The Ricochet Podcast - Waiting on a Friend

Episode Date: April 19, 2018

This week on the Big Show®, we’ve got former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul (pre-order his new book From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia) on the new warming relations with North Korea, what to do about Syria, and yes, that pesky President Putin. Then Commentary’s associate editor Noah Rothman (yes, he’s one of the stars of the world famous Commentary... Source

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advance your digitization and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test,

winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal, you will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks, and today we talk to Mike McFaul, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, and Noah C. Rothman from Commentary Magazine. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 398. We're brought to you by the fine people at Eero. Hey, Are you tired of paying for that high-speed internet only to be frustrated

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Prescription eyewear should not cost more than a plane ticket or a new phone. If you've bought glasses, you know you wince when you see how much you pay for just a little wire. Come on. Head to warbyparker.com slash ricochet to order your free home try-ons today. And we're also brought to you, well, usually by Ricochet itself, but there is a great massive event in which you, the Ricochet listener and member, can be part of a Washington insider cocktail party and lose your credibility forever. Rob, you're one of those squishes who goes to the cocktail parties all the time. Oh, I just want around, yeah.

We make moderate jokes about being moderate and centrist. Yeah, well, and does everybody stand in the middle of the room, I imagine? Well, no. Actually, they stand to the left of the room, but mostly people on the left like to call themselves moderate and centrist. Ah. That has been my experience. Where are the moderate Republicans, they always say, when they really mean – where are the liberals? Yes, yes, yes. Well, here's what I want? Yes, yes, yes.

Well, here's what I want to say to you, James. Normally, this is the time when I say things like, you've got to join Ricochet, you've got to join Ricochet. If you like this podcast, you're listening to it. We have hundreds of thousands to millions of downloads, and we don't have hundreds of thousands of millions of members, and we really do need you to join. And one of the reasons people say, hey, why should I join? I say, well, you know, to help keep the business going. But the other thing you could do is you can come to the AEI Ricochet Podcast Summit presented by Donors Trust.

Donors Trust is also sponsoring it along with AEI. It is May 10 and May 11 in Washington, D.C. It is a podcast convention. I'm calling it the ConPodCon, the conservative podcast convention. There are a few tickets left. You can get yours today. We're going to be doing an open to the public Ricochet meetup on the night of Thursday, May 10 in DC. And we're going to be doing our – it's basically a podcast summit.

You get to see live versions of many of the shows on the network, including Conservatarians, Q&A, hosted by Jay Nordlinger, Mona, Sharon, and Jay will be doing their show. The Substandard will be doing something live. GLOP will be doing something live. Jonah Goldberg's The Remnant will be doing something live. American Walk will be doing something live. And, of course, our own Peter Robinson

will be taping Uncommon Knowledge. Would you care to hear my, I was going to say, would you care to hear who my guest will be? Yeah, very special guest. Go ahead and announce. The Secretary of Defense, James Mattis. That's it.

I've announced it. Not bad. Not bad. Now, listen. Tickets for this event are extremely limited, and here's the trick. You have to be a Ricochet member to purchase them. So if you're a member, go to the member feed on Ricochet.com on Monday starting at 9 a.m. Eastern. And tickets will be available for purchase for $80 for the two-day event, which is pretty good because it includes meet and greets and seminars and podcasts and lunches and dinner and all that stuff and a Ricochet meetup.

If you are not a member, you are not out of luck. You just have to go to Ricochet.com and become a member. And you'll be accomplishing two things. One, you'll be able to come to this great con podcast, and the second thing is you'll be a Ricochet member, and future events will be open to you as well. So please, I hope to see you May 10 and 11. It will be at the American Enterprise Institute in D.C. Come say hello. That was me finishing, James.

I'm sorry, I was muted. I had to mute myself back there. Because I'm one of those people who just lets the other guy read the spot. Well, there's your problem right there. There's my problem. I was going to say at the end of it, though, Rob, are you saying that there are people who listen to this podcast but don't belong to Ricochet? Is that what you're saying?

That's what I'm saying. You're saying that they're sort of taking up space without buying anything. Well, I'm saying that they're loitering away. They're hanging out. I guess they're waiting for something. I don't know. What if they're asking for a code or something? Because we give all these codes away when we're doing the spots. What if they're waiting for something? I don't know. What if they're asking for a code or something?

Because we give all these codes away when we're doing the spots. Be that as it may, how do you guys think that Starbucks is ever going to recover from the PR black eye and bloody nose that they have this week? And they're so woke. That's the thing that must be just frustrating. Yeah. It is true that the left, they do eat their own first. That's the nice thing. Well, I have complicated feelings about that because I have gone to a Starbucks and not bought anything and used the men's room. And I've also gone to a Starbucks and sat there for a while waiting for somebody and not ordered anything. You monster. Have you ever been a waiter? Were you ever in your life a waiter? I think you know the answer to that, James. Because those of us who work always feel a little guilty for overstaying our welcome.

Those of us who have family that runs businesses like this know that you've got to turn the tables. You've got to keep them turning over. I go to Starbucks from time to time, not much because i don't like their coffee and you will just see people who have set up their entire office there apparently for the day right um and so is that what happened fill me in i just missed this whole story a couple of african-americans got thrown out because they were sitting at a table too long i don't what how where does the racism bit of it come into it they weren't buying what's the allegation the allegation their allegation is that they were uh waiting for a few minutes less than 10 um uh they were not to buy and they weren't buying anything they were waiting for to meet somebody there and they asked for the

code you have to use a code to use the men's room and they were refused they were asked to leave they're not going to buy anything and then they were arrested so they came the cops came and put them in handcuffs um oh it does seem i don't know i mean like it does seem extreme as somebody i can say as somebody is a you know a middle-aged white male i have done all those things at a Starbucks and, you know, not had any trouble at all. I mean, I've seen other people, as James says, set up, you know, not just laptops, but I've seen laptops and printers set up on those tables for all day. And I don't really know what the business model is there. I have also waited more than 10 minutes sometimes at a Starbucks just for the guy to remember to make my espresso. So I've done my time and I feel like we're not hearing something.

