specialty, which is the torpedo style.

I will, if it's in the afternoon and I know I, like, have enough time to smoke it, I will absolutely go Cuban. I'll go to an H. Uppman or a Partagus No go Cuban. I'd go to H. Upman or Partagus No. 5. I will endorse all of those as fine cigars. Unfortunately, as a small guy, just having something like that is like, it looks like I'm trying to chew on a telephone pole. So I go for the cigarillos,

the dry cured Dutch ones, which some people just can't possibly figure out why you would smoke. But it's just not so much as a big, huge stogie. And I also look, I look a little silly with a big, huge stogie, frankly. Like I'm trying to be somebody that I'm not, so I scale everything down a little bit. That doesn't mean that I have my whiskeys in tiny little cups, though. I mean, that's what you want.

You want to scale it, right. Big, enormous mitt around these things. No, I, and again, unlike Rob, I'm ecumenical, and I think it's a good thing to not be too particular. It's like the more you know something about that, the more you'll be able to figure out why this maybe isn't the best and most complex as opposed to this. But if you know so much that you can't enjoy something, I mean, yes. If you're going for the bottom of the shelf stuff in the bottle that's 1.75 liters and you can palpate it, you know, it's plastic, then that's probably not the best liquor you're going to have. That's my first standard for something I drink. Can I palpate the bottle?

If not, let's go up to the next step. And I've been enjoying the George Dickel 12, which is really smooth. The mash bill is high on corn, so it's got a certain taste that I like to it, but I like Maker's Mark. I got a bottle of Maker's Mark 46 that I tried, and it's okay. And I've got it sitting there because at some point, there will be a reason for me to have 46 as opposed to the regular Makers. But I don't know. Belit Bourbon is great. I just finished off a Buffalo Trace, which is one of my favorites. And so there you go. But again, it's not necessarily a nightly combination.

So I'll have to pass on that. I sort of feel like there's a – it's one thing to have favorites, right, and certain experiences that are favorites. And I always find that way with the people in the food world that I know well and who operate at an incredibly high level. And not one of them is a food snob. I mean, they all, you know, I mean, Jacques Pepin, you say to him, what would be your last meal? And he says, oh, really good bread and really good butter, which, of course, you can find really good bread and really good butter pretty much anywhere. And I just was like, yeah, okay, yeah, exactly. I think just the idea of having favorites is great as long as it doesn't – you're

not saying I'll never go a little down on the price scale or I'll never go – I don't understand the appeal of something. That to me is weird. And you're missing the point. I mean, I've been experimenting with some blended venerable scotches that have been around for a long time that people just dismiss

because they've seen them around for a long time and it's not boutique. One of the things that I can tell, however, by looking at the label is whether or not somebody's using the first tier of commercially available fonts you can get at these places that sell you packages of, you know, 100 retro fonts. When I see certain fonts on labels, I just have to laugh because I think you think you got me fooled, but you really don't.

But let's move along to some other questions because we have so many. Full Size Tabby wants to know, oh, me, what it's going to take to restore reliable news coverage. What has my paper done that's especially effective, and do you think that can be transferred to other markets? Yes, I think our paper has done something that no other paper can do locally. Local, local, local, local, local. Nobody wants to go, unless you're living in New York or Washington, D.C., nobody wants to go to their newspaper to find out what's going on in the rest of the world at large.

Yes, you nod to it, but tell the story of where you are. You have people here who know this place like nobody else can, and the New York Times is not going to cover suburban news in Minneapolis. The Wall Street Journal is not going to say, gosh, what's going on in Fargo these days on an elemental level? Go local, stay local, and what's more, local news tends to be sort of non-polemic, non-political even. I mean, yes, there's local politics, but people want to read about who's knocking somebody

over the head and where and when. Right. And that stuff is not political. So you can build people around, you can build an audience by telling them the stories of your local community. The other thing that we've done at our paper is we have a good news section. It's not called that, but that's basically what it is. And people love it because here's a part of the paper that's not Pollyanna-ish, but it's not depressing.

