The Ricochet Podcast - Where's My Flying Car?

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

This week on The Big Show, we attempt to return to some sense of normalcy (while of course maintaining social distancing by at least 1,000 miles). Yes, we talk about that thing we’re all doing and what our new lives are like now. But then, we shift gears to visit with our good friend Ross Douthat, NYT columnist and podcaster (The Argument, which Ross co-hosts is one of our favorites) on the... Source

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My call was perfect. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson observing six-foot distances. I'm James Lylex. Today we talk to Ross Douthat about this decadent society. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody.

This is the Ricochet Podcast number 489. I wonder what number 500 is going to sound like. I hope it's full of brass bands and celebratory music and fireworks and the rest of it. But we'll see. We'll get there with the usual suspects, Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Hey, guys. How are you today? I don't know about you guys.

I'm three weeks into quarantine here with another week to go, supposedly, in Minnesota, and probably another two to come out of that. And I'm starting to feel, A, itchy, and, B, angry. Not a good combination. And I'm not alone in this, am I? Well, that's the way I felt when Rob and I mixed it up a couple of weeks ago. I still feel that way, but I'm trying to control myself so that I don't end up in fisticuffs with my close and old friend Rob all over again. I'll let you do it, James. Take a swing at it. I would be an absolute improvement if you and I could get into fisticuffs. I mean these are – we're within a fisticuff length, the distance from each other. Here's how I feel.

I feel like I always – first of all, I always get itchy when I'm angry. That actually happens – people in my office have told me that they know when I'm – they need to wrap it up or they need to get out of my office or get out of my space is when I start to get a little itchy. You mean literally so or just literally so? Literally so. I see. I send off the spiky, wavy lines from cartoons and just sort of give that feeling of an all body uncomfortableness. But you literally start clawing at your epidermis. I usually when I scratch my neck, it's when there's trouble.

That's your tale. I've been told. Yeah. Look, it's starting to affect all of us. If you scroll through Instagram, it's a lot of people baking. A lot of people doing that. A lot of young people putting on skits for each other

on TikTok. But it's interesting, too, because there's this beautiful thing that happens every night at 7 p.m. in New York City. It's been a couple nice days. A little rainy, but not cold. It can open up the night at 7 p.m. in New York City. And if you open, it's been a couple of nice days, a little rainy, but not cold. It can open up the windows at 7 p.m. People lean out of the windows and they make noise and they applaud and they cheer for the hospital workers and healthcare workers. And they do it all over town. They do it on 11th Street. There's no hospital near me and they do it everywhere. And it's kind of an amazing thing to hear pretty much a whole city doing that. So there are moments of grace in our

houseboundedness, I have to say. All right. Enough of the happy talk. You want to hear a couple reasons I'm angry? Yeah. There's a park near here. I won't name the park because, well, I won't name the park, but I've been going for a walk in the park. It's one of, it has some hills, so you can get a little proper exercise. And I, and the park has been well used and I have been seeing neighbors and I ran into a couple of friends the other day and they, oh yes, we come, we walk here once a day, husband and wife, we have to get out of the house, we're doing this for our health, for our sanity. And that is just the general tenor. By the way, we had that conversation about 10 feet apart. And yesterday, a bureaucrat decided that people were not adequately distancing in a park that has to be at least 100 acres and announced that as of 5 o'clock today,

this park will be closed. And you know what? That made me more than itchy. Right. Because people are doing this for their health. It is one of the few places where they can be social at a distance, at a distance, but they can be social. You can see your neighbors. You can stop and chat. Nobody can handle those. Well, nobody in my generation can handle those hills for more than 45 minutes or an hour a day. But it makes all the difference to hundreds, maybe low thousands of people over the course of a week. And some bureaucrats said, nope, shutting it down. You people have been warned. They put up signs saying,

maintain your social distance. You people were warned. And many people did, of course, maintain their social distance. But it's those few who refuse to obey, and they're shutting it down. That's item one of two. Yesterday morning, plumber in the house, as Rob knows, I don't know that you know this, James, but I live in an old house. We've remodeled bits and pieces, but not the pipes. Kitchen sink clogged solid. Lovely guy came, snaked it out, and we found ourselves chatting from a distance again across the kitchen. And so I said, how's business? And he said, well, you're just lucky it was your kitchen sink.

We had some guys come in to do work on a gas line that had already been permitted. And we got a call from City Hall this morning that somebody had reviewed the permit and decided that it was non-essential. So three guys at our firm showed up for work this morning and went home without earning a penny. And this is happening over and over and over across the country. And okay, I think I understand, yes, there's a terrible crisis. But by about now, I believe, we'll see if Rob is going to do this, if I so rouse Rob that he's going to take a pop at me. I really don't mean to. But I believe the burden in the court of law, it's the burden of proof.

In politics, I think it's something like, in the current situation, it ought to be considered a burden of explanation. There have been enough articles written by learned physicians saying, wait a minute, we need this kind of testing, and you don't really know that kind of data. An economist saying, do you have any idea what you're doing in shutting down the entire state of California? Do you have any idea the budget implications for helping the poor of California next year? The gravity of shutting down the economy is immediate and clear and enormous. And although, of course, it's a terrible disease, of course, we want to take every due measure to protect the vulnerable. I just feel we still don't have the people telling us, close that park.