Yes, yes. It doesn't quite add up somehow. Well, waiting 10 minutes for your espresso and then finding the name has been misspelled on the cup is the very definition of white people problems. What people are looking at this really is what people are looking at this and saying that what we have here is a reaffirmation of implicit racial bias that this wouldn't have happened to a couple of white guys. Let's put it this way. These guys were well-dressed, from what I can understand. I mean, they were not people who were coming in off the street homeless. A homeless white guy who sits there in the corner and doesn't buy anything after a while is going to be asked to leave.

These guys had every social marker of being people who were not going to be disruptive. But at the same time, if you're going to a place and you're taking up space and you're waiting for somebody, buy a damn cup of coffee. Why is that so hard? And so when they said, look, you're taking up the space, you've been here for a while, you want to use the bathroom, we do have a policy, buy a cup of coffee. The fact that they didn't buy a cup of coffee indicates that they're sort of a, they're actually either trying to take advantage of being singled out or they're sort of a – they're actually either trying to take advantage of being single out or they're taking Starbucks at its word, that it's the third place.

Right. That you don't have to buy something to be there. Starbucks is your extension of your living room. And where was this Starbucks? Where was this one located? It's in Philadelphia. Philadelphia. Okay.

Inner City, Philadelphia? Oh, that's a good question i don't know okay i just the whole thing still doesn't quite add up and you know my experience of starbucks 95 of my experience of starbucks is well i can tell you exactly 95 is california three percent is new york city and two percent is mexico city where we spent a lot of time in Starbucks and in all three of those places this story just would not compute everybody in California on the edge of the Stanford campus exactly

what there are kids who've been there for weeks I'm convinced yeah I guess my question my thought and again there's a drama here that we were not did not see and I feel like that's the clue here. That's what it feels like. And it's probably something really simple, like they asked for the thing in a busy time in some jerky fashion, which customers have been known to do. And the person behind the counter at Starbucks responded in a jerky fashion

or didn't respond or in some way – In Philadelphia? Yeah, right. And the animus escalated. But the truth is that if – I'm trying to see. I don't know how to put this. If you're a young – if you're a younger person and you're African-American, you do in some places have a nuclear button you can push. And this, Your Honor, is why I refuse to have Mr. Rob Long on my jury because he will write a sitcom to fit the facts and persuade the other jury.

Yeah, a narrative, a fake narrative. But everyone has that. People have – I mean some people say, do you know who I am? sitcom to fit the facts and persuade the other jurors yeah a narrative a fake narrative but i do like everyone has that you know people have like i mean some people say do you know who i am some people say um you're you're you're uh you're you're not letting the elderly in they love us a problem for a while or whatever and it's a way of fighting back against what they perceive as bad service or mean or rude or whatever. I'm not certain that is what happened here, although we don't know because I think it escalated somehow in everybody's mind, and we weren't there for the steps of the escalation. But on the face of it, it does seem a little – I mean I hate to say this. It does seem a little suspicious.

I mean I have done all those things at Starbucks. Yes. I have said, do you know who I am a couple of times? And it doesn't work. Yeah. The horrible part. It would in Fargo, James. No, the horrible part is I'm looking at myself in the mirror as I get old. I usually say, do you know who I used to be? Do you have any idea who I could possibly be at some point if that next book sells? Right. So whatever happened doesn't matter because the company is going to be shutting down everything for a day to give everybody lessons on how not to do this. The question is whether or not they're going to change the policy so that anybody can just use the bathroom and stay as long as they want without buying anything because that's the fulfillment of Starbucks ethos, right? If they want to be this place, this third place, then they're really going to have – I

mean, when you go to your living room, you don't have to buy anything to sit on the sofa. When you're home, you don't have to buy anything to use the bathroom. So it'll be interesting to see whether or not some other coffee shop sets up themselves as a competitor saying, here at X Coffee, we expect you to pop for something in order to enjoy our luxurious seats and our blazing Wi-Fi, right? I don't know. But then again, I mean, do you guys think this will insulate Starbucks in the future? Because I don't. There's no way that a company is ever insulated from further outrages yeah that's a good question

it sure insulates them on the pr front all their investors think that they've done everything they could do right but what i just or does it in some way set them up as a target here they have the i just don't know that's a hard one to, I mean, if you work backwards from the outcome, they shut down for a week. I don't know really what the, what is the, I don't know what the lesson is. I don't know why you need a day to say to people, don't be rude to customers.

And then the secret thing, like all these trainings, the secret thing is do the thing that we're going to tell you you can't do, but do it differently. So what they'll say is we don't want you to not – they won't say this. This is what they'll mean. We don't want you to not profile customers or not profile people in the store. We want you to not profile them racially, but we do want you to profile them according to whether they're bums and homeless and whether they're just going to sit there and drive other people away because that is why they have the code on the bathroom. Right.

So they're going to say something else or wink at it, and it's just going to be one more of these kind of incredibly torturous yoga-like poses we all have to or a company has to do to avoid saying something that's common sense, which is that you really can't tell anything about somebody racially, but you do know. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting, and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on

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A homeless person when you see them. And homeless people in a Starbucks drive the customers away. I was told by somebody at the local Starbucks that one of the reasons they require a code is because they're close to the freeway. And this means that there's often needles to be found in the bathrooms. Um, because the, because the guys who are panhandling are also using, and they wander to the bathroom about four or five blocks away and they use the bathroom and shoot up and they don't even put them in the sharps dispenser. They just toss them in the trash, which is the height of incivility. So those guys who are standing there probably aren't going for the Wi-Fi.

But if they weren't homeless, if they had a home, of course, Wi-Fi would be essential, and good Wi-Fi would be essential. Oh, man! That was fantastic! Oh! Well, there's just been so many. I am in awe. I'm in awe. I'm in awe.

I thought you were in New York. Where's your dog? No, I said I'm in awe. I know. Oh, in awe. In a state. Yeah. Not in a political entity of awe.

