The Ricochet Podcast - Tiny Tim Takes on Scrooge

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

The ghost of Christmas’ Present is here with words for the Bankman-Frieds. Since Peter’s just down the road, he’s got the top dog-walkers on the case listening in; Rob has some culinary advice for Andrew Robinson (who premiers on the podcast this week); Mr. Lileks posits the nobility of the trades he got to know in chilly Fargo, ND. And as Tiny Tim observed, “God bless us, every one. Source

Did James just freeze? James froze up on me. But, but, Mr. Scrooge, sir, we did discuss it. It's Christmas Day. You gave me the day off. Tell me, what day is it? What day? What?

Christmas Day, Costa. Christmas Day. Christmas Day. And I haven't missed it. The spirits must have done everything in one night. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. Merry Christmas. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 623.

If you're listening to this when Christmas has passed, don't worry. This is going to be just as topical after the Yuletide season as it is before, which is to say it's just the three of us flapping our gums here at the end of the year. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, also known as the North Frickin' Pole. Peter Robinson is in Palo Alto, where I believe he's in lockdown now because there are helicopters above. There's search beams stabbing the air.

The cops roaming around everywhere because Sam, I'm sorry, SBF. SBF, yes. Which sounds like some sort of calibration for a suntan lotion, is going to be coming out at some point soon. And Rob Long is in Texas. Did I get that right, Rob? I am in Dallas. That's exactly where I am. Dallas, Texas, where it is 14 degrees.

14 degrees, which seems wrong. Yeah, it's 14 degrees. 14 degrees, which seems wrong. Yeah, it's very cold. So we up here are wondering whether or not Texas' inability to manage the grid means that the rest of us are going to start paying for it like we did last year, somehow. Anybody talking about that? Are they worried about the grid going down? I came in late

last night and had dinner and then went to bed. So I have no idea. I'm not one of those reporters, you know, where they fly to a place, they get into a taxi on the way from the airport. They have five, you exchange five words with a taxi driver. They land, they get to their hotel. They're instantly saying the sense here in Vienna or wherever it is. It's the canny wise cab driver.

I could tell that my daughter had spent too much time on the East Coast, too much time, when I picked her up at the airport. She stowed her bag in the trunk, and then she got in the back seat of the car. And I turned around and said, I am not an Uber. And she was just so used to just jumping in the back of a car. I just thought that was absolutely hilarious i had a friend who spent a long time in japan in tokyo where the the taxi all the taxis um have automatic doors that open and close um and uh he discovered that when he came back to the states he was so used to ubers and japanese taxis that he would just sit in the car and wait for the door to open or where he would get in the car and just sit and wait for the door to close or he would leave the car and

leave the door open he just said like he was completely um you know at that point so costed and um I don't know well as long as he wasn't walking down you know staircases into random basements and expecting bullet trains to come by he he probably can adapt. So here we are at the end of the year. And, you know, it's strange. I look back and I think of all the things that I did and wanted to do and complete, and I thought it was a good year. Somehow that feels like it's not fair or wise to say or smart because it was in many ways not but it's possible for one to have a great year to be grateful for a great year at the same time casting your eye back and saying oh man oh yeah but i think 2022 was better than 2021 certainly better than 2020 the the line seems to be going

upwards we have problems and perils and the rest of us but when didn't we anybody who spent a lot of time looking at old newspapers know that it's always a mess it's always a mess the whole bloody meat stew the whole plant but you guys looking back at ricochet in 2022 and the world beyond how do you feel about it peter i am totally unprepared i thought i was thinking christmas and i see now we're doing an end of year Wrap here Well sort of kind of Nobody wants

It's all the same You know I feel like a failure I feel like a failure Two tenths of a mile Two tenths of a mile Up the road here Live people

Who raised their kid To lose Thirty billion dollars By the time he was thirty What did I raise my kids to do You know What did they lost It's true What did I raise my kids to do you know what are they lost what did i raise my kids but you know what here's the thing he had to move back home

that's true that's true you gotta get you know it is interesting i mean i don't know whether we want to like i don't i don't know these people i don't there is something about the um i mean look he's a thief probably that's what he is it has really not as much to do the crypto part is really just the amplifier but the underlying crime something that we've seen many people do um but what's interesting about it is that he and i don't want to turn this into a think piece but it is kind of they've um a son of extraordinary privilege the hyphenated last name you know all sorts of things that are triggering to me right the the what i the the sort of like outrageously progressive politics coupled with this kind of uh crypto greed and then underlying it is that probably this delusional justification

of what he did and i'm sure we'll hear more and more about it i don't think he's going to come out and say yeah i shouldn't uh shouldn't have stolen money from people and use it to pay off my debts no altruism altruism a new form of ethical yeah like these like extremely privileged white progressives and i hate to be quite so on the nose but i really think it's important um i just have this an incredibly rich deep uh multi-hued vocabulary for describing their crime it's, it's kind of like, it's astonishing. It's as if his entire, you know, upbringing and education was designed to sort of teach him, one,

how to master the technology, and then, B, how to also master the denial and the alibi. Okay, but how technically sophisticated do you have to be when you are in a culture that has the following premise? You can make up money. Go ahead, make up some, make up money, call it what you want, and then you can give it to these people who think it has the value because you said that it did, or you can do something with it behind the scenes and

nobody really knows because you made up the money. You also made up this other money, and the other money is made up, all the money is made up up but it's on the blockchain how technically sophisticated do you have to be to actually do something like that when you're living in a culture that says it starts with a premise we can make up money well you know we there's a there's a ricochet ricochet productions podcast that answers all these questions james and if you are supposed to answer these questions and you have these questions you there's a ricochet podcast that has all these uh all these answers all of these questions right but it goes to his brilliance is he brilliant was he was he some techno savant or was he just some schlub who

knew how to say the right words to the right people i think it's okay so i i've haven't i have i have two questions of my own and a third that the kids are asking. I'll go through this fast. But since it's all happening in our own neighborhood, the kids are asking. So he said, well, what did he do wrong? And I said, well, the crypto thing is really complicated, and I'll come to that in a moment. That's where my two questions lie. But what he did wrong was just, if this is alleged, I am conscious that

