The Ricochet Podcast - We Need the Eggs

Episode Date: March 4, 2018

For this (very) rare Sunday Ricochet Podcast, we’ve assembled our original cast as Rob Long, Peter Robinson, and James Lileks gather ’round their respective audio capture devices to chat about current events. Also stopping by, That Sethany Show hosts Seth and Bethany Mandel (the latter is of course also a Ricochet Editor and a member of The LadyBrains Podcast). Guns and due process, trade tariffs... Source

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first, go through due process second. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks. Today, Bethany and Seth Mandel. And oh, look, life life is short but the rob is long he's back let's have ourselves a podcast welcome everybody to the ricochet podcast number 391 and that one stands for one extra special person that you've been missing for an awful long time we'll meet in just a sec. In the meantime, though, I have to tell you that the Ricochet podcast got this far because it's brought to you by the fine people at Texture. Why subscribe to just a couple of magazines

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day, and Quip knows that. They've combined dentistry and design to make a better electric toothbrush. We'll tell you a bit more about that later. And we're brought to you by SaneBox. If at this very moment you are looking at your mailbox with a five-digit number of unread letters, then you despair, don't. SaneBox, if at this very moment you are looking at your mailbox with a five-digit number of unread letters, then you despair. Don't.

SaneBox is the easiest way to automatically organize your inbox and keep it that way forever. SaneBox sorts your emails for you, keeps the unimportant emails out of your inbox so you can focus on what matters. And we're brought to you also by Ricochet. I mentioned that there was one special individual who we've talked about in absentia for all these many months, and here he is to tell you that you should give him money. Rob, did I just imagine that I heard Rob's voice earlier? No, you heard me. I was briefly on mute, and I apologize.

I was just muting myself. This is an unusual experience for me to do a podcast. I was just going to say, when just going to say when do you ever mute yours that's extraordinary I do mute right then I would have I would have done so I am on

I'm here really because I'd like to join in with my pals but I also want to remind people that Ricochet the podcast you're listening to and we hope enjoying and the podcast network that I hope that you're enjoying and exploring. We have lots and lots and lots of great offerings. It is member-supported, and we need you. And I say this all the time, and sometimes people respond, but often they don't.

And I think what happens is people put it off. Now is a great time for you to join Ricochet for a couple reasons. One, because we really, really need it. We do need to grow. We do need to keep paying our payroll. We want to add a few more podcasts. We want members to feel that they are part of this growing network. Second thing is the site, Ricochet itself.

We hope you can go and check it out. We are still flying the flag, the only flag, I think, one of the very few flags on the Internet for civil, polite conversation. It is a swamp out there, we know. But I believe that Ricochet is a place that doesn't have the swampy attitudes that you find all over the web. You, as a listener of this podcast, need to make a stand, need to join. We really want you to do that. It's not expensive. It is incredibly, incredibly valuable.

If you join us at the podcast level, which is, I think, $2.50 a month, you will be helping us immeasurably. Of course, there are better, higher levels than that. But why don't we start you at the low level, and I know that we will earn your longstanding membership. James and Peter and I are members along with you, and we'd be honored to have you with us. That's it. Let's not make the point, though,

that civil means boring. Some people might say that civil means, I say that Troy is a ghastly fellow. To which somebody else says, indubitably, he's the worst of sort. And I think that, no, I mean, a couple of weeks ago, we had an enthusiastic dust-up

to Peter and Charlie Sykes, and that spilled over into the comments in which people were re-exploring, shall we say, the issues that were raised during the podcast. But it was – I mean it was divisive as much as the Republican side is divisive today. But there are always things you come back to, fate of the nation, fate of the civilization, common language of our politics, et cetera, that binds us together. And so that's the difference between civil and just dull. It's not dull. Lord knows Ricochet isn't dull. Well, Rob, yes, go on.

No, I have an anecdote to relay, but I think we should say hello to Peter first. Hello, boys. How are you? It's very, very good to be back. I guess I've missed two weeks' worth, one week's worth. I've been traveling. And so, James, it's good to talk to you again. And, Rob, it's extremely good to talk to you, to have the chance to talk at you because I have a long list of comments you've made on Blot Podcasts where it seems to me you may be in need of just a touch of remedial education. However, first, in ray the matter of my dust-up with Charlie Sykes,

good lord, I had no idea it would produce so many comments and produce such a deep feeling. I viewed it as the kind of dust-up that you get between two professional yakkers, and Charlie and I remain cordial even though we got well i have to say he did get my dander up that was clear to everybody but but if i if if that exchange truly offended people if i offended anybody i hereby issue an apology it's i know it's a weak mealy mouthed apology if i offended you because i i listened to it again and i didn't it struck me as pretty well within the bounds of discourse between professional yakkers.

And here's the one point. It was unbelievably unlucky that I had to drop off before the end of that segment. This apparently annoyed people more than almost anything else. But I promise that I had told Scott Emmerg got our i beg your pardon i had told blue yeti the night before that i had a meeting to go i have a i have a paying job and there are moments when it actually takes precedence over my beloved ricochet and i just had to drop off so yeah i had none of those yeah i had to leave during uh when dr larry arn was on and we were having a dispute about trump and i had to leave too because i had had a hard-out idea. You've got to do the same

hot water. Right, it was the same hot water. Well, he swanned off, he flounced away, couldn't take it, and the rest of it, no, I mean, it's fun to stay and engage, but I understand you did not leave because you were steamed. Speaking of steam, though, Rob, let me ask you there

in New York, and Peter, I have to ask though, when you say you were traveling over the last week or so, were you shuffling between university enclaves of bubble think or were you actually out there amongst the – You know he was. I spent six days for my many sins. I spent six days in Washington, D.C., and I learned something. I learned how lucky I am in this age of Trump to be living out here in California. It really is the case. I truly do believe, I became convinced by about day number four, that back on the East Coast, people see things differently

because Donald Trump is just in their faces, particularly our friends in journalism in Washington. I had dinner with Andy Ferguson. I ran into Bill Kristol. And Donald Trump is just in their faces day by day by day. If you're in the business now, and now being in the business means paying attention to Twitter. And, oh, Lord. So I said, well, yeah, but taxes are.

I had a conversation with Senator Portman, who had just returned from a week in Ohio. And he said, you know, in Ohio, of course, Donald Trump remains a polarizing figure. There are people who quite rightly think the man is a horse's backside. And why can't we have more? It's all that granted. But in Ohio, the big news is that although it's less than three months old, the tax cut is already producing effects. So people see people see investment, new jobs, just different when you're away from Washington. And I have this is an obvious point, but I had sort of forgotten how vivid, how lurid the whole Donald Trump show is minute by minute by minute when you're in Washington and in the business of journalism. Go ahead. Rob, you're close. I mean, you're in New York. Shouldn't it be also sort of kind of in your face, proximity-wise? Well, it is.