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And you can buy individual Aeros or beacons to add to your current system. Special offer for you, the listener of this podcast, here you come. Free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada on your new Aero Wi-Fi system. Just visit aero.com, E-E-R-O.com, and at checkout, select overnight shipping, and then enter Ricochet as your code, and it's free overnight. Aero.com. Order your new system, select overnight shipping at checkout, enter the promo code Ricochet to make the shipping free. Thanks to Aero for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we bring to the podcast Michael McFaul, professor of political science, director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spolier Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council at the White House, 2009-2012, and then as U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation. His new book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia. It'll be available May 8th. Welcome to the podcast here. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So North Korea, with no conditions or preconditions, is this astonishing or is this what you get when you agree to give a megalomaniacal dictator equal status on the world stage? Well, it's definitely unprecedented, that's for sure, because what he wants first and foremost is the meeting. And what we want first and foremost is denuclearization. So there's a real asymmetry there in terms of who gets what when. And in general, you know, if

President Trump manages to achieve the latter by giving the former ahead of time, I will applaud him. I'll nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm highly skeptical that a meeting between the two presidents in the front of a long negotiation with this regime is going to lead to do indeed nuclearization. But, you know, he does things differently and I wish him well. I hope it succeeds. Hey, Mike, it's Peter Robinson here. Excuse me. I should at least the first time I speak to you, I should call you Ambassador McFaul, but you and I have known each other for years. So it's Mike. How about his excellency? His excellency will do. Excellency will do. So Mike, what do the North Koreans want? Survival? Is that it? What do they want? Well, yes, first and foremost, survival. I mean,

all states want to survive. That's the first rule of International Relations 101. And they obtained this nuclear weapons program that both the nuclear weapons themselves and the delivery vehicles that can eventually reach the United States to deter what they think is an imminent attack from the United States. Now, I think they're wrong about that calculation, right? We've had decades of no war with them or cold peace, but that's their calculation. They've seen other autocratic regimes go down that did not have nuclear weapons, and the lesson they learned from that, from Iraq and from Libya, is if you obtain these weapons, that helps your security. What did we, did the United States, I know you were ambassador during the Obama administration, and I'm about to ask an event that happened during the Obama administration, but it wasn't

in your portfolio. Was the way we, the United States, but the West more generally, was the way we handled Libya and error. Should we have permitted Muammar Gaddafi to go down after he had agreed to give up chemical weapons, nuclear weapons? He had essentially caved and agreed to do what we wanted him to do, and he ended up dead in the streets. Mistake somehow, somewhere in all of that? Well, there are lots of mistakes associated with what happened in libya in fact i write about them in my new book in rather uh vivid detail both about libya and syria in fact syria is the longest chapter in my book because it's so tortured of

a story that it took me so long to tell it. But here's what I would say. Remember, he gave up those nuclear weapons during the Bush administration era. That was a huge achievement. But then what happens, and this, I think, is an important thing to remember more generally, what happens between states and between governments is not always important to what the people of these countries think. And so stuff began to happen, both with Mr. Qaddafi and then resistance inside Libya in 2011, over which neither we nor the regime controlled. And so we faced a decision, and I still was at the White House at the time. I was a marginal player. I was a listener more than a participant in the decision, but I had my views. And we faced what we thought was a choice of,

will we sit by and watch a humanitarian disaster in Benghazi unfold, or will we seek to stop it through a very limited intervention? We chose the former. And by the way, a lot of people forget this. We had UN Security Council authorization for that intervention, including the Russians abstaining. It was UN Security Council Resolution 1973. That has never happened before or after. And that was a huge achievement for international law and the I see. certainly the way Gaddafi was killed not only, I think, sent a strong signal to the North Koreans about what to avoid, but I also think it sent a strong signal

to Vladimir Putin, who said after that, we are never going to go along with these Americans in trying to bring about peace and stability in places like Syria. Hey, Ambassador, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us.

Sure. Since we're talking about Syria and Russia, let's just go down that road a little bit more. We've sort of, I mean, this is not, I'm not doing any kind of Monday morning quarterbacking, but we've sort of dithered for, I don't know, X number of years about the Syrian civil war. Yes.

Early in that dithering, it was very clear that Vladimir Putin had a very clear vision of what was going to happen, basically cynical, but basically accurate, which is that the opposition to Assad was going to fragment and scatter, and Assad would probably emerge victorious. And so he decided to back him for a lot of other reasons, but I think primarily because he knew he was going to win. Why was Putin's strategy better than ours, or more effective than ours, or was it? Well, I think it depends on which, what year we take up the story. So if you go back to 2011 and early 2012, and I was in most of those conversations with Vladimir Putin and other Russian government officials, our two governments laid out two different theories, and they really were kind of analytic theories, paradigms,

predictions about what was going to happen. And I remember very vividly, I write about it in my book, this tense meeting between Putin and Obama in Los Cabos, Mexico, of all bizarre places, to be having an hour-long argument about Syria. But we were there for a G20 meeting. And Obama said, look, if we do not intervene, the international community, to force all sides to the table, two things are going to happen. One is the more extremist elements are going to play a bigger role in this conflict. The acronym ISIS was not even used at the time. I did not know the even used at the time. I did not know the acronym ISIS at the time. And number two, he said, it's going to become more violent because that's what

we've seen with other kind of conflicts like this. So let's get ahead of this now. You put pressure on the government of Assad. We'll put pressure on the moderates and we'll cut a deal, a pacted transition. And by the way, it was, you know, a lot. We did not call for regime change at that time. We did not say all the elements of the Assad government must go. We wanted to pact a transition. We'd studied some other transitions. And Putin listened to that and said, you guys are naive about the Middle East.

You don't understand this part of the world. The only way there's going to be peace in Syria is if Assad prevails, just to the point that you just made. And for him, he was not thinking about, you know, the Polish transition or some other more peaceful transitions. He was thinking about the war in Chechnya, and his lesson from that war in Chechnya was double down, triple down on a strong man, and that case could do that, and he'll eventually wipe out the terrorists. So fast forward two or three years, Obama's prediction was correct. Things got more violent, the extremists took over, The moderates got pushed to the side. And that happened. But then we shift from being analysts to actors. And that's when Putin intervened in 2015 and not just was watching this event, but added, you know, in the game, as we say, to change the course of events. And by 2015, President Obama did not want an echo of the former American foreign policy, which is like, yeah, he I have no evidence of this, but I would say two or three things. example in the region of a functioning democracy as a counterexample? Well, I would say two or three things. I mean, first of all, to say that Putin's strategy has