I'm talking about people who don't live that far from me. This is alleged. If he did what is in the newspapers, he had an exchange where people made effectively deposits, and then he had an investing operation that was his, and he moved money from the deposits to the investing operation. And my son looks at me and says, yeah, but how is that any different from the Stanford Federal Credit Union investing the money that you deposit? And of course, it does so with my knowledge and permission, whereas SBF was doing so without the knowledge and permission of his customers. And to my benefit. And to my benefit.

And to my benefit. That's correct. I get interest payments. But it gets to this question. So the two questions I have that I think are big and fascinating and somebody, is it going to be Michael Lewis who apparently was already tracking this guy before the trouble started? I don't know. Somebody's going to get into this.

Question number one is the nature of money. It's exactly what you said, James. How can we live in a society where you get to make up your own currency? And then you think, well, wait a minute. The federal government makes up its currency. There's nothing behind that except the say-so of the federal government. Right. there's nothing behind that except the say-so of the federal government right but there's that hope that but the say-so and the history of it in the full faith and credit etc i understand fiat currency is in the same sort of general thing but i but the but the the dollar has a track record

and an establishment and an institution behind it well maybe a little less liberty give it than some guy in the bahamas saying i'm going to name my new coin after the moon well wait a minute wait can i can i can i just like a small a small defense okay well okay you got that a small defense of crypto just a small one which is the idea behind it was that it was going to be a stable currency that everybody agreed on the value was going to be easily convertible and the idea of it really was it was going to be a stable currency that everybody agreed on the value was going to be easily convertible and the idea of it really was it's going to be this enormous ledger so you never had to keep any rec you know all the records sorry all the records are kept you you know it it

follows not just currency money exchanges but thing exchanges too um and it what it became was a speculative tulip bubble based on nothing and then i think sam bankman freed them again all this stuff is alleged he has pled guilty to some stuff um i some people have i think uh what he did was what crypto then became was because it was such a bubble it became very easy way to identify credulous people of a speculative mindset and all of those people were easy those are the easiest people to police you know as the old con men always say you cannot con an honest man you can't con somebody who thinks well wait a minute this seems a little too good to be true so you you got them all together they use a direct mail assembly that could not be bettered and they weren't really going to look into anything and then you created a separate sort of hedge fund um investment vehicle that you speculated on and when those debts came came due

you just simply went and raided other people's piggy banks. It's like, because it's crypto and because it was the middle of a bubble, all of those numbers are amplified, add zeros to everything. That's your defense? That was your small defense of cryptos? My defense of it is that these things have to fail first, like Web 1.0, and then they come back. The problem with crypto is that nobody wants, you can't use it at the 7-Eleven. You can't use it. So the dollar, the value of the dollar is set by really two things. One is the Federal Reserve and the United States government, sort of that apparatus.

But mostly the value of the dollar is set at a one trillion transactions every day by people buying something for a dollar whether they're buying it here or they're buying it you know wire transfers that is the reassurance that this thing is useful and liquid and fungible and everyone is universally accepted until crypto has that it will always be a an eccentric weirdo thing for nerds and for charlatans. Yep. Okay. I'm going to grant everything you said, including the intriguing bit, which was once he had this up and going, it was like dropping blood into the water.

And every person who liked to play showed up. Okay. Here comes my final question. I'll set it up by going back to 2008. We have a financial crisis. One reason that the financial centers of the world froze was that all of a sudden, everybody realized all at once, when I say everybody, I mean all the major commercial banks in the Western world recognized all at once that they really didn't know how much of the collateralized mortgage obligations they were holding, how much of the debt they were holding was garbage. They didn't know the value of their own debt. And Alan Greenspan, who started his career as an acolyte to Ayn Rand, that's how much of a libertarian he was.

As chairman of the Fed, he was one of the chief defenders of the free market. And he testified before Congress, paraphrase, I'm not quoting him, but he testified before Congress that events had shaken his faith in the free market. Mine, too. These people had every incentive to understand the debt they themselves were holding. The cheapest, the lowest salary anybody at Morgan was making in those days was $600,000. Go downstairs and check the obligations. See if, okay. It didn't happen. And now what do we have? This kid, and he's still only 30, and the money was gushing in when he was 27 and 28 and 29, holds investments from some of the most sophisticated

players in Silicon Valley. If this is true, but it's been in print that Andreessen Horowitz, one of the big sophisticated venture funds in this town put money in. The Sequoia Partners put money in. Where was the due diligence? Where was the double checking? You had every reason to double check that an operation run by a 27-year-old or a 28-year-old that was brand new, that was dealing in currencies, some of which he had just made up. As far as I can tell, no due diligence took place.

Total collapse of what you'd expect free market incentives to produce. I have good news for you, Peter. Good. I have three pieces of good news. One is even the smartest people in the world are stupid sometimes. That's good news? Yes, because it means that the world still works the way the world works, that there aren't people who figured everything out, right? No one doubts Elon Musk.

