The Ricochet Podcast - We're So Baked

Episode Date: July 18, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file We’re down one host this week (Lileks is on assignment), but it’s a super-sized edition of The Ricochet Podcast, clocking in at almost 90 minutes of chat time. This week on the podcast, Ricochet contributor Matthew Hennessey on that Rolling Stone cover, religion in daily life, living in a bubble with four kids, and why he shouldn’t be driving. Then, SCTV legend (and former... Source

Count Floyd here. Saturday night kids. Time for another monster, chill, horror theater. I bet you're good and scared, huh? Activate program. This bill, 24 pounds, 1,000 pages of a rushed job of a bill that literally was rushed through. It was Pelosi to Pelosi to Pelosi to Pelosi. This is nonsense. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. I'm coming to you from beautiful, sunny Southern California. And on the line with me, as always, old school style, is Peter Robinson in Palo Alto, California. Peter, how are you? I am extremely well. You talked me into this 176 times. Yes. This is weird. It's just you and me this week.

James is off. I don't know. He's off. Just like the first two. Yeah. And this is the way we started. week it's not uh james is off i don't know he's off just like the summer yeah and it's uh and this is the way you this is the way we started and it would have been 200 by now if i had started doing this when you first suggested it i resisted i have to admit that's you know you didn't understand

what a podcast was i didn't you have come so far what what we just get on the phone in the morning and and just talk that's what yeah that's right you're What? Wait a minute. I have to tie my sweater around my neck. I'm not ready yet. I need to put on my tie. Yeah, that was the idea. The idea was to launch the podcast before we launched the Ricochet site, Ricochet.com. By the way,

if you are hearing this for the first time, welcome. You are listening to a podcast by Ricochet.com. It is the fastest growing, most interesting, funniest, most witty and civil site for center right conversation on the web. We'd love for you to join. Wait, you're already a member because you're listening, so I don't have to do this. But it's fun to say anyway because it makes me feel good. But we are in fact celebrating this morning, Peter, a new sponsor. Tonks. Tonks. T-O-N-X is a coffee company that sources their beans directly from the growers, which is always a good thing, roasts them and ships them

to you within 24 hours of roasting for the freshest beans you can find. We'll be talking about them later in the show, but you can check out Tonks, T-O-N-X dot org for more info. And just so you know, I'm enjoying some right now. They sent us some, a little sample, you and me and James and a few other people. And it's really good. I mean if you like coffee – I have to confess. I'm not a big fan of the Starbucks coffee.

You're not? No. It's too oily and – Right. It's just too oily for me. So this stuff is really good, especially morning because it tastes like real coffee. It has a good coffee taste. I feel like coffee should taste a little bit like warm coffee ice cream.

Right? Yeah. There are those who say that coffee ice cream should taste like very cold, creamy coffee. There you go. If you start with the ice cream and work your way back to the coffee, reverse engineering, that will do. By the way, as a deeply conservative that I am in all kinds of ways, what I've discovered about Tonks in these last three days since I received my beans and immediately had to get in touch with Blue Yeti to ask what to do with them, I have now – it's like the Japanese tea ritual except that it's the American coffee ritual. I grind them. I enjoy the aroma and put them through a press.

It's – the actual process is a lovely way of slowly waking up in the morning. It fits with life. I actually feel like – I mean – wait. Before I continue with this, I should also say we are also and still continue to be sponsored and are very grateful for their sponsorship by Audible.com, which is the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment. Listen to audiobooks whenever and wherever you want. Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial. We'll talk more about that later. They have been very, very great sponsors to us. And of course, in a way, Audible and Tonks are kind of the same new thing in that they make something that was once kind of complicated really easy.

And the great thing about Tonks is they'll send you the beans. The beans come in the mail. And then you put them in a grinder and then you dump them. I've dumped them in a French press because it's the easiest thing for me to do and then you pour in boiling water it's like making a cup of tea and um it's simple and it's and it just smells great right so it smells like you're having a real coffee which is always nice um and i can tell i've had it because i i feel very awake right now everything's working but uh uh what what's interesting about all of that is all those people are removing the little friction from our lives, all the little complicated things that we couldn't do before that were pains in the neck.

They have – these new businesses are taking away and are sort of figuring out how to do better. And I know I'm on a – I say this all the time, but I feel like that is a sign that the future may not be so terrible not only for the country but also for people on the right, people who believe in the free market because that seems to me to be a good sign. From Tonks Coffee and Audible Books to Hope. Ladies and gentlemen, only Rob Long. That's right. It must be really good coffee. It's put me in an optimistic mood, which is hard to do when you look at a culture. Well, I don't know. Let's just get this out now because I don't know. You and I have not talked about this, so I don't know how you feel about this.

But the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, very controversial cover this month, week, month. I forget what Rolling Stone is. It's monthly now, I guess. One of the Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers. The surviving. The surviving one. The one who pled not guilty. And he is – it's kind of a glamour shot.

I mean it's an actual shot of him. They didn't photo illustrate it. It's real. And it's irritating and offending a lot of people because it seems to glamorize or give him sort of the Justin Bieber treatment. Suddenly he's a teen idol. And the headline is something like how this promising young student was failed by his family and turned to Islam and all sorts of other things. And, you know, I tried. I mean, I understand why it's.

Offensive, I suppose, but I'm not so sure it doesn't bother me that much. Am I missing something as usual? Yeah. No, what you're missing at the moment is a host who disagrees with you. I tried pretty hard yesterday to work up – what's distressing I guess is the cover shot is just as you put it, a glamour shot. with his brother for killing people, killing a small number of people, which is unspeakable, but also maiming many, many more people, shutting down the entire city of Boston for the better part of a day. The action was horrible and it doesn't fit the notion of a glamour shot.

On the other hand, it strikes me as a worthy journalistic enterprise trying to figure out how this kid who at one moment in his life seemed to be a good-looking, winsome, talented American kid, a good student, turned into such an appalling criminal. And I confess it was a busy day yesterday. I didn't have a chance to do more than skim the thing, the first couple of paragraphs online. So I haven't read the piece yet. But I've heard and looked – going from site to site and seeing this thing commented on that as a piece of – the writing is actually a pretty interesting, pretty comprehensive story. So I've been told. So I've been told. Yeah.

I didn't – i'm actually trying to get it i'd like to read it which i know it's being cvs pulled it off the shelves right um in boston in boston i thought maybe they were doing a chain why they're not but they have they have possibly possibly they have big roots in in boston i mean i grew up in new england school in new england and cvs was the local drugstore always so i think they felt that that was that was the local drugstore always. So I think they felt that that was the wrong thing to do. And I sort of understand that too. But I suppose I am interested in how this guy, this kid, cognitive dissonance of being these two dudes in Boston, half American and half psychopath. That is interesting.

And what happened in Chechnya? I am interested in all that stuff i do want to know because it seems to me that that that could be what we're up against in the future isn't going to be somebody from you know some middle-class kids from egypt who managed to slip through the tsa um net but kids who are already here you know the other piece of the story that i find especially interesting want to read up on, is the back and forth. Meaning they come over here from Russia. I don't know whether they started out in Chechnya, but then a piece of the – after you compare Russia to American life and then they go back. So something very peculiar is going on there. We know a century ago that half of Italians

who came to this country went back to Italy. Well, that's sensible. You go to America, you make some money, and then you go back to Italy. Who wouldn't want to go back to Italy to retire, so to speak?

But there's something – this is an intriguing story. I want to read it. Yeah, I do too. And I get that the picture seems just too – they could have chosen another photograph. They could have chosen a photograph that's less flattering I suppose.