Sorry, we're yanking that permit, are not doing an adequate job of explaining why they're doing what they're doing, what the data is that permits them to feel they ought to do this, and what comes next. I just feel we're not getting the explanation that a democracy is owed by about now. Yeah. Here in Minnesota, they've closed the lakes in the city for the summer. Now, you can still walk around them, you just can't go to the beach, because people crowding on the beach on a wonderful summer day does not lend itself naturally

to the distancing that you want, so they've closed the beaches in advance for the summer, as of April. Okay, that may change. They may revisit that if things get lifted and things get better. But, I read the news story out of Vermont, where apparently the government of Vermont, the state of Vermont, said, Target, Walmart, sorry, no, it's going to be food and medicine only, the rest of this stuff we deem as nonessential, and you dastardly sell them.

That means seeds. People can't buy seeds. Somebody had a picture of the seed department at Walmart that was walled off because it was non-essential. I'm sorry. I'd like to make a victory garden just in case, but you can't. Television set, clothing, all that stuff, non-essential. All right. Let's consider it. Where's that power coming from? It's got to come from somewhere. It has to be duly vested in them by some instrument, right? By the Constitution, by a bylaw, perhaps some emanation of a penumbra that rules off a regulation, but I'd like to know what it is. I'd like a little bit more explanation for

this because I just don't want to shrug my shoulders and say, oh, right, that's the new rule that they get to just make these decisions, however arbitrary they be, and I get used to granting them that power. We are sort of psychologically getting used to granting them all of these things because we shrug and move along and say, well, we have to do it because we have to bend the curve, et cetera. And I get that. But I don't want to become accustomed to it. I want to fight every single one of these things intellectually and emotionally before

I give in and say, yeah, I'm going to do that. But I mean, at this point in April to say, yeah, I'm completely down with closing all of the lakes in August, on August 31st. Good with that. No, I'm not. You make a really important point. I mean a really important point. And I'm embarrassed to admit that it simply hadn't occurred to me before.

This is a country of laws. And in a crisis such as this, every authority that tells us how we're going to be living for the next X weeks really ought to be required by the journalists, whose job it is to ask questions, really ought to be required to point to the specific statute or, in the case of the federal government, the specific constitutional provision and subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court that gives them that power. There is a lot of sloppy, well, I'm the governor, I get to tell you people we're shutting down the state for 40 days. Oh, yeah? On what authority? Now, I am pretty sure that governors do have emergency powers. But even as we ought not to get in the habit of just accepting assertions of authority, journalists really ought to remain in the habit of saying, oh, yeah? On what legal basis? That should be just routine. The president, when he speaks about this and that other dramatic measure,

really ought to have the attorney general standing on the platform with him every so often to explain the legal basis. National journalists are not particularly interested in this, it would seem to me. And it's either because they're lazy, they just want to find out the thing that Trump has done wrong or said wrong that day so that they can trumpet that. Or in the back of their head, there's this sort of idea that, well, you know what? All of these instruments of power we've discovered and all the ease with which we are moving them and nationalizing this and that, that might come in handy in the future because these are great precedences to be used later. Declare a national emergency, confiscate the property. I mean, I know that sounds like strange guy in the basement counting his gold coins and putting stuck in the guns, you know, the guns with cosmoline.

But, no, we're seeing exactly what a lot of people have warned about the overreach of the state. Here's something else. I go out maybe once every four or five days or so. I went out last night to get supper for everybody, and I hated it because the assumption that we have, and for all we know, it's correct. I don't think so. But for all we know, it's correct that everything is coded out there with radioactive causes, coronavirus, that every surface, if you touch it and then touch your face or something like that, you're going to die. That is the assumption that we have to live under. So you have to wash your hands. You have to do the distancing. You have to get out the gloves and the mask. And we'll talk about the mask in just a second. But that

might be the case for a compacted urban district like Rob is. But it's not the case for the entirety of America. This is a big country with huge spaces like this. And the idea that we're all psychologically supposed to adopt the regulations of Boston or New York or California, or adopt that mentality, is injurious and insane. Now, when it comes to the mask, again, if everything out there is corroded with this stuff, and if it can linger in the air, because an asymptomatic person walked past and exhaled a gust of microbes that are just floating there, this coronal miasma waiting to stick its deadly tendrils up your nostrils, then ought we not to wear a mask? But wait a minute, Rob, weren't we told not to wear masks at all, that that was an overreaction?

Yeah, wait a minute. This is so much to unpack already. Yeah, we have to let Rob—you and I have been the angry old men. We have to let Rob be the voice of reason here. I don't know if I disagree with anything. I mean, look, what is the authority that gives these bureaucrats the right to do what they do? It's the authority of the bureaucracy. They're the only people who are still putting in full work days. Go to the office, and they've got nothing to do, so they're work days, go to the office and they got nothing to do. So they're going to come up with new rules and regulations for us to follow. I mean, this all of these all of these orders to stay in and all this other stuff.

And, you know, it's like it's not by law here in New York City, but people are out on the street, but they're keeping six feet away. It's not the worst thing in the world. All of those things, unfortunately, have an army of bureaucrats who are absolutely convinced that as the deputy commissioner of parks and recreation under 100-acre category in Palo Alto, California, that I am a first responder. And I am a healthcare worker, basically, and a first responder. And I'm crucial because I'm the deputy commissioner of parks. And that's the mentality that's been in bureaucracies all the time. This is like their golden age. They can't wait. They're flexing all their muscles. The problem, of course, is that we, as always, tend to become obsessed with what other people are doing and what other people,

maybe that's right in this respect, but other people, we think more about other people than we do about ourselves. So it's, you know, these bureaucrats toss and turn every night because they've been watching the news and they think, well, you know, I have to do my duty and close that park. Whereas instead, you know, listen, if you're an American and you are unaware of the coronavirus and how basically it is passed from one person to another, you kind of deserve at this point to get it as far as I'm concerned. But if you're an American and you've been reading the news, you kind of know how it goes, you got to be a little bit on your own. But the on your own society that we like to think on the center right here is just beneath the surface, is a little farther beneath the surface for all of us.