No one doubts Elonon no one doubts elon musk is a genius but he is a blundering horribly at twitter no one doubts by the way i mean i use you the same same example all the time that howard hughes was a genius howard hughes invented all these things there's a movie maker and a aeronautical whatever engineer and all these things um and yet he ended his life in a you know in a hotel tower walking mumbling to himself walking with eight inch fingerna himself, walking with Kleenex boxes on his shoes. So sometimes the smartest people can behave like idiots. The bubble mentality that existed around crypto also involves this kind of crazy obsession with its past regulation. It's not being regulated.

There's no federal government in you know in the interference this is free this is sort of pure libertarianism which is absolutely fine in which case you probably make a fetish out of the fact that his audit his financials weren't audited or there was no cfo that you could call or that they weren't filing the reports they need to file or all those things you can that's all that's that's a that's a feature not a bug it fit the story right okay the story the final piece of good news is they're going to lose all of their money and they richly deserve to that's how capitalism works you if you're dumb with it you'll lose it as opposed to 2008 when the one thing we were um i think we were cheated out of uh and i mean this almost

literally i was cheated out of seeing very rich formerly rich very arrogant investment bankers people who thought they had it all figured out and i was cheated out of seeing them selling apples on the street and i think that if i don't think they did anything i mean i don't think that i think in this case there is illegality that will be punished but in that case i don't think there's anything illegal about it they were they took foolish risks and then they were bailed out and um i wanted to see them selling apples on the street the the absolute destitute the idea that you can go from from riches to rags i mean rags i don't mean just well you know i gotta pay my lawyer's fees no to you living in very different circumstances than you lived before um that is That is the great, that's the great risk hedge of capitalism.

And if we rob ourselves of that, which I don't think, people who invested in SBF are going to lose all their money, and they're not going to get it back. And that's how it works. Boo-hoo-hoo. One of the lines that will probably strike modern generations as ridiculous comes at the end of Titanic, when Rose is describing what happened to the guy who, the rich guy, remember, who was chasing her all around the boat, the one that she was supposed to marry, the one who doesn't see her in the deck of the California or the Carpathia, can't remember. She says offhandedly at the end of his story that he lost everything in the crash of 29 and put a bullet in his head and it gets to them i say well why did he do that well i would do it wasn't there a bailout

i mean what do you mean he put a bullet in his head because he lost in the crash you're right rob i mean people lost everything they lost their their gatsby lives evaporated and now it doesn't happen because we don't like that. But you're correct that there are stupid people, but there are also people who have a new variety of stupidity because it's their fascination with disruption. This is the idea that we're all taught to believe, right? It's going to disrupt the car industry. It's going to disrupt the hotel. It's going to disrupt the paper cup industry. We are going to disrupt the toothpick industry start to finish.

And everybody piles onto this and puts a lot of money into it because they believe that breaking things just shatters the old paradigms and new things emerge. And it's great, but it doesn't. Generally, it doesn't. What the disruption usually accomplishes, maybe sometimes it's good. You learn new things about what you can do with old industries. But there's this sort of inbred post-60s progressive idea that disruption itself is a virtue. And all of these people, I'm sure, have been marinating in a culture that celebrates disruption of old paradigms because it shows that the establishment and the man and all those old,

old things have got to go. So if there wasn't this sort of pre-existing condition of celebrating disruption for its own sake, you wouldn't have an awful lot of otherwise smart people piling into this because they thought, oh, I'm going to be praised for being a disruptor. I'm a disruptor now. That sounds like something out of an animated children's cartoon with robots that turn into something else. Anyway, Peter, you had a response to Rob's. Well, I just wanted to let you know, James, let you in on something. The real reason Rob wanted to see these Wall Street Titans out on Madison Avenue and Lexington Avenue's subway stops selling apples, and the reason I wanted to as well, was that Rob and I both applied for Wall Street jobs as we were leaving college.

And it turned us down cold. We wanted to see those bastards wearing barrels. Well, I mean, look, I think that's the, you can't, you know, one of my favorite financial writers and a very nice guy, James Grant, always says, people forget that you, you know know the trick when you're investing isn't to sell high it's also that you must buy low and the buying low part people always forget about because but that's the that's the regulatory function he actually posited this brilliant thing so we should just uh after 2008 so we should just remove all the should we know financial regulations really we don't need

all these audits we don't need any of this stuff um uh banking things what we need is if you work at a if you're at a financial institution that makes use of you know essentially a federal information highway so that if you're part of the international banking transferring thing if you're in any way associated with it if you're part of the federal reserve system whatever you are right then in order to be part of the club you you need to, every employee at a certain level, so it could be, you know, the first thousand of the top thousand employees, top 2,000, whatever, they pledge 99.99% of their liquidated net worth towards the settlement of any crash. So that means that you lose everything. you probably aren't selling apples on the street

but you're close to it uh and it will he said it would clarify the mind you wouldn't need federal regulators to look at the books of a bank the books would be examined carefully usually by not by the top 100 people who are rich enough to lose them but by the crucial middle management people they would be regulating that bank every second of every day uh and that's the you know that was the i thought it was a very elegant solution of course it'll never happen and it used to be something it wasn't 99.9 but in the old days when goldman and when dylan Dylan Reed was still around, these all started out as partnerships. The big boys at the top really did have a large portion of their personal wealth at stake every day in those institutions. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It all used to work and there are reasons why. Well, no one's going to be hurling themselves out of the windows of skyscrapers in this one because they probably work, you know, in suburban office parks, which have maximum height of three stories.