But I don't know. Something about the fact that it's a flattering photograph makes it seem a little spookier and slightly more – in a way, slightly more interesting. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'm not even sure it's a bad thing if what you want to do is make a case that this is something that the enemy within. Yeah, I grant you all. At the same time, I can certainly understand why people are upset by it because you put this winsome looking

attractive kid on the cover and the implicit message is to turn him into what he became somebody had to do something to him which is nonsense the story is really what he did to other people that's that's the story that's the story you want to keep so i can understand there's that there's a kind of oh we're about to read how we failed him well i think that's extrapolating maybe right no i agree i think that's extrapolating. Maybe. Right. No, I agree. I think that's maybe seeing too much.

I do want to know. I do. I mean, I know what he did. And I think we all do. I want to know what happened to him. I want to know about his crackpot mom and his lousy dad. Or if they weren't, I want to know. I do want to know the source here. I want to know about his crackpot mom and his lousy dad. Or if they weren't, I want to know – I do want to know the source here. I want to know what happened.

I want to know what horrible imam we need to deport or whatever it takes, right? Yeah, and something tells me that there will not be a follow-on story in Rolling Stone about the imam we need to deport. Yeah, exactly right. But on Ricochet. Yeah, we'll track it down. You know, we should get our first guest in here. Our first guest has a very long bio. Not a long bio, but a long resume and a huge list of credits, as you say, in Hollywood.

It's Matt Hennessey. Let me just give you the list and let me tell you who he really is. He writes the Dad's View column for the Fairfield County Catholic, which is the newspaper of the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He writes about faith and family at firstthings.com and writes articles that have appeared in New York Post, Crisis, Irish Echo, Catholic New York, and Human Life Review. But he is – that's just – that's a a hobby his full-time job is as uh the husband of ursula hennessey ricochet's own ursula hennessey and father to their four children in connecticut and we're pleased to have him on hey matt how are you i'm pretty good rob sorry sorry for uh reversing your credits that way i i led with the lower lower end stuff and i ended with the uh

with the with the your actual qualifications. Well, let me tell you that – Mr. Ursula Hennessey. Being Mr. Ursula Hennessey is also a hobby. My true full-time job is dancing. Oh, really? That's good. That's good.

The modern dance. That's good. So Peter and I were just talking about this Rolling Stone cover because we just kind of like wandered around. And neither one of us was too exercised by it. Are we missing something? The whole – the thought of that thing makes my stomach hurt. Yeah, I think you are missing something. I don't know what it is necessarily, but the glamorization of – I mean I just think of that eight-year-old kid that was standing on that fence watching that race.

Every time I see that guy's face, that's all I can think of. So yeah, putting him on the cover and making him look like Johnny Depp or something sort of disgusts me in a way that I can't even really verbalize. But they didn't make him look that way. That's a picture of him. Yeah, but okay. Fair enough. There's probably a few pictures of me that look like that. Well, come on.

From when I was a right-winger, I'm sure that they would dig up the worst picture they possibly could. Well, that is absolutely indisputably true. And that brings me to our next kind of weird cultural – By the way, I specialize in things that are absolutely indisputably true. So this is going to be a great few minutes. Knowing your wife as I do, I suspect you don't hear that phrase, that is indisputably true, that often in your house. I heard it this morning as a matter of fact. My mother-in-law is visiting.

So we have a special relationship. That's good. So the other cultural moment of the week, which again is another one of those baffling things, not baffling in the same way for me, but baffling in the way that the culture seems to be either better able to handle this stuff or more trivializing is the zimmerman trial outcome which as of now i think has to be partly the good news is it the reaction has not been as worse as i imagine it to be it might have been should is there is there is that a good sign or a bad sign? Well, if it's got to be a good sign, I mean, I live in a bubble. I ride the train from suburban Connecticut to Grand Central Station and I walk underground for about 150 yards and then I ride an elevator up into an air conditioned office. So I understand that there have been some demonstrations. It's like a sci-fi movie. But no one's getting hurt, and that can only be a good thing

because it certainly is the kind of event that frequently leads to people getting hurt. Matt, Peter Robinson here. You mentioned that you're a right winger which is i mean even people some people who post on ricochet such as rob would never describe himself quite as a right winger right of center is what rob says but you come right out i feel i bring people together on big time okay so you come right out with it right right? And yet if we were to look at your background, intensely Irish, intensely Irish Catholic. Severely Irish, please. Severely.

Yes, exactly. Mitt Romney was governed as a severe conservative. You were raised as a severe Irish Catholic and self-confessed as a poet and a man of ideas and a man who has trouble with numbers. So you're an Irish dreamer. What are you doing as a right-winger? Explain yourself, Mr. Hennessy. Well, I certainly never said I was a poet, but I wasn't always a right-winger. I'm – nobody uses this phrase very much anymore, but I think

of it in relation to my own politics. I'm what used to be called a 9-11 conservative. Before that terrible day, and I can literally trace it to the day, I was kind of

I wasn't apolitical, but if anything, I was just a sort of – my leanings were to the left. I was raised in a household of very typical Irish Catholic Democrats. But my whole – literally my whole world, and I hate to use the word literally like that, but my whole world was – my whole worldview was turned around in an instant because I – it just so happened that Ursula and I could see the smoke from the building. And it just, literally there's, you know, people describe these experiences. It was like nothing after that moment was the same. And so, yeah, I'm a right winger. I remember what it was like to be sort of, I think David Mamet calls it a brain dead

liberal, just someone who didn't think very much and just sort of accepted platitudes uncritically. So that – all right. So you become a kind of George W. Bush conservative I guess would be one way – as distinct from somebody of my generation who was a Reagan conservative. But that doesn't quite explain the cultural positions you've taken in writing about raising children in contemporary America, right? Well, I'm an outlier in my family just to sort of sew up that thread. And that's not a thread that's easily sewn up, but I'll just leave it at that. The other big event in my life that influenced my worldview, I don't know how interested everyone is in all of this, but my daughter was now seven. Go ahead. When you get boring, Matt, we'll cut you off. Don't worry about that.

If I feel like I'm getting boring, I'll do some of that Irish poetry that I'm so famous for. Yeah, that'll work. My daughter Magdalena, who's now seven, who is our second child, was born in 2006. And when she was not yet born, the doctors informed us that she would have and has Down syndrome. And after my oldest daughter was born, I was raised a Catholic, although not terribly Catholic. When my oldest child was born, Ursula and I started going back to church. I don't want to rat out Ursula here. And sort of as happens when you have a child, the universe opened up a little bit to me, and I started to think about, you know, the big questions. But then when we learned about Magdalena's Down Syndrome, that sort of, that opened up another universe in my mind. And that

sort of, people think that there was a decision to be made. But for me, the decision to be made was whether I was going to become a thing that quite honestly, the old me would have despised. I'll say the young me, not the old me, which was a, you know, a sort of an out and proud pro-life Catholic. But, you know, turns out that there's a lot of us, thankfully. So, so here's – that leads on to all kinds – obviously, you're touching on huge questions there, sin, redemption, the meaning of life, and you've got them sorted out in one way. But it also leads on to all kinds of smaller questions. Here's where I'm going with this. I, too, am a father, although I'm a little older and my kids are older than yours. And I keep coming up against

this question, frankly, for me in the last couple of weeks, it was gay marriage in that I've known it. There is a question coming here, not just a big, long, windy speech, but I've known it in a kind of peripheral way. But now I really feel it that whereas when I was a kid, my parents, but really hostile and dangerous. And I feel, really feel that the job of being a father in America today is much more complicated, but in some ways, possibly much more important. So, Matt, do you feel that? And how do you, okay, you said you're a catholic how do you raise your children in a

in a world that is in many ways post-christian post-judeo-christian becoming more secular all the time am i on to something is do you feel it too well you're on to my my my deepest fears i mean this is like i thought we were going to be rob rob will step in at any moment to lighten this up i can just see him right now. He's looking at his watch. A few more seconds. Let these two lunatics go. Go ahead.