I mean, it is because I live in Manhattan, but I work on Long Island, not that far away. But they are two different worlds. I mean, it does remind me of the old days when you'd look at a map of Los Angeles County and you'd discover that all of the sort of working class neighborhoods voted for red and all of the pricey, fancy neighborhoods were blue. And this is sort of the opposite of the messaging of each side, but yet it seemed to the right appeal. The anecdote I want to share was I have to now couch in like in pseudonyms and things. But just speaking of D.C. itself, an old friend of mine who is a very, very, you know, accomplished economist and businessman and investor and has worked in Democratic administrations is a proud Democrat, you know, moderate Democrat, normal Democrat. Right. He I recently saw him in New York City. He told me he he had spent some time in D.C.

with some old friends who also had shared time in Democratic administrations. And he was saying, you know, look, this guy's a normal guy. He said, well, yeah, you know, I understand the politics of hating the tax cut because you don't want to give a credit to the other side. I get it. But just between us, he said to his friends, we understand that the tax cut is fine. It's stimulative. Maybe we would change this or that, little bits and pieces of it.

But it's basically a stimulative tax cut, and it does this huge thing, which we never thought we could do, which is to remove the deduction for state and local taxes, right, for rich people, which is a big thing that no one ever thought they could do. And that seems kind of fine. And his friends looked at him like he was from Mars. And then he said, and also let's be honest about the trade stuff. You know, there's a lot of intellectual argument about getting tough on China. It's been in Foreign Affairs Magazine twice in the past 18 months. It is a mainstream idea.

It's not a freaky idea. Maybe everything, maybe we're all freaking out. We should just all take a chill pill. And his friends, he said, erupted in screaming. And he said it was crazy. He said he thought he had entered into some kind of psych ward. So it's interesting that we're looking at the divisions on the right, but I think there are divisions on the left too. Do I have time for a secondhand anecdote, James?

Sure. Okay. So I mentioned that I had dinner with our friend, and I say our friend because he's friends of all three of ours, Andy Ferguson, when I was in Washington. And Andy, again, Andy was sort of giving me an education about what it's like to be working in Washington in this moment. And he said, you know what it reminds me of? When I, Andy, first came to Washington, somebody introduced me to Harry McPherson. There's no reason anybody listening to this podcast will know the name Harry McPherson. But I did and Andy did because Harry McPherson was a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson.

And there was a club for many years for presidential speechwriters. Andy and I both attended and got to know, among other people, Harry McPherson. In any event, Harry and Andy had lunch a couple of times. And Harry McPherson, this is way back in the early 80s when Andy first came to Washington. And Harry said, here's one thing you need to know about the era that preceded you and that Reagan seems to be changing. The bitterness of the 70s, even now, is very difficult to recall. But I, Harry McPherson, a longtime Democrat, can tell you that the Vietnam War broke down the relationships between hawks in the Democratic Party and doves, such that I lost friends that I

didn't recover for years. It got to be the point that if a hawk and a dove saw each other in a restaurant, they wouldn't say hello. They'd turn their backs on each other and walk to tables as far separated as possible. And Andy said that he thought to himself at that time, that will never happen to us, to our side. And Andy said, you know, in this town, we're getting close to it. Republicans, conservatives, neocons, all of these people who've been making common cause for three decades now.

And it's getting very, very rough in some circles to talk to each other. All right. circles to talk to each other all right so i thought to myself wow if andy feels this andy who is the warmest most generous most most for the best friend anybody could ever have he he hasn't lost friends but he sees it happening uh well that means we just have to work we just have to make absolutely certain it doesn't happen right here on Ricochet. It depends how much contempt one shows for the other side. That's right. If you're absolutely naked and calling the other side names and accusing them of being bad people who sold out or who are too pure to live.

Exactly right. That's the point. Both sides decided they were not only morally superior, but the other side was just evil. Can't let that happen. I'm surprised there's a restaurant, a bar in D.C. called the Hawk and the Dove. And I'm surprised there wasn't two rooms where people could go separately so they knew that they wouldn't be molested by the exposure to the other side. But when you began by saying that Charlie – or I'm sorry, that Andrew and Bill Kristol feel like Trump is in their face all the time. The funny thing is that Trump has no idea who Bill Kristol is. He has no idea who Irving Kristol is.

He has no idea who Andrew McFerguson is. He doesn't even register. They sort of let him be in their face and their head because in the D.C. culture, he's the boss, he's the king, he's the lead spotlight guy under the prom light. He's everything, right? Out here, not so much. When you talk about the atmosphere of the White House, the contentiousness, the roiling tides that are going to DC.

Right. I mean, that's when you go to DC and you experience it. It's fun and it's thrilling and it's insider and it's all of that. But you get outside, even, I hate to say, Rob, even outside. Manhattan doesn't qualify as outside. You get out here. Right, none of that stuff matters. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.

The people who hate Trump are just as crazy and upset about him. But the magnification and intensification, the way things boil down to that ichor in D.C. I mean, you drink that all the time. You get convinced that that's the way it is worldwide. Yeah, I think it all depends on, I mean, the litmus test is, if you react to the phrase,

John Podesta's emails, and if you hear that phrase, you think, oh, election hacking. Right. Right. Right. Indeed so. Well, listen, guys, we're going to go to our guest in just a second here, but I would just like to let Rob.

Oh, listen to that. He's breaking out how charming. I was just going to tell Rob that there's no opportunity for him to step on a segue because I'm not going to make one. I'm just going to go right into the ad. Whoa. These are bad habits that have erupted since I was in production. James, I'm out of production next week, so you've got to up your game. Oddly enough, nobody

missed it. Nobody missed having these carefully crafted little... Oh, I got DMs and tweets, and I got a lot of... There was a lot of pushback. But go ahead. Oh, indeed. I wanted to tell you about texture. This is your last chance to interrupt, Rob. Three, two, one.

Oh, nice. Anyway, texture. We talked about this before. Because the interesting thing about interrupting – oh, sorry. Did you? All right. I'm on with you. No, no, no.

You know that you're buying yourself something like this that will be detonated months down the road. I mean I've accumulated so much justification. I mean, I just pocket every little shot. You think that I don't know that? I mean, I can literally go into a – the Yeti will give me the opportunity to take a pre-recorded glop podcast and imitate you and have you say all sorts of strange, horrible things. I have so much capital.

I have so much justification. You do. I do. But the question really is, I mean, what would you do if you wanted to have unlimited access to 200 premium magazines? That's the question. Right. Well, I assume that you've done sponsor-

It's impossible. Literally impossible. Yes. You never have that. Right. And- have that. Right. The service doesn't exist. Now, you see, the deal is if you're going to be Ed McMahon, you have to do the spot yourself. Wait a minute.

As the most recent expert on civility here, boys, you're heading in the Charlie Sykes, Peter Robinson direction. Civility, boys, civility. Yeah. Well, it does go for me putting myself on mute because texture is a fantastic product. And the best possible explanation for why it is comes from James Lilex. I'm as cool as a cucumber about this. I'm like that cartoon character who's holding the boxer at bay with one hand and is exhaled while the other guy's arms are flailing. Rob is so off his game when it comes to this at this point.