succeeded, I'm not prepared to say that. They've killed 500,000 people, 13 million people are in exile and displaced. And the notion that somehow Assad is going to reinsert the state, that's a proposition for the future. He doesn't control that state. The state is divided. The state is partitioned. He doesn't control the east where we've been fighting for four years against ISIS. And by the way, I don't foresee a new equilibrium point back to peace and stability while Assad's there. I think people will still continue to fight and still be encouraged. The jihadists, remember, tens of thousands of jihadists from all over the world, including America, including Russia, are in that fight because they have been attracted to it because of what Assad did. That's point number one. Point number two, I believe,

and I agree with President Trump on this, that the United States has a national security interest in preventing the legitimization of chemical weapons in the use. Because if they become legitimate in Syria, then they may become legitimate in other theaters where we are fighting. And I would just remind you, we have 2,000 soldiers in Syria right now. So that principle I share with the president. I think that was right, and I supported the strike that he did 10 days ago. You know, it's hard for Americans to think, well, why do we care about the breakdown of states and faraway places that don't affect us? And, you know, generally, I think we need to avoid being entangled in civil wars as a principle. But remember, these places become safe havens for terrorists that have transnational objectives, not just local objectives. I think we learned that lesson rather tragically in the 90s when nobody knew anything about Afghanistan. They were fighting a civil war, not our problem.

We pulled out. We went from $2 billion in aid back in the early part of the Bush 41 administration to zero because we said it wasn't our fight. And for a decade, it wasn't our fight. And then it came back to haunt us on September 11th. And I worry that if we just pull out and let ISIS come back, and there's no doubt in my mind that ISIS will come back if we pull out, then we create a safe haven for one of the most dangerous

transnational actors in the world that have made it objectively clear that they seek to attack the United States of America. Yeah, I mean, I hear you. I mean, but one area of intersection or alignment between the United States and Putin, or in many ways, Putin is more emphatic on this, is that, is the, is combating radical Islam. I mean, he, the one thing I think that Putin and Trump agree on, aside from probably some other stuff too, is that radical Islam is a great big threat.

So his argument is, support Assad. Assad's a strong man. He's going to keep that country clean. And if you're making an argument to Americans, like, well, you know, the guy's a jerk and he's a murderous, genocidal maniac. But on the other hand, he's going to keep Syria free of Islamic radicals. I mean, it seems like a persuasive argument, right? No, it's not a persuasive argument. They've been fighting for six or seven years. ISIS was growing until we went in and intervened to wipe out ISIS. It is a myth

to say that Assad was somehow defeating terrorism. He wasn't. He was encouraging terrorism. When you gas those children, remember in the Islamic world, that is a non-Sunni leader, an Alawite gassing Sunni children. And guess what that does? That shows up on all kinds of jihadi tapes all over the country and encourages terrorist acts and encourages terrorists to come to Syria, including, by the way, tens of thousands of people from the Russian Federation. So even in his own country, Vladimir Putin hasn't won the war against the jihadists. So I just don't, I think it's a myth to say, let's double down and triple down on Assad and he will bring order there. He's had that, he's had that opportunity for five years

and he's failed. I think it's a really good point that you just made. I think that's had that opportunity for five years and he's failed. I think it's a really good point that you just made. I think that to me is what I find so confusing about trying to figure out what Putin's strategy is. Unless it's just pure bloody-minded naysaying and chaos agentry, I don't understand his strategy in Syria. Is there a strategy there, or is it we say yes, he says no, we say up, he says down? Well, the first strategic objective for him going all the way back to 2012, was to make sure that his partner, his ally, was not overthrown in a regime change operation. He is obsessed with the threat of regime change that he believes we are behind. And it goes back to Georgia, 2003, Ukraine, 2004, the entire Arab Spring in 2011, and then Russia in December 2011 where there was a mass uprising against his regime, and he blamed us, and he blamed me personally, by the way. I sat across the table from him when he blamed me and said, you know what you're doing here.

Can I interrupt you for a second? Because I'll forget to ask. Is he scary? You know what I mean? Like he feels like a thug, right? Is he scary across the table from you? met him in the spring of 1991. He's not the same person then as he is today. And other leaders who have known him over the course of time, George W. Bush, for instance, has talked about that. He has changed. But in his current state, where he has this deep streak of paranoia on the one hand and on the other hand um you know he he's uh he's not as risk averse as he was 18 years ago and that makes him scary whether he's dealing with his own opposition inside or with people he deems to be enemies of him uh including me personally uh right abundantly clear so we see him in the west or at least in the united states anyway or i think uh the trump view right or the trump aligned view he's a

strong decisive leader he has a vision and a strategy uh he's laughing at us. Is that true or is he just desperate? Well, I would say two things. First, on the domestic front, I think we exaggerate how popular and strong a leader he is. That society is way more complex than the cartoonized version you see in debates in America. We say, oh, look at those opinion polls. Look at how popular he is. And people forget that he controls every national television station. He controls the Congress. There's no NGOs that can resist him. And he controls the polling firms. So, you know, Obama used to joke, you know, if if every TV show, including Fox, took his calls and if the parliament was completely controlled by the Democratic Party, he also would have a 70 percent approval rating.

Right. And I just want to, you know, for your listeners, just remember this fact, this is the most wired system for gathering information about people, you know, one of the most wired, if not the most sophisticated country in the world for doing that. Putin has invested tremendous resources into recording everything. They might be recording this right now with us, by the way, they have that capability. And so if you live in that society and you know about that and you've seen instances where people uh you know conversations have been uh put up on the web including my own by the way where they use disinformation with no respect for uh you know the truth um and some you're out there in in siberia and some guy from mosc Moscow, Ivan Ivanovich calls you from Moscow, total complete stranger and say, hey, I'm working for a polling firm. I just want to know, do you support Putin?

There's only one rational answer to that question in that context. So, A, don't overestimate how great a leader is inside. And if he was such a charismatic, popular leader, why doesn't he let legitimate candidates on the ballot? If he could crush Navalny, the opposition leader, why did he keep him off the ballot? That's in the inside. On the outside, I think, you know, the way I think about Putin is he has some pretty weak cards in his hands, but he plays them pretty effectively. So, you know, their power is not what it used to be.