If Rob wants to answer first, that's fine. I just fret about it all the time. Ursula and I, for one thing, I feel terribly underqualified to even be raising. I don't even believe that. I can't even believe that I can't even believe that they let me drive sometimes. Like I don't, now that I have four children under my care is, is, is really, um, it, it weighs heavily on me. I think it weighs heavily on all parents, but the questions that you're asking are, are like the big ones. I, we're making it up as we go along

and we're doing the best that we can. I think that's all that anyone can do. The, the, you know, you're right. And I feel, I feel as you do that, the,

that the culture has changed dramatically. And I'm, you know, I, I'm going to be 40 this year. And, uh, even in 20 years, I, I, it's almost like a world that doesn't resemble the one

that I grew up in. So I'm not entirely sure I know how to equip my kids with the tools they're going to need to navigate this world. But isn't that the old story? Isn't that what becoming a parent is all about? I think that it is. It's just the challenges are different. Now, the big thing that we do, which really marks us as crazy right-wing Catholics, is that we

homeschool some of our kids. We don't homeschool Magdalena, which is another big and confusing question. Um, uh, but the homeschooling has been a, has been a, it's been a real eye opener to me because the younger me would have thought that, um, never would have imagined that we would have, uh, had the guts to try a thing like that. Um, I say we have the guts, Ursula does, carries most of the load, so I shouldn't try to take credit for it. But it's an option that's available to people, and it's not nearly as difficult as people who are concerned about the kinds of things that you were just discussing. It's not nearly as impossible to do as it seems. No, I think that's the way it used to be done. I would say to Peter and maybe even to you, Matt, that as a secular person, that may be a good thing. It may not – it may be a good thing that there's a little bit more – and I'll say this.

I'm not a parent. You raise your kids now with a little bit more wariness and a little bit more armor as they go out and face a culture that is probably at the very least ambivalent about – or neutral about their principles. That's probably a good idea and a good idea for us to sort of look at the – what we used to think of as institutions we'd have to worry about like public schools with a lot more of a critical eye. I mean I've noticed just among the people that – so my contemporaries who are raising kids, there's a lot more – even from the liberals. Rob is everybody's favorite godfather for children. So an increased amount of skepticism, not even – not just about higher education, which is now I think is an epidemic among parents that are my age whose children are now within range of college. They're starting to look at this proposition and think to themselves, good lord. Is this really worth it? I've noticed the skepticism about secondary education. Like, well, homeschooling, all that stuff, that might be the way to go.

That might be something more. We might need to rethink this and might need to rethink the way we educate our children. And that's a good sign. I don't think it's a bad sign. Well, if anybody read that article over the weekend in the New York Times about the hookup culture on campus and what the young women have to deal with. I mean I am extending an invitation to my kids now to live with their parents for all time. I honestly don't know. I can't handle that. I'm not going to be able to. I'm going to be a very nervous person when my kids go off to college.

But I think that parents who – this generation of parents who remember college from their – remember co-education college at a time of enormous prosperity, meaning the 80s or late 70s, 80s. They do not remember college as a time of great intellectual uh um development they remember it as a time of four years of partying which is something that the culture's managed to convince us is a good thing to do but at a certain point it reaches a price and every parent i know parents i know went to college with are thinking themselves are you kidding me? $500,000, whatever it is, right, or a lifetime of student debt just so you can do that? Why don't you take some online classes and go to DeVry and get a job and then you can go – you can take some French literature classes at night if you want.

Yeah, I grant every bit of that, but I maybe disagree a little. It's not just partying. Suppose you slap your kid into studying and what is this kid going to study? In fancy schools, I will name one at random. Let's say just for example, Yale, which Rob knows in detail. So Yale is an example. Yale, everybody at Yale is supremely intelligent. The faculty is credentialed in every conceivable way. And even mighty mother Yale no longer has the fortitude to say in any rigorous way, here are the things you really need to study. We know better than you because we are faculty and you are 18-year-olds. Here is the Western canon. You need to know where you stand in human history. You need to understand what people who've gone before you consider truly great and meaningful works of all gone. You can still find that at a great university such as Yale in the curriculum, but now the kids are just tossed onto the beach in the attitude

of beachcombers and told, go pick up the interesting shells. And by the way, there's gender studies, there's ethnic confusion, there's the, oh, there's Shakespeare, and they're just left to kind of assemble this for themselves on the beach. And that, coupled with a partying culture, coupled with a prevailing air of political correctness and aggressive – even now, even – I keep thinking these things are generational and at a certain stage, the faculty of the 60s will go into retirement. It seems not to be the case. There's an immense amount of self-selection. So the culture is broadly speaking anti-American or skeptical of the American tradition, broadly speaking anti-Judeo-Christian.

And you're going to – so you end up, if you're one of these parents, as I'm sure Matt and Ursula are, who are superb parents. They take the school. And by some miracle, the child does the work and is bright enough to get into a yale you spend all that money and the best you can hope is that it doesn't do the child much damage it certainly won't get him a job we know that it's mad anyway right you got someone what you don't want to do is you don't want to that that first – the first Thanksgiving your kid comes home from freshman year, while his mouth is filled with your food, you get to hear him lecture you about the failure of the American experiment. Right. That he just learned in some idiotic class. Right.

So Matt, what do you think your kids need to know? Like if you're going to homeschool kids up to like the time they go to college, what would the Hennessy curriculum be? What they need to know – I have two answers to that question. I want them to know everything that there is to know about American history. Everything else to me is secondary. It's not secondary to Ursula and thankfully she's taking care of all the rest of it. And then the other thing I want them to know is some, it's like the stuff that Ursula and I don't know and which really would come in handy. And I'm talking about like sewing buttons on shirts and like what to do with this faucet in my kitchen that the water is coming out of the wrong part of it.

Like for some reason – and I don't want to be too hard on my own parents but I will be hard on their generation. A lot of that stuff didn't get passed along and I think it's a real shame because I can't fix a thing in our house. Ursula can't cook. I barely know how to tie a tie. You know, something went wrong there. Something went south when the baton was being handed from the baby boom generation

to my generation because I feel a little bit under-equipped to – I've already said I feel unqualified to be a parent. But it's just a lot of stuff kids ask me and I just – like let's go look it up. So Matt, you just – you've got to run I know. But you just said something that sort of to me one of the underlying questions here is to what extent to parents today – my kids are baked. I've got three in college.

You mean – just to clarify the jargon here, Peter. What you mean is your kids are fully mature that you're – Well, I still have – what I mean is it's too late. Whatever I should have done is too late. Don't ruin it, Rob. I won't ruin it. I won't ruin it. Go ahead. Did I just use something that has a double meaning of ruin it, Rob. I won't ruin it. I won't ruin it. Go ahead.

Did I just use something that has a double meaning of which I'm completely unaware? Yes, you did. Yes, you did, Grandpa. But go ahead. Sorry. Sorry. That should be the title. That is the title of this podcast.

It's all cool, man. Yeah, it's all good, bro. Wait a minute. Matt's supposed to be my friend. What is it that you two of you are ganging up on me? Just keep going. So the question, which I'm now scrambling to try to remember, what was in my increasingly porous brain?