Sam Bigburn Freed's place in Bahamas probably, you know, he's not going to hurl himself off the veranda. And if he does, he'll land in some nice, soft, cushy. I'm just waiting for Rob to think that I'm going to go into a spot about something about soft betting or something, but I'm not anyway. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm operating on my, uh, I have the info on the phone and I'm on the iPad. So I'm not ahead of you for once, James, I don't know where you're going. Well, we seem to, I'm not going anywhere. Uh, I hope not. Anyway,

we have dispensed, I think with that story and Peter, you can keep us, you know, if you find up, if, out, if you hear some sirens go by because, I don't know, maybe some Russian mafia figures who were deep into this and are resenting the loss of their money have sent a plane by and a Tom Cruise-like special effect where a guy's going to be deployed on a hook and pluck him from the sidewalk as he walks from one place to the other. Who knows? Wait, before you get going, Peter, do you know, did he give his parents any money? I mean, are they like, oh, whoops, guess we have to give back the Ferrari? Here's, I have to be very careful because this, as you may well imagine, has been all the buzz here in the neighborhood.

But his parents are both professors and highly accomplished people as far as i know no my only encounter with them is that a couple they're his younger brother and one of my kids played little league together so i stood watching baseball games with these people i don't know them um they're professors and in the arrangement with the court, they have promised a bond. They've put up a bond worth $250 million secured by their own real estate holdings. So they have done really well. Now there are other ways to do well in Silicon Valley. There are people on this campus who've invested in this, that, or the other startup, but they possess great wealth. Boy, I've got to be honest with you. Dog walkers want to know why. I can't imagine a less pleasant place to be right now than sitting around the table as one of Peter Robinson's children as he clowers at them and says,

Why couldn't you be a crypto billionaire exactly a million dollars like you know peter when you said and i and i realized of course this is this is due to the context in which you live and understandable but it used to be when somebody said well they're professors i had a certain image i had a certain set of expectations yes at the very least i would have that that's what I've lived up to. I would see somebody, poverty, genteel poverty, somebody with a vaguely middle European mien, perhaps, you know, the cliched mustache and the rest of it, and the academic matter, and a devotion to principles, and a devotion to truth, and a devotion to all of these things. Now when I hear, yes, that's what I signed up for, but now when I hear professor i i immediately think well okay is there some

other attribute that i might find notable and laudable because that doesn't mean anything to me anymore i'd taken the same hit as scientist over the last year i've always admired scientists i always believed in science that these people were devoted to a particular to the empirical search right not anymore uh and I hate that. I really hate the fact that these terms have become so debased. But on the other hand, the debasement was accomplished by the people who held those terms, and now we have to reconstruct them. Or do we? One of the challenges ahead is to exactly figure out what we're going to do with academia, right? I mean, when we look back at the last year, the last couple of years, we all agree that all of the major institutions have taken a hit.

But that's with us. Do you think that they've taken the same sort of hit with the general public? Do you think that our lack of faith in science and academia, the college, the experience, do you think that that's widespread? Or are most people just simply indifferent to it and really don't give it much thought one way or the other? I fear and think it's the latter, probably. Except for the sun. Here's the way it looks. Fascinating question, to which I have, oddly enough, although I work at a big operation, big university, I haven't given it that much thought. But the way it looks to me is that there are between 20 and 50 institutions in this country sitting on top of such large endowments that they are really not accountable to anyone,

including their own alumni. Their boards exist in some ways for the sake of the faculty, and it's not even all the faculty. It's the faculty who are running big research labs. But there are over 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. And again, as I counted, it's maybe 50 that are just so rich, they don't have to say boo to anybody. But that leaves almost 4,000 institutions, many of the marvelous local institutions I read with heartbreak a couple of weeks ago, the Casanova College in upstate New York, a wonderful little liberal arts institution near where I grew up, closed. And that's got to be one of many, many closures that we're going to see. Institutions that did that. Sorry, why did it close? I don't know the details of Casanova. It's been a long time since I lived back there, but they ran out of money and they ran out of students.

And even as I think part of what's going on, as best I can tell, part of what's going on is that even as you've got young males dropping out of the workforce, you've got students, often males, less interested in attending colleges than they used to be. The smaller institutions are exposed to all of this in a way that these giant institutions sitting on top of enormous endowments are not. So, you've got this very sharp divide and the little college, the little liberal arts operation, the tiny ones, the dozens of wonderful institutions in the midwest particularly the upper midwest james you know you live among them mcallister and saying all as far as i know

they're all doing just fine i'm just naming several off the top of my head but those small local institutions where the name of the game now seems to be you have to be an international operation. And there are local institutions that were founded by farmers in relatively small towns in the old days. Eureka, Ronald Reagan's college, was founded by the people, by a church, the Disciples of Christ, I think, a particular denomination, substantially farmers in the local area in Illinois. Those institutions played an important role in the history of the country, and they're exposed. Yeah, yeah. I mean, a friend of mine once explained to me, I mean, recently,

how Princeton University, I think, because of the size of its endowment and also the size of its, it's a smaller university. Princeton has the biggest endowment per student of any institution in the country. And it has a smaller operation. So like, you know, when you really look at financially, you know, like Yale University, and you look at it as a financial entity, and it really is a gigantic healthcare company, because that's a huge hospital research thing. And it's really the same thing with Harvard.

I mean, these are, Harvard is really just a health insurance company. That's what it is financially. But Princeton's small enough and has an endowment that's large enough. It is actually effectively a money machine. They don't have to take in any money. They don't have to do anything. Their expenses have to stay roughly close to the market, but they could absolutely not

raise any money or charge any money and be fine forever um and there's something wrong about that i mean i you know i just to be super i don't know whether it's the end of the year so it should be blood but i remember um you know we had uh larry arn on our podcast, Not That Lush, which turns out a long time ago, and he and I went at it about Trump. And I was rolling my eyes at Larry Arnn and spent all this time thinking, oh my God, I can't believe it. Larry Arnn runs Hillsdale College. And I'm saying this as somebody,

you know, occasionally, Peter, you and I have to look you know, look at hiring somebody or really looking at young people. And, and I have noticed this, not just with us, but I've noticed this with other people that it's sort of kind of hands down. The Hillsdale graduate applying the recent graduate applying for a job is almost always the one you want to hire. Yes, exactly. You know, they're smart. They are worldly.