I mean, in good times, we love bureaucrats, right? We hate them, but we love them because they get to do stuff. In bad times, we realize, oh, my God, look how much of our potential freedom to roam the park as grown people who understand the health threat, look how much that ability and that freedom can be curtailed by somebody behind a desk somewhere in the annex of Palo Alto City Hall, not even the main building, who just thinks, oh, I have the authority to do that. I'll do that. Wait, stop. In good times, we love our bureaucrats. We do. We do. We pretend we don't, but we want them to do everything.

I'm not pretending. We pretend we don't, but you know what? We love this giant—especially the conservatives need to do some soul-searching here. We don't like the things they do that we don't like, but we sure do like them when they're doing things we want them to do. Conservatives talk about cutting regulations, and sometimes they do it, but they don't ever cut the big stuff. They kind of like the big stuff, right? We love it when government does stuff for us. Well, it has tariffs. We like tariffs. We like it when it taxes the rich guy or taxes the other guy. No, I don't. Well, all right. We like it when it tells us when we can retire and how much to save for our retirement.

No, I don't. Well, all right. All right, you don't. But we vote for it constantly, right? I don't have a choice. There's nobody on there. All right, that's fine. The Libertarian.

You can vote for the Libertarian. But wait, so the conservatives— I'm just saying, to be honest, instead of blaming—I mean, yes, it's true. Liberals are terrible. But conservatives do this all the time. And then we suddenly discover, oh, my God, we've given up a lot of our freedoms, and we've gotten some stuff in exchange, and now we sort of want to take it back. But you can't take it all back. But there's a big difference between saying we're going to have an imposition of tariffs for a specific time in order to force a certain result from a trading partner.

That's what – if you want to call that bureaucrats, that's fine. That's different from saying, we can't do this because there are regulations that keep us from doing it that were put in place seven years ago before what we were even trying to do was spent it. And those are the ones on the ground. That's the centipede. That's the millipede that's crawling through every single action of human activity economically that we have in this country right now. There's nothing untouched by these people. But big government, if you want to talk about your social security. But big government is something that all Americans vote for, right? Even when they say they're not. But conservatives vote for a slightly smaller big government, and liberals vote for a huge

big government. But it's a big government we like. Define big. I mean, yes, government's big. Do we say that that means any sort of social security and social safety net? Because I think most of us have made the decision that probably there's no way we're going to be able to undo all these things now, at least not in this election. So we vote for the guy who we hope slows the growth or doesn't get on board with 17 duplicative programs. It's not to say that we love the idea of mandatory Social Security contributions that will never come back to us, that are not put in account for us, that we don't belong, that our heirs won't get, that that's all gone. Just because we are forced to do it doesn't mean that we like it. And just because we are in favor of other less fortunate people doesn't mean that we wish there. And just because that we are in favor of other less

fortunate people doesn't mean that we wish there was some alternate system we can get away with. We're being pragmatic, but there's no love for the bureaucrat. I mean, there may be love for certain elements of a paternalistic state. Yeah, that's what we've gotten. But that's different from saying that we're in love with the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats are the ones who, what we're seeing constantly, if it's the FDA or the CDC or the rest of them, have their laws and procedures in place that have kept some very sensible and necessary and life-saving things from happening. And seeing that and seeing all of these regulations knocked away, brushed aside when it came that we had to do this or die, the ease with which they were doing that and the senselessness of these things in the first place has all been revelatory, I think, to a lot of Americans

who, you know, are we going to go back to that state? Are we going to go back to worshiping the regulatory state, all of us? Rob, Peter? I will not. I think we will, but go ahead. Well, no, Rob's point, two points, and I'll make them really fast because we want to get to our guest. One, I'm not sure I agree with Rob that we love the bureaucrat, but Rob for sure makes a trenchant point when he says we put up with a lot of big spending. And the conservatives, great hope right now. My position is he's our best hope because all the alternatives are worse, but there are plenty of conservatives who feel genuine enthusiasm for him. And of course, his name is Donald J. Trump. And Donald J. Trump did not mind the spending in that $2.2 trillion bill that passed the other day. And when our side said, wait a minute, millions of dollars to the Kennedy Center, the president actually stuck up

for the Kennedy Center and said, well, you know, they need to be paid as well. Rob's general point that even conservatives, especially conservatives, have a responsibility to stand up against the spread of government. And we get our guys get into Washington and they start doing deals and they just get sucked in. The second point has nothing to do with this, but I'm going to say it because it needs to be said. This would have been a huge story any this, but I'm going to say it because it needs to be said. This would have been a huge story any other time but now,

and now it's getting buried. The inspector general investigated not just the FISA requests, the request for surveillance permission. 29 of them. 29 of them, most of which had nothing to do with Donald Trump, and found errors in all of them, most of which had nothing to do with Donald Trump, and found errors in all of them. The FBI is sloppy and or corrupt in its most sacred duty, which is to protect the civil rights of ordinary Americans, and it is outrageous.