Yeah. So it's interesting to me that you want your kids to know a lot about American history. In other words, your impulse is not to withdraw from American life. Your impulse is not to become the Hennessy Brigade in Southern Connecticut and sort of withdraw from politics and American life and teach your kids to keep to themselves. You feel no impulse to become Amish, let's say. You want them to participate in American life. You still feel it's their country, which I think is – I mean it's very commendable. But I could easily see people reasonably drawing the other conclusion. This country has had it.

We need to teach our kids to take care of themselves like medieval or Renaissance Italy where family was everything because the wider society was untrustworthy and in some ways predatory. Matthew? Well, yeah yeah don't worry rob will think rob i promise he'll figure out a way to get out of this on a high note go ahead he will end this on a laugh i promise this is what i want to say about italy and family is everything family is everything but one of the great – I've always felt that one of the great American mistakes is this thing that we all grew up with where we're from a place – so my dad and I went to the same high school. He went in the 50s and I went in the 80s. But it was the same high school. We were rooted in that place. Almost everyone that I know and almost all of my brothers and sisters hit 18 and then bought the first ticket out. I have friends who are from Europe and they tell me stories about how their brothers and sisters lived in their

parents' house until the day they got married, which seems eminently more reasonable to me, not to mention more economical. Kids growing up in New Jersey want to go to college at Arizona State. They want to immediately sever all ties to the things that they knew and the things that they grew up with to reinvent themselves, which is an American thing. But it comes with a price. Now, I say this as someone who does not live in the town where he grew up and is raising his children.

Like, you know, sometimes it feels like we're on an island because we've only moved to this place three years ago and we've somewhere else in San Francisco or Florida or something in order to have some sort of individual identity. So if I could somehow convince my kids, I said earlier they could live with me forever, and that's true. I probably would prefer they didn't. I would rather that they didn't become 17 or 18 years old and then decide that they wanted nothing more than to hit the bricks as quickly as possible. I don't know what your question was. You might have to wait for them to be fully baked before that. OK.

OK. OK. Excuse me. You have to handle the rest of the podcast because I'm leaving to ask somebody. Yeah, you got to go to the UrbanDictionary.com. Go right ahead, Peter, and report back what you discover. Hey, Matt, thanks for being on. It was great to talk to you.

And as always, we're big fans of yours at Ricochet and big fans of your wife, Ursula. Ursula is one of our founding editors. So we're always glad to hear from you guys. And we do not hear from you enough. That's what I mean. Well, thank you. Before you hustle me off, I just want to say this is truly a strange and wonderful honor to be on here because I have been listening to the Ricochet podcast since the very first episode. And it is a fully – Yes.

It's no joke. It's a fully – well, the inauguration of the Ricochet podcast sort of coincided with our move to the suburbs. So I spent a lot of time on trains. And so I have a lot of time to listen. But I can't say with certainty that I've listened to absolutely every single one. But this is truly an exciting day for me. So thank you. Well, let's hope for the first of many.

Long may you roam. Well, thank you. And long may you appear. Okay. So you've listened to us since the beginning now i too am beginning to wonder why they permit you to drive a car matthew that's right well it's on the train he's on the train stay with the train stay with the train you can't hurt yourself there matthew thank you thank you thank you peter thank you can't

can't wait to have you back can't wait to see your next post. Okay. I'm working on it. Take care. I know. We have – our next guest is a big treat for me. By the way, can I just say, first of all, Matt's everything that we knew he – which is thoughtful and funny and wonderful. What I was not expecting was for him to become your ally within about ten seconds. Well, I just want to – I thought I'd have – for once I'd have somebody with me on one of these things. I just was imagining these two people who are – Ursula and Matthew.

They sound – they're so smart and articulate and when they talk, they're so – they write so beautifully and I just loved the idea that the mornings in their house are just chaotic because you can't tie a tie and she can't make breakfast and things are breaking and they don't know how to fix them. It makes me think this is too intellectual, too smart people completely baffled by the real world. It's a pretty funny idea.

All right. We have to go to our next guest because I'm kind of super excited and freaked out a little bit. Our next guest is a guy named Joe Flaherty. And if you were a fan of SCTV, which was Second City Television, in the early days of it, when it appeared after Saturday Night Live, and then later on when it appeared sort of

co-terminus with it, I think at a certain point, you'll know exactly who this is. We have to shout out Ricochet member Pseudoionysus for seeing a guy, a Ricochet member named Joe Flaherty and saying, hey, are you Joe Flaherty from SCTV? And then it turned out he was. That was pretty much the limit and the extent of the investigation. But he is one of the funniest people around and was part of a legendary group. Yeah. And once again, proving that Hollywood is not monolithically filled with left-wing robots. Please welcome SCTV founding member and Ricochet member Joe Flaherty. Joe, how are you? Oh, I'm just fine, Rob. Just fine.

Now, you have no idea how weird it is to hear your voice so indelibly etched in my head uh i i i i said to our our producer i said i don't think it's really him i think it's somebody uh this is a prank but the minute i heard you just two seconds ago i know oh my god that's that's i mean i hate to say that's guy caballero that's that's well all right. So so now let's get the politics out of out of the way. OK, where where where are you on this? You know, I'm I'm a total rhino squish center right, you know, basically enemy of the state. But where where where where are you? How did you get there? How did I get um uh it started back when i was at second city in chicago and uh it just um i found myself just doing scenes pandering to the left more left

more or less you know uh we would just uh the audience would just sit there sort of you know reflexively waiting for us to do a crack a joke about nixon right and uh the whole thing with nixon and watergate i i thought i thought what the heck you know that they they're acting as those this guy was like hitler or something you know um the way they would uh oh god they were going after him constantly. I mean it just – to me, it didn't make sense. I just thought, well, what did a guy do that was this horrible that you're always talking to him, talking about him like this? And so that's what started. I just thought, boy, I don't know.

It looks like they're a little unhinged somehow on the left. So did you go – were you – I mean a lot of your fellow early SCTV members were Canadian. Are you Canadian originally or are you Chicagoan? No, I'm actually from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh? Yeah. And I can give you a quick bio if you want. Yeah.

All right. How did you get to Chicago? Well, here's my story. When I was 17, I went to the Air Force. I was in the Air Force for four years. Then when I came out, I was just looking around for, you know, what kind of – what did I want to do? And I tried acting, taking acting lessons. And I liked that.

So I went off to New york and i studied acting uh the method of course uh what everybody did back then uh oh um and then um i um came back to pittsburgh i worked at the pittsburgh playhouse um i sent a letter to somebody that worked at the playhouse with me uh mike miller and um i i said do you know of any acting jobs uh and he said no i don't have any acting jobs but i've got i need a stage manager uh here i'm working at this place called second city and um i i had heard of it so i thought oh this is okay yeah yeah he says do you know anything about lighting and I said yes I do yes you do you lied that's right yes

like every actor when you go in you know can you ride a horse oh yeah kidding me absolutely I speak French too so I went to Chicago I got into the cast I loved it I loved doing that show improvising

and doing sketches you know and and it was a delight I could have stayed there for years I did stay there for years

I was there four and a half years I think and one day Bernie the producer came in and said we're opening a theater in Toronto

up in Canada any volunteers to go up there and nobody seemed that interested except me and Brian Murray a theater in Toronto up in Canada. Any volunteers to go up there? And nobody seemed that interested except me and Brian Murray, who's known as Brian Doyle Murray now. Now, just to, I don't mean to interrupt you, but Brian Doyle Murray is one of the stars of the show that I'm doing right now, Sullivan and Son.