We really have got to get him back in shape when it comes to it. We do have to. We do have to. Anyway, I was talking about texture before I was so rudely interrupted. Now, when you want something to read, dependable political reporting, high-quality storytelling, or just the latest on culture and entertainment, magazines, we love them. They're great. They deliver it all with high-quality writing and beautiful photography, and you can get all your magazines in one place now with Texture. The Texture app gives you unlimited access to over 200 premium magazines.

You can find National Review, Ha Ha, Read Rob and James, too. On the Texture app, you'll find other well-known titles like Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker. If you're looking for a break from news and politics, though, Texture's got you covered there, too. Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, Forbes, Better Homes and Gardens, Entertainment Weekly, break from news and politics though texture's got you covered there too sports illustrated national geographic forbes better homes and gardens entertainment weekly food network magazine wired and many many more 200 premium titles i used to subscribe to entertainment weekly years ago it was fun just to keep up and know what's coming and going and then i got expensive and it got boring and i just pushed it away because it wasn't worth the money but hey if you subscribe to texture and it's one of the many options you have,

well, try Texture for free right now when you sign up at texture.com slash ricochet. It's normally $9.99 a month for 200 magazines. That's preposterous. But now you'll get a 14-day free trial at texture.com slash ricochet. One more time, 14 days to try Texture for free when you go to texture.com slash ricochet.

And our thanks to Texture for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Bethany and Seth Mandel. Bethany is the part-time editor at Ricochet, senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward. That's a lot, but she's also a stay-at-home mother of three kids, four years old and younger. She's the co-host of that Sethany show and Ladybrains podcast. Seth is an op-ed editor at the New York Post, commentary magazine alum, and they're both the parents of three

often discussed but never seen kids. You can follow them both on Twitter. We welcome you here to the podcast. How are things this fine morn? The kids all, they've been fed their pancakes and, you know, their bacon. I was thinking of the breakfast that I had, and I had to go right to that, didn't I?

We do beef bacon in our house, and that's close enough. Good. You've got them all cranked and ready and strapped so they can let you work. Let's talk, though. Parenting is off about talking about difficult things. My daughter is a senior in high school, and have gun control discussions which are contentious and emotional and you recently wrote a piece about how to talk about the parkland students why don't you tell us a little bit more about it because lord knows the first word of criticized criticism gets

you excoriated for being mean to the victims yeah yeah i barely remember that piece. I mean, I think that what basically the way that we need to talk about all these contentious issues is how I learned to talk to my husband when we were in premarital counseling and how to have fights because I'm not very good at fighting. And the trick that I learned was to sandwich sandwich so you say a nice thing and then you say your point but then you finish with a nice thing seth and he falls for that every time wait give me an example of that that seems okay so let's say i didn't love the way Seth put the groceries away. Seth, thank you so much for helping me. I really appreciate it.

The next time you put the eggs away, can you not put them where they might fall? I would love to be able to make you an omelet. All I heard was, you're making me an omelet. Making me an omelet. This, by the way, this conversation has literally never happened. I have no idea what we're talking about. But I will say that it's a good practice because it is exactly how I was trained to be an editor. When you're dealing with writers, it was to do this, to sandwich criticism because they're – generally speaking, it's not even dishonest. People write something, and there's plenty of good stuff in it, and writers tend to be protective of their egos and especially when they're young and starting out.

So it's probably a good uh a good idea well i'm in network television and network executives always begin every notes call or notes meeting with lots of great stuff in here really really fun fun fun stuff you know just really just two questions really not even just and the questions of course are you know demands that this for that be removed so my but uh so does that work do you think that works with with kids yeah no it works especially well with kids i mean just as just as men are suckers for that and women's are suckers women are suckers for that kids are suckers for that you want to hear the nice things and so if you slip slip in the negative thing in the middle, we're all very easily manipulated if you play into our egos.

Did you notice that Bethany just did the reverse thing there? She said men are suckers for this and women are suckers for this and children are suckers for this. And in that case, the one that wasn't true went in the middle. That's true. That is interesting, isn't it? And I could tell she didn't really mean it. No, no, exactly. It was a reverse sandwich no but is there i mean i mean i'm just

about teenagers now just because we're talking about this subject then i'll shut up but i i have one question i have sort of whiplash from the general media attitude towards young people because before uh parkland before that the mass shooting, it was pretty much 100 percent agreement that young people in high school or even just in college were morons, dumb, spoiled, entitled. Yeah, well, they've been eating Tide Pods. It couldn't be dumber than being – or could be more poorly educated, I should say, being a student on a college campus, being a student in a high school with a rampant political correctness and all that stuff. And then since Parkland, it's been sort of 24-7, complete reversal, that they are the future. They're brilliant. They are – we should let them vote. We should raise the age for which they can buy a gun. We should lower the age for which they can buy something else.

And I mean is that – is it even close to being real? And why do you think we're so obsessed with young people? So we've been conditioned to think that who's leading in the – they always say coveted – in the coveted 18 to 34 demographic or whatever. So I think that just in general, products are geared toward the younger generation. And so we just kind of have that in our minds. I think that the thing about the Parkland kids, at the Post, at the New York Post, Nicole Gelinas, one of our columnists, wrote a very interesting piece last week about this where she said that what she finds so striking about the Parkland students' willingness to engage in their civic activity in the wake of the shooting is that they are the generation that's known basically nothing but complete and utter government failure. They are the generation who grew up knowing there was 9-11 on the national security front. There was the Iraq war. There was Katrina. There was the housing crash followed by the financial crisis, etc.,, et cetera, and on and on and on. And so I think – and then they watched the 2016 election, and the two major parties put up candidates that were almost uniquely disliked by the electorate on both sides. So I think that her point was that they've been watching the system just fall on its face. So now they want to be part of the system, and they feel like they can help it make a difference. But if you were standing on the sidelines and you were watching this, you know, the older generations above you just do nothing but step on rakes, you would probably want to jump in as well.

And I think that's what's happening here. And I also think that there's just an element of people throwing up their hands and going, well, we can't seem to figure out what to do here. And these kids, they always fix my computer when it's broken, so maybe they know how to fix gun control. I don't know. My generation went through the same thing worse. We had Vietnam. I mean, when I was growing up, there was the Vietnam failure, followed by the failure of Carter, well, the failure of Nixon, of wage and price control, of inflation, and the confiscation of gold, and then the long lines at the gas station.

I grew up during a period where authority could do nothing and was manifestly corrupt and obvious and evil and horrible. So that's not new. What's new about these kids and what we're seeing today, it seems to me, is that they have been granted absolute moral authority because they are properly emotional. If these kids were coming out and saying, oh, if these kids came out Spock-like and intoned a 14-point program for starting at the grassroots level, working up to the national level,

to repeal the Second Amendment. It would be a nice little civics lesson. Everybody would give them a round of applause. But when they can have a couple of charismatic spokesmen who can channel the energy of youth, which somehow is seen to be automatically justified because it's coming from a pure soul unsullied by experience, except for this one experience. I mean, it's a lionization youth cult that we've had for decades, and now it results in you can't say anything about these people because they're passionate.