It tells you good things. It's specifically geared to inspire you about living here. We have a new pet section because people love to look at dogs and talk about them. And we put out a Sunday magazine as well because people like to sit around and read something on a Sunday. So we've got really smart, canny management that gives people great print products. And so you can survive and do it. The idea that you're going to get uh that you're going to make your bones by being more woke and by being the the the broad sheet of the resistance that isn't

going to work the idea that you're going to be making money by being a ganette wannabe with just the same cartoons and the same news stories and the same columnist no you're going to die so go local and stay local rob i would say for you. I would say that's really good. I mean, it's incredibly heartening because I love local papers. Local papers from the Dunn writer are fantastic. And yes, people – and I would say two things for general news. One is if you're trying to sell a newspaper, stop being a snob. Recognize, as you say, that people like to hear some good news, and they like pets, they like community. They also like food.

You know, the L.A. Times has had this terrible, terrible recent history, 20 tough years, and it never made any sense to me because Los Angeles County is huge and diverse and crazy and lurid and lots of, like, there's juicy murders everywhere and there's juicy crime and there's also uplifting stories. If you can't sell a newspaper writing about the ins and outs of Los Angeles County and the people who live there, there's a problem. I remember going to a dinner thing and I was talking to this woman who was at the LA Times. I said, listen, I get my national news from the New York Times. I don't need the LA Times to tell me what's happening in Washington.

I want the LA Times to tell me what's happening here. And one of the weird things about the Los Angeles area is it's so big that nobody really knows where anything really is. They don't really know. If it's not around where you are, you're not really sure. I remember asking people who live in Los Angeles, you're just going to date me the rodney king beating when the police attacked robin they pulled him over and they beat him rodney king started a chain of events that really um kicked off uh three days of riots in los angeles 1994 um i remember saying where did it happen and they all say oh it happened it happened somewhere in South Central, I think.

They know what happened in Pacoima. Like, what's Pacoima? And Pacoima on the map is way, kind of almost in the San Gabriel Valley. It's in the far, far valley. And people are like, really? That's like 50 miles from, yeah, that's right. And so I said to her, like, every, you should cover it, relentlessly cover local news, and every article should have some kind of little graphic box that tells me where, kind of where in this big sprawling place it happened. And she said, well, we just don't feel like we want to be that kind of newspaper.

I went, okay. Well, guess what? You're going to go bankrupt, which is exactly what happened. And now it's having a slight resurgence, the LA Times, because they've decided, well, what is it that makes the New York Times so – where are the clicks in the New York Times? For the New Yorkers, right? It's all the local stuff. It's food. It's style. It's what's happening here.

And so they're doing more of that. And I think – I mean, what's wrong with that? That's sort of interesting too. I suspect that relentlessly local, as you say, is the way for newspapers. The second thing is I would just make sure that you hire some conservatives. Just have a few people writing news stories who are not reflexively – I don't even consider it. I'll take that back because I don't think the problem with news is that it's liberal. I think the problem with the news right now is that it is pro Democrat.

It's, it's not, it's not that it's philosophically left wing. It's just that it sees the democratic party as its party and it writes from the position of defending democratic party politicians. And that's sort of hard to argue with, although people tend to argue with it all the time. Even the statistics are there. I mean, Glenn Reynolds used to do this great thing,

I don't know if he still does it, called Guess the Party. He would use headlines from news around the country. And usually when some politician has done something terrible, you know, Republican commissioner in Eugene, Oregon, steals $100. And then if it was a Democrat, it would be like a politician involved in fundraising controversy. And it was his guest party. So if they don't tell you what the party is, it's always a Democrat.

If they tell you what the party, you know, he's always right. He's been right. I wouldn't say that the problem is necessarily defending Democrats, which they do. But it's also sort of instinctively adopting the mindset of the center – the idea that the realm, the range, the Overton window if you want, of their ideas is center left to left. That that's the acceptable parameters that most normal, reasonable thinking people who to national public radio and read the new york times all think and so they getting outside of that mentality is difficult which is why you find often words that are not what they seem the word sustainable for example has a pedigree that you but every time i see sustainable or diverse used as though well well, we all know what these mean

