The Ricochet Podcast - What's That Smell?

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Even with Rob out, we’re glad to celebrate a great week for democracy! Our guests this week are old friends of ours, Mark and Mollie Hemingway, and they’re here to take us through the irregularities of last November and why it doesn’t have to be nefarious, illegal or fraudulent to call it “Rigged!” Maybe somebody should write a book with that title. Well, maybe somebody has. (Rigged: How the Media... Source

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Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Hey there, this is Rob Long talking to you from the streets of New York City, inviting you to Tuesday night. That's this coming Tuesday, 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern, a conversation with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

You know him as our COVID guru. He knows it all. 8 p.m. Eastern, a conversation with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. You know him as our COVID guru. He knows it all. We're calling this No Dumb Question. Please join us Tuesday, 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern. Members only. If you're not a member, this is a perfect time to join. Rob Long, wherever you are, turn your clock back this weekend. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed.

I am not even first generation American. When I joined the Marine Corps, I was still a Jamaican. But this country had done so much for me. I was willing, willing to, but this country had done so much for me. I was willing, willing to die for this country. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. Rob Long's out. I'm James Lowentz. We've got the Hemingways, Mark and Molly, talking about the new book, Raked.

So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 569. How did we get this far? Well, because of, well, like they say on public radio, people like you, not necessarily you, but people like you who joined Ricochet and kept us going forward into the future. You can do so. You can be a person like you, if you're not already, by going to ricochet.com, signing up. It is a mere pittance. And what do you get in exchange for it? Well, you get access to the most stimulating conversations and community on the

web. Tired of Twitter, tired of Facebook. Aren't we all? Join and find new friends at Ricochet.com. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis. Peter Robinson is in sunny California. Rob Long, who knows? He's in the wind, as they say. And, you know, Peter was gone last week and it was me and Rob. I seem to be the anchor, the glue that's holding this whole thing together here, Peter.

In all kinds of ways, you certainly are, James. But I'll get out of the, you certainly are, James. But I'll get out of the way and ask you a question. Did we just see a fundamental shift in the electorate that's going to change the map in 2022? I always love after there's an election where everybody starts drawing all kinds of conclusions. But it does seem as if there are conclusions that we can draw from what we saw in Virginia, Minnesota, Seattle, elsewhere. We're going to be talking probably about Virginia or about yes,

Virginia, New Jersey with our guests to come. So let's look at some other stuff elsewhere. How do you see what happened and why? And given that everybody's had a take on this, that's quite stunningly obvious. It's up to you now to come up with something provocative and different uh james i'm sorry i missed that question because i'm monkeying around with new rig that scott gave me and for a second i hit a button by accident and

you went silent i did that too once brand new mics we have brand new mics by the way and i hit the mute button and spent 35 minutes trying to figure out how to get my thing back to go until i saw this little button and said okay oh fine all right so so i heard you say we'll talk about something else then you went blank and then i heard you say so it's up to you to say something interesting i'm sorry it's all i'll just repeat my question um everybody's everybody has the same take pretty much on what happened uh depending on what side they belong to the democrats are saying well this is just proof that the southern strategy is alive and well that if you run on racism you're going to win and the right is saying well i actually know there's a concatenation of issues out there that shows that the democratic party has moved a little bit too

far to the left they're sniffing their own fumes they're high in their own supply they don't realize that they're out of touch with what a lot of people want um so i'm saying that kind of is what the obvious thing is come up with something new and novel and different to shatter the paradigm of all the chattering heads well okay else i don't know that this shatters a paradigm but here are a few thoughts that occur to me and of course i want to hear what you have to say too james um the biden presidency the the Biden administration is essentially over. They have a majority of seven in the House. There are at least 20 or 30 House Democrats who suddenly are in a position to say, no, I'm not voting for that stuff because I'd like to keep my job in the next election in the senate 50 50 kirsten cinema comes from a state which is fairly evenly balanced but the conservatives in arizona are well organized um she's not going to move to the she's not she's in a stronger position now to say wait a minute joe manchin in west virginia they can both say uh majority leader schumer um you've been telling us from the beginning that

the democratic party was moving to the left that the country was moving with them, and look what just happened in Virginia. The country moved toward us, not you. Now, sit down and take notes. Here's our new list of demands. Joe Biden, one year into his presidency, has been rendered, well, not irrelevant. The president of the United States is never irrelevant, but the grand scheme of FDR2, of remaking the country, that's just gone. They'll get something through, but the grand scheme is over. How do they conclude that the country wanted

full-strength progressivism in all of its form when Bernie Sanders didn't win, when Elizabeth Warren didn't win, when the country turned its yearning eyes to Joe Biden because he was going to be a sleepy conveyor back to the old norms of civility, that the firm hand of Joe would guide us back to a sane place. I mean, I don't know how they took that idea, but apparently they did. So, yeah, but when you say that his presidency is moot or spent or the rest of it, we still do have three years of it. It was interesting that we saw last week, the, uh, another one of these climate kabuki

dances where everybody flies in massive jets. Yes. Don't tell me you couldn't have zoomed that one, but they did. And they went there and came up with, with what is a big editorial in our paper today about how now is the time to act on climate. And the Republicans will probably fight progress by fighting all of the electrical vehicle mandates. And as somebody who is raising to forestall the flooding of times square in the next four or five years uh you have to have a grid that is capable of supporting all of that power you have to have a robust infrastructure of charging stuff everywhere now the president may say you can drive from one end of the country the other on one tank of gas meaning i don't know what he meant but but to have to scale up to what they want is going to require

an awful lot of power at the same time that we are crimping and cramping and shutting down the energy supplies that we've come to use and are of course forbidding nuclear power because it would make jane fonda a reporter character in a movie from the 1970s very unhappy if we did so so i i at a time when everybody's looking at prices going up, at gas going up, at food going up, to all of a sudden for him to go off there and start talking about what is to most people, setting aside for the fact whether or not it is a dire existential concern. It is not to most people. Most people are concerned about the fact that beef went up a buck. And that's no small thing. And if you continue to swan about it, if you continue to say that these larger issues are the ones that we're going to have to talk about

and scorn the people who do, you're not on Twitter as much as I am, which is why you are a sane and happy man. But were you aware of the milk discourse yesterday? I saw a couple of... I did not spend much time on Twitter yesterday, but I made the mistake just before setting my head on the pillow to go, I checked it and I thought something happened here. There was some little flap concerning milk of all things, and I don't understand what

it was. So could you explain it to me? Well, they did a story, I think it was CNBC or MSNBC or one of those or somebody did a story on a large family. I mean, they got 11 kids. I think they adopted a whole bunch of them. And they go through about 10 or 12 gallons of milk a week. Right. And they were noting that the price has just gone way, way up.