And nowadays, if you're passionate, it counts more than whether you are correct. Well, it sort of dovetails what I was going to clarify on the demographic side, the 18 to 39, or sometimes it's 18 to 24, whatever it is, it's young. The reason that demographic is so coveted is because they are so gullible. They haven't made up their mind about what soft drink, what beer, what car, what brand of jeans, what brand of toothpaste. Older people are like, ah, I'm a crest. Younger people are like, well, I don't know, I could be persuaded to try something new. And that's why they are so coveted because they are so easily sold to. Anyway, that was just my little two cents.

Yeah, I mean I think also that the media – I'm not sure that there's a prevailing air of you can't question them because I don't tend to agree with a lot of what they're saying on gun control, but I happen to be – I like the fact that we're hearing from them, and I want them to have the floor as long as we should also – we want to engage them. In other words, welcome them to the debate, but that means actually debating them. But I do think that what you're seeing with a lot of the media is that they understand what's effective. And people do make rational decisions based on their own economic situation, but for the most part, people are moved by emotion and symbolism and trends and things that contain an almost inexplicable representation of them rather than something you can just point to and say that person is like me. And that was true, and that's often true with successful presidential candidates. There are exceptions, but for the most part, the guys who are good at winning nominations and then winning

the elections are people who appeal to voters on a visceral level and offer them something, especially in the West these days, in the secular West, offer them some form of almost religion and meaning beyond just policy. And that's what politics has become. But aren't parents and adults required, obligated when they talk to children to teach them the role that emotion has and to make it not a primary one. Yes, of course, you're going to be swayed by it, but you can't give into it entirely because then you empower the people who say,

let's ban the guns and hurrah, and let's do this broad sweeping change. Hurrah, that person is passionate. Things are going to be great. The crowd goes wild. But unless you teach your children to think about the ramifications of what they're saying, then it's – I mean that's why this is such an incredibly difficult teachable moment. You have to tell your children stop feeling as bad as you do about those kids. Stop feeling as empathetic as you do and consider rationally what can be done and what the results will be. I mean, definitely.

Yeah, parents definitely. Sorry, just going to say parents definitely do. But if you're a booker on a cable news station, you don't feel that same responsibility. I mean, I don't understand how parents can teach that when nobody seems to be doing that in the adult realm either. And that's something we've seen, especially since this last election, where people have pretty much had nervous breakdowns. And I mean, in parenting Facebook groups, I mean, you literally could write a book about how crazy people are in these groups, and it will make you feel fear for the future of humanity, that these

are the people that are breeding. And there's just, there's so little rational thought these days. And, I mean, that's how we are, where we are as a society and as a political culture, whatever. There's very little rational thinking, and it's really disturbing. You know, could – Peter here, could I – this is a kind of – this is just occurring to me. And so bat it away if it's a – I don't think it is a stupid question though. So don't bat it away. So, you know, what was it, 1965 when Moynihan came out with his report on the crisis in the African-American family? And he said the family is disintegrating. And the out-of-wedlock birth rate was then 25 percent among African-Americans.

Today, it's over 70 percent among African-Americans, over 40 percent, if I recall correctly, among Hispanics, well over 30 percent among non-Hispanic whites. And here are Bethany, who is writing wonderful stuff for Ricochet. You have a column coming out tomorrow in the New York Times, and there is Seth, who is an editor for what I consider the best city newspaper, with the possible exception of the Minneapolis Tribune in America, the New York Post. And the two of you have three little kids and are making it work. I just – what do you say – what will you say to your own kids? What do you say to kids who say, oh my goodness, how do they do it?

What is the price they have to pay? And I ask one elected official after another, what do you do about the family? And you know what? Nobody has a good answer. What do you do about the family? And you know our life motto and our family motto. It's really hard. We're really, really profoundly tired. Seth has an hour and a half commute one way and I work during naptimes and after bedtime and it's hard, but it is so worth having. And I think that parenthood and marriage gets such a bad rap among our generation. People want to accomplish, I want to work on my career before I get married.

And I don't understand why you can't be married with a career. And people say, well, I want to get ahead in my career before I have children. Meanwhile, I'm better in my career than I ever was after we had kids and after I started staying home. And Seth is the same. It puts a hustle in you that you didn't have before when it's just the two of you or just you. But I think that a lot of it is that marriage is hard. And so people decide not to do it. And kids are hard. So people decide not to do it. But even though marriage and kids are hard, they are, I mean, Seth and our kids are what makes life worth living. And I'm not sure. I mean,

I would be like, triteasing the world if I didn't have a husband and kids, but it would be a far emptier life and experience. Kids are hard. I mean just because something is hard doesn't mean – she's right. I mean that's our family motto. But also I always think of before – right before we had our first kid, my father told me his piece of advice was you learn to do things tired. That was it. There's no – you learn – right now, you think that – A good and wise man. Yeah. You have to get up in the morning and go to work, and you will do your job, and we've done it, and I think that that is – we live in – especially now, not to hammer the young people, but we live in this technological time where there's an app for everything, and there are these life idea that there's got to be a life hack so that I can just have whatever I want and nothing has to change or whatever.

But the truth is that there is no life hack. Being a parent is tiring, and it is also without a doubt worth it and the most meaningful thing you'll ever do. And it's a wonderful life. But yeah, you have to work for it. That's part of what makes things so joyful is the effort that you put into them and the world within a world that you create. You have people today who are 23 years old or so and congratulating themselves for adulting because they washed the bowl in which they made the mac and cheese in the microwave. You know, I look back at my dad's generation when he was 23. He'd been home from the war for four years.

You know, Lord knows how many people he'd shot out of the sky on Uncle Sam's behalf. So it's a different generational mindset. That's true. And nowadays I worry because kids are hard and cats are easy. Bethany, you've got a piece in the New York Times tomorrow, which I assume Dead Tree as well. Tell us about it before we let you go. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. I'm not sure if it will be in the Dead Tree version.

I probably won't, but it will definitely be online. And I basically told the story of when I was a kid, soon after my dad left. I was about, I think, like three or four. And my parents were not gun nuts, but we had a lot of guns. And my parents were incredibly liberal and progressive and Green Party voters and druggies and whatever. And we, it was just me and my mom, and I was sleeping with my bedroom window open. And a guy banged his ladder in my window and started climbing up into my bedroom window because that was the only open window in our house. Wow. Yeah.

And I was sleeping literally right under the window. And so I look up, and I see this ladder land right at my face at the top of the ladder. And he starts climbing up, and I started screaming. And my mom heard the bang, and scream and she grabbed her rifle and she grabbed a gun. She grabbed her rifle and her ammo and she started running and loading it as, as she was running. And so had her rifle loaded and pointed at him, and she said, Bethany, get behind me. I don't want you to get his brain matter on your face. Whoa. Man. Amazing. No, I think we could say badass.