Their economic power, of course, is a shadow of ours. Their tools for engaging in the ideological battle is weaker than ours, although I think they're catching up. But he is doing that. He believes he is in a, you know, a fight to the end of his life to thwart American imperialism and decadent liberal West. And he is investing heavily into that ideological fight. And I think, you know, given the cards that he holds, he plays them rather effectively. Ambassador McFaul, James Lilacs here in Minnesota, far removed from Russia. But those of us who've been watching over the years, listen to what you just said. You described Putin as an autocratic and increasingly paranoid man with an ambivalent relationship with the West. You have a surveillance state, police state, and you have a population that's surf-like is going along with it, grumbling.

In other words, Russia. There are certain constants that we've seen to Russia over the course of a century. So when it came to the reset, which I understand that you were involved in, in crafting the famous reset, what were the predicates? What were the assumptions? Were there new ideas, beliefs that Russia had changed in its characteristic? Or was there just more of a hope and a belief that they would like to get along? Because they're behaving as Russia behaves. What was going to be different with the reset?

Well, so first of all, I disagree with your premise. And that's why I want you to read my book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, because I go right after that hypothesis of continuity. I don't see continuity. I see a lot more volatility, especially over the last 30 years. I stood on the streets of Moscow in the spring of 1991 where 300,000 people, Russians, stood on the streets there demanding democracy, demanding markets, and wanting to be part of the West. And now Putin wants you to forget about that history. He wants you to forget about that Boris Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union and stood in the U.S. Congress to a standing ovation because we have the same set of ideas about the world. He wants you to forget about Gorbachev working with Ronald Reagan to bring our countries closer together. He wants

you to believe that it was all just one story. And he wants you to forget about, by the way, the hundreds of thousands of people that came out again in December of 2011 because they just wanted their votes to be counted in a free and fair election. All those people are Russians too. And I want, the reason I wrote this book in part is to remind Americans and to remind people in the West that it isn't just one story. And so that's the first point. Second point,

uh, the reset was, uh, stolen, uh, just full disclosure here, right out of George Schultz's memoirs.'s memoirs, and I think it's chapter 27. You can look it up.

It's called Re-Engaging the Soviets, I believe is the title. I have the book in my office at work. I don't see it here. I do too, Mike. We'll trust you on this. We'll trust you on this. Go. And what the principle of the reset, and this is, I think, confused with President Trump right now, was never to have a good relationship with the Kremlin, to never be friends. I think in general, diplomacy should never be about that.

That is a means to an end. The goal should always be concrete objectives that advance American security interests, that make Americans more prosperous and secure. And so the strategy, taken right out of Schultz's approach, was to engage when you can over issues of mutual interest and then to confront when you must over things where we disagree. And that's what we did. We got a START treaty done, by the way, you know, something that George Shultz was a big supporter of and backed at the time, back in 2010, reducing by 30% the number of nuclear weapons in the world. That was the goal. We got in place new sanctions on Iran in the spring of 2010. That was the goal. It was not about holding hands and singing Kumbaya with, you know, President Medvedev. And I'll go, you know, we opened up a transportation route through Russia into Afghanistan

that allowed us to then go kill Osama bin Laden two years later in Pakistan so that we were not dependent on Pakistan for supplying our troops. Pretty concrete military objective there that Russia helped us with. And so, you know, I would encourage the Trump administration to do the same thing with the caveat that Putin has a different worldview than Medvedev did. Medvedev was a weak leader with a good set of ideas, and then Putin abandoned them. And like I said that time in 2009, Putin has gone way out of his way to break some very basic international rules of the game well beyond anything that he had done even back in 2009. And so we just can't forget about those things. We have to be pushed back on them. And I think the Trump administration is doing a good job of that, by the way. I think I applaud what they've done. And then also, when you can, look for moments of cooperation as long as the cooperation is in the pursuit of the American national interest. Well, I will read your book because I remember well that hopeful post-Soviet moment.

I was there in Washington when Boris Yeltsin came to town and was five feet from him as he's waving to the crowd with his grenade-damaged hand. And what happened afterwards is a tragedy. And it's something I want to hear what you have to say about it. The book is From Cold War to Hot Peace, An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia, available May 8th. Can't wait to read it. You should all buy it too. And thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast, sir. Yeah, that was great. Thanks for having me, guys. Mike, thank you.

Thank you. That was excellent. Covered a lot of great stuff. You know, Peter, you've been to Russia, right? you know what? I have never been to Russia, no, I have never been Rob, you've never been Rob's been everywhere I have been technically to Russia but not really, in that I have not been to Moscow

yeah you mean you have to go to Moscow in order to be in Russia? well, no, just I haven't really spent any time. I have not been a meaningful traveler to Russia, I will say. I have stood in

the Hermitage at 10 o'clock at night with the winter sun blaring down, making it look like noon, surrounded by art gathered, shall we say, from the great states of Europe. A monumental cultural achievement, which, of course, was applicable only to a few elites

who were able to go to it. But now you can go there, too. And as a matter of fact, if you are planning a trip to go see some art, the question arises, whoa, beautiful. I knew. I was going to actually say something like,

but, of course, travel is so complicated and difficult. There's no way to do it anymore. May as well just stay home. The thing of it is, is that it is so complicated and difficult. There's no way to do it anymore. The thing of it is that it's not complicated and difficult. If you go to the internet, you can find all kinds of places to stay, but they're going to be expensive. Hotels are expensive, and they're limited in what they can offer you. There's the idea of staying in vacation homes and rentals and places that have – well, it's a home. It's got the amenities of home. It's in a neighborhood where you can go and buy food, and you can eat in a kitchen.