And now I'll shut up about that. I just wanted to say it. No, it's like 29 out of 29. He picked them. I mean, it wasn't so much that they weren't all about Trump. He picked them randomly. It was a random selection of FISA applications. He just, in order to be fair, and probably, I think, to game it slightly so there was least likely to be the skewed ones. He picked 29 randomly, just out of a file. I'll take this one and this one and every third one, whatever it was. And he found trouble with all of them.

I mean, that's not a good thing. But of course, that's, I mean, I would just say like that FISA is, and these FISA requests and these FISA forms are a product of 9-11, of the Homeland Security, the race of Homeland Security Acts that we all sort of said, oh, we need that. We need the Patriot Act. We need all that. And what we did was we created a gigantic bureaucracy. Now, some of those FBI agents were, you know, obviously, obviously Trump is correct. They hated him. They wanted to hurt him. But some of them are just like, well, why are we even doing this? Seems like a ridiculous thing to have to do, to have to file this particular form this way. And we can lie about it if we want to. And the judges.

And the judges. The judges. Some of these were so sloppily done. And these are members of the federal bench. They are thoroughly trained, prestigious members of the legal profession, and they didn't ask questions. As far as we know, they didn't cry foul. The whole thing just stinks. I would say that if we – I know we're going to move on and we have a good guest, but I would just say about this last – about the quarantine or lockdown question is that if you are honest with people and you tell them what you know and you get on it quickly and you have a plan and you explain to them exactly what you know when you know it, and then you ask them to hold themselves to account. Like they need to – you need to do this as a sovereign

citizen. This is what you need to do. This is your duty. And we don't have a nanny state, and we don't coddle people, and we don't have the equivalent of a trophy society in democracy. Then the idea of closing that park would be unthinkable. Yes, it would. But the bureaucrat has contempt for the people because the people keep demanding goodies from a government, and they seem like these incredibly ungrateful supplicants. And the government doesn't want to tell us to wear masks because there aren't enough masks. And if they tell us to wear masks, they think we'll freak out.

They think we'll be unable. They've infantilized us. And part of that infantilization we've enjoyed because there is something fun about being coddled and swaddled. So I'm not sure we'll change after this, but this definitely, as you Warren Buffett, you say about when there's a recession, when the tide goes out, that's when you find out who's swimming naked, right? When stuff happens, that's when you find out just how little authority the deputy assistant commissioner of parks and recreation under 100 acres in the municipality of Palo Alto has, how much power that person has, and how little accountability they have. So it was the same situation. They had that same situation two months ago, three months ago. You know, Rob, all I do is I just hear you speaking black and white like a typical conservative.

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slash ricochet. And our thanks to The Zebra for sponsoring this, The Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Ross Dauphitt, Catholic conservative columnist for The New York Times, writing about politics, religion, pop culture, and sociology, and he writes movie reviews for National Review. Happens to be the co-host of New York Times podcast, The Argument, and his new book, The Decadent Society. I'm just seeing Nero with grapes and dancing girls and the rest of it, but it's more than that. It's out now.

Ross, before we get to the book, how are you doing? You're in New York, the epicenter here, and you've written about your brushes with corona. How is everybody, you and your family, doing? Well, so actually we're in New Haven. So we're in an outpost of New York City where we essentially are hoping that Connecticut practices containment more effectively because we're expecting a baby in two weeks. So every day I check the Connecticut hospitalization statistics to hope. So, so far, so far, so good.

But in the hope. Congratulations. But I can't imagine more nerve wracking circumstances than delivering as part of a wagon train traveling west. Unbelievable, Ross. Oh, my goodness. It's, you know, I mean, in the midst of death, we're in life or something. But but yeah. of death, we're in life or something. But yeah, and so we had our own, we were all sick two weeks ago after I came home from some book travel promoting this book, actually. And the only

test we were able to get was from me. And I tested negative. So officially, we didn't have the coronavirus. Unofficially, I'm pretty sure we did. And I and my wife, I still have some mild chest symptoms. Our kids all had the equivalent of a bad chest cold, but I had shortness of breath. Oh, you did? Oh, no. Yeah. So, yeah. So I think, you know, we have friends across the street who had a similar experience

and tested negative. We have the negative test rate seems to be about 25 to 30 percent. And I don't want to make, you know, we're fine. We seem to be fine. But I think I, well, in fact, at this point, I hope that we had it because. Yes, of course. That we had it and we're all still here. So it's been an interesting

month as it has been for everybody in the world, I guess. Ross, could I just ask, if I'm curious about this, other people are going to be curious about it as well. We will get to the book, but what, what is, what is the medical situation of a child still in utero? Is it assumed? Do you assume that if your wife had it, the baby did too? Have you looked into that? How does that work? There are competing theories, as with everything. One argument is that the baby probably hasn't had it, and that therefore you have to be very careful at birth. And again, these are sort

of the things we're worried about. There are stories of, you know, infants that have to be taken away from their mothers if the mother has COVID. I have also read, though, some studies or some data suggests that at least some babies are born with antibodies to it, which would suggest that they did sort of, that they, whatever it means to have it in utero, they did. So I think it's just too soon to tell. In general, most of the evidence suggests that, you know, most pregnant women and their babies will be fine. There have been plenty of cases in China where they were fine. I think there's been one. Anyway, I don't need to go down all the data, but we're not sure. The hope is that even if we did have it, we are past the point of being contagious or anything like that. And so we