I think we could say badass at this point. She was amazing. She once – a guy, a pickpocket tried to pickpocket her in New York when we were at the theater district, and she beat the crap out of him. My mom was 105 pounds of pure badass. And so she had her gun pointed at him, and he started to go down the ladder, as he should. And my mom walked over to him, still with the rifle in her hands and she took her hand um off the barrel and grabbed the ladder as he was going down and she said the next time i'm not going to hesitate and she shook the ladder like if and if she had pushed the ladder he would have broken his

back and she just shook the ladder and she looked at him and that was that was having a gun in the house turned that story into like this amazing, like empowering, badass story when it would have been a really tragic thing that would have happened to me and it would have changed me in a much different way. And so having a gun to me always meant empowerment and being able to protect myself and protect my family. And so when we had kids, I told Seth, well, we have to have a gun. You have to have a gun in the house if you have kids. And it's so counterintuitive to so many, probably New York Times readers that that would be, you know, when you have kids, you get a crib, you get a gun. It doesn't quite equate. But I mean, we are gun owners now, and a lot of it is because of that story and because, I mean, Seth works long hours, and I know that I can protect myself, and that is invaluable. And it's not just some sort of potentially one day this could happen. It did happen, and my mom saved us. us. I don't, I don't know what would have

happened had we not had the gun. We would have been barricaded in a bedroom, um, crying hysterically on the phone to 911. And it would have taken them a while to get there because we lived in a pretty rural town. What kind of gun? You mind if I ask you what kind of gun was it? My mom's gun? Yeah. I don't remember. I know it was a rifle, but it wasn't a shotgun. I don't remember what kind of gun it was. If both of you had been assaulted, that would have been the story about the difficulty of being a woman in a patriarchal rape culture. If your stories had not been told and the guy had been caught and gone to prison and 20 years later was a poetical advocate for some kind of reform, he would have been the hero of the story.

When you introduce the gun into it and you say to horrified liberals, thank God my mother had a gun, all of a sudden you become that thing, that story, that anomaly. Oh, am I going to have to hear about a story where somebody used a gun to keep... Which, the stories, they hate because they believe that there are about four or five or six of them in the history of gun ownership. The ones that are acceptable are the ones that are done by women. The badassery. I mean, Godless, this western that

Netflix came out, is all about single, strong, pioneer, frontier women with their guns keeping things right. That kind of story they might let you tell and might be acceptable because it's empowering. But for the rest of it, I mean they hate these things because it suggests that guns are primarily used by ordinary people for self-defense, and that just simply can't be the case. That's the – I mean so, yeah, good luck. I can't wait to see the's the i mean so yeah good luck good i can't

wait to see the reaction to the new york arts by the way one little uh textual analysis here i now see seth knows what kind of woman bethany was raised by and it just has to add a little bite to her requests to put the eggs away properly. Yeah, I have a feeling you should really, really take a little bit more time with those eggs, Seth. That's my advice. What I can understand is where are you putting them exactly? Because there's a specific

place in the fridge where the eggs go. Are you putting them in the freezer upside down or something? We had this. This was on twitter the other day actually when some when people were talking about how you how you take eggs out of the uh out of the carton and i i um just take the same equal numbers from each end to make sure that they that they that that the carton itself maintains its equilibrium see bethany has him so rattled

that now he's turned eggs into a science that's my god now we understand how the marriage works her husband lives in fear of course it's the opposite it's the opposite bethany hates that i do this this stuff but this is just i to me there there is just there is real there is beauty in egg equilibrium i take eggs very seriously. And that is how she sees, you know, she fears that the way I put eggs back, they're going to come all tumbling out or whatever to create obstacles for her. But I told her I don't coddle eggs. I'm with you there, Seth. This morning when I got the eggs out, somebody had taken them all from one side and not the other.

The carton was unbalanced. It wobbled in my hand. I could barely control it. It was out of control, it seemed, and I thought I was going to lose all the eggs, but I managed to grasp it firmly and bear it over to the counter. Okay, the people who are balancing out the eggs specifically to avoid that kind of situation are crazy. Just let me say

that. I think this is a marriage in trouble. I've got to be honest. It's a little thing, but it's, I don't know. Well, you can hear it all dissolve, everybody, at the Sethany Show. That Sethany Show, which you can catch at Ricochet also, the Lady Brains podcast as well, Bethany and Seth Mandel. And we're going to let you get back to everything you've got to do because today, of course, you've got the whole day ahead. What are you going to do?

Are you going to take the kids to the zoo? Are you going to go out and play football Kennedy style? What is it? What's on the agenda for this wonderful Sunday? The kids are going to a Purim carnival. So like a Jewish Halloween kind of. And we're going to a carnival. Well, wonderful fun.

Thanks. We'll listen to you. We'll read you on Ricochet. We'll follow you on Twitter, et cetera. And thanks for dropping by the podcast today. Thank you. Thanks, guys. There's so much we should have gotten to. And we'll dropping by the podcast today. Thank you. Thanks, guys. There's so much we should have gotten to,

and we'll get to them next time. But then again, if you follow their tweets, you find a lot of stuff. Seth had one the other day where he said that humorlessness is the defining feature of American politics. I want to ask you guys about that, because whether or not it's always been so, or whether or not that we are in a uniquely humorless

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I love it. All right. Um, Rob, what have you been up to? I know that you've probably been giving Peter updates, you know, all the time,

but really what have you been up to? As he runs back to the microphone, that's a PD, that's a PDQ Bach on the air spot right there. Rob, yes, we were talking about you, but since you obviously checked out. Yes, I was on mute, and I'm using a little new Skype, and I can't tell when the thing is white, it's on, and then sometimes when it looks like the other icons it means it's off which doesn't make any sense nothing you said made sense to me right there so i'll ask you um we're going to ask you

what you've been up to we know you're doing this little television thing let's go right back into the news and talk about uh tariffs do you think we're going to get them do you think that this is going to happen or anybody's going to stand in front of it and where does that go down the road and after that peter you tariff question same after that, Peter, you, tariff question, same thing. Well, the tariff question is strange because in terms of steel and aluminum, the only countries it has the most deleterious effect on are our largest trading partners, Canada. And so I can't imagine that it will continue – I can't imagine that it will continue – that they'll actually go through and not simply spark some kind of complicated back down from the Trump administration.

It really has no effect on China. China's not really much of an exporter of steel or aluminum to us. they use a lot of it, but they don't really export it. So it's a very strange kind of, um, uh, you know, a hairpin turn there on what we thought the, the, uh,

Trump administration trade policy was going to be, which was essentially focused on China. Uh, and then somehow it becomes about something else. You know, uh, uh, tariffs are those things that everybody imposes. I mean, George W. imposed it, and Barack Obama imposed it, and of course Trump's going to impose them.

It did just with washing machines and solar panels. Everyone does it, but usually it's done quietly so that it's part of a longer negotiation a very quiet poker game and but the trump administration doesn't do anything quietly so a lot of this stuff i think i hope because i'm against all you know this kind of trade war a lot of this stuff is simply the trump version of old stuff and the trump version of old stuff is loud and brash and a little bit ugly and irritating because of its incredibly unsubtle way, but it's essentially the same thing, right?