That's right, yes. I just spent, although I was in the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday night as we wrapped with Brian Doyle Murray, so I know him well. This is the morning on Tuesday night as we rapped with Brian Dorel Murray so I know him well, it's the second series I've done with him very funny guy oh yeah, I love Brian, love him he's got that voice, you know

in fact, I remember talking to him we had a lunch not too long ago and I said to him I said what's that producer like, Rob Long? He said, oh, he's okay. He's a good guy.

He's a Republican, I guess. But he didn't have anything bad to say about you, so I thought, oh, good. No, he thought that was the bad thing. Yeah, well, yes. He would put up with that though you know he's now he was sort of mystified i like a lot of them are you know like how that how can anybody go in that direction so uh um then i went up to i went up to toronto with brian to uh and uh dell close um uh people in improv proff know him He's like a god. But we went up there to cast.

And I always tell people about that casting session. We went up and I thought, is there anybody in Canada that can do this kind of work, this improvisational work? And so we had auditions. And the first day of auditions, in came Gilda Radner, Danny Aykroyd, John Candy, Eugene Levy. It was amazing. And I think Marty Martin Short was there, too. Came in.

It was. Yeah. And and they were so good. I was blown away. You know, I thought, wow. I think we struck us gold here. You know, I thought, wow, I think we struck us gold here. You know, we hit the mother load. Yeah.

Because they were good. I'm telling you. Dan Aykroyd is brilliant. He was absolutely brilliant. And they were all great. You know, Gilda was so much fun. And John Candy, you know, he was just a kid then. He was just a young kid.

And he was funny. We loved. He was just a young kid. And he was funny. We loved him. And so that's it. We got that company together up there. And, well, you know, as the years went on, in Chicago, by the way, at the time, I was working with John Belushi. He was in my company and Harold Ramis. So, yeah, right around that time, there was an –

Just for people who are listening, you just mentioned – the names you just mentioned are some of the most influential comedy names, performers, writers, directors of the past 30 years. I mean these are people that if you're my generation younger, older, really shaped what you think is funny, what you think is good, what you think is smart, what you think – what you aspire to, what your benchmark is for something. Those are all the kinds of people that you thought, okay, they've set the standard. It's almost like, you know, that's the Justice League right there. Those are the superheroes. And you're just trying to kind of, like,

and on the stuff that you guys did on that show, people remember and imitate. I mean, I don't think I've ever been in a room of writers in the 23 years I've been doing this and not at least once a week had somebody you know doing you know Guy Cavallaro.

Joe, it's Peter Robinson on here. I'm keeping quiet because I don't know the business the way Rob does but I can certainly obviously attest to what Rob said but when I was in college and discovered you guys and, and as Saturday Night Live, the other thing about it was that it seemed new. It seemed there,

nobody was doing what you guys were doing. You were inventing something completely new. It was just, it was not only funny, it was exciting. It was. And the interesting thing is half of the people from Second City in Chicago and Toronto that I'd work with went to Saturday Night Live. You know, Gilda and Dan, Dan Aykroyd. And then later, Billy Murray, Bill Murray, who's Brian Murray's younger brother. They went to Saturday Night Live. We eventually did SCTV. So it was a great time. It was like an explosion of talent. Toronto, especially at that time, around 1973 when we went there,

it was just a great city to be in. It was just coming into its own, you know. Because up until then, when we went to go up there, you know, I never even knew too much about Toronto. I'd heard of Montreal, but I didn't know much about Toronto. But Toronto, when we were up there, just as I say, exploded creatively, you know, there was all sorts of things going on. It was a very exciting time to be there and so yeah we had people down there down in uh um new york doing saturday night live and then a year or so later are in order to keep us uh from going to saturday night live uh from second city they they got a tv show for us this is that smart yeah

yeah great show by the way they said we got you a half hour on Global to network there on the Global Network. And I said, oh, the Global Network. Then I found out the Global Network consisted of like four cities in Ontario. That's on the Globe. Yeah. I find those on the globe that's about it so we got a break for one second and i want to come back to what it was like to be uh in in that comedy troupe and to be saying every now and then hey you know uh have any of you guys checked out uh governor reagan but

this podcast is uh sponsored by audible uh books.com. You get a free audiobook of your choice and a 30-day free trial, over 100,000 titles on virtually every genre. Also, the incredible whisper sync technology that syncs your Kindle to your audio device. You got to use it to believe it. Audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet for your free title. My pick would be, since we're on the line right now with Joe Flaherty, there's kind of an oral history of the best of Second City that's got a bunch of narrators. The narrators you'll know, Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell and a bunch of other people.

And it's audible. It's pretty good. I have it in the hardback, so the other stuff, the audio will be fantastic. And if you're interested in that as like a little bit of comedy history, I would check it out, The Best Second City. Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet to get that. So back to Joe. Sure. So at what point do they discover, hey, Flaherty's a kook?

You know, I never broadcast my political views, unlike a lot of my colleagues on the left. You know, I just wasn't into that at all. In your face, you know, all of a sudden just bursting out into some, you know, political tirade against the left. I never did that. And as a matter of fact, and I never told anybody this while we were doing the show, but I tried to keep the show, SCTV, as apolitical as we could. I just steered us away from political scenes. Whenever they'd come in, the writers would say,

how about this? Let's get somebody, you know, who was that guy? The guy from the CIA. Who was the guy from the CIA, from Nixon? Gordon Liddy, yeah. Gordon Liddy, right, right. That's just Gordon Liddy's seat. And, you know, I'd say yes.

I'd read it and I'd say, I don't think that's that good. So I try to keep, as I say, you know, I didn't want to push my right wing politics on, even though I wasn't totally, you know, conservative at that point. I was certainly leaning in that direction. But, you know, I never liked that. And, you know, they love it on the left. They love just announcing, you know, their, on the left they love just announcing you know their oh yeah their political views and then so yeah i try to keep ap uh sctv as apolitical and if you watch the shows you'll see that uh you know rarely do we venture in that into that also i thought it's

sort of um you know it sort of dated the show too you know going totally right yeah i mean you watch those shows now. They're still funny. You don't really – it doesn't really matter when they were made. You don't really ever think about that. It's just funny stuff. It just remains funny. And when it's all that political stuff, sometimes you just think like in three weeks, this is going to smell.

In two months, it's going to be like that carton of milk you have in the refrigerator you forgot about that comes out looks like cottage cheese right it's not yeah totally hey joe and rob peter peter here a question for both of you so i remember watching uh some youtube thing watching an old dick i love groucho marx yes i found some old youtube interviews with dick cavett and groucho marx made the point that he never worked blue because it was too easy. It was beneath him as a comedian. Now, I've read enough memoirs to know that in private, Groucho Marx had a filthy sense of humor, but he never worked that way. And I'm wondering if political humor is almost the same category, that jokes dominate. The business is dominated by people on the left. The writer's rooms are dominated by people on the left. And that if to the two of you

taking a crack at Richard Nixon during the seventies or a crack at Ronald Reagan during the eighties was in some ways just too easy, not funny enough. Exactly. I consider them almost cheap shots. We had Reagan on our show. We got a film clip of him. I was doing Guy Caballero. We were doing some award show parody. Oh, right. I think that's right. As guys, you people seem to have an immense capacity of appetite for these kind of shows. And so we're having our own SCTV award show. And then we cut to this film clip of Reagan and the audience laughing. Right. So whenever we do something we thought was funny, we'd cut to this clip of Reagan laughing in the audience. That was the closest.