and these are good things automatically, and I haven't thought about these terms forever, but they are good, I know that I'm dealing with somebody who has a particular mindset or has had their work run through the filters where you have to adjust and take this out and put that in. I will mention that you're right about what you're saying about the LA Times. It's stupid of them. One of the things, one of the sections that we have that people generate just huge amounts of clicks aren't just food but homes you show people picture of a you know of a cabin up north that

cost 1.6 million dollars and they the clicks are going to the smoke comes out of our steamer farm that's what people want yeah And what's wrong with that? And there's nothing wrong with it. And it pays for journalism that tells you sometimes the stories that maybe people don't necessarily want but have to read as part of their instruction of where they live and why. The next question, the last question, as Peter Robinson

is going to be for you, Rob, but first I have to tell people about something else. And you're going to have to sit through this and you're going to have to listen to this because otherwise you won't be able to get to Rob's question. You can't fast forward ahead, too, because you don't know where I'm going to end, do you? No, you're with me to the end here, pal, so buckle in. The great thing, though, is that I'm telling you about something that's really quite spectacular if you're trying to find a software solution for your business. Or just a software solution, for that or just a software solution for that matter it's capterra capterra is the leading free online resource to help you find the best software solutions over 850 000

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podcast well rob the question that comes to you the last one we may hear wrap it up is a well aaron miller wants to know the pros and cons of working with streaming services versus the more traditional broadcaster cable networks and bishop walsh wants to know the pros and cons of working with streaming services versus the more traditional broadcast or cable networks. And Bishop Walsh wants to know if the individual streamers will ever offer a bundle, which I think is hilarious because we've all been wanting to cut the cable and get all the card pricing. And now that we have it, we hate the fact that we have 16 different subscriptions from which we could just pay one. So pros and cons of working with the streaming services. Do you like the future more than traditional broadcast network model that you've been working in before? Well, you know, look, everything eventually becomes everything else.

The benefit of the streaming services was that they were young and scrappy, and they were, you know, they had two executives. And you could kind of like, you made 20 episodes of a show, and maybe you only had two notes calls, right? You get to do the show you want. That, of course, has changed totally because the one renewable resource, it seems to me, in Hollywood is executives, right? They seem to have tons of them.

So the first thing Amazon did, the first thing Netflix did when it got a little money in the bank, a little more success, was make sure they hired a bunch, got to hire a bunch of executives to supervise all this. So I think all of those features have gone away. And they all have their own sort of specific thing. Like Netflix, you can spend a year working on a script and a Bible and maybe two more scripts for the show and all sorts of things that you never had to do. And then it doesn't go forward.

And you've kind of been locked into this relationship for a year, year and a half, and you can't get out of it. They used to say that HBO was the place that great projects went to die. And now they have to say HBO and Netflix, too, because they they just – they buy a lot and they don't make a lot. So they buy strategically, they say. Sometimes they buy something just because they don't want anyone else to have it. But the benefit of broadcast television is still – it's a lot of people. It's so many more people.

It's 15 million people, 10 million people. That's a lot. But it's not buzzy. Yeah, I mean it's interesting. But it just shows you – eventually the – it's different for broadcast network. It's not competing with Netflix or streaming services because broadcast just gets paid by the eyeballs, right? The advertisers pay. The streaming services, broadcast just gets paid by the eyeballs right the advertisers pay the streaming services you pay and so that just gets to the a la carte model which is yes it's it's right now we're in this weird period where uh people are paying for streaming services on

their credit card and they're not checking them all the time, right? Right. And it's hard to unsubscribe. But what happens when, and I think this is the next six to nine months, 10 months, 12 months, Visa or Master Charge or American Express probably or your bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America says, hey, if you get our app and you subscribe to a streaming service, we'll have one button you could press and we will handle your cancellation for you. And so what happens when people say, oh, I don't want to watch Netflix for the next two months.

I want to cancel. I don't want to watch Hulu anymore because the kids went to school or college or I don't want to watch it because I don't like what's on it or because only one person watched one show. You know, what happens when a family sits around the living room and somebody who's ever paid the bills raises his hand and says, who here in this house watched Hulu last month? And only one hand goes up and everybody says, well, I got some bad news for you. You're no longer the majority. We're not paying for it.