They're sophisticated. They're hardworking. They're entrepreneurial. And they're creative. They're all the things you want in a college graduate, including well-educated. And they're not entitled. You don't have to waste two years before they figure out that nobody owes them anything. Wait a minute.

You honestly believe that somebody who came on a horse-wessel high is the same as somebody who came from Yale or Harvard? The rigor. No, I think they're better. I think they're better. I agree with you. The degree to which these larger schools just carry with them so much cultural weight is preposterous is ridiculous i

the higher and more impressive the organization from which the person comes the less likely i am to think that they actually know how anything works if they have this much money and they don't really need to do anything what's the harm for them for giving into every single little intellectual fad and scientific lysenkoism that comes down the pike? There's none. They're still going to make their money. So why not? Want to be popular and mouth all the new dogmas?

I certainly get more popular attention and press that way. I mean, I think we all assume that in these larger schools that the humanities have been corrupted, right? I mean, yes and no. My daughter just got out of Boston University. And as far as I can tell, the wokeism that we're always hearing about, they're always bemoaning when we see it in this story about college or that, did not affect her education.

Or she kept it, you know, hidden from dad because, you know, we're paying the bills. But as far as I can tell, Boston University still provided a pretty good old-fashioned collegiate experience that would not have been unusual or inscrutable to somebody in the 80s or 90s. But yes, we hear of other places, where DEI, or DIE, if you want to put the letters in the right order, seems to have infected everything.

It's like the version of the bad mortgages. You have no idea how much of the curriculum has been poisoned by the insertion of these tranches of bad ideas. So what are, I mean, I just assume now, I mean, that we know exactly what needs to be done in the educational system. We all know it. Everybody knows it. For all of the talk about everybody talking, oh, they just want to destroy public education. That's all they want to do. The Republicans don't want to teach history. They want everybody to be ignorant about the fact that there was slavery so they can all vote Republican and be wage slaves. No, that's not it at all.

What we look at is a system that does not work now, and we want to give the money back to the parents so that the parents can choose something, be it a public or a private school. How about that? That idea, I think, has a lot of traction all over the country because people are dissatisfied with what public institutions do. The second thing, after we busted up public education and sent everybody to good schools where the disruptors aren't there and the people who want to learn can learn, is that we somehow culturally dethrone the idea that college bestows anything other than the fact that you paid the money and sat in the place and got the paper and we bring back the idea that there is a nobility to trades there's absolutely somebody who comes to me with a degree in social sciences that stuff that studied some ridiculous little sliver of culture

from 200 years ago and attempts to recontextualize it in the, in the, in the framework of modern fascinations is boring. Somebody comes to me and says, here, what I do, frankly,

I had to figure out how to turn the water off to the loading dock. And I was looking at the schematics and it wasn't easy to find. So I kind of had to follow the pipe all the way down from the third floor. That's interesting to me. And that's actually more interesting to me than somebody who's going to tell me about cutlery and its role in gender in 17th century Belgian... You know, you have just come up, you have come up with a test of tests, James. I would trust you to turn off the water main at the loading dock.

Rob Long, that is the last job I would ever give you. Yeah, I wouldn't trust me either. But you know what I say to somebody? You know what I say to somebody when they come to me? They say to me, I have a PhD in, you know, 17th century cutlery with a look through the lens of gender. You know what I say to that person? I'll have a grande latte. Oh, right.

That's what i say but by the way i have this other thought like when you said uh it should be a diversity equity inclusion should be died the diversity of the way around i think it should be what it is day d-e-i latin it is their new religion right so they're dropping those little whatnot on you that's what a y Yale English major, a BA in English. Somewhere Harold Bloom is saying, nicely done, Mr. Long. Nicely done, Mr. Long. Yeah, he said that to everybody. I told you my Harold Bloom story, right?

He says it to everyone. But I'm right, am I not? You were correct. Tom Sowell, as usual, Tom soul said said it best tom soul who is a graduate of harvard university tom soul said the principal benefit of holding a harvard degree is that you never again in your life have to feel intimidated by anyone who holds a harvard degree here's the benefit of having a yale degree and living in new york city you get to join the yale club and in the old days the yale club had two it's actually had two sort

of um great benefits one was the what we call a club pour so when you go to the bar and you order a drink it's a club pour obviously the whole thing is sort of a you know non-profit institution that the yale club is non-profit so there's no nobody at the bar manager saying hey don't give them that much and all the people who are at the bar at the yale club when they order you know a bourbon on the rocks they it's a healthy pour it's it's not a splash on the rocks it's like it's a triple for everybody else and the second reason is because the rooms you could stay there were perfectly nice very simple but perfectly nice and super cheap and i've always used the yale club as a kind of a economic indicator because when times are flush when the market's up when everybody's feeling rich nobody stays at the yale club

they're gonna stay at the saint reed say someplace fancy doesn't matter spend the money when times when people start especially in the financial world start feeling pinched they'll stay at the yale club because it's perfectly respectable place to stay it's cheap and they'll give you on your good you charge your membership they'll give you like 90 or 120 days to pay before you start getting like stern letters from the club secretary or whatever um and so if you call the l club and they don't have any rooms and it's full you know that um times are rough times are a fair market you call the l club and there's plenty of room, you know, hey, it's a bull. That's actually borne up by 30 years of observation. That makes only too much sense. As you know, I'm sensitive to fluctuations at the Yale Club myself

because since the Dartmouth Club burned down, well, let's put it this way, the Yale Club of New York City has served as the temporary home of the Dartmouth club of New York city since 1923. That's right. And of course it's a lovely place, but, but I mean, it's perfectly respectable place to stay,

but it's not, I wouldn't call it lots. So, um, and usually when you can kind of tell. All right. Now here's what I want to know from James Lilacs. James, when you were growing up and your dad ran his operation, his fuel operation in Fargo, how many people with fancy college degrees did you know?