would be fine too, even if for some reason we tested, we had tested positive. But those of us who pray will say a prayer for your wife and that baby. And those of us who think good thoughts will hold them in our thoughts. Ross, I have to explain that you and I have a little bit of history on this book. We recorded a show, an episode of Uncommon Knowledge. Perhaps the best episode ever. Well, I was going to say you were pretty you were pretty good but i was absolutely brilliant top of your game technical problem

tape got lost not ross's fault not my fault either i'm a better urge and in a it was a weird comedy of circumstance tragedy of circumstances so that it was nobody's fault but ross and i are going to shoot that show again. I have been holding back thinking I want to get you in person again. But you know what? You have a book to sell right now. Maybe we'd better arrange to shoot the show on Skype or some such. In any event, I've had you to myself. I'm going to ask an opening question and then let James and Rob have at you. The opening question is, of course, the threshold question. The book is called The Decadent Society. I look around, and even before the coronavirus,

outside maybe Las Vegas, there were not lavish scenes of orgies and serving girls, peeling grapes for billionaire oligarchs. Well, maybe a little bit of the Harvey Weinstein, maybe a little bit of the Jeffrey Epstein, but you would look at the United States and you would say, decadence brings to mind late-stage Rome, and this doesn't look like that. Ross, what do you mean saying we're decadent?

So first of all, I mean, I have to concede, as in every interview going forward on this book, that the coronavirus is not decadent, right? Whatever was happening in America before and whatever happens after, this is a moment of emergency crisis, which is not at all the same thing as decadence. What decadence is, in my definition, is not so much the grapes and orgies necessarily, but a period of stagnation, repetition, drift and decay in which institutions don't work very well. Economic growth slows down, innovation disappoints, and cultures seem to go in circles. And that's what I was describing for America and I think for really much of the Western world. And some of the aspects of

this have been thrown into relief by the crisis we're living through now. I think, you know, the failures of government sort of at various levels are kind of what you would expect from a decadent system, that it would have trouble reacting quickly to a crisis like this. But in general, that's the idea behind decadence, basically, that if you go back and sort of start the clock in the Western world around the time of the moon landing, what you see since then in basically every area except internet technology is sort of not the end of economic growth, but slowing of economic growth, political gridlock and stalemate, and a culture that just makes the same Star Wars movies over and over again and has forgotten how to do anything new. All right. So one of the arguments here is, in particular, technology.

We've had, aside from the cell phone that we all carry in our pocket, aside from software, which isn't real in some way. I don't have quotations from your book in front of me the way I did when we spoke last time. But you argue there hasn't been anything that really transformed life in as basic or as important a way as plumbing, electricity, air travel. And it happens that your book gets talked about even when you're not present, Ross. And Rob Long and I had a little conversation about technology, and Rob said, you know, I'm not so sure he's right about that. Rob? I should let Ross speak. I'm not sure that software, just because it's invisible, isn't meaningful. I mean, we're all sort of sitting at home right now using software that people are talking about having huge impact in their lives,

and they assume not just a minor impact, but a major impact after corona. I mean, I sort of spent an hour last night on the app house party with my family, which of course I could do anytime, but we chose to do last night because of course we're all in separate places, locked down. So I'm not sure that that won't last after corona. And I'm not sure that that's a sign of just because we can't see it doesn't mean that video compression and bandwidth and speed isn't something that's actually a remarkable, remarkable achievement. I mean, it isn't a big, loud explosion that sends a rocket to the moon, but it's got huge impact. Why is that decadent?

So I don't think that is decadent. And I want to be clear, I don't think just because it's invisible doesn't mean that it's not real. I think that basically the internet is the great exception. It's the one area of life where you have had sustained rapid technological progress, although you can debate a little bit how sustained that's been over the last five years or so. I think the challenge has been, how does that translate into the rest of the economy, right? So if you look at productivity growth, right, which is basically the best measurement we have of how much impact technology is having on the economy. If you're having a lot of rapid technological change, you expect to have, or at least in the

past, you expected to have a lot of productivity growth. Productivity growth is basically flat from the 1970s until the initial dot-com revolution. I'm laughing because the stat used to be, and I think it's true, I mean, I'm agreeing with you, that productivity in America started to flag the moment every employee had a computer on his or her desk. Right, and had solitaire and hearts. Yeah, exactly. Minesweeper. Right, so that's the second. So the first point is that you have a productivity surge in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the internet sort of comes online. But then since then, productivity growth has gone back to being lousy. And what that reflects, I think, is that it's been very hard for Silicon Valley to figure out how to translate its communication revolution into revolutionizing other industries. So you have a lot of case

studies, you know, sort of the most extreme being Theranos or WeWork or something where sort of internet money gets plowed into some sort of brick and mortar or chemicals and test tubes space and doesn't have the impact that people expect. And that's, I think, true across the economy. But then the other point is that, you know, the nature of the Internet is that it is a machine for simulation and entertainment, which is, you know, potentially a wonderful thing. But those people playing solitaire become the people playing video games and you end up with your one area of technological progress being a place where people, you know, sort of retreat into entertainment rather than sort of going forth to innovate. But not a passive form of entertainment. I mean, that's the difference.

Before, people would sit in front of a television and watch television because that's what you did. You just, you watched television, even if you didn't like the show and you had four channels. Now, with massively multiplayer online games and the rest of it, there's more. There's a social aspect to it. There's a dynamic aspect to it. And I'm not saying it's great.