And he presses one button and it's unsubscribed. When that happens and it's going to happen yep all those places are in big trouble that's when netflix will suddenly think well maybe we should have advertising maybe we should and then it'll be right back to where it was um because it's a hard hard hard business and people don't like paying for things they just don't no i remember when i got cbs discover or whatever it was so i could get the new star trek show which i loathed um and my i showed a couple of them to my wife because they had a series that she liked and she said wait a minute there's commercials we had this argument a little while ago when i found something that she was supposed to that somebody told her

to watch and i dug it out of the recesses of the direct tv and somehow got it out of their server and put and she said but there's commercials i said yes now in the first instance it was annoying because i had paid cbs to watch this show and they're forcing me to sit through these things that was there was another tier of payment that was twice as much where i wouldn't have to sit through the commercials and that seemed to break the fundamental idea. If I'm paying for this, you don't show the commercials. On the other hand, here was DirecTV, which, again, I was paying for the service, but they're not a content provider.

They are merely the conduit through which this comes. So I can understand why, in order to have this service that is able to find these things and give it to me, that you have to watch an ad because it's gone past. If we recorded it when it happened, we could have fast-forwarded through them, but this is the world in which we live. And so these distinctions are annoying to her because it's just, I want to watch it, I don't want to watch ads. She's right.

What was the show she was watching, The Good? Yeah, it was The Good Wife. The Good Fight, yeah. The Good Fight, something like that. Right. So now The Good Fight, just if you want to let her know, is going to be, they're going to show it now on broadcast, CBS broadcast next season, I think. And she'll be able to watch it with commercials, but she'll be able to watch it as God intended on broadcast television. So I signed up for HBO this week or a couple of weeks ago ago, in order to watch the Deadwood movie, specifically for this.

Here's how weird the business is. I call up my DirecTV guys, and I say, yeah, I want to add HBO, and I see that there's a promotional price on your site right now. And he said, well, let me take a look at that. And he goes through my record and says, well, Mr. Lilacs is a valued customer. He's been with us since 2000. I will give you HBO free for the next three months, and then after that, it'll be X amount of dollars, which exceeded the deal that I'd pointed to on the website. So you don't want to argue, but I called up to give you money, and you give me the product for free. Okay, I'll take it. Because what's a bet, right?

Their bet is you're not going to want to give this up and also it's going to be hard for you to give this up so you're not going to give it up. That's their bet. Right. But they have not met James Lilacs. I can understand why they would do that if I was calling up to cancel something. If I was calling up to,

I mean you call up to DirecTV and any of these services and you want to cancel, they want to keep the numbers, especially DirecTV. Especially now that the idea that getting your television pictures from space, that's archaic. That's old. Having a satellite that communicates with a bird in geosynchronous orbit is ancient history, man. Because now it comes to the little fiber optic in the wall. And I understand that. But the idea somehow

that I called up to pay the money and they gave it to me free indicates that there's something askew with the model. Point is, Rob's right. I got this for Deadwood, just because I had to see Deadwood with the movie, which is itself a beautiful piece of work. I also enjoyed Chernobyl a lot. I think Chernobyl is one of the finest

series I've seen. But that's it. There's nothing else on HBO I'm particularly interested in. And the idea of having all these movies floating out there is not something I'm interested in. So I'm going to cancel at the end of my three months, except I probably won't because I'll probably forget. Because there's no easy way. There's no ding. There's no

bell that goes off. I didn't make a reminder that tells me this. So they made a bet. And while I will cancel, and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to cancel Hulu in the next couple of months or so they did get something out of me at absolutely zero cost to them so there's that but they're but that's the danger right the danger is if people cancel then the uh then the long-term value used to be called the lifetime value but nobody you know that's too much long-term value of you as a subscriber it goes way way way down and i mean i and i get it look how how we've done 451 podcasts so i've at least 451

times i've been trying to get people to pay to ask to give some money right right and and you know if everybody if if one-tenth of the people who listen to this podcast and do not subscribe to Ricochet, are not members of Ricochet, if only one-tenth of those people sign up this weekend, we can grow. We can add more. Better. Podcast. We can do a lot of stuff, right? What do you mean better podcast? You know what I mean.