Who were the people you most admire i'm trying to get to what life was like in fargo when you were a kid and all of those and the immense amount of practical knowledge and and also hearing you talk about it over the years i would say patriotism simple decency it was a remarkable place it was a good place to grow up the man across the street worked at the bank mr herman uh which at the time we thought with mr drysdale and the rest of it, he's probably very rich. He's got access to all the money. He worked at Gate City. And he and his wife both went to college. They were very cultured.

They went to the cities at least twice a year. They went down to Minneapolis, Minnesota and saw plays at the Guthrie and stuff like that. So they were right across the street. On the corner, Mr. Johnson ran the pharmacy that's at Northport. So I assume that he had some pharmaceutical training. Three houses down, there's a teacher. So I assume she went to teacher's college, which is a different thing, but it's still a college. The people next to us played in a rock and roll band and raised dogs. A lot of stuff. So it was all over. On this street were degrees, not degrees, practical,

trade, and the rest of it, all of which came into the block that it was because everybody had pretty much that salary, same values, same way of living, suburban culture in a North Dakota town. It was fine. But the idea was, by the time that I came along, well, of course you have to go to college. Of course you do. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, I, of course you have to go to college. Of course you do. Oh, really? Yeah. Even my cousin, I mean, I had two cousins who grew up in the farm.

The older one went to school to become an agronomist and he became a brilliant agronomist and he studied and that was his way somehow of maintaining the family tradition. His brother stayed behind and ran the farm.

He did not go to college. He ran the farm and he ended up a wildly successful businessman who ended up on boards of co-ops and all the sorts of, a brilliant guy, but he didn't go to school. And nobody ever thought, how can this guy run this farm with all of its, I mean, it takes a smart mind to run. You have to sit down at one point of the year and say, what are my fertilizer futures are going to be? I got to lock in the price now. That's just one thing you have to think about all this stuff. So you

take, but the idea that you'd have to go to college to figure that out. No, absolutely not. So, but still when in 1976, when I graduated, the idea was amongst my peers and speech and debate and the rest of it, everybody was going to go to college, but they went to college for a specific thing. They went to college to become a lawyer. They went to college to become a lawyer. They went to college to become a banker or an economist. With the idea that there would be a practical application at the end of it. Nobody seemed, with the exception of one or two perhaps, wanted to go to college with the idea that they would then get a job in college. In other words, I'm going to study something so effusion-rarified that the only possible employment is in the place that

taught me that so that I can then pass it on to... No, everybody wanted to get out in the world and get a job and do well. We'd all grown up in the 70s, which sucked, and so we wanted to make a world for ourselves. So that was Fargo at the time, but the idea of what a college degree actually meant changed. So the idea, guys, is if we all know that most people out there, I think if push came to shove, would say, I would rather kids attend good schools than public schools, when you phrase it like that, and we should make a push towards helping people get practical degrees in trade schools. These not losing arguments these are very popular arguments i think especially when you talk about the yale club in the way that rob does

because you will alienate 99.99 percent of the population will be alienated once they learn the existence of this stratification this this this these people up here who are able to, I mean, you just gave us a peek in a keyhole in a door to which none of us will ever pass, ever. And I suspect that if there's a Yale club in New York, there might be one elsewhere. There might be such a- No, no, I know, I know, I know you think,

it's only one, I mean, a physical club. Well, I'm sorry to tell you, Rob, that you probably haven't been told about the existence of the other ones, which tells us there's another level beyond. There's always an inside door, isn't there, James? Anyway, that's my that's my that's my if I had one wish for 2023, it would be that we would have a serious discussion about education and start from the cost to the purpose to the right. Because when I was growing up, and I hate to do the old man get off my lawn stuff, but honest to God, I had young single women as teachers. I had old battle axes who had been there since forever. I had great teachers. I had a good education. The idea that my parents would walk into kindergarten and

there would be somebody with multi-hued hair with a bolt through their nose with an angry t-shirt on who was about to teach my child something in contrary to my cultural expectations, because my cultural expectations were retrograde and violent and offensive. It's absolutely... imagine everybody walked into kindergarten in 1963 and there's somebody who looks like trotsky right you know and it smells like trotsky you know smoking vulgar cigarettes and is about to teach your kids everything that they need to know about marxism we wouldn't stand for it but now of course we just sort of assume that that's a part of the course. You know what?

I would say that we should also, because this is a holiday show, we should get on a more cheery note. But I would be thrilled at this point if they were actually teaching Marx in schools. Johnny Marx. Johnny Marx. No, no, I mean. Who did the fine soundtrack for Holly Jolly Christmas? No, I mean Karl Marx. Karl Marx is incredibly complicated prose.

It's really hard to understand. You have to know something about history. You have to know something about the references. You have to, I mean, I would, my fear is that they're teaching the sort of, you know, the graduate school Clip Notes version of it, the it. The Mother Jones magazine version of it. But if they were really going to teach it, I don't know. Any kind of academic rigor at this point would be a welcome change. But, you know, look.