I'm just saying that it's a little bit more communal and engaged and creative than simply passive, making it all sound like passive consumption of energy. No, I think there's a reasonable case that aspects of the internet are healthier and more vital than aspects of the television era circa 1975. On the other hand, there's also a question about, and we're sort of getting an intense test of this with the requirements of the coronavirus era era of whether those kind of communal aspects of the internet are an enhancement of community overall or whether people end up sort of substituting thinner forms of community in the virtual world for thicker forms in the real world. So in six months, we can all look at our friendships, our marriages, and our social networks after we've

retreated fully online and have more of a sense of how true or false that is. I mean, yes, you're right. I mean, I can't wait to get back into meat space is the term that I've always hated. And I miss those relationships and I value the ones that I have at home. But at least here now in this lockdown, I mean, there are various fads and fancies that flip through the Internet where everybody's playing Animal Crossing. And so now instead of, like I said before, everybody just locked down at home under quarantine and unable to interact with anything, there's a shared culture that arose with references and names and memes and all the rest of it that comes to characterize this time because everybody was inside playing it. And yes, it's thin, but it is still a tendril, a strand that wraps people together.

I'm glad for it, to be frank. No, it's no replacement for actual human interaction, but I think it's one of those little lucky boons that we have at this time because otherwise we'd be going absolutely nuts. So, Robbie, you wanted to go on with the tech question? No, no, no, we can move on. Go ahead. One bit of the book, Ross, if we could sort of reduce this to a sentence or two, because I really want to get to the conclusion, the way you might have rewritten it, or what you might, let's put it this way, what the paperback edition is going to include by way of epilogue concerning the coronavirus.

But another couple of points, one of the points that you make as an indication of decadence strikes me as simply irrefutable. It just is a set of facts that is. And that is the sterility of the present moment in the West, but also in surprising other places in the world. Could you summarize that one for us, please? Sure. So that's a sort of basic and peculiar fact about the last 50 years of Western and world history, is that every society save one, which is Israel, that has reached a certain level of wealth and material prosperity has stopped reproducing itself at a level required to sustain itself over the long term. And America was the exception to this rule for a long time. And over the last 20 years, we ceased to be exceptional. And so now, basically,

from the Pacific Rim to Western Europe, to the United States, and then increasingly, in areas that we think of as developing countries as well, birth rates have fallen below the two kids per two people that you actually need to sustain the human race. And this then has, you know, it creates a sort of cascade effect where as societies have fewer children, they get older, they become less innovative, they are more locked into their existing sort of groaning political systems. And so it's sort of a compounding of decadence effect that you get as societies cease to be youthful and cease to have the new human beings that would make them useful

again. And on this one, there really is no room for argument. It is just math. The United States, all of Europe, South Korea, Taiwan, China, of course, with its one-child policy, just as a matter of math, we are all going to look, we are all looking more and more like Japan. Yes. And I mean, there's a lot of interesting questions about why this is happening. Yes, yes. And a lot of arguments about, you know, economics versus culture, even, you know, even the role of the internet. You can sort of go back to that question of virtual relationships and virtual sex as substitutes for the real thing. But there's no question that it's happening. And the best thing that can be said for it is that there's an argument that I call the case for sustainable decadence, right? Yes, yes, yes. Which is basically that, well, yes, we aren't going to

be dynamic and youthful and innovative anymore. But guess what? All that innovation was just leading us to some sort of climate change disaster. And the world is pretty full as it is. And we should just be sort of content to grow old where we are as a wealthy and at least until now stable society. Right. And that I think is it. All the world starts to look like Florida, God's waiting room. And just enjoy yourself, order another Mai Tai and be happy. Right. And that I think is a— All the world starts to look like Florida, God's waiting room. Yeah. And just enjoy yourself, order another Mai Tai, and be happy.

Right. Is sort of the argument, right? Okay. One other indication of decadence, and I have a feeling James and Rob are going to have maybe some pushback, but at least some fun with this one. And this is cultural, the sense that we're in a cultural cul-de-sac. Explain that argument as it applies to pop culture. Well, I mean, basically, it's just that everything's been downhill since Cheers and, you know, the high point, the high watermark, right? Yeah, I'm making sense. So this is, you know, this is a little bit harder to prove than birth rates or economic stagnation.

But so in a lot of areas of culture, I think that we have ended up sort of stuck under the heavy hand of baby boomer culture over the last 40 or 50 years. And so the biggest cultural products today, with a few exceptions, all come out of an era from about 1930 to the late 1970s. So basically the period when, you know, basically from when the baby boomers were conceived to when they, you know, turned into teenagers and young adults. So everything from comic are, you know, all of our iconic comic book stories to Star Wars and Star Trek and so on. Everything that dominates blockbuster entertainment now, with maybe the exception of Harry Potter, I guess you could argue, belongs to that sort of glorious boomer

heyday. And this extends beyond the movies, right? Like if you go into a shopping mall at Christmas, 85% of the Christmas carols, not Mariah Carey, but all the others come from that same window and so on. So, you know, this is sort of made most manifest in the arc of the Star Wars movies, where you go from sort of dynamic original movies to George Lucas's failed attempt to make something even greater in the prequels the arc of the Star Wars movies, where you go from sort of dynamic original movies to