And it's tough on them. Now it's an added strain to pay for all the milk. Well, they were promptly set upon by the people. There's a group of Twitter people who love to show without any sort of self-awareness how amazingly out of touch that they are. They're questioning the price of milk. Who drinks that much milk? It's like when, I can't remember who the Twitter was years ago said uh i wonder how many people in the mainstream media know somebody who owns a pickup and they just got furious about it right so within their world these people who ian millhauser who's writes for i can't

vox or vice or something or whether it's just a stonkingly ridiculous man wrote that uh yeah i'm gonna go to the uh store and get my 12 gallons of milk and then take a bath and then talk about QAnon and the rest of it. That's what they think, that all of these deplorable idiots out there bathing in milk, gargling with this stuff, frankly, forcing it down their kids with funnels and pouring it, glug, glug, glug. It just shows that none of them seem to go to the store ever and note what everybody else is noting. And so milk discourse, again, on Twitter, all of a sudden became a way of showing the people who say, yeah, there's something going on here that's affecting a lot of people. And the people who are just rolling their eyes, milk?

Seriously? And it's indicative because the bubble, the people who are within it in these little isolated urban areas appear to think that they are setting the national conversation for everybody. And they have been, but they're not going to if their party wants to win. No, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's the meaning. I have to say, I'm still in a wonderful mood about Virginia and New Jersey. Here's why. I just love democracy.

We get this, people say, actually, no, we don't like being called racist. We don't like being told that. And furthermore, we're not racist. Many of us voted twice for an African-American to become president of the United States. And in the very self-same election in which Virginia turned down Terry McAuliffe and the Democrats, these putative white supremacists elected as lieutenant governor, an African-American woman, and a Hispanic as attorney general. The charge that these ordinary Americans of Virginia are somehow racist and white supremacist is preposterous on the very face of it. And it's just thrilling.

The best of all is the best race of all was the trucker in new jersey who defeated the president of the new jersey senate by spending a total of 153 dollars running against him just great that's america yes we don't realize peters that these people are simply white supremacy adjacent enablers that they have decided to throw their lot in with the corrupt systemic things that are systemically systemizing and gain power for themselves by doing so. They are not authentic. They are not authentic. In order to be authentically of one's hue, according to racial essentialism, you have to espouse a certain set of ideas. And also, when you said, I mean, you just proved Kendi's point that a hallmark of racism is denial of racism.

The more you deny that it exists and is the dominant operating modus operandi in the society today, the more you are revealing your own racism. So if Joe X says he's a racist, he's a racist. And if Joe X says, no, I'm not a racist, he's a racist. Right. That's the Kendi position, correct? It's a wonderfully unfalsifiable, one size fits absolutely everybody position. So you can have the Lincoln Project, which is run by this guy who had a cooler with a Confederate flag on it, coming up with the idea of the white supremacist standing outside with the

tiki torches and the rest of it, which was patently false to anybody who looked at it. You had an incurious press who looked at this and said, I'll just report this. It's got a wink, wink, nudge, nudge. You had a confused group of people tweeting and retweeting this, not knowing whether or not they were in on the deal. And that somehow is not right, that it's operated by a guy with a Confederate flag in favor of candidates who themselves were in pictures with hoods and adjacent to guys who had blackface on. Somehow, that's not racist. It may look so on the

surface, but that's just a little thin veneer. And frankly, beneath it is all the wonderful progressivism that proves that their hearts are pure. But you're right, the candidate that actually has the woman who is an African-American standing with a gun looking serious in a full Harriet Tubman mode, to vote for that is simply a chimera, a series of tricks that have been played upon us to actually make us feel comfortable with our own racism and tell lies to ourselves. It's really, really quite a trick, but it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. They may think that this is Penn and Teller level misdirection and handiwork, but it's a three-year-old with a deck of cards you know winsome sears in one one interview after or another i believe it was during election day before the results had come

in winsome sears is now the lieutenant governor-elect of virginia and she said you're african-american why are you running as a Republican? And she launched into this beautiful set of remarks about how the Democratic Party has taken African-Americans for granted for decades, reduced them to a status, be condescended to them over and over and over again. And then she said, go find another victim. Go find another victim. I practically leapt from my chair cheering to hear to hear an african-american woman who within a matter of hours was declared lieutenant governor-elect of the capital of the old confederacy say this is over this is over we're all americans now let's move forward it was just thrilling just thrilling and it infuriates people who find that she was demeaning at live score bet we love cheltenham just as much

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the election of Tuesday, although only one state turned, there were, New Jersey came very close. That was a shock to the Democrats. Good for that. We've got a change in power in Virginia. That's wonderful. Not much else. A few, you oh excuse me uh a defund the police effort was defeated where in seattle is that there was a ballot measure in some major city yeah i think it was a place called minneapolis oh it was right there in minneapolis oh well tell us about that how did that vote go how did that come out it was overwhelming wasn't it it's pretty decisive we decided no we're not going to replace the police department with a vaguely worded public safety committee or committee for public safety or something like that. And we can talk about that a little bit.

And it wasn't even close, was it? It wasn't. No, it was pretty decisive. And all the usual excuses are being made. So all of a sudden, here's what comes to this beautiful dream comes to my mind. All of a sudden, and it's not a dream, it's plausible. We take back the House next year. Donald Trump, this is the controversial part,

Donald Trump announces that he's not going to seek the GOP nomination, but will campaign for the party even so. Youngkin and DeSantis and Cotton and Sass and Josh Hawley slug it out. Whoever wins the GOP nomination names, for example, Tim Scott or Nikki Haley as the running mate. They win in a landslide, and the republic is safe for another generation.