These are depressing topics for the end of the year. I thought we were going to be more, you know. Well, I'm having fun. I mean, we can be Pollyanna-ish about it if but we can we we can identify things that need to be done and talk about them and and and have fun doing so but if you want to come up with something let's see what do you want to talk you well i know about what spain spain yeah peter just got back from spain oh hey hold on i i would like to know what Rob is, what you're each going to be cooking. And I'm going to grab my son, Andrew Robinson, who's back from Boston and is going to be cooking

our Christmas dinner. Let me see if I can find him. You got, I'll be right back. You have to leave in a second right now. I'm going over to dinner at my sister-in-law's house. So I have no idea. It's goose or something like that. I think that'll be fine. We have to make the salads and the dessert. What are you gonna make for dessert? Well, that's up to my wife again, some sort of tart perhaps. So she and my daughter will be slaving away at the today and tomorrow, probably while I'm watching football with the guys, having a proper distribution of, you know, gender duties here.

That's right. They made caramel. My wife made caramels, and she also made walnettos. Now, we can't call them walnettos, because, of course, that name is legally owned by somebody else. Well, the FTC cops will

burst into your Christmas dinner. No, and if they do, I've got a pretty good reason, I think, for calling them as such. My house was built by the man who invented the walnet no there you go minneapolis used to be quite the confection center back in the in the tens in the all the germans right well a lot of these guys came over and it was something to do you hired guys to stir the pot forever but the milk i mean the milky way was invented in minneapolis the stuff that you fills your three musketeer was once called the Minneapolis Nugget. In Louisville, Kentucky, they have an old German candy maker,

and they make the greatest candy ever, Mojusco. Essentially, it's a marshmallow covered in caramel. It doesn't sound amazing. It is, in fact, amazing. The history of American candy is just is extraordinary every city had their guy you're right like the german who came by um they all disappeared or got absorbed into a conglomerate our last remaining big confectioner here pearson's which made the salted nut roll which is absolutely quintessentially a minnesota treat was just purchased by a company

out of state out of country i believe at least it wasn't China. So, you know, we see that diminish and go. There's a great post on Ricochet, which we actually should push, right? The whole Ricochet thing. About regionalisms. Somebody brought up the Sky Bar. Do you remember the Sky Bar, Rob, when you were a kid? Oh, yeah, yeah. S-K-Y, what was it? S-K-Y-B-A-R. I think it had five different flavors in one bar, and it was a product of Necco.

Oh, sure. The rest of us out in the world never got the good stuff from Necco, like the Bowser or the Sky Bar. All we got were those poker chips. You know, the Necco wafers. Oh, right. I think it was the headquarter of New Haven, Connecticut, actually. Boys, may I introduce my youngest son, Andrew Robinson,

who, forget about your Christmas ham or your Christmas turkey or your Christmas side of beef. Andrew is going to cook. Andrew? All right, well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. It's a great pleasure. I will be cooking paella mixta. So it will be featuring for protein, chicken thighs, chorizo. What else? Shrimp, no? Shrimp and mussels, yes.

Oh, so you chickened out. No, it's like it's supposed to be rabbit, snails, and chicken. So I guess you have some finicky eaters over there? No, those are just a little hard to source. And what about the special rice? There's a special kind of Spanish rice you have to get? Yes, and we're going to use short grain rice

as the special kind of rice. Arboria. Rice bomba. Rice is pretty short to begin with i mean yeah well it sounds it sounds delicious that sounds great so um are you are you are you using a recipe whose recipe you're using or are you just kind of figuring it out uh we have i'm not i can't remember i want to say like New York times, maybe a recipe. Here's what I was taught by a great New York times cooking. This section is really good.

Here's what I was taught by a great Spanish chef is that the trick is you want to keep stirring the rice before you assemble it, before you let it, you know, crust in the bottom to get all that socarrat, the crispy rice, inside the paella too. It's not just on the bottom, it's all the way through. That is a technique they stole from the Arab conquerors for the Ricotista, because that was the way, that was a very famous way for Persians, actually, to make rice. Yeah.

There you go a little so we got a we got a white guy from the east coast in texas talking about a spanish chef who had a secret that he got from the arab oppressors of his country who themselves had extracted it from the persians now we can either say that nobody here has the right to talk about any of this because it's all cultural appropriation up and down and backwards and forwards, or we can say this is the glorious melange, the glorious ratatouille of world culture in which one informs the others, and we all learn and we come up with great dishes at the end of the result. I'm inclined to think it's the latter. But when you say New York Times recipe, that's where we sort of wince a little bit.

Because if the person saying these things does not come specifically from the culture of which they are talking about, there can be problems. Well, Andrew's half Cuban. So we don't have to worry that you're going to have you don't have to decolonize the kitchen. Your kitchen comes pre 50 percent decolonized. Yeah, exactly. Good. Rob, you... Or 50% heavily colonized. That's true.

Depending on what part of Havana you're from. Rob, before we leave, because Peter has to run off and we have to get out of here, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Thank you. Nice to see you, Andrew. Merry Christmas. Good luck today. Good luck on the payout. Your Christmas dish is, and you're going to be in Texas, I assume.