Like more. Different. Diverse. Interesting. More content. More content, more content. Always good. But we can't – but people are just like, well, I don't know. I'm not going to do it.

So at our – like when I go – and I tell people at Ricochet and what we've done, and I tell people that our retention rate of members is in the high 90%. Right. members is in the high 90 percent right and that we actually believe that our retention rate would be higher if we got our billing set stuff sorted out because so we do have a little bit sometimes we have a little billing trouble with our software here um and so some people just think they're members they're not um uh not for any fault of their own, but just because our billing system was sort of Cro-Magnon for a long time. So I understand it's hard, but that's the point. The point is it's hard.

And maybe what we're going for is if you listen to your music and you subscribe to music, right? You subscribe to Spotify and you can listen to anything you want on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever music system you like, maybe that's where television is going to be. You subscribe to a thing and you get to watch the stuff within that thing and it's awfully hard for the people making that stuff. For instance, like recorded music,

they don't make that much money anymore on the recordings. How could you? You don't sell records anymore. So they make money on their concert tours and their other ancillary businesses. And that, I think, is the future of startup and the future of Hollywood is ancillary businesses. And there's more to that than – so in other words, Rob Long T-shirts is what you're saying is 2030. Ricochet T-shirts, yeah. Right.

It's the company that not only provides you with an easy way to cancel the credit card, and Apple is coming out with their own credit card. This may be one of the things they do. Convenience, but not only just that, privacy. Apple's new developer kit says that you'll be able to sign up for various services using your Apple ID, which encrypts your information and doesn't let the other guys know what your email address is. And a lot of the developers or companies are panicking about this because, oh my God, that was a great way to get people's emails. Now, we can't.

How many times do you go to a website and before you can read a single jot, a scintilla of content, it pops up a box saying, want more like this in your inbox every morning? Subscribe. It's like, well, I don't know what you give me in the first place because I can't see it because there's this window blocking it. Could you please get a – nobody ever signs up for those things. But they have ways of gathering and hoovering and scraping your email so they can use them for marketing.

And that's – email marketing and online advertising are two things whose inflationary bubble has got to pop at some point. There's a whole lot of bubbles out here that are going to pop, and when they do, we'll have a better look at what the landscape looks like. Right, Rob? Who has, of course, put himself on mute and has been looking out the window contemplatively as he sips his one morning cup of coffee. We're going to head out here in a second.

I'll let Rob have the last word, but first I have to tell you that the podcast was brought to you by Bold and Branch, by Calm, and by Capitera. If you support them, you support us, and you make your life even better because everything they make is great. If you enjoyed the show, like every other podcast member says, if you're playing podcast bingo with that little grid, you can check off the one that says, please go to iTunes and give us a nice review. I know it's pathetic, and I know it sounds like the guy from a car dealership running after you screaming please give us a 10 or the company fires uh which i had a card i i bought a car from a guy this was in 2006 and he actually chased me afterwards begging to give a good review because the honda corporate executives would come very stone-facedly

hand them all the knives ritual disemboweling um so rob you get the last word on this one here and uh go well i was going to say just that this is a lot of fun i don't think you and i've done one of these in a while no and it's sort of nice without uh you know who around yeah it's a real it's a mystery to me how uh the two of us could actually fill up an hour and 10 minutes of spontaneous talk it's almost as though you as though our glibness is exceeded by our self-confidence. There's a lot of newspapers, tobacco, coffee.

That's why we keep getting asked back. These are kind of our greatest hits. That's why we keep getting asked back on those National Review cruises, although I'm not going on the next one. Are you? No. Nope. Well, that was fun while it lasted, as was this podcast, and not going on the next one. Are you? No. Nope. Well, that was fun while it lasted, as was this podcast.

We'll see everybody next week. It'll be 4.52 and I think... Is Peter with us next week? He'll be with us. All right, grand. All the gang together next week and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

Next week. next week and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 next week guitar solo Can this feeling that we had together Suddenly exist between This meeting of our minds together Have it just cut in Somewhere I'd like to know Can you tell me

Please don't tell me It really doesn't matter Anyhow It's just that I thought of us so happy A piece in my mind Has a beautifully Mysterious theme Ricochet.

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