I mean, that's a way to establish a relationship with a culture much more than just going down to the hotel breakfast buffet in the morning with everybody else who's on a business trip. How do you find a place like this? Tripping.com. Don't visit a ton of different sites when you're trying to find a place to stay. At Tripping.com, one search lets you compare every home from the world's top vacation rental sites in one place to find the absolute best deal on your perfect vacation rental. Now, vacation rentals, as I was just saying, they offer much more privacy, more space for everyone under one roof, more choices, fully stocked kitchens if you like, extra bedrooms tubs all the comforts of home and then some and best of all though tripping.com you can join the millions of travelers who find more than savings with rates up to 80 less than traditional hotel rooms do you hear that 80 less up to

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Tripping.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Tripping.com slash ricochet and our thanks to tripping.com for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we happily welcome to the podcast noah rothman associate editor of commentary you can follow him on twitter like i do at at noah c rothman uh we were talking earlier about starbucks eating their own you've written a piece about this how do you think this is going to play out for the company? Well, if it plays out like a lot of other very similar efforts by the social justice left to exact concessions from their allies when they find themselves in hot water, they'll get a pittance of something and they seem to have gotten it. Starbucks has agreed to close down their stores

for a day, sacrifice a whole lot of revenue in order to provide their employees with unconscious bias training, which is a modest victory for those who were suggesting that they needed to do something, anything to appease people who said that there was a culture at Starbucks that permitted this kind of thing, which resulted in the arrest of two gentlemen unduly and unnecessarily, by the way, at a Philadelphia branch. And that'll be about it. If it were a harder target, like a Chick-fil-A, for example, they would be able to weather this storm. And that's why you don't see very many concerted efforts to force companies like that or artists or individuals or any company or businesses or what have you to conform to the expectations that the social justice left has they have devoted themselves mostly now to uh attacking their allies attacking soft targets because they manage to exact concessions from

them they manage to win small victories and in doing so, establish their relevance. And I think they've become addicted to that, because you don't really see them going after the targets that you would expect them to, which are adversarial targets, people who are hostile towards the pretendants of the social justice left. You don't get much more liberal a company than Starbucks, which is probably why they attracted the attention they did from their so-called allies. You mentioned Chick-fil-A. Are you in New York or Washington, D.C.? New York. Right. So you know then that there's a great fear amongst New Yorkers of the infiltration of this Christianist enterprise, right?

We were alerted to this by the New Yorker. sense that, actually, that Gotham itself is fearing that the essential character of the island may be changed by a chicken joint that closes on Sunday? No, not at all. There are lines around the block. It is constantly busy. It is very difficult to get inside Chick-fil-A at 37th Street

and 6th Avenue, which is the branch that's closest to me. I think there's another one. At lunch hour, when it opened up, it was a sensation. The thing is that these profiles manage to alert people to the deliciousness of their food and the franchising opportunities that are not being taken advantage of in urban centers. And they're talking to a very small audience, but I don't think they're effective at doing what they want to do,

which is obviously alienating people from this chicken joint brand. It's only patronizing self-hating New Yorkers, Rob. Yeah. Hey, no, it's Rob Long. Welcome. Hi, Rob. You'll notice that there's something different here about this podcast and that we're letting you talk. They warned me you were going to lead me down this path, by the way. Yeah, no, no. Should I be John Podhoretz here?

Should I be John? Yeah. You need a John in this instance. I don't know. Isn't though that the first rule of a left-wing movement is that the most important thing is to maintain discipline on your side? I mean isn't that sort of like classic Marxism? Like you don't – or Leninism I should say. You don't – it's never really your enemy who's your enemy.

The enemy are the insider weaklings and the wobblies inside your organization who need to be punished and corrected. Isn't this sort of normal? Yeah, it is absolutely normal. And your observation that this is Leninism is is spot on. People will think that's rhetorically excessive. But Lenin very famously reserved his his scorn and consternation for the social Democrats around him. in the first Congress after the revolution, he didn't really have much to say about them. They were backward-minded, but the people who really irritated him were his allies, just not Bolsheviks. And that's essentially, you're right, this is the character of just about every leftist movement that can't stand its allies when they are divergent.

But the thing about the Starbucks episode is, and other elements of the social justice left going after uh really trite targets art uh comic books young adult novels what have you is that they're not in disagreement really it's not an ideological issue yeah it's just that they happen to step on a landmine and they get no special dispensation when that landmine triggers uh they are attacked as though they were an adversary of existential level threat. And that is a unique character, I think, that the social justice left. There is a social justice right, but they behave a little differently.

That is something that I think is indicative of a movement that has no interest in broad appeal or revolutionary change, for that matter. It is really just about enforcing a kind of self-perception, not even sort of ideological discipline, just an idea of oneself and how oneself is supposed to be perceived in the world and by their friends. You mentioned something very interesting there that is not on the national radars, and that's comics. When you said the social justice warriors and their effect on comics, and you said they're not interested in great mass appeal,

they just want to enforce a certain amount of ideological consistency. Most people don't know that for the last few years, comic books are no longer the guys in spandex beating up Nazis or the bad guys and have become something completely different. That every time they take an old character, they reimagine him to be some new woke version of themselves. That it's a strange world that Marvel has become, and the pushback has become quite extraordinary.

Are you actually following ComicsGate, the successor to GamerGate? Sort of briefly, in a very superficial way. You could probably educate me on this, but I have done a fair bit of research on this for a book on the subject of social justice, which is coming out early next year, in which I devote a chapter to the trite efforts to attack really superficial nonsense, like comic books and movies and what have you, stuff that people enjoy or used to enjoy, and now are enforcing ideological discipline on them. You had mentioned that Marvel is a pretty big target for them.

And the people who write these comics now are writing them in a way that you could only describe as bigoted and prejudicial. They write new characters. And the only way in which they ascribe new traits to them is accidents of birth. The individual has to be a Pakistani Muslim or a black person or an African American or an Asian American, and that is believed to confer to them a whole new set of traits that will lead to a different character. And that's not how character development happens in the real world.