All this has suddenly become plausible. Let's just hope that the issue they're not running on is who lost to Taiwan. Hey, I got to say something here before we get to our guests, and I'm going to do it brusquely because frankly, Rob isn't here. So I don't have to dance around this. I don't have to do that tiresome little thing where we pretend I'm doing a spot and he interrupts it and the rest of it. No, I need to tell you something about something that you probably have heard about because you go to a

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And now we welcome back to the podcast, The Hemingways. It's like a sitcom pitch. He's a senior writer at Real Clear Investigations. She's a senior editor at The Federalist. Together, they solve crimes. She's also a contributor at Fox News, by the way. Mark and Molly Hemingway, surely one of the conservative media's favorite investigative couples. If you're on Twitter, oh, please be sure to follow the two of them, at Hermanator and at MZ Hemingway. Welcome back, guys. How are you today? Great to be here, I guess. Great to be here with you.

Well, Molly has a book, if I understand, and I know this is hard to do with authors sometimes, but if you could tell us about the book, what it's named and stuff like that, you're probably sick of it. So, Rigged, I believe. Now, if only Rob Long were here to talk about this, because it has to do with the election and Trump. And we know that's Rob's favorite subject.

But let's pretend that Rob is here and you're addressing him and you're giving him the praises of the book and its central argument. Yeah, well, it it's a book on the 2020 election rigged how the media big tech, and the Democrats seized our elections. And it came because after the 2020 election, you weren't supposed to talk about what happened, even though it was clearly the weirdest election that any of us had experienced in our lifetimes. And it came after, you know, the weirdness of 2016, when the entire establishment, the entire media complex, all the Democrats and others participated in this crazy theory that Donald Trump had stolen the 2016 election by conspiring with Russia. They carried that on for years, special counsels, congressional investigations, daily drips of stories. But then once 2020 happened, you weren't supposed to talk

about it at all. So I didn't like that. And I wanted to find out for myself what happened. And so I just reported on it and interviewed a ton of people at the national level, the RNC, the campaign, and also a bunch of state and local election lawyers and people who were involved in the disputes at the state and local level. And I'm really glad I did because I found a bunch of explosive, interesting stuff about how many hundreds of laws were changed in the 2020 election, how that was a coordinated campaign. Actually, one of the things I thought was so interesting is the guy who orchestrated the campaign to have chaos and confusion in our

election laws is a guy named Mark Elias. And he's the same exact guy who orchestrated the 2016 election hoax, the Russia collusion thing. He he's the one who secretly paid for the operation to come up with the lie that Donald Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia. And it's he also was the guy who did the 2020 thing. So that was just like one of the interesting things that I found and how much big tech was involved in controlling the outcome. And it turned out to be really interesting, and I'm really glad that I wrote it.

And I'm really glad also that people are receiving it so well. So we're not talking about the theories out there that Dominion routed its servers through Venezuelan cutouts and changed the laws and that FedEx trucks backed up with secret piece in the Washington Post, Mitt Romney, Republican senator. And the argument in the post was, the argument in his piece was that the Democrats ought to preserve the filibuster because who knows, Donald Trump might even come back. Okay, so let me just quote Romney to you. And the question, Mark, I'm coming to you. Don't get up for a cup of coffee but at the moment we've got a book to talk about with molly i'm going to read a quotation from romney

and ask molly how do you respond how do you how do you make mit romney understand what actually happened romney writes for several years many of us have recoiled as foundational american institutions have been repeatedly demeaned the judiciary has been accused of racial bias, the media maligned as the enemy of the people, justice and intelligence agencies belittle, belittled public health agencies dismissed. Even our election system has been accused of being rigged. Now since the title of your book is Rigged, it's difficult to resist the thought that Mitt Romney may even have you personally in mind. How do you reply? Mitt Romney, interesting guy. I think when people think about recoiling from something,

they think about how he had so much of a role to play in the transformation of the Republican Party because people were alarmed when he didn't do a good enough job of defending Republican voters. He would be attacked as Hitler and murderous and he would say, oh, you know, no big deal. I'll be a nice guy and let that go. And he didn't realize that in letting things like that go, he was not defending the party that he was supposed to be leading. And I'm not sure what the larger point of his op-ed was in the Washington Post. I haven't gotten a chance to read it. But in fact, I think what we've seen in recent years on both left and right is a realization that the entire establishment is not very good at doing things, whether that's running wars or bailing out banks or handling the border. And they do look at a system that is entirely rigged.

I like the term rigged because it refers to the structural systems. Right. It's not stolen. It's rigged. Yeah. But I think for a lot of right of center voters, they look at, for instance, what happened to the FBI, an institution that they probably did have some level of confidence or trust in prior to about five years ago. I did, honestly. one standard of prosecutorial approach, one approach for political allies, an entirely opposite one for political opponents. And they say this whole system is rigged. But you also hear Bernie bros say stuff like that about financial systems. Rather than just get mad

at people for not believing in public health officials, even as public health officials contradict themselves, maybe deal with the underlying problem, which is our election system was not handled properly during the COVID year. It did have floods of tens of millions of ballots, of mail-in ballots. The system had never even attempted to handle that kind of mail-in traffic before. And that those changes happen at the same time that we were dropping scrutiny of mail-in ballots. You can't get mad at people for not trusting that. You have to deal with it and make it secure. You want to make it so people can vote fairly and have confidence in the outcome. And just dismissing their concerns is not appropriate. I just want to quickly jump in here and make some points here. One is that a big part of the reason why this book was written was to

look at the systemic structural problems with what happened last year and to partly steer the conversation away from some of the crazy stuff right um because you know the venezuelan voting machine conspiracy and all that stuff was nonsense but what was not nonsense is there are major problems that occur when you take you know tens of millions of people and force them to vote by mail when they've never voted by voted that way before and then the way that that all goes down in terms of election security i mean like those are major issues that we haven't really addressed and the big problem that a lot of people on the right have is specifically with this romney argument which is we look around and we see all these institutions that are failing us and failing us in very big ways and we know we need to fix

these institutions, but any criticism of those institutions is an attack on the bedrock of American society, as far as they're concerned. And the reason why they view it that way is because a certain elitist technocrat, you know, liberal mindset, you know, which Romney, I'm afraid to say, I think falls distinctly in that camp, camp, views that as an attack on sort of the power and control that they have over those institutions. And a big part of the problem is that the institutions themselves are representing a group of people that aren't representative of the broader desires of the American people or serving them very well.