So when he put tariffs on solar panels and washing machines, these were just extensions and reciprocal extensions of Obama tariffs that everybody had forgotten he'd done because he kind of did it quietly. Trump doesn't do anything quietly. So the noise factor is what a lot of people think is the downside of these kind of tariffs because the louder you scream and yell, the harder it is to back down later. I'm not sure I buy that 100%. I mean I'm against tariffs, so I'm against this stuff, but I think it's going to go away. And I'm not sure it's the worst thing in the world every now and then to rattle the

saber and the scabbard. But in terms of steel and aluminum, I think it's a, you know, if we're going to be a manufacturing country, we're going to have to import a lot of that stuff. Yeah. By the way, since I seem to have totally unintentionally, I never woke up one morning and said, you know, I'm going to be on the Ricochet podcast. I'm going to be the guy who sticks up for Trump. Anyway, on this one, I'm not sticking up for Trump. The idea of imposing tariffs, particularly tariffs as steep as these, 25 percent on steel, 10 percent on aluminum, is crazy.

Free trade benefits everybody over the longer term. There are losers in the short term, but there are other things that we can do to help those people who are harmed in the short term by free trade and this is i trump of course has been loud and vulgar and a boor and allowed and saying ridiculous things on twitter this is the first policy that if they actually do go ahead and put it into effect i will just say is absolutely utterly flat wrong just plain wrong as boneheaded in policy as on the tweets. All of that said – and the reason it's boneheaded, I agree with everything Rob said. I guess I'd make one point. I'd emphasize one point, which is that we have to deal with Iran.

We have to deal with Russia. The question of the day and for the next decade and maybe for the rest of our lives is China. Iran spends about 1% or 2% as much on defense as we do. Russia is about 10%. China is already at over 50% and going up to 60% in a single-digit number of years. China is a rising power threatening us, and we will want our allies in figuring out – in dealing with China. And you slap on these – you even talk about slapping on these tariffs and you are precisely right, Rob. The people it rattles far more than those in Beijing are those in Ottawa and London and Paris and Berlin? Our allies. So get Charlie Stikes on the phone because I want to dump on Trump.

Well, two points. That's a dumping I'm in favor of at the moment. One, as far as our allies go in needing to face the Chinese peril, I agree. We're going to need that fearsome, mighty Canadian military and the German power in case we need to deploy it. I mean, Germany's recent report on its armed forces is pathetic. Their tanks don't work. Their helicopters don't work. I mean, they haven't funded and paid for it in years.

And as a consequence, the people we now want for our allies to combat Russia, Iran, and China have only soft power. And I have the feeling that soft power evaporates very quickly, like rubbing alcohol on the skin the moment that it actually is needed. I mean, Iran, I agree with you, Peter. China in the long term is a threat but not necessarily an enemy yet. Iran, on the other hand, when we're seeing what's playing out in the Middle East right now, how quickly could Iran go nuclear? How quickly could they strap something on one of those medium-range intercontinental ICBMs? How quickly could they decide, hey, you know what? The revolution culminates in the glorious chaos that brings the 12th Imam climbing up the well.

Let's do this thing. I mean that I'm more worried about short-term than I am China. And long-term long term yes we need our allies but to me the idea that we need the tariffs on aluminum like this little can i'm crushing here in my hand is crazy so but he said he was going to do this and even though it may tank some sections of the economy the economy in general are going to be better so i gotta ask you peter do you think that hillary would have better? Because now you're one of those people who has this is your line here, right? This is the point where

some of us were back here got to the point where we weren't crazy about it. Now aren't you in danger of being called a cuck and a rhino and a defeatist and somebody who's enabling the other side? You're just like one of those 25 bloggers you're up there with crystal and the other frowny face alpha male i mean believe me just welcome to the club that's all i'm saying come over here sit down it's nice and warm with that cookies all right thanks save some chocolate chip cookies and a warm glass of milk for me yeah well the question is that that's a good question because it does what whether hillary

would have been better what sorry well well what whether the the trade policy of a democrat but whether a a hillary clinton policy would have been reflexively free trade and i think that's um don't think so i think it probably i think it would have obama level free trade but i think it would have been exactly it was one of the reasons why she was was so loathed I think by a huge part of her own democratic constituency was that she was a corporatist, a go-along, get-along. She was just like her husband who was basically a centrist democrat. But she too opposed the TPP, Trans-Pacific something or other, whatever it was called. So she came out against the tpp she at least during the campaign so i get the point corporatist yes okay so who knows how she would have behaved and i grant

your argument but during the campaign she was anti-free trade not nobody was as vividly anything as donald trump but she was anti-free trade during the campaign but but she went from being in favor of it to being against it it was It was so clearly a political move. And this is the one consistent point in Trump's political life over three decades, I guess, right? Yeah, he's always had this – Protectionism. Protectionism, which is what you do when your main business is essentially licensing and software essentially or property, where it's very hard to measure the import-export value of intellectual property because it's just the way people – what

is the Trump name? When you export the Trump name, what's it worth, right? When you export five shipping containers of steel, people on that side of things tend to have a very complicated view of – or I should say an uncomplicated view of trade that is basically wrong, but you understand how they got there. Trump made a lot of money but didn't export or build it. Didn't make anything and export it. Didn't import anything and made it somewhere else. It's just his name. Just intangible. You're quite right.

Go on, Rob. You go on with the point. Well, no, I was going to say that the problem with all of this is that nobody – none of our politicians – I mean, I think Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of that. She knew the right thing, which was that TPP is better than no tpp um but yet she couldn't articulate it in its brutal honesty right if you're going to be honest about trade you have to be brutally honest about trade and to be brutally honest about trade means that's that this compete a comparative advantage of some places and other places don't have it. And that manufacturing on the size and scale with which the United States used to do it, where we had this gigantic industrial machine that was essentially run by five, three or four big companies and one or two giant trade unions, is simply not going to come back. You cannot pass a tariff to tax the future, right? You can't build a wall to keep tomorrow out. This isn't going to come back you cannot pass a tariff to tax the future right you can't build a wall to keep tomorrow out this isn't going to happen and you can't you're not allowed to say that you

know mitt romney has to say those jobs are coming back and so does donald trump and so did brock obama and then hillary clinton had to say i think tpp is terrible but the truth is that the future the american future isn't going to be written in large, inefficient manufacturing. It's going to be written in small, nimble manufacturing that a portion of our workforce is just not prepared to do. But you can't just pass a law and say, okay, well, we'll change back. You can't do that. The Smokestack Restoration Act, which builds large, huge, messy, hot Bessemer furnaces built with smokestack. No, you're right.

And Hillary Clinton, as much as I can stand her, probably did have a pragmatist attitude toward trade and knew that it was going to be bad for her with the increasing leftist shift of her demographics. So she has to – if we find anything, it will be that those 30,000 emails that she got rid of all had to do with how wonderful NAFTA was. But how do you – if you've got 30,000 emails, that means you probably have 150,000 emails. Now, how do you deal with them? How do you sort? How do you figure out what's in there and what's needed? Literally impossible. Beautiful.