It was the People's Golden Global Choice Awards. Perfect. That's what it was. It was very, very funny. You guys were the first people doing this kind of smarter, hipper kind of inside making fun of

the idea of television, that you're sort of slightly hipper than what's on Saturday Night Live. You're kind of beyond it, past it, which I thought was just always hit your funny bone. People remember the sketches you guys did more indelibly than they remember the stuff on Saturday Night Live because it felt more sneaky and um subversive which i think was like that's what made it so special i mean so all right so so then so now

what are you up to now no i'm uh i'm pretty much retired to be honest i'm taking it easy you sit there you're on your watch you watch fox news and you uh and you you make comments on Ricochet, right? That's good. I don't watch Fox News. I don't know why. There's just something about it that just... But I used to. That thing, when it came on, I was so happy to see an

alternative voice. Yeah, Ricochet, I'm kind of addicted to that. Yeah, I've got my TV and I've got my computer. I have a gig coming up, and this sounds almost like a joke. In fact, I think Chris Guest used this almost exact thing as a joke in one of his movies. My gig coming up is in Fort Edmonton up in Edmonton, Canada I'm going to be working with this improvisational group up there

they call themselves Dynasty very good Fort Edmonton that does sound like from waiting for Guffman or something exactly so these days what do you what do you these days what do you think is funny um i you know what i i discovered years and years later uh i discovered seinfeld like you know 15 years after it was off the off the air i started watching seinfeld

episodes uh and I like those. I think they're funny. In fact, I was doing a pilot for CBS over at Castle Rock, and Chris Guest and I were working on – no, it was actually a movie we were writing. And the offices right next to mine was Jerry Seinfeld. And they were working on something. Him and Larry... What's Larry's last name?

Larry David. Larry David. They were working on something there. I'm going to walk by every once in a while. How's it going, guys? Okay, I guess. That's right. They had a short order. They got three episodes from nbc then they got six episodes and nbc

kept telling them how much they hated the show oh yeah it was they they were rough yeah and uh i also watch family guy uh now that's's crazed, you know. But he's got a great sense of comedy. The jokes are really good on that show. They are. They're mean, but they're good. Yeah, yeah. And I've actually done a couple of the, he's had me in a few times to do things.

Yeah. So, but he's, the guy's sharp. He's, he's really good. And I wish the hell, you know, he wouldn't, he wouldn't go into the political stuff and the anti-religious stuff so much. He just, you know, too much, but, but it's worth, I just, now I just, I'll switch to another channel or I'll turn down the sound when I see one of those – when the direction they're going and I'll come back to watch the actual funny jokes. Well, that's what people do, don't you think? You just kind of pick and choose and you're just going to – well, these are the unfunny jokes.

Yeah. And then you kind of have to – it's the tax you pay in a way to get to the funny stuff but i feel the same way you just wish why did you you know really you're gonna make a make a dick chain meat joke in 2013 come on yeah yeah which is what they do you know i love it it's a you know truth to power well truth to former power yeah truth you guys sitting at home you know truth to power how about the truth of the guy sitting in the white house right now oh no no no no you can't do that so okay before we let you go i gotta ask you this how did you find ricochet like how did you find us you know i'm trying to

remember uh maybe it was from nro uh It may have been from that. Somebody had something on there. Was it maybe a common knowledge I watched? I can't remember exactly, but I did stumble upon it. I saw it, and I thought, well, this is interesting. This is one of those sites where you can post, the people can post on it, and it's civil. It's very civil. These comments don't turn into these

Yeah, that's what we're hoping. These dogfights, you know, or shark frenzies that happen so often on those places. You know, the comment section, anyway. No, they're really good and interesting, and there's a wide variety of stuff on there.

I just thought, this is great. And of course, the podcast, which I really like. interesting, and there's a wide variety of stuff on there. I just thought this is great. And, of course, the podcast, which I really like. I really got addicted to the podcast. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I really like you guys. And I was kind of disappointed James isn't there. Oh, sorry.

That's all right. I wanted to talk to him about 100 Mysteries. That thing he did, those 100 movies he promised he'd watch, and he did. He watched 100 of these really low-budget public domain movies. Oh, that's right. Yeah. And I watched some of them, too. It was interesting to sort of compare notes.

But, Peter, I got a question. Yes, John. I was crestfallen once i was listening one of the episodes and and you talked about um when you were writing for ronald reagan jimmy stewart was came in and he was there and you said something to him you said you introduced yourself and said something about you wrote the speech right right And he was kind of cold toward you. Oh, he wasn't. This was at a, it was the year that he won the Kennedy Center Honor Award. They still do that, five people a year. Yeah. And I always volunteered. They would meet and there would be a big reception in the White

House. And then the president would offer remarks about each of the five honorees. And none of the other speechwriters wanted to write those remarks because they had nothing to do with politics or policy or the nothing. It was just Hollywood in the old days, basically. Well, there's nothing I loved more. So I always volunteered to write those remarks because the writer could always go to the reception. All right.

And so I met I met Lucille Ball at one of these receptions. I chatted with her. Tough broad. She said, oh, you're a speechwriter. Yeah, my friend Bob Montgomery used to help Eisenhower with his speeches. With her, it was just immediately professional. And Jimmy Stewart, I watched him. I mean I just thought Jimmy Stewart was the greatest, brilliant actor, but also a great American.

You know, he flew any number of bomber missions over Europe during the Second World War when a lot of big big timers in Hollywood sat that war out. I just thought he was a and I finally worked up the courage to go speak to him. And I went through this and said, Mr. Stewartart but he was by this time he was really kind of old and really quite frail and he was trying to take in who i was and i explained and i fact i wrote the speech i did this big lead up and then jimmy stewart spoke to me and he said oh and then his wife gloria came up and took him by the hand and said come on jim we're doing the east room and let him away and that was the end of on, Jim. We're doing the East Room and led him away. And that was the end of my – that was my life with Jimmy Stewart.

He wasn't cold. He was just an old man. He was just a sweet old man. He was old. It's fair. Exactly. But while you've got me, I'll do my other – there was a – when I did the one for Frank Sinatra, I found – this was the days before Wikipedia. So any little research nugget that you found was just gold.

And I put in the speech. So the president gives the speech and said, Frank Sinatra's first gig was singing in a saloon in Hoboken where he worked for $5 a week. Pause. And the president said, let me repeat that. Our friend Frank Sinatra once worked for $5 a week and everybody in the room broke up. And after the event, again, I worked up my courage and I walked up and I introduced myself to Frank Sinatra, told him I'd written the speech. And he said, oh yeah? Well, that thing about working for $5 a week, that's true. I did work for $5 a week. And then he marched off. Okay. Hey, Joe. You treated it as a writer.

I can absolutely guarantee that we will have you back on when James is here. Okay. Rob will speak to you as one professional and as another, but I'm just a fan. And I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to learn that in some small way, through Ricochet, we're giving back to you a little bit of the pleasure that you gave to so many of us. It's just wonderful.

Yeah, it's great. I'm happy about that. And so, please tell me that the Fort Edmonton gig is more than $5 a week. There's no pay. It's gratis. Oh, my Lord. Yes. Listen, Joe, we got to talk offline.

You're making everybody look bad. This is not what we do in show business. We got a rice bowl to fill. Yeah, I wouldn't mind. I love the show. I love when Jonah comes on. I like Jonah Goldberg a lot. I think he's a bright guy, really.

But everybody, too. I was going to say Norman Padoras, but John Padoras, too. Yes. And so that's great. Listen, real quick, you guys, if I ever go on one of those NRO cruises, do they have a stage there? Would you guys like to do an improv thing with us? Get us on stage. I sort of have this thing figured out that we could do.