So on Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, I remember when he was running, he said in a number of interviews, I think he stopped because it was clear that his experience as a consultant for Bain wasn't helping him. But early on, he said over and over again that when he was at Bain, he loved taking what he called a data bath. He loved looking at the facts down to the smallest level. He's famous for deciding to fund Staples after he went around to the secretaries in his office

and said, actually, this week, count how many paperclips you use. Let me know how many Staples you use, right? And so what Molly and Mark Hemingway say to Mitt Romney is, dude, read this book. It's a data bath. We've investigated, or not, the book is by molly molly has investigated i wanted to make sure that was clear mark is essentially the co-author he's like the unnamed

co-author but i i note in the end of the book that he did so much on it it's a long story anybody who knows the way your marriage works anybody who knows the two actually anybody who knows either one of you knows both of you let's put it that way so so that's the the argument is we've got the facts large numbers of laws and procedures across the country were changed in one way or another the the pretext was covid but in one way or another change after change after change advantaged the Democrats. This was done legally, by and large. It wasn't stolen in that sense. It wasn't accrued, but it took place. It happened, and we've got the facts, correct?

Yes. Absolutely. Oftentimes the scandal is what is legal, right? And that's largely one of the things that we were trying to address. But it's also true that a lot of it wasn't legal. I mean, the Constitution says that it's state legislatures that are supposed to handle their elections. And in many cases, that's not what happened. There were large issues of illegal voting.

We tell the story about what happened in Georgia, where more than 10,000 votes were in all likelihood illegally cast. The margin in Georgia was just over 10,000. Another big issue that we look at, which the legality isn't totally settled, is that Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men, engineered a private takeover of government elections. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race.

That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie. That's not resolved whether that was legal or not. It definitely was done for partisan aims. It had partisan results. It was not, you know, certainly not free or fair to fund blue counties in swing states to affect the outcome of the elections in those swing states. And to say, and this is like a totally legitimate thing to be upset about and to not think is okay. And we haven't even talked about the corruption of the media or big

tech. We've also played a huge role. One more on the actual election itself. I certainly want to come to me. I know James wants to come to, to, to media. Can I read you? This is something Chris Christie said on this podcast. What was it, James? Three weeks ago when Chris Christie appeared with us, it's a longish quotation, but I'd like to see how you reply to this. Let's face it. The president and his campaign blew it. I mean, you know, the idea that when you saw COVID coming in March of 2020, and this is part of the problem, the president never took COVID seriously in the beginning. And that not only manifested itself from the perspective of public policy,

but it manifested itself politically as well. Because if you took it seriously, you'd know from March or April forward that there were going to have to be changes in those laws, and that in some instances, Democrats were going to try to take advantage of that to change things in a way that had nothing to do with COVID, but could help advantage them in the election. The president raised over $1.2 billion for his campaign. How much did we spend on the legal effort? Not much.

We did not put together a top-notch legal team. The Democrats did. They outmaneuvered us. That's not stealing the election. That's strategic failure. And let's face it, this game is not for the faint of heart. And so, you know,

of course there was irregularities in the election, but there's irregularities in every American election. Molly, Mark. Okay. Multiple thoughts on that. I don't entirely disagree. And in fact, tell the story of various failures that the Trump campaign had as part of their effort, but it's not entirely true. They actually had a lot of successes fighting Mark Elias's plans to water down election law. This election would have been very different had they not had those successes. They didn't have enough. The Republican National Committee had been barred from Election Day oversight and litigation for nearly 40 years, which is another

one of these stories I tell in the book that I was shocked when I learned that they had been bound by a consent decree enforced by a New Jersey federal judge for 38 years. They were under this. It prohibited them from really doing the kind of litigation and oversight that you need to do as a national party. They finally get out of it in 2018. And so they start litigating. But Christie is right that Democrats have very much funded this and very much worked on this. I think it's not just Trump campaign and RNC fault, though. It's also Republican voters who only decided to care about this issue like in November 2020, when they should have been caring about it for decades. The left has invested so much money, energy, time, thoughtful procedure.

The whole way Mark Zuckerberg was able to bring in this army of left-wing vote activists is because they built an army of left-wing activists. Bringing them into the governmental system might have been wrong, illegal, unethical, but they had this army. Does the right? No. Maybe now they've got one. So it's a large-scale problem for the entire right.

It's really just, it's not an either or in this case. I mean, Chris, he's absolutely right. They got outmaneuvered and he's absolutely right. They should have invested more in this earlier. But it's that doesn't make what Democrats did do to outmaneuver them, neither ethical or legal. So let me let me just ask you point blank on this, because here's a charge that that's going to be already is being leveled against the book oh molly molly molly and those of you who know you well will also be saying oh mark mark mark another effort to say trump really won this is just a pro-trump book but as you're not saying that you're saying trump or no, we have a problem here and it has to be fixed. It's because they care about 2022 and 2024. And this is not just about 2020. This is about all elections going forward. And

also just like the country going forward. You can't have a republic if losers don't have confidence in the outcome of elections. But I just want to say also, I don't think it's just about Trump. One of the big problems people have had in the last five years is making everything about him and not thinking about the voter like I think about the voter who voted for Romney and felt poorly served by Romney I think about the voters who supported the Republican in the last five years and there's a reason why they reacted the way they did and continue to react the way they did to the election. It's not just about the election. It's about the entire system.

It's about what happened in 2016, the way the establishment responded to losing power. And that's something that you're not going to have the media report. Honestly, they were part of the whole hoax after 2016. They were part of the shutdown of communication in 2020. They're not going to tell the story, but that story needs to be told. I have questions backed up like container outside the port. But Mark, you're going to say something. No, you go ahead. Well, there's so much here.