George Lucas's failed attempt to make something even greater in the prequels that turned out to be bad to the Disney era, which is basically just recycling the same stories over and over again. And I think that this is not, you know, this is not happening everywhere and in every way. There are certainly pockets of real creativity still in the culture, but I think it's a big story of what's happened, especially over the last few decades. Robert James, are you going to let that stand? Well, I agree. Certainly when it comes to movies, certainly when it comes to a lot of these things,

and it seems to me also that we're living with, I mean, it's not just the boomers, it's the people who came before them who decided after World War I that Western culture was not only decadent but was evil and led to this horrible catastrophe. And all of the old standards had to be done away with. All the Beaux-Arts standards, all of the painting standards, sculpture had to go, architecture had to go. We had to start from zero in that big, exciting new phrase. And they abandoned tradition, threw it away, castigated it. And we're living it now at the end exhausted point of modernism, which has nothing to offer and can connect us to nothing. I mean, we saw the pushback that when Donald Trump said, hey, let's make our federal buildings great

again. Let's design them the classical style. He was excoriated everywhere for bringing back fascism and architecture and the rest of it. But it seems to me that if these are intellectual dead ends and the human desire for beauty, whether it's in the form of a classic Christmas song or a great building or the rest of it, has not diminished, that there will be an appetite for that, that once people start to feed it, may lead to a cultural renaissance. Because the alternative is just a bunch of boring, strange, Netherland-rem-cool-house architectural buildings that give you nausea, music that appeals to nobody,

except for what you hear in the movies, and painting that means nothing, and sculpture that means nothing. Ross, is it possible that, even though we may be in a decadent cul-de-sac phase, that there's still remnant appetite for these things that could lead to the rena Renaissance if somebody had the guts to stand up and say, no, this is beautiful. We need beauty. Let's do it.

I mean, look, I wrote, I was, I think the Trump architecture proposal is the one thing that Trump White House has done that I have written fully in favor of. So, yeah, I think absolutely it's possible. But it's a challenge because, you know, the nature of decadence is that it is hard to escape, right? And so if you look at something like architecture, the whole sort of modernist, brutalist, you know, the phase that was ushered in, you know, from basically the 1940s through the 1970s, it had an era where it was, you know, ugly but interesting, right? Like, say what you will about the worst of brutalism, it has a certain kind of crazy, you know, crazy dynamism. Like somebody was just like, okay, I'm going to, you know, make a model of a Gothic cathedral, except it'll be in cement and

it'll be ugly. And you're like, okay, that's something, right? But at a certain point, that rebellion, and I think this was true generally of a lot of those rebellions, it becomes institutionalized. And then the institutions have a certain kind of power, so they train the next generation. And again, the whole society is older and more sclerotic. It's harder to change institutions. It's harder to start something from ground zero. Like if you want, you know, if you want to become, if you are a, you know, a politician in a state and you want to transform the way your public buildings are built, you have 17 layers of bureaucracy to get through with the guild of professional architects standing at the end of it. So in a sense, you do need things like,

you know, a president who likes columns, right? Not newspaper columns, but Doric ones, who says, all right, let's, you know, let's cut through that tape and hire a bunch of outsider classical architects and do something new. And, you know, and the same is true, the same is true in other businesses and other areas. If you want to make a really creative movie in Hollywood, you know, you may want to be outside the system in various ways. And like, you know, we were our mutual friend, Sonny Bunch, the, you know, DC journalist who went off to work for Rebeller Media, which is based in Dallas, Texas. And they're trying to make sort of, you know, weird outlaw cinema that doesn't fit today's Hollywood standards.

Maybe that's, you know, maybe that's where the future lies. But decadence is powerful because it embodies the weight of these institutions that are very hard to change. Every time we talk about some place like Dallas and the rest of it and say that maybe that's where the future lies, I feel like Winston Smith standing in the window with Julia saying, the proles. That's where the future lies. Forgive me for just bigfooting this here, but I have to ask you one thing more. You talk in the book about how we had a space age and it fired the public imagination. We went to the moon and that was great. We planted the flag and then we lost interest. And that this is indicative of our cultural

decadence. Even though right now we are in a renaissance of a space age in which the private companies are doing it and doing incredible things. They're landing ships on platforms at sea. They're coming up with new drives. They're planning to get to places. We've got robots on other, how many robots do we have on other planets crawling around taking pictures? I mean, it's extraordinary. And maybe the reason that it doesn't fire the imagination the way that the Apollo did is that we've got such great computer-generated

effects in our movies that we feel as if we've already been there, done that, conquered that, you know, got the Klingon Homeworld t-shirt. With Apollo, nobody had really we had special effects in movies, but there was nothing like the majesty of a Saturn V thundering off into the Empyrean blue. Now, you know, we've got these marvels, but at the same time, we're sort of—it's like the real world is catching up to the imagination that we—the imaginative construct that we built.

Is that going to last forever? We have imaginative marvels, but we also are less impressed by technical feats that don't involve human beings directly. I watched the Elon Musk, the SpaceX rocket maneuvers, and they're incredibly impressive. If there is going to be a real space age in the future, they will be essential to that. But part of the reason the Saturn V rockets were so amazing is that, you know, human beings were strapped to them, right? And I mean, this is the sort of the difference between simulation and reality is in part just a difference between are human beings actually doing something? Are human beings the ones going into space? Or are we just sitting at our screens watching a robot crawl around? And those are very different experiences. And the latter can lead,

I mean, I guess my basic view is there are all kinds of scientific and technical breakthroughs happening, not just in space travel, but in other fields that may eventually produce the sort of scientific equivalent of the cultural renaissance we were just talking about. But right now, in space travel, but in other fields, that may eventually produce the sort of scientific equivalent of the cultural renaissance we were just talking about. But right now, it's more that they're potentially laying the groundwork than that they're achieving the things that change the world, right? We will have changed the world when Elon Musk actually sends somebody to Mars or actually builds a moon base or there's actually a space station.