Literally impossible. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's why I'm here to tell you about SaneBox. I am. Now, I got in my email box today the rundown for this show, and it came bubbling right to the top for a variety of reasons. But the first of all is because I've got SaneBox. If you're like me, making time to manage your emails is pretty much the last thing you want to do. Sifting through all the junk to keep up with

the important stuff, it's tedious. Well, that's why SaneBox is a lifesaver, frankly. It's the easiest way to automatically organize your inbox and keep it that way forever. SaneBox sorts your emails for you, keeps the unimportant email out of your inbox, so you it that way forever. SaneBox sorts your emails for you, keeps the unimportant email out of your inbox, so you can focus on the stuff that matters. With SaneBox, you can spend hours every week scanning through hundreds of emails without it, I mean. But if you do have it, you don't miss the important things.

It's such a waste of time to try to find them manually, but SaneBox, the junk is out of sight, so you only see the essential stuff, saving time and energy so you can get back to the important things, like listening to the show, for example. It takes less than five minutes to get SaneBox set up, and after that, keeping your email organized takes minutes, not hours. Rob, you got it, right? I love SaneBox. I love it.

I have never missed an email that I needed, but more importantly, I have never been forced to read an email that I didn't have to read. I just don't understand why it's not that for everything. I don't understand why I don't have that for people and stuff. I'd like to send people to my sane later or sane black hole, right? I mean, I wish. I wish.

The black hole function that he mentions. Drop something in there, you're never going to hear from that domain again. It's remarkable how little time I spend dealing with people from Nigeria who are convinced that I'm the guy to help the prince move his money. That's not a metaphor. If you've been meaning to get your email organized and get on top of it, because you know you hate email, don't you? Everybody practically hates it until you get SaneBox,

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SaneBox. Clean up your inbox in minutes and keep it that way forever. Well, before we go, you know, it's a little late for by the time the Oscars are done. People will be listening to this. I would just like to ask you both, in the general meta sense sense whether the Oscars matter the same way they do. It used to be time of glamour, beauty, all of the wonderful sophistication of Hollywood coming out. And now you kind of wince because it's going to get political and it's going to get hectoring. It's going to wag its fingers and it's not going to be any fun.

Yeah, that for sure. I'm with you on that. Who wants to watch it? Fewer people. I don't want to. Well, Rob may have a professional obligation. We'll hear what he says in a moment. But the movies don't matter in the way that they used to.

And I'm not making some big, vague market point. It happened that returning from Washington to California, I have six and a half hour flight. I'm always too fried when I come home even to read. So I downloaded a bunch of movies, and I also downloaded a couple of series, televisions. And you know what I found myself watching? The TV series.

It's just better. It's more engrossing. Even the production values seem higher. I know, and it's 12 hours long. Yes, exactly. You can watch it incrementally, but as opposed to a two-hour movie that that is well what it is you have extraordinary attention to period details and great storytelling

and a prestige series that's yes yes yes right and i tried out of a sense of duty i tried to watch the post and you know it felt like a time warp the storytelling the story was old but the storytelling was old well okay rob is the professional on this but i just i just feel as though the movies are slipping away as a cultural matter well i mean they're not slipping away they're they're just they're morphing into something else i mean the biggest movie in the world is the black panther and black panther people love and people have assigned it a lot of cultural meaning whether it has it or not it's separate is irrelevant what's important is that

a big fat movie is a big fat cultural thing but nobody can afford to make big fat movies and over and over and over again you can only make a few big fat movies a year and then then pretty soon you know you you make one that dies and that's the that's that's the high wire act of movie making a slow slower longer story in in series television television, whether it's 12 episodes or 15 episodes or 1,000 episodes, you're just more forgiving and your relationship to your audience is just fundamentally different. I mean the economics of movies are we get your money before you see the thing right and by the time you get inside the movie theater you've already spent money and time you figured out where you're gonna go and you've maybe had to park and maybe you had to get a babysit whatever it is you went out and you put gave them the twenty dollars and you sat in a theater and then the movie started and so your tendency is to gravitate

to sort of big fat value movies like we're gonna see a movie that people are talking about it's got a lot of noise to it and it has some crazy special effects because i've made a big effort to see this picture right right television uh you know what you know i cracked open a bottle of wine i had to work hard all day and put my feet up and i'm going to scroll around or maybe i'm excited because i get to watch two episodes to this continuing series that i'm interested in and that is a different experience. And people are more – have always been more friendly towards the latter than the former because you can only put up with so much spectacle. And I think that's what's happened.

Here's the touchstone. The biggest, classiest movie star in the world is Meryl Streep. Meryl Streep is by law, federal law, required to be nominated for an Oscar every year. Whether she makes a picture or not. Right. She often wins. She's up tonight. She's going to be up for an Oscar tonight. Everybody thinks that she's not going to win, but I think she's going to win because the law is you've got to give the Oscar to Meryl Streep. She is doing series television in a year. Now she's doing it on HBO and she's doing it with Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. She's doing it in a jewel-like setting for a person with the prestige and the honors of Meryl Streep.

But once you do that, once Meryl Streep appears on your small screen on a TV show, that's what it is. Pretty Little Lies 2 is a TV show. It's all over for features. small screen on a TV show. That's what it is. Pretty little lies too, is a TV show. Right. Um, it's all over for features. I mean, it's not all over, but it's all over for the kind of movies that you guys remember that I love

that we like to watch because there's not making those anymore. So, so Rupert Murdoch is selling 21st century to Fox at Disney to Disney. It's just the right moment. Um, well, no, he's selling 20, 21st century Fox at Disney. Um moment? Well, no. He's selling 21st Century Fox to Disney

because that sale is not... He's not getting rid of an asset. He's combining it with a better manager. He could not afford to buy Time Warner when he wanted to buy it. He could not afford to buy anything. He could only afford to sell and retain a huge piece of the resulting company.

So he's basically sold his thing to the smartest guy in show business, Bob Iger, who continually makes gigantic, big, fat movies, Star Wars, and Black Panther. He owns Marvel and Lucasfilm and all the Pixar movies,

plus theme parks, plus now two TV networks. He has placed a lot of money and a lot of chips on show business, both big movies and on series television, that I think is probably going to pay off big. I mean, he now owns one of the largest streaming services, Hulu. Which is losing huge amounts of money, but we'll see. I've been trying to get people to

watch a show called Babylon Berlin, and once they find out that it has subtitles, a lot of them check out, because their experience in watching something is to do something else at the same time. They're checking their email, or they're scrolling through Twitter feed or something like that, and a lot of these shows let you do that.

The ones that don't, I find, are the ones that are the most rewarding. If you have to read subtitles, you have to pay attention. I mean, that's challenging television nowadays, ones that you actually have to do some reading. But, Rob, when you said that as soon – I mean, it brings to mind the Gloria Swanson line from Sunset Boulevard. The movies are getting smaller, and we like it a lot because what it did was made an old it made the television medium, which was always the poor

second cousin to the movies, it made it step up its game. And now television is incredible. It's a golden age again. But when you said the big movies that we like are no longer going to be made, what do you mean exactly? Because did somebody just get tasered?'m sorry no that was me sorry i'm still here all right because the movies that the movies that i recall that i enjoyed the most in the theater were the spectacles even if it was just soil and green it was the big i mean everyone went to see kramer versus kramer it made something like you know 350 million dollars in modern money but is there really a lot of attention appetite nowadays for serious

emotional dramas of that sort no that's what i mean i mean i mean those movies aren't going to get made because there's no that they there's no price point to make them efficiently you know a movie is 50 million dollars and then you got to get into the theaters and then to get people out of their houses into the theaters it's's another – you double the budget basically. At that point, it's just – I mean, remember, getting people to do something is hard. So the trick for moviemaking has always been get the screen closer to the person, right? When there are movie theaters everywhere and movies are the only thing, and everybody went to see two, three movies a week and they were 50 cents.