I mean, Molly was talking about attempting to make permanent these laws that were done before. Now, we all know that we had to change everything about voting in 2020, because if people went to vote in person, COVID would kill 97% of them. And it would be hard to vote because there would be dead bodies you'd have to step over to get to the polling place. We didn't want that. So we had to change. And all of a sudden, that new paradigm became the permanent good thing. And that any attempt the Republicans made to go after it afterwards was disenfranchising people because nobody remembers what happened yesterday and everything flips and the world starts and resets anew, which is crazy. When you mentioned Zuckerberg, and I want to hear a little bit more about what he did because this

story isn't much known. This comes as a total shock and a paradigm breaker in the left's brains because Zuckerberg is the man who made right-wing algorithm hate speech possible through Facebook. They view him as the absolute enemy of everything. And the media, which you were ending up, which I really want to get to, is frustrating for a lot of us because we know that people do not marinate in this as we do. And frankly, if they listen to the news at all, the best way to make sure that at least that you get the headlines is to turn on some source of news that you trust and look at it and read it for at least two minutes, which is the duration that you have when you're brushing your teeth with a Quip

toothbrush. Let me tell you about Quip though. Yes, the two minute Quip habit. I have it. I'm glad I do because good health starts with good habits and Quip makes it easy. They deliver all the oral care essentials you need to care for your mouth. The Quip electric toothbrush is loved by over 7 million mouths. I'm one of them and it has, are you ready for this? Timed sonic vibrations with 30 second pulses to guide a dentist recommended two minute clean, a lightweight and sleek design for adults and kids with no wires, no bulky charger to weigh you down, a multi-use travel cover that doubles as a mirror mount for less clutter. And I save that and I use that when I travel. And reusable handles in a range of sleek metal hues. They look cool. I like that, including the best-selling all black and the all pink, as well as bright plastic colors to make

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affordable electric brushes starting at just $25, you will not be paying for the teeth for better oral health. If you go to getquip.com slash ricochet right now, you'll get your first refill free. That is your first refill free at getquip.com slash ricochet. That's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash ricochet. Quip, the good habits company. And we thank Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. So from that big banquet of questions that I just said before you, let's talk about the media. Because again, if Rob were here, he would roll his eyes. He's so tired about talking about how the media tends to massage things. But we really did have a four-year

concerted effort with the Russiagate. And then we had what came after with that. Explain the media's role in it being rigged, because I'm sort of in the mainstream media myself and I see what does and does not happen. Well, it's interesting because this week we had the arrest and charging of one of the participants in the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Donald Trump was plotting to steal the election or had stolen the election. that investigation that John Durham is doing is focused on malfeasance by political actors hired by the Clinton campaign. The people who will probably get away with their participation in it the most might be the FBI, but also the corporate media. Nothing would have happened if these media people had behaved responsibly. They did not. And their punishment

for participating in what was pretty obviously a delusional lie was that they received Pulitzers and other prominent awards. They got promotions. Well, let me stop you. Faced with what was coming out, what would have been the responsible thing for them to do? I mean, if the FBI or it comes out and somebody gives you this big, juicy leak about what Russia did, have they have on them? Are they not obligated at least to talk about the story that's being talked about? I know that's part of the dodge. People are talking about it, so we have to report what people are talking about. And then the New York Times saying this is what people are talking about legitimizes somehow what they're talking about. I get that. But what were they supposed to do when faced with this stuff that was coming? Well, what they were supposed to do is they were supposed to run down the allegations and

determine whether or not they were true before they reported them. Oh, Mark, come on. That's so much work. You got to call people. For instance, the Steele dossier was reported on a few times before the election, and it didn't really break through, but really broke through in January of 2017 when CNN has this big story with four bylines on it, including Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein himself, you know, reporting that Trump and President Obama were briefed on this dossier like it's the sinister thing that's like so important that the president and the president elect were both briefed on it without verifying any of the details in the dossier. And like this had been circulating on D.C. for months. And the reason why it hadn't been reported on to that point was because anyone who looked at it knew that it was a laughable document. Garbage on the document itself, which they surely had in their possession, is an absolute outrage and was a complete and total abdication of journalistic responsibility. But more than that, I think it was the act of participation in an operation against the incoming president of the United States.

And that is a huge problem. I just want to add one thing. Sure, sure, sure. the incoming president of the United States. So that is a problem. I just want to add one thing. Sure. Yesterday, the Washington Post, when they reported on the Durham indictment that dropped against the main source for the Steele dossier, includes the line. I'm going to read this to you. The allegations cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations, including the Washington Post.

That's just like a throwaway line in the story. I mean, are you kidding me? New uncertainty on some reporting. It was an outrage. So here's my question for, I guess this is, I ask a question to one of you, and you can take it any way, whoever wants it. But Molly said they all fell down on their job. That's the piece that i don't understand in the old days you would have had a sigh hirsch who's still around in his 80s now but a sigh hirsch

card-carrying liberal of the old school but if he saw the media pack going in one direction he instinctively moved in the other where are the where are the reporters with the nose for a story everybody's getting it wrong i'll get it where are what happened here i was i was being hyperbolic because there were almost no reporters who did a good job but as one of the reporters who immediately and regularly fought this false narrative. Beginning, my first piece was in October of 2016, which was on the day after there was a coordinated Clinton campaign drop of Russia propaganda, of their own Russia propaganda. There were about 10 of us, I'd say, who did really good work. And what's interesting about the 10 is that they're not all right of center.

Some of them were left of center journalists, Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald, right. And the one thing that does seem to unite a lot of us is that we developed our skepticism of intelligence community leaks from the Iraq war. So if you recall that when that happened, that the intelligence community

claimed they had airtight intelligence about curveball, this source who was airtight about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And then it turned out it was like a German source who wasn't airtight and had completely invented it. The media said, we will never let this happen again. This was embarrassing. We helped participate in a march for war because we believed credulously the intelligence community. But they apparently didn't mean it because by 2016, they are just taking whatever they can get from totally compromised IC sources and just regurgitating it, even though it was laughable on its face. It was an intelligence test, whether you believed this stupid dossier or not. And yet most people failed it. I think it's what Mark said, that they were so happy to participate in a fight against democracy that they wanted to do it,

but it's also possible they were just- Okay. So can I, I'm sorry, I just want to set up one more question, then James, over to you. But it now appears clear, really undeniable, that this whole thing traces right back to the Clinton campaign. And that the Russian collusion, which tied this country in knots for three years, was a political dirty trick. And it makes anything that Richard Nixon did look like the merest trifle the merest trifle now contrast the two situations you just said that the ten of you who were skeptical of the Intel community earned your skepticism by paying attention to Iraq well go back to the 70s, the whole press corps was skeptical of the government because of Vietnam. The same thing had happened.