Well, I don't know yet. Good pecan pie? You know, I punted on my sister-in-law's made pies. And so I think I'm going to, I don't know yet. I just flew in last night and we sort of had brief discussions over dinner. I got a little work to do today but i'm going to probably go out to the market later and see what's up and what's good it's only the it's only the immediate family for christmas dinner this year and so um it's gonna be we have like a lot of like huge family stuff coming up so uh you know we're only

here for a few days uh and then christmas then a day after that and then we go back all of us go back east for a wedding we all have to go to so it's good um yeah um so you know my ordinary my ordinary thing would be i just get a giant standing rib roast and just cook that all day all morning low and slow and then it's delicious but then and then have leftovers but then we're all leaving soon so that's probably a bad idea so i don't really know you know what my actual um hope is i'm gonna make asabuco i feel like i have six people to feed asabuco is a really kind of a nice hearty slightly different non-traditional dish but but i have to go to market see either that or like lamb

some kind of rack of land because it's like six people it's easy to do a couple racks you know that's how you end up with more traditions the next year you keep accreting these things you keep adding you wait a minute you know what you know what we're doing this year to christmas we're disrupting it i'm gonna make i'm gonna go right now. I'm going to bake some imaginary money. I'm going to put those little bags and I'm going to give them to everybody and say, here's my new token. Listen,

guys, it's been a fantastic year. I assume, unless the Eddie tells us otherwise, that we are off next week so that everybody can do what they need to do. I like the fact that my calendar says that Christmasmas is on the 25th but also for the 26th it says christmas day observed i like that i love that uh as as

though we're sort of judging watching it from a distance through binoculars mine says christmas day substitute isn't that weird i guess it's because you get christmas off and if it's sunday we don't it's like if your birthday's, and if it's Sunday, we don't. It's like if your birthday is on a Christmas, you can't say, okay, my birthday is now the next day. That's when it's observed, so you get an extra present. But Christmas Day, you get that off, but I still want a day off, so it's the next day. But if you are religiously faithful, are you not observant? So, I mean, you could say, when are you celebrating Christmas?

Well, we're observant, so the 25th. How about you? Well, we're not,, so the 25th. How about you? Well, we're not, so we're observing it on the 26th. Okay, got it, fine, whatever. But we're going to be with you the first week of January. And just a reminder, nothing will have changed. New year, all of those things, resolutions, new start, nothing will have changed. We'll all be different.

We'll all be ourselves as we were minutes before the clock striked and the calendar changed. But Peter, Merry Christmas. Rob, Merry Christmas. To everybody in Ricochet and everybody who's listening and everybody who's joined the site in the last year, everybody who's thought about and wanted to, come on, come on, come all, it's there for you because we can't wait to see you

in Ricochet 2023 as well. So Merry Christmas, everybody. We'll see you in a fortnight at ricochet 4.0 as i do each year i'm setting up rob and so as tiny tim observed please join ricochet ricochet.com we need you we if you want to give us a present and you're not a member, this is a great present to give. We absolutely do need you. That's not in Dickens. So that 2023 is not a sad year. And so instead it's a year...

That's not how you do it. Do it with the Dickens style. Do it with a ghost of Christmas future. If you don't join, Tiny Tim dies. Right. These are the chains we forged in life. It's going to be an empty little crutch in the corner if you don't join, and it's going to be on you,

you Scrooge and a half. That's actually a very good point, James. Think of Ricochet as Tiny Tim. And think, if you've ever wanted to join Ricochet and you haven't, you've been putting it off, you are Scrooge. We are the three ghosts. We have visited you. We're telling

you, please don't let Tiny Tim die. You know what to do. Wake up the next morning, raise the shade, call down to the boy down the street and say, boy, boy, can I still join Ricochet? What do you mean? That center-right discussion podcasting company? Why, that's the very

one. Why, certainly's the very one. Why, certainly, sir. Go to Ricochet.com. That is what, that would be the only Christmas carol I want to hear this year. Throw open the sash, throw a sovereign out the window, and then find your nephew and do a jig. That's absolutely perfect. Exactly right. And I'm sure, of course, EJ is relieved that you've just finally given him some art here with the three of us. I don't know which ghost I'm going to be, but being the most slight of the group, I think I'll probably end up

as the one that Joel Grey played in the, was it the Patrick Stewart version or something like that? I don't know. It all depends. As long as we're not Muppets. I'm sorry, these people who say that Muppet Christmas is fine. It's fine. But there's one answer to which is the best of the christmas carols right and it is what rob the best of the christmas oh i'm sorry for the actual christmas carols uh it's the first one it's the it's the this first scary one alec guinness right no no no you're thinking oliver he played fagan yeah fagan right it wasn't the first one because they were making that back and they made one in the 30s i think you're talking about the 151 british black and white alistair sims exactly that's a great one that's the one that's the only one that there is it's a very peculiar one it's a very peculiar musical one with uh leslie written by

leslie brickus and anthony newly starring al Finney, which is very, very weird. Although it has one or two really good songs in it, but it's very weird. They all have their charms, but the only one that's the most British and the most heartfelt is that one. Good, we've given everybody something to argue about in the comments,

as if there isn't already. Gotta go. Peter, Rob, everybody, Merry Christmas. And if I have to do this myself, I will. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone. Bye-bye, boys. Everyone, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. And if I have to do this myself, I will. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone. Bye-bye, boys. Everyone. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Lots of snow and ice everywhere we go.

Choirs singing carols right outside my door. All these things and more. All these things and more. Oh, that's what Christmas means to me, my love. That's what Christmas means to me, my love. Yeah. And you know what I mean. I see your smiling face like I've never seen before. Even though I love you madly, it seems I love you more.

The little cards you give me will touch my heart for sure. All these things and more, darling. Oh, that's what Christmas means to me, my love. Oh, yeah. I feel like running wild as angels and little child. To greet you beneath the mistletoe Kiss you once and then tomorrow And wish you a Merry Christmas, baby

Oh, and such happiness in the coming year Oh, baby Let's stick the hearts with holly Sing sweet silent night Fill the tree with angel hair Pretty, pretty light Go to sleep and wake up Just before daylight

And all these things and more, baby Oh, that's what Christmas means to me, my love. Oh, baby, baby. Ricochet. Join the conversation. It's the Starry Sea It's the Starry Sea