And so what results is this stilted, one-dimensional idea of what a character should be, and the effort fails. Noah, Peter Robinson here. Shifting topics just a bit. You've written a piece recently about Paul Ryan. As Paul Ryan walks off into the sunset, I'm quoting you, beware triumphalism over his exit, close quote. And the triumphalism you're referring to there is triumphalism in the Trump camp or the not quite the all right. So Paul Ryan stood for, if he stood for anything that was distinctive to Paul Ryan himself, as opposed to every other Republican, he stood for containing entitlements. And the president doesn't even want

to talk about that, Social Security and the rest of them. And he stood for welcoming, a welcoming policy toward immigrants. And that is just not what anybody in the Republican Party is talking about these days. So why is it not the case that the departure of Paulolvency, which is going to materialize in the late 2020s, early 2030s at this rate. And those are concrete conditions. They're not going away. If you listen to people who are, some of Paul Ryan's harshest critics on the right, they're talking about the need to have some real fiscal discipline and leadership like, say, Jim Jordan

or a member of the Freedom Caucus. Steve Scalise was the Republican study committee chair. He was the conservative's conservative before he joined leadership. Once he joined leadership, he became part of the problem. The problem isn't the representative. It's leadership. Leadership is difficult. Managing a majority in the House is very difficult, and it is not popular to attack the entitlement

problem. But that doesn't mean it's going to go away. It will continue to yield Jack Kemp's, Paul Ryan's, because the condition is intractable. It's not Paul Ryan that is creating the entitlement crisis. It's the other way around. That's why I don't believe that that influence, the Paul Ryan approach to green eye shade fiscal discipline sort of conservatism is going away. Second, your notion that the notion that Republicans are going to forever be ignoring the lessons of 2012 because Donald Trump proved the quote unquote autopsy, as it were, to be a fallacy in 2016 doesn't necessarily mean it's going to hold forever. The demographics are clear. The trajectory and the evolution is pretty clear.

It is a fallacy to say that people will vote according with their skin color and their group and their tribe. And that's something that Republicans, I believe, have internalized and done very well with. But you cannot continue to antagonize an immigrant group and expect to win national elections 2020, 2024, 2028. This is going to become a millstone around the GOP's neck, and I expect they'll recognize that. James? Well, actually, can I just jump in for one second? Yes, absolutely. I know we're talking about Paul Ryan and there's some cheering from sort of, I don't know, I don't think alt-right is the right word, but from. From Mickey Kaus, among others, from your friend Mickey Kaus.

Exactly right. Some cheering and there's been some animus about people who are never Trumpers and the people who are Trumpers. Isn't the right doing to itself what the left is doing to itself? I mean, isn't there an echo here of what the left is doing to Starbucks? It's generally its ally and what the right is doing to itself and making these divisions. You're for me. You're not for me. Good for you.

I don't care if, you know, I've heard some ardent Trump supporters saying they look forward to the midterms. They think it'd be great for the Republicans to lose the House because, after all, all we'll lose is a bunch of cucks. Yeah, well, I suppose there's a no true Scotsman element to that as well from the right in particular. The definition of cuck, by the way, and sort of a brief aside, is very malleable. I've recently found myself in defense of the Trump administration and Donald Trump's approach to Syria, and I am still a cuck. Even though if you attack the president or defend the president in certain contexts, you remain a cuck. It is a very versatile term. But yeah, I think you're pretty much right on there is that there's definitely an element of

tribalism to this and some sort of an idea that Paul Ryan has been defeated and Ryanism has been defeated. And yet in his exit interview, he made a very pointed appeal to attack identity politics on the right. And I suspect if he is, he may just wander off into the sunset and disappear from politics altogether. But that doesn't sound like him. And I suspect he will continue to be a rallying force for Republicans of a certain variety who really just refuse to disappear from the political stage, much to the consternation of people like Mickey, who I like very much, but disagree with him on the immigration question. Again, I think the conditions that are animating this wing of the party are material.

They're not philosophical. They're not sort of things that will disappear tomorrow. They are concrete, and I think they're going to continue to motivate people like Paul Ryan to oppose Trumpism, if not Donald Trump himself, because the administration has adopted quite a bit of their recommendations policy-wise since Donald Trump became president. Spoken like somebody whose cuck-titudinousness can never be washed away. I'm pretty thoroughly and deep in cuck territory. What's the SJW book coming out? What's the title?

What's the ETA? Because I want to read that. It is tentatively titled Unjust, Social Justice and the Unmaking of America with Regnery. And it should be coming out sometime in early 2019. We don't have a release date yet. But the manuscript is in, so eagerly awaiting notes. I'm terrified to tell you the truth. I can't wait a release date yet, but the manuscript is in, so eagerly awaiting notes. I'm terrified to tell you the truth. I can't wait to read it.

Noah, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Follow him on Twitter. It's right there in the description of this piece. You will enjoy it, and give our love to J-Pod. Thanks, Noah. I appreciate it. Bye-bye. I can't wait to see what he's going to say in particular about comic books because I have been following this for a while.

And people say, it's just comic books. Come on. All of the big movies are based on comic books. This is a tremendous driving force in the American self-imagining. And to this day, I'm surprised that they get away with Clark Kent having to wear glasses because that's ableist. That sort of says that he can't possibly be Superman because he's got a deficiency in his physical capabilities. So it's ridiculous. But then again, I imagine that Clark Kent's glasses have to be pretty strong, don't they? Because he's got to whip them off really quickly when he changes.

Where would you get glasses like that uh rob do you know i i mean i'm just wondering myself when you're going to interrupt me interrupt me he must have had a stroke somebody call 9-11 i can't no i i i'm sorry i actually literally dropped the uh the device and i could hear you kind of through my head so i apologize this this is what he does he leaps in on two of them and then when i really give well i was And I could hear you kind of through my head. So I apologize. This is what he does. He leaps in on two of them. And then when I really give, well,

I was, I had a, I had a, I, what I was going to say, I was doing, I was going to try to jump ahead of your segue by saying what I love about Noah Rothman is he sees things so clearly.

Oh, that would have been good. And then I was going to like be my, my, my new shtick is to do a really bad segue. So you can kind of like, that's yeah, that's – That would have been –

Yeah, great. Save that for your other podcast that you do. But we were talking about eyeglasses. Anybody who – I just bought eyeglasses recently, frankly, and I had to go and get these. I've got all kinds of weird prescriptions and the rest of it. And the prices on the frames, you just weep because they're all from one big company. They're charging ridiculous amounts of money for this little bit of wire. It's like, what, did you get this?

Did you mine this from an ore of a meteorite or, you know, from the asteroid belt? $400. Prescription eyewear should not cost this much. No, that's why there's Warby Parker. What is it? Well, it started as a collaboration between four close friends, and Warby Parker was conceived as an alternative to the overpriced and the, you know, frankly, bland eyewear that's available today. Now, by engaging with customers directly

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because they believe that everyone has the right to see. So you get great glasses, great price, great style, and you do good. Warby Parker's got a free home try-on program. You can order five pairs of glasses, try them around for five days, show them to your friends and your family, see what people say. No obligation to buy. Ships free and includes a prepaid return shipping label. So there's none of that, oh, I've got to print this off and slap it on. Peter, you're more stylish than ever since you have Warby's, right? I have a pair of Warby Parker's, and I have to say I love them.