Watergate comes along and they all pile, and careers are made. Woodward and Bernstein have been rich and famous men all their lives because of Watergate. And it's only 10 of you? Well, that's because in the 70s, the establishment was not perceived as, and in many crucial ways, was not liberal. I mean, the journalistic establishment is on the same ideological page 40 years later

as the people running the country. And that's the big, big difference. I mean, you need an adversarial press ideologically. And when you start thinking about that in terms of everyone being on the same ideological page, once, once you accept the notion that the, you know, main sort of the, the corporate press, the beltway press, if you accept the notion that they see their highest responsibilities determining the outcome of, you know, America's major elections, then everything else that they do makes perfect sense. I mean, that's basically where we are in this country. I mean, if you look at what happened, for instance, between 2016 and

2020, one of this, we talked about a lot about this in the book, one of the major developments in that interregnum was the total acceptance and cheerleading of, by the corporate press, of censorship. And I mean, widespread censorship like unthinkable 20 years ago it was totally insane it wasn't even unthinkable in the fall of november 2016 i mean when trump got elected there were immediately everyone immediately turned to look for a to sign blame and they blamed two people basically they blamed the russians and then they blamed facebook and mark zuckerberg's initial reaction to being blamed for Donald Trump's election was, you know, he was like, this is preposterous. But you know what? His own employees, which are

liberal Silicon Valley employees, were all revolting. And by, you know what happened? By December of 2016, Facebook announces the creation of this fact-checking program, right? That all of a sudden, if one of Facebook's fact-checking partners, which by the way, are a bunch of corporate media outlets, determines an outlet is, determines a new story is false or misinformation or whatever it is, that means according to Facebook's own press releases, that when one of USA Today's fact checker or PolitiFact, you know, says this is false, they go into the back end of Facebook and they put in the link that they say is false and Facebook brags they kill 80% of the global internet traffic to that story. And that was their response to the 2016

election. We spent a year before the election saying that the lab leak hypothesis was a racist conspiracy and you couldn't discuss it on an internet platform that 3 billion people use monthly because basically that narrative helped Donald Trump. It doesn't matter. The preponderance of evidence always was and is now accepted as the most likely origin of the greatest news story that we've experienced in a generation. That's the kind of control that they are willing to exert simply to determine the outcome of an election. Yeah. When I was a DC journalist in the Beltway back in the nineties, the idea that we would actively work towards these things was preposterous because we still held to old notions that we thought held our industry aloft. But the more I listen to the people who are coming into the industry now, the more I hear this constant, constant insistence that objectivity is actually a tool for empowering the bad people. That to pretend that there are both sides to an issue is to utter a lie.

There aren't. There's the good and there's the bad. And we had broken a little small groups at one of our diversity meetings at work the other day via Zoom. And we're discussing the idea, the old line journalists who are old style liberals who go to work listening to the National Public Radio and regard the New York Times and the Washington Post as essentially truthful operations, regard the idea of abandoning objectivity as madness because they still think that it's one of the bulwarks that stand, not that bulwark, one of the bulwarks that stand

between us and complete inability to determine what the truth is. But you're right. I mean, I don't care who's saying the truth if it is the truth. Glenn Greenwald is somebody I disagreed with for years until now I find myself agreeing with him. Is it because I have changed somehow or he's become a tool of the Trumpy right and the rest of it? No, it's because he maintained a skepticism toward the intelligence community and the instruments of government, which he always believed were there to do nefarious things and not further the interests of the American people. So now here we are on the right, all looking at these institutions that we grew up with. We watched the FBI on television with Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. We believe the CIA was actually out there in the field doing work to keep us safe. We believe that the CDC was cold-hearted and logical and empirical. We

believed in all of these institutions. We granted them their mistakes because of human failings. But now we find that because they've been captured by the left, the left will defend to the death, everything about the establishment that they castigated when they were out of power. So it turns out it's not about ideas. It's just about power. What a surprise that is never seen that it happened before. I do think we should remember that Watergate itself was an example of a malicious and

insufficient leak from an intelligence community operative, Mark Felt, who was number two at FBI. I think he was upset that he hadn't been given the position of FBI director. And so he leaked. And there were all sorts of other examples from the reporting of Watergate that are very much less favorable than the conventional, all the president's men narrative, including violations of due process, violations of the grand jury secrecy. There were a lot of things that are actually kind of similar to some of the Russiagate reporting. And I mean that in a bad way. It wasn't as, I know we all have like a favorable impression of it, but if you read, and the Nixon library has great stuff on this actually, and very fair balanced stuff about how journalism, that was not its brightest day either.

So how do we get back? How do we get back to the point where both sides have a reasonable amount of faith in their institutions? Is it possible? Or is it just going to be a back and forth battle between whatever? I think it's kind of already happening. I mean, there was a story I saw this morning that CNN did not average a single program

that had more than a million viewers for the entire month of October. Oh, that makes me just as happy as Youngkin's election this week. That's great. People are rejecting this corporate media narrative and a lot of these outlets that exist to control the narrative because they sense that it's happening. About a week ago, I drove out to this house in the middle of the woods. It's in the border of West Virginia and Maryland. And I did a podcast, a live YouTube show

that something like 423,000 people watched. I mean, this is a guy in his house in the middle of the woods. We now have the technology programs, outlets, platforms like Ricochet. These things are growing and they're going to supplant a lot of the mainstream narrative that you're seeing. Now, we still have obviously a problem that we need to

deal with. And I'm sure my wife's about to jump in and correct my optimism. Yeah, no, I would say there are many good things. One of the best things is that at least for the right portion of the country, they no longer believe corporate media. I mean, the most recent Gallup poll showed that like 75% of Democrats love how the media portray them. 9% of Republicans do. 9% of Republicans have confidence in the media to accurately convey information. That's a good first step. I think the leadership also needs to, like so long as Mitt Romney thinks running to the Washington Post to help the left with its messaging is a good role for him as a Republican senator you've got you're going to have Republican voters feeling like their leaders need to wake up to the situation where

corporate media are the most powerful unaccountable political actors in our country and they must be stopped they don't get to they don't get to moderate debates anymore. They participated in the Russia hoax. They can't do it anymore. If I can just say also, we need to see much more funding of non-leftist media sources like the Washington Post and New York Times, these people who control narratives and make up stories and push false stories. I think we also need to revisit- You're not arguing that we should have more billionaire sugar daddies for our side? So right now when you think, like I remember Donald Trump said something. Don't we want to grope toward a business model where our side can be profitable again and freestanding news organizations?