If you're there, I'll do it. Okay. Absolutely. If you're there, it'll happen. Okay, great. Listen, I'm going to be there in a couple weeks, so there's still room. Oh, it's that soon, huh? There'll be one in November, too, so this could be kind of cool.

Okay, all right. But, you know, this won't be $5 a week. Let's be honest. We've got to talk before. We've got to package this properly, Joe. I'm worried about your negotiation skills we're conservatives right it's a free market and the emphasis on on market not on the free okay hey joe it's so great to meet you um over the skype and and uh and and we'll i mean from now on i'll i'll know who – that Joe Flaherty, a Ricochet member, is Joe Flaherty, star of SCTV and comedy legend.

And I look forward to meeting you in person. Okay. All right. Sounds good. Yeah. Take care, Jeff. Yeah. I'll see if I can try to get in for that last show.

You have one left, right? Oh, for Sullivan and Son? Yeah, Sullivan. No, we wrapped on Tuesday. That was – oh, okay. I wanted to come in and see it. I talked to Brian about it because he said I should because the guy is from Pittsburgh. It's the lead on the show.

Oh, yeah. They're all from Pittsburgh and we had a bunch of – but you know what? Look, we're – fingers crossed for a third season. So when we do, we'll let you know. Okay, good. We'll come back. Okay, guys. Take care.

Take care. What a pleasure. Fun. It's like impossible to describe. That's he just like this is a guy I could, you know, everybody imitates. Everybody does versions of the characters he did. You know, he's a guy Caballero and Sammy Maudlin, all those people. He's a super, I mean, a legend.

And what's amazing to me is that it went to Nixon. You know, we were talking about talking to Matt Hennessey and it went to 9-11, like that moment where you think, what on earth? But what's interesting about Joe Flaherty is that he's talking about Nixon. And so he went through the 70s and the 80s kind of dissenting probably quietly. They all probably knew. They all always do know. Before we keep going, I got to remind everybody that this is the Ricochet Podcast. We are sponsored by Tonks Coffee.

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I know, Rob, because you're a connoisseur that grinding beans is old news to you. But I had to ask Blue Yeti, they've sent me beans. What do I do? Go online, go to Amazon, buy a grinder. I bought a grinder. Now what do I do? Buy a press.

I bought a, it's sort of fun to grind these things up and swish them through that French press. You just, you know, you grind the beans and dump them in the French press and pour it in boiling water and then wait three minutes. I mean, it could not really be easier. Okay, so for you, it's easy.

For me, it's the absolute pinnacle of my. Okay. So for you, it's easy for me. It's the absolute pinnacle of my Q and a achievement. So far, that's fair. It's a, it's a new accomplishment. It makes me feel proud of myself. That's good.

You should pat yourself on the back. Now, people like me and Matt Hennessy who are, who are right, who are, who are competency challenged. Yes. Now,

before we continue, before we, before we sign off, um, we should just talk about briefly about a, uh, there was a was a long thread. It was in one of the Mara Kissel threads about immigration, and she posted something. And Mara Kissel is from Wall Street Journal, and we're doing a partnership with them, which I think is really great for everyone, especially for our members who now are being read and heard in the corridors of probably the most influential conservative opinion-making journal, right?

The Wall Street Journal, wouldn't you say, Peter? Absolutely. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. They're all Ricochet members who now have – you're not just writing letters to the editor. They're reading our conversations and they're posting and they're reading that. But I guess she posted something and it was a long thread and I didn't get to the whole thread this week or last week. But there was a certain misunderstanding or a certain sort of – I don't know what I would call it, a feeling we should just address with the idea that at a certain point, Mary stopped. She didn't respond to all the comments. There's over 100 comments.

And so there was a sense from some members that, hey, listen, hey, we're still here. We still got to – you got to stick around, and that didn't happen um and so i guess i guess i mean there's no nothing we can really say about that except that you know we it's hard to get these people who write for a living and certainly do a national daily um to stick around for that long um so i know what to say because it's happened to me yeah that i've that and i think it's happened to you at least a couple of times over those two or three years since we started Ricochet. The point is that Mary meant no harm or ill will. She was just busy. And it's happened to me that I've started a thread and people will disagree with me and – but disagree in an intelligent – and I just run out of time.

I've got other things that I have to do. So there's that – there is that problem that I ricochet but that's just human beings doing the best that they can. Yeah. I mean what we say to people, the Marys of the world is like a post and then stick around as long as you can to interact. Obviously, this is going to be harder because this particular issue is harder because let's be honest, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has a very

specific position on immigration, which many of our members and many of our contributors and me and Mickey Kaus, people like that, find insane or they don't like or they disagree with or they take a slight – have a slight objection to. Not to put a fine point on it. So there's just naturally going to be this sort of free-for-all, which is kind of fun and interesting. But it's also – the problem is that – Mary is a working journalist. She has deadlines. She has deliverables.

Yeah, it's math you know our members scale and there's only one Mary so she's only so much she can do so I don't think it was um I don't think it was a big I don't think it should have been a considered uh um we know we we still want to invite people to to to contribute to the extent that they can uh and if they if they sort of disappear or bail at some point, it isn't because of any real reason of that. And I guess there was also this sense that people who object to the immigration bill are – I don't know what. What's the word? Closed-minded. Closed-minded, yeah.

Well, that's what you say when people disagree with you, right? They're closed-minded. If they were open-minded, they would agree with you. That's something that the Wall Street Journal is going to have to articulate. It's interesting to see that because the editorial page and the editorial board is very smart and articulate and they are almost always right about conservative values and conservative economics certainly. In this case, they do seem to be out of step. I would agree with that. It has irritated a lot of people and frankly even me. By the way, I speak as someone who cannot get through the day without reading the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. I appear on it as often as I can.

Not only do I find it indispensable, the folks who write for that page are back of its hand to the people who disagree with it and suggest – saying the Republican Party, if they don't do something about immigration a long piece by Congressman Tom Cotton, which said in effect, I disagree with the journal and here's the way we're going to handle immigration in the house. We're not doing this comprehensive reform. We're going to take it step by step by step. We will enact small pieces of legislation that make sense. But any big comprehensive is just out of the question. And the journal ran that. So God bless them. What am I saying here?

I guess I'm saying that for once, with the greatest respect and friendship possible, I dissent from my friends at the journal and even go so far as to say that I think they got the tone a little bit wrong. But I'm talking about the editorial page of the journal. Mary Kissel is welcome back any, any, any time. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we also posted – it's just so funny to see her doing – I guess it's what they call WSJ Live and interviewing or reporting,

co-reporting with our own young Harry Graver. Did you see that? Yes, exactly. That was hilarious. One of your many – I don't know whether formally he's one of your godchildren. No, no. He's just a young guy. One of your many protégés.

Yeah, and he was a Ricochet intern for a summer or two, and it's just hilarious to see him there. That's the sign. Ricochet is – we're spreading our tentacles. But it will be interesting with the immigration bill, with the immigration issue to see establishment conservatives or whatever you want to call them. I don't know if establishment conservatives are right. But to see our side have to reconcile that because there is a there is a there's a disconnect between i got a call the day before yesterday from my friend this isn't as pompous as it sounds because we've known each other since we were in high school john hoven senator from north dakota who was on our podcast a couple of weeks ago sticking up for the senate bill and john called

and said explain the comments to me on Ricochet. What he – John called because he understands that Ricochet represents a kind of running focus group. If you pay attention to Ricochet, you can see what conservatives are thinking and he actually called – Yeah, and also the conservatives who are persuadable. Exactly. Conservatives who are thinking and debating with each other.