I love the process. I had a couple of boxes of five pairs each sent home and then tried them on for my wife. In the end, on a Saturday afternoon, we went to the Warby Parker shop in Palo Alto. They have, I think, some dozen of shops across the country. If you happen to live close enough to one, you can go into the shop. Last time I got glasses, it was through an optometrist and I just didn't like the process. It was like buying a new car in that there was subtle but constant pressure to move up market. Oh, well, what about this option? What about this lens? What about this frame? And at Warby Parker, there they are it's a finite number there are

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She was also charming and warm and gracious. And she led – she really did stand in the tradition of Abigail Adams, who was the only other woman who was married to a president and gave birth to a president in the sense that these were both tough women, literate women, and women who were absolutely indispensable to the achievements of everyone in their family. I have to say, I've been terribly worried, frankly, about her now widow husband, George H.W. Bush, 94 years old, not in good health. I had lunch with him, I guess it's getting on two years ago now in Houston. And even then he was in a wheelchair and breathing had become difficult for him. Mine's still alert. And here's the statement. Here's the statement that he released. It's only a few sentences, but it's just a remarkable thing. I always knew Barbara was the most beloved woman in the world, and in fact, I used to tease her that I had a complex about that fact.

So he's lost his wife, and he's beginning with humor. But the truth is that the outpouring of love and friendship being directed at the enforcer, which is what they called her in the family, is lifting us all up. We have faith she is in heaven and we all know life will go on as she would have had it. And here's – so cross the bushes off your worry list. That's just amazing to me. And there's no doubt that that was written by the old man himself. No staff would have written that.

No. Cross the bushes off your worry list there's something beautiful about that and something so ah i hate to use the word because it's kind of a it it's kind of the opposite of what it describes it's vulgar but it it's classy it's classy right we're okay We're doing fine. I mean I'm not quite sure I know exactly how to describe that kind of character. Yes. Certainly her kind of character. Because from the outside, it always looked like she's this warm, grandmotherly type, and she had the white hair, and she was self-deprecating. And I think that was definitely part of her.

But she was also really, really, really tough and scary. People who worked for the president, President Bush, the first one, were scared of her. She was never cruel or mean, but she was very demanding. And I remember a friend of mine told me a great story about being up in Kennebunkport for an early political kind of conversation about politics. And everybody woke up, or he woke up one morning, and he went downstairs to get a cup of coffee, and there she was in her robe. And she looked at him, and she said, the eggs are right there. She pointed to sort of one of those multi-dozen boxes of eggs. Exactly.

And he said, yes. And she said, start scrambling. That was Mrs. Bush. She was making bacon. He had to scramble the eggs because he was awake and he had to do all that. And then that was it. And then there's a certain matter-of-factness to that that I think is very, very refreshing. Ability to see things for what they are and to not put on airs.

And I think for someone like her who was obviously an aristocrat, an American aristocrat, the ability to be simple and be direct was utterly un-pompous I think is unfortunately a lost trait. We took the kids when – this is about a dozen years ago when the kids were 12 to 2 years old, five kids. We showed up at Kennedy Bunkport and the former president showed the kids around and then took us to the pool and then he had to go back to his office to make a call. And my kid starts screaming and jumping and doing cannonballs in the pool and Mrs. Bush appears. And she – kids, over here! And they immediately cowed and i was a little nervous it became instantly clear nobody had told her we were coming and she just she said i need to swim now so you choose one side of the pool and my kids slightly frightened chose one side of the pool and she said fine you have as much fun as you want to but you leave me my side

of the pool and she swam for 20 minutes got out took my wife to the hot tub chatted with her and every few moments as the kids continued to splash in the pool she would she would look up from the hot tub and say you no running on the pool deck and then go back to chatting with my wife gracious but tough that was barbara bush right wow well according to uh slater salon or slate salon the other day they said that the fact that she seemed unpretentious and she didn't wear expensive clothes and shoes and the rest of it is actually just all of a sod we should not participate in this because it normalizes uh you know the uh the uh the oligarchical nature of our ruling class and it's all theater for them and i just thought you simple-minded joyless jerks exactly right maybe maybe there are some people who no matter how much money and power they have just can't bring themselves to pay a ridiculous amount of

money for some shoes it's just it's it's it's just how some people are and it's not a character flaw it's it's it's a good sense of I may be loaded, but that's a ridiculous price. And you can feel a way about your glasses, too. Don't pay a lot for glasses. Don't pay a lot for the place you're going to stay. Don't pay too much money for internet that you're not using. That's why we have Eero.com, Tripping.com, and Warby Parker, all of whom have wonderful bargains for you if you use the coupon code RICOSHET.

Support them. Support us. If you enjoyed the show, head on over to iTunes. Give us some great ratings. That'll help more people find the show. And of course, Rob, Peter, we encourage everyone to join so they can see us in Washington D.C. on May 10th and May 11th for the ConConConConPodCon.

ConPodCon. ConPodCon. I would say, even if you are not planning to come, please join. We do need you to join. We want every listener to join say even if you are not planning to come, please join. We do need you to join. We want every listener to join, even if those listeners are Vladimir Putin. I want Vladimir Putin, if he's listening, to join.

If you join, you can listen all you like. And it's dirt cheap. As a matter of fact, dirt's going to get cheaper if we continue to have a trade war and the prices go up and the land value starts to sag in the Midwest. So there you go. Hey, thanks for listening, folks. Rob, Peter, we'll see you next week. Next week. Thanks, fellas. Watching girls pass by

It ain't the latest thing I'm just standing in a doorway I'm just trying to make some sense Out of these girls passing by The tales they tell of men I'm not waiting on a friend. Smiling is a heart that grieves. Remember what I said I'm not waiting on a lady

I'm just waiting on a friend I'm just waiting on a friend Just waiting on a free. Just waiting on a free. I'm just waiting on a free. I'm just waiting on a free. Just waiting on a free. Ricochet. Join the conversation.