Let's deal with the reality. Oh, that's never as much fun. Donald Trump said in August that the Atlantic Monthly was failing. And it is true that they lose like 10 to 20 million dollars a year. They also are a bargain for their leftist donors, Steve Jobs' widow, because they control outcomes of elections. They made up a major story in the 2020 election. That was the false Ayn Marne story, that Donald Trump didn't actually love the pomp and circumstance of military rights. He secretly hated all these people. That story was made up. It had anonymous sources that nobody ever could verify. It was disputed by 20 some on the record sources, including John Bolton, not exactly someone

who wants to help out Donald Trump. It gets asked about in a debate. You know, it controls outcomes. They're losing tens of millions of dollars, but it's a small price to pay. Do I think that in our current model where Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, which has no viewers, MSNBC, get nothing but major corporate advertising while right of center outlets don't? Is that like a is that an equal situation? And they not only don't. Is that an equal situation? And they not only don't get that advertising, they get boycotted and they get deplatformed. So I think the right actually does need to understand that it's not sufficient to not respect these media outlets. They need competing news gathering operations

that can hold people accountable, that control the halls of Congress and ask tough questions of members of Congress, senators that can push their own news and not just be reactive to other people. We need our own... So two ways these might emerge. Way number one, Mark, Molly, Peter, and James go from billionaire to billionaire to billionaire with tin cup in hand saying, we've got a terrific idea, but we need you to fund it. Two, a model emerges over the next few years. Maybe it's Substack.

Maybe it's the guy out in the woods who interviewed Mark the other day. My interview with Jay Bhattacharya of two weeks ago now has 250,000 views on YouTube which is not, it's not Tucker, it's not three million, but you know it's not nothing for a guy for a guy who's talking back to Anthony Fauci. So somehow or other, organically because people want the truth, people want good journalism. This stuff will emerge. We will find a way. Or we need rich sugar daddies.

I'm sorry. We haven't even talked about the fact that YouTube is only currently permitting you to host something there. That's true. They could change their mind tomorrow. They've actually deplatformed tons of people. They yanked an interview I did with Scott Atlas. They took it down for two weeks. They major league censor and deplatform any effective

voice that they don't like. They have their own sort of like, oh, you're okay. You're not causing too much trouble sort of standard. The moment you actually address like a truly contentious issue, they decide that you don't have the right to speak. This war on freedom of information does require political power, financial power, and grassroots support. And to that end, I think your hopefulness about an alternative model thriving might be the best argument. Well, I was going to say, and a competing infrastructure too, because who knows what can arise. Build your own internet, James. Well, not build your own internet, but build your own internet well not my yes not build your own internet but build your own servers build your own you know structure so that you can't be shut down by these guys and every you know i know that every one of these things that comes up in response to ends up being a cesspool

and that's a problem but i'm i mean yes youtube is the dominant paradigm paradigm right now but we know how fast these things can change. Here's the thing. We would love to go on for 90 minutes, two hours, three hours, but we're sick and tired of you two guys agreeing on stuff. What we want is a fight. We want your fight of the week. That's the most pathetic sounder I've ever seen that's not for a major league prize fight that's two you know small little people coming out and slapping each other with tiny macros all right we'll get a better bell in the future but right now tiny fight go hon so go hon oh that's a good way to start a fight backstory to this of course is that uh you

know molly and i used to do a podcast together on the rickshay platform or whatever and the most popular thing about that podcast where we would discuss current events and all these other things which you know i thought we did an okay job of but far and away the most popular thing was we would do this thing called fight of the week where we'd talk about some silly thing that we we would argue about um in our in our basically day-to-day lives as a married couple. And it was always insane things. I remember the classic argument that I remember everyone getting really excited about was I always used to use hand sanitizer. My wife was convinced that I should be washing my hands with soap and water because that was

so much better. And it turns out that this is this amazing body of literature on both sides. Like this fight has been like raging in the medical community for forever. But so, you know, she's about to tell you you're wrong, Mark. Right. He is wrong. But the really bad news for this portion is that we haven't been fighting much. Although we did recently fight about we fight a lot about fish. Fish seems to be a really contentious thing in our household. How to cook it or which fishes are admirable. What do you mean you fight about fish? I could

understand fighting with fish, slapping each other with mackerels, as James just said. The problem is its presence in our house in any form, more or less. So something weird happened. My wife did not used to be this way, but we got married and we got married in September. We had a child the following August. So that all happened very quickly. But the moment my wife got pregnant, she immediately got extremely nauseous and she developed this like bionic smelling. Like it was crazy. Like she wasn't that way before, but like I would be downstairs in the house and I would open the refrigerator door and my wife would scream from the upstairs bedroom, what's that smell? And this is like preceded ever since then. And so of course her version of this is that I can't smell anything, which is somewhat true. I don't think it's that I can't smell

things. It's that over the years and doing various things, I spent a summer working at a port-a-potty place. And I have have stories involving let's say elbow length gloves that i won't share with your listeners today oh but um suffice to say i have trained myself over the years um i don't know my dad was a marine colonel right and combat veteran all these things like incredibly practical man and like i've always trained myself to be like incredibly stoic about any sort of you know discomfort or we work we work in our home it's not a large home he stinks the place up with like the most foul smelling fish and then it like just kind of sticks around in a way that's really not conducive to work and you know

i'm also a big fan of like say organ meats like i will cook i'm going in like fry up no no no i just moved over to molly's. I was with you, but I just switched sides. As we all know, everything you spray in the air doesn't work, right? It's just a bunch of droplets that mask what's there and then the droplets fall to the floor. The one thing you need besides opening the window occasionally and not cooking so much fish is something called

oseum, which actually, as every guy in a dorm in 1978 will tell you, is really good at masking any kind of smell it's good it just somehow charges the air makes a difference so mark by ozium and you will be fine um and now i thought this was an ad so i was like really i know that wasn't a segue it's just a personal it's maybe it should be an ad as james just before James closes, I have bad news for you, Mark. Our last child, our youngest child, was born 19 years ago.

The other day, I'm down the hall, and I hear, close the closet door. I'm getting a cold. Why should you? I can smell the mothballs. Mark, it doesn't go away. It doesn't end. And my wife has the same thing. Women, I'm told, have a superior sense of smell because they have to determine in the

lair if something's rotten or bad or the rest of it. And I say, that's fine change. That's great. Women are good at that. Men are better at directions. We are instinctively attuned to magnetic fields and the points of the compass because we have to go out, find things, kill them and bring them home. Somehow that's sexist.