So it's not – you're not just trying to – yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. No, I'm just saying as – immigration is really hard because there are good arguments that can be put forward on both sides. And I'm not even sure there are only two sides. That's what makes it even more complicated. There are different ways of structuring legislation. One argument is, wait a minute, anybody who's here illegally has broken the law. Are we serious about enforcing the law or not? Another argument is, as Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles puts it,

we're all children of God. We owe compassion to people who want to come to the – all of this is true. It's complicated and it's difficult. And what I am proud of is that Ricochet is one place where by and large, 98 percent of the time, people are thinking this through in a civil manner and actually making progress. I have to say my own thinking about immigration has taken place reading and thinking through and writing on Ricochet. So Reagan – Well, me too. I mean I was a Wall Street Journal editorial board acolyte. I completely agreed with them and it was really Ricochet – reading the Ricochet comments and sort of sifting it all out that I began to think I forget who it was and I'm not

doing – whoever – whatever member posted this for the first time, at least I read it for the first time. It wasn't this week. It might have been – it could have been a year ago. He said that the problem with immigration reform – the problem with comprehensive immigration reform is that it's comprehensive when it doesn't have to be. It can simply be discrete steps that aren't really part of the same – solving the same issue. I couldn't agree more. Border security has nothing to do with immigration of people in – engineers from Europe and South Asia. They're completely irrelevant.

Border patrol – border security really has nothing to do with what we do with the current number of illegals and how they have to – how we have to either – what process we need to do to take them from where they are now to potential citizenship if that's what we want. I mean all sorts of things. These are not – these moving parts do not mesh. They don't have to. They're separate. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more.

That's where my own thinking is right now and it got to be my own thinking because of reading it at Ricochet and saying, wait a minute. This huge – why have such a huge bill? Let's break this down into pieces that we understand and do something reasonable when we're sure it's reasonable piece by piece. And I think everybody knows that when somebody is trying to build a complicated mousetrap, it's because somebody is getting cheated or lied to, right? Or tried to hoodwink, right? The more complicated something is, the more we're sure we're being tricked and I think that's exactly right. I mean I think that's exactly what's happening with this bill. By the way, one of the things that was really interesting to me – I mean John Hoeven and I are old friends but he's also a member of the United States Senate who put forward this amendment with Senator Corker of Tennessee, increasing border security.

Fine. And I said, John, you know what happened was that five days after you guys enacted that bill, President Obama unilaterally decided to delay the implementation of Obamacare on big companies. And you know what? A lot of people, including your old friend Peter Robinson, said, wait a minute. You can enact anything you want to with regard to enforcing the law at the border. But if the president of the United States gets to pick and choose what law – it's the question of trusting the government to live by the law. And John said, you know, that is exactly right.

That in some fundamental way, what's going on is not a question of border security, but the fundamental faith, the ability of the federal government to keep faith with the American people by abiding by the law. Right, right. This is not just a lot of noise. This is something that's really going to get done. And when you and when you when you when you telegraph to the American people who believe in something that what you're really doing is trying to get them to shut up. Right. You would you're telegraphing to them is the next words out of my mouth are designed to make you shut up and I'm really not going to do it. And that's then they say, OK, fine, then we're not going to believe you until you do it first. And they have every right to do that. And in fact, it's rational to do that.

So if – that's what I would say to people who are more sort of libertarian I guess about open borders or more Wall Street Journal-ish about open borders is that's fine except that you – that ground is now toxic. You can't – no one believes you. We need border security first and when that's happened – I suspect when that happens, half of the – or two-thirds of the opposition to immigration and even a more liberal immigration policy will evaporate because you've taken care of the one thing you need to take care of first. So – but we should say before we go any – you and I are just batting this back and forth. But Friday, this Friday at 11 a.m. Pacific, so that's 11 – that's what, 2 p.m.

Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, we're doing a special immigration podcast. So this is going to be super wonky. If you're interested in this, you're not going to – you will not get a more detailed conversation about immigration policy than you're going to get with Mickey Kaus who is obsessed with this, Mark Krikorian who is also obsessed with this, and Clint Bullock from the Goldwater Institute who's going to take kind of the more Wall Street Journalist side. So it's going to be kind of a fully rounded debate and I think it's going to be really illuminating. And I'm going to actually have to block off some time on Sunday to sort of sit and listen to it. I ran into Mickey in the – actually I ran into Mickey on the weekend on Saturday at around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I was sitting outside the In-N-Out Burger around the corner from me and Mickey also lives around the corner from me and mickey is also lives around the corner from me and he walked up and that's my sometimes my saturday afternoon ritual after i've done my errands is to um uh

is to like have an in and out burger and uh so mickey comes up and say hey mickey hey rob mickey how are you doing and you know small talk right how are you fine it's great what are you doing today blah all that's no hey mickey how are Not good. I think they're going to pass this immigration reform. The first thing out of his mouth. So Friday, 11 a.m., it's going to be a full conversation. And Clint Bollico should point out is a thorough conservative member of the Goldwater Institute. And he is the one who co-authored with Jeb Bush, the recent book on immigration. Ah, the title is escaping me and I can't seem to find it on Amazon right now, but it's, it's their book was effect. The book came out several months before

the Senate began work on the immigration reform, but it was fundamentally in favor of a comprehensive immigration reform. So you've got people who know this subject in great detail on both sides of it. I was about to say they're all conservative. That's not really true. Mark Kerkorian and Clint Bullock are conservative. They're on either side of the issue. And Mickey Kaus, whom I think would still be described overall as a liberal. He's a big government liberal.

Is against the immigration bill. Yeah. This will be interesting. Yeah, and what's interesting about it is that the little complicated world that Mickey Cass lives in inside his brain is interesting because he believes that an open border policy favors sort of a

low, a smaller government, low-wage universe. So the fat cat's life. And a good immigration policy favors a higher wage because you have to pay Americans, higher wage universe, and a larger – and sort of a big government policy. Mickey likes big government. So it's really interesting. I mean I don't quite know how to work it out myself, but it's really interesting. And he identifies the choice that people are making now and I think a choice that probably underlies some of the Wall Street Journal kind of version of things and some of the other versions of things.

So it's – I mean I'm looking forward to it. The title of the book, Immigration Wars, Forging an American Solution by Clint Bullock and Jeb Bush. And they've also written pieces on the Wall Street Journal, Jeb Bush and Clint Bullock, a Republican case for immigration and on and on it goes. Anyway, I just wanted to i mentioned clint bullock's bona fides and i wanted to give the title of the book cool done done robert peter this is a long one i know i know we've been having fun yeah we get that's i get that this is your money's worth um amazing to talk to joe flarity matt hemesee is always a pleasure. And Tonks Coffee – you can hear it in this plastic pouch they send you. I would shake mine, but I've ground it all.

Is that a mistake? You don't grind it all at the same time? Well, you can grind it all if you want. It comes in that zipper kind of vacuum-sealed pouch so that that's a place to store it when you grind it. It smells good. Go to Tonks.org, T-O-N-X.org slash ricochet. Get the best coffee on the planet delivered to your house every two weeks.

And again, thanks always to audible.com. Our podcast, one of our podcast sponsors who sign up for audible at audible podcast.com slash ricochet today. Get your free audio book. Next week, we're back with James Lilacs and Peter Robinson. And I'm Rob Long. We'll see you next book. Next week, we're back with James Lilacs and Peter Robinson.

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