And in the old days, that was great. And then around the early 60s and the mid-60s, the movie business just collapsed. And nobody could figure out why it collapsed. And the reason it collapsed was because the audience had moved to the suburbs. And getting them to go back in town and drive and park and the town was scary and there was crime and riots you get mugged they just didn't want to do it so they and so they watched television it wasn't like they turned away from movies they just watched tv because they didn't want to go see a movie and then when they started building the multiplexes in the suburbs those you know the 12 15 screen uh big complexes

uh and shopping malls um guess what block Blockbusters happened. Jaws happened. Star Wars happened. Close Encounter. All the blockbusters happened in the 70s. Right. Because we moved the screens close to the people.

But they also tried in the 60s to bring people back with roadshows, with huge Cinerama, Panavision, Todd AO Vision, widescreen things

where it would be an event where you would have to go. And I'll stop with this because we've got to wrap up here. On Thursday, I went to see this film festival of young persons' movies at the Walker Arts Center because my daughter had a couple of pieces in it. Oh, wonderful.

Yeah, she's part of the WACTEC, as they call it, the Walker Arts Center Teen Arts Committee. And they had a couple of movies in this thing. And a lot, I mean, the quality of these things ranged from here's your participation trophy, nice job, Pat, and they had to, hmm, these people actually might make a go of this when they age. Because high schoolers have the tools right now that exceed the tools that Greg Toland had when he was starting out and making movies in 1929, 1930.

And they've also grown up with a whole visual vocabulary. And so they know innately, or at least they ought to, how pacing works, how to compose a shot. In one of these little videos, which had in one point excreble acting, horrible, unbelievable plot twists, but really nice composition of shots, great lighting. There was a drone shot. And they used it very sparingly and they had the drone capture two of the characters running across a verdant green field that shot which which these teenage right which was easy these teenagers could come up with was beyond the can and capabilities of some of the greatest filmmakers ever so these guys have extraordinary tools, and the cost of doing this is nil practically. And they can put it on Vimeo, and they get a link from io9, or they get a link from BuzzFeed, and the next thing you know, more people have seen their little movie, which isn't even their job.

It's their hobby. So while I do despair about the blockbusterization and the infantilization of audiences as we get one more mindless blockbuster after the other and we end up discussing politics of Black Panther as opposed to a serious Scorsese movie or versus Kramer movie, I'm willing to give that up in exchange for the democratization and the rise. I could not agree more, but I don't think we're giving up those smaller pictures or those smaller stories, I should say. We're just seeing them on the smaller screen that has moved from downtown movie palace to the suburb, Cinerama, the multiplex to the living room. Boys, I know you want to wrap it up. To the two of you from whom I take all my cultural cues, a simple yes or no question. Is Black Panther an assignment? Must I see it? It feels like it to me.

It really does. Well, I think it might be, but I haven't seen it. Oh, you haven't? Oh, I just assumed. Okay, you've been working too hard but I haven't seen it. Oh, you haven't? Oh, I just assumed. Okay, you've been working too hard. I haven't yet. But I suspect that you'll go see it and go, oh, yeah, you know, it's a superhero picture, and it's got a little bit of a twist, so it's slightly more interesting because it looks

different and it's slightly different. But I don't think it's – you know, look, if this kind of thing speaks to you, if you like superhero movies and you want to see a slightly different one, I think you should see it. You're not going to like it if you don't like the superhero movies. That's for sure. I guess the distinction I'm getting at is it's just another movie or is this a cultural moment, something you just have to be aware of? Something you should be aware of that's out there, the fact that it's a cultural moment is deeply irritating because it's just a superhero picture with a black guy in it. I mean let's not go crazy, but people are going crazy because it's a superhero picture with a black guy in it, and you're like, okay. It's a vision of what Africa would have been if there had been no European colonization is what I'm told by some.

It's a vision of economic self-empowerment. It is a vision, some say, of what happens when you pursue Trump policies and wall your country off, allow no immigration, and control tightly the one natural resource that you have. I mean, so apparently it's a Rorschach test into which everyone can pour everything. And I oughtn't to see a Rorschach. You should definitely see it.

Okay, all right. I will. When it's the unanimous decision, I always do what you tell me almost always next week Peter Robinson will be reporting back on Black Panther which is

no no no I'm going to wait until it shows up in iTunes and I can download it here at home alright that's the long wait the whiteness of this the whiteness of this and the blackness of that once put in close proximity will generate enough energy, I think, to achieve a warp bubble throughout the entire ricochet. It can only result in Peter Robinson in a dashiki. That's right.

All right, boys. So we'll meet the newly woke Peter next week. But in the meantime, we want to thank you. Thanks to Texture. Thanks to Quip. And thanks to SaneBox. There will be a next week because they keep the show going, sponsors like them. Support them for supporting us.

And also support Ricochet, Rob Wright. What's our new podcast listener tier here you want to know? Oh, you say I start talking. I start talking the details of commerce. Oh my God, I did it again. I did the stupid app. It is the podcast listeners tier. It's $2.50 a month.

It will support everything including Bethany and Seth's fantastic podcast and will help us grow and become what we want to become, which is nothing less than the 24-7 on-demand and streaming alternative to national public radio. Smart and center-right. That's a great idea.

And you also, if you want to make this happen, go to iTunes, leave a review. And we managed to convince Rob to stop creating false accounts and logging in and giving us five stars because that never happened and it never would. No, we want you, the listener, to do it because that makes more people discover us and keeps the show going. It's all part of the ongoing churn of commerce and joy and your contributions and the rest of it. So, Rob, are you going to be here next week

with us or was it just like a once-in-a-year experience? No, I'm back. I'm trying to get back. I'd like to be back next week. Yes, plan on it. Fantastic. I'll do it. I'm on a hiatus starting a week from today, so yes.

All right, everyone who's part of the Ricochet family, go to the comments and welcome them back. And if you don't want to welcome Rob back in the comments, you're lying to yourself. Join so you can. Thanks, guys. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3 to yourself. Join so you can. Thanks, guys. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3.0.

Next week, fellas. I am here as you are here as you are me And we are all together See how they run like pigs from a gun See how they fly I'm crying Sitting on a cornflake

Waiting for the wagon to come Corporation t-shirts Stupid bloody Tuesday man You've been a naughty boy You let your face grow long I am the Eggman They are the Eggmen I own the walrus

Mr. City placement sitting I'm crying. I am the Eggman. They are the Eggman. I am the Warlord's Cuckoo Cuckoo. And I thought of that old joke, you know, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken. And the doctor says, well, why don't you turn him in? And the guy says, I would, but I need the eggs. Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd,

but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.