Somehow saying that men are good at directions is sexist. But women are great. Well, I hate to break it to you, but my wife is far better directions than I am. So. All right, Mark. Well, you just climb back in your little. You smell bad and you get lost in the woods. This is not good, Mark.

We know. Actually, I'm very good at directions in the woods. It's driving is the issue. It's just a problem. We don't find ourselves in the woods as often is not good, Mark. Actually, I'm very good at directions in the woods. It's driving is the issue. It's just a problem that we don't find ourselves in the woods as often as we would like to. Yes, exactly. That's my problem. All right. Well, then join the New Jersey Mafia and end up on the Pine Barrens

disposing of a corpse, and we'll see exactly how good your directions are. Mark and Molly Hemingway, it's been a great pleasure. The book is rigged. You can buy it on Amazon for now. And thanks, guys, for coming on. We missed you rigged. You can buy it on Amazon for now. Thanks, guys, for coming on. We missed you. Thanks, and give Rob our love. We will. Good to see you again. But not probably in the

forms that you intend because I'm not going to kiss him on the cheek or anything. I'll give his hand a manly shake. It'll do. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Thank you. I cooked fish yesterday, and it was okay. I had to do it in a toaster oven because our real oven broke, and we can't get one for months because of supply chain issues.

It's just been a real big pain. I know. No Thanksgiving because of it. Nightmare. I asked when I could get my dual fuel, and they said, March. I have one coming in a couple of weeks. That'll be great. And I'll cook some fish again and stink up the whole place. But here's the thing. The fish that I cooked yesterday, it was okay, but it wasn't restaurant quality. Why? Well, aside from my own lack of skills, it's a matter of tools. Restaurants have access to the right kitchen tools. Made in, M-A-D-E-I-N. They make professional quality

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Go to madeincookware.com slash Ricochet and use the promo code ricochet for 15% off your first order. That's madeincookware.com slash ricochet, promo code ricochet. We thank Made In for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, Peter, here we are ending up here. And, you know, any sort of stuff we talk about the daily election

and the rest of it, it'll be gone and boring by the time people get around to the podcast so there has to be something timely like the world series i didn't follow it i'm frankly not a baseball guy and i really i suspect that you are sort of in the george willish sense as well um i am ordinarily but i was traveling through and i missed the whole darn series i think that may be the first time in my life since the age of seven that i didn't even watch one game in the world series i'm really sorry to say i'm delighted that the braves won um uh not actually even sure why oh yeah i'm there's a

political reason i'm delighted the braves won because there wasn't there the baseball commissioner attacked them no he refused them he refused some to permit some playoff series to take place in Atlanta because of Georgia's election laws or some screwball. Anyway, God bless the Braves for winning. But may I ask you, James, little boy, North Dakota, daylight savings time. Something tells me that you being you, you'll be able to tell a wonderful story on that prompt. Well, just that there, when you've had a long, dark, cold winter

as you had in North Dakota, and I mean cold. I mean, the wind would come down from Canada with no trees between us and the border, and it was cold, and the snow was piled up. I have pictures of the snow piled up to the rafters, to the eaves. You know, it happened one year, but you take that as the standard for the rest of the years going forward.

After you've endured that, when you spring forward and all of a sudden the summer nights attenuate longer and longer every day until you have those glorious periods in the middle of the summer where it's 9.30 and it's still light. It may be a sort of fading and crepuscular, but it's still light and it's still there. And we worship and enjoy that so much that we're willing to pay for the horrible thing that happens in November when we're kicked into the cellar and the door is shut and bolted behind us and we have to fall back. And all of a sudden it's darker. It's just dark. And I don't mind.

I don't mind the fact that it's dark at five o'clock in the afternoon. First of all, people used to complain. I hate driving home at five o'clock when it's dark. Well, you're not driving home anymore, are you? Because nobody goes to the office to stop complaining. I liked it because the darker and colder it was at that one point when it gets to that day where it's the shortest day ever, from that you climb out and eventually find your way back to the glorious days of summer. So I don't mind it at all. Now, if they say that this is some unnatural imposition upon time, yeah, okay, right. Yes, the earth goes around it at a set amount of time. It goes around the sun. It sets an amount of time, hours, minutes, the rest of that. That's arbitrary.

I get that. But if you want to stop going back and forth, back and forth, and some are saying, oh, it's bad for people's health. It gets them off a schedule. That gives them an excuse to mischurch. If you want to do that, fine, but don't set the clocks so that summer nights are short. That is the argument that I cannot accept, and I won't. The idea somehow that we will arrange things now so that no child will ever be able to run around and catch fireflies in a bottle at nine o'clock 9 30 on a summer night is wrong and the idea that the sun should set at 7 10 in august is wrong so i will fight that peter so this is interesting standard time if i if i may offer the shorter lilacs standard time because somebody

out here standard time builds character but daylight savings time enhances imagination accommodation of the way it is right now is fine the way it is right up here now is fine and five when it gets dark at five o'clock, that builds character. When you're able to enjoy the summer pleasures late, that builds a different kind of character, not the kind where you bear down and stare manfully into the future

and resolve to do what needs to be done because it's cold and dark, but the character that takes some sort of mystical joy in the strange gift of a summer evening. They're both building character. That's why we have such excellent character up here in Minnesota, Peter. So I hope that people are, you know,

listening to this podcast and nodding with agreement with me because I am correct emotionally and empirically. All right. You know what? This podcast was brought to you by Rob Long because he was one of the founders of Ricochet. I'm just kidding. Well, sort of, kind of. Brought to you by ExpressVPN, by Quip, and by MadeIn. Support them for supporting us, but you get a lot of great stuff in the deal if you do. And join Ricochet today, will you? We're going to have to drag Rob back here for another one of his beloved member pitches. Don't make us do it. Take a minute, if you will, at 30 seconds, 15 to leave a five-star review, five seconds to leave a five-star review, one second for each click

on the Apple Podcasts. The reviews, well, they help new people find the show and discover us and keep Licochet going into the future foreseeable and beyond. Peter, it's been a pleasure. We thank our guests. Rob's coming back next week, we hope, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Licochet 4.0 next week next week james whiskey bottles and brand new cars oak tree you're in my way there's too much coke and too much smoke look what's going on inside you. Ooh, that smell.

Can't you smell that smell? Ooh, that smell. The smell of death's around you. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Music Music Music Music

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