Why though? Space tourism becomes real. Why will it actually a space station. Why though? Space tourism. Why will it have to be a person though? I don't know. I mean, if you're the Iranian general walking out of a, you know, an airport lounge in Baghdad and a drone controlled by some guy on a ship or maybe even Oklahoma City kills you, that's pretty good, right? I mean, that's a pretty good, right? That's, I mean, that's a pretty good, it's pretty good, right?

I mean, yeah. Why does America have to fly that plane? But he's really dead, right? No, that's a real technological breakthrough, but it's real because he's dead in the real world. Actual human beings all over Iraq and Iran have their lives changed because of it, right? In a way that, I guess what I'm saying is that the person controlling the death machine was way,

way far away with a joystick and basically a video game screen doing it. So it may look like somebody had to be there. I mean, the person who lands on Mars and explores Mars may actually be in Oklahoma City. And why is that not exploring Mars if he's just got five robots and an avatar there and something collecting soil samples? Because I think the appeal—I mean, it is exploring Mars in a sense, right? But the reason the space age was seen as such a big deal was that there was an assumption that human beings would go forth and, you know, as human beings do, be transformed by this, right? So if the Age of Discovery had featured Columbus discovering America and essentially just writing a lot of letters back to Europe describing America, then you could say, ah, well, you know, Europeans are experiencing America through Columbus's letters. But in fact, the actual revolution came when hundreds of thousands of Europeans came

to the New World, right? I guess the only thing I push back on even slightly, or just want to offer, is the idea of a cul-de-sac, which suggests that there's no exit. It feels to me like the reason that people built these ships and went across the briny deep and explored new worlds back in the day wasn't because they really cared to map North America or South America. They wanted silk, they wanted pepper, they wanted cinnamon, they wanted stuff. They wanted essentially self-indulgent stuff that really didn't make your life materially any better if you're in 14th century London. If you're Geoffrey Chaucer sitting there and somebody brought you a silk robe, well, that's nice. You can't eat it. And when the Black Death comes, it can't save you. But it did somehow create an appetite or maybe restart an appetite that started from an idea

of sort of pure self-interest, even, I would say, even sort of decadent self-interest. It sort of led to a lot of sort of amazing outcomes. I mean, is it possible? I think it was, so one, of course it was self-interest, right? And this is, but this is again, part of why space might just be a cul-de-sac, right? If there isn't an economic incentive, if there aren't huge benefits in some way, if there aren't worlds that people can actually live on, then maybe we will never go. But then it does become sort of a dead end. But on the self-interest part, I don't think that, of course, there was decadence in the 16th century, as there's decadence in every moment in human history. Something is decadent. But most of the Colombian exchange involved things like

potatoes and corn and tomatoes and all of these, you know, things that revolutionized peasant diets to the point where before the Irish potato famine, the Irish were better nourished than the English because they all ate potatoes that came from the New World. So there's, I think, you know, and then there's also the fact that, you know, America was settled in Jamestown and Plymouth and Jamestown was crass self-interest and Plymouth was, you know, religious utopians trying to set up their own theocracy, which is, you know, a huge part of the American experiment that, that again, reflects, I think, dynamism and creativity and goals, you know, sort of that until we can set up, you know, the church of Ross Dowsett and Rob Long. No one wants that, I guarantee you. So until then, we have limits on our horizons, maybe. So, Rob, I don't want to step in if you've got more. Okay. Okay. So, Ross, The Way Out. You mentioned a moment ago that every modern, every developed country, with one exception, was at a below replacement birth rate, and that exception was Israel. And I can't remember whether I mentioned this to you already when we were

taping the now lost brilliant show, but I'm going to repeat it if I did. I found myself in the south of France, complicated circumstances. Believe me, I'm not the kind of person who goes to Cannes regularly, but I was at Cannes and this beautiful Beaux-Arts late 19th century waterfront, one elegant, formerly elegant hotel after another. And it was just filled with drunk kids from Western, all over Western Europe, shabbily dressed, rock music blaring. These beautiful 19th century hotel fronts had been covered over with neon signs that were flashing. And I found myself, and as I said, music was blaring up and down the beach. I found myself chatting with a young Israeli. And I said to her, would this be a scene in Israel? And she said,

no, no, we have our parties, but not this. And I said, why? And she thought for a moment and she said, well, my country, Israel, my country is still a cause. So is there something there? Is the decadence related in one way or another to a collapse of civilizational, what, self-confidence, sense of purpose? Purpose. The sense that you're part of a story larger than yourself. And Israel still has that story. But the crucial fact is it doesn't have that story just because Israelis are more focused on the future and their people than everyone else. It has it because there's a particular history related to, you know, hundreds of years of persecution and the Holocaust, and a particular political reality where Israel is threatened by their neighbors. Right, exactly. And those realities, those realities keep, you know, sort of external pressure. This has always been true in human

history. It keeps a sense of purpose strong. And the problem with decadence is that you can't just wish that into being. You can't say, ah, well, we don't like being decadent, so let's invent an enemy, you know, and go off and fight. I mean, that's, and when people have done that, and when they do it, you know, you end up with World War I, right? So you can't just invent that, but you do have to recognize that sort of purpose, national stories, religious stories, and so on, they come out of conflict and challenge and pressure. question then. Last question then, for me at least, last question. Even as the space conquest arose from the Cold War, might the emerging conflict, this is just a weird question, but somehow or other, I feel almost as though the very clever professor has trapped me into asking an especially stupid question, but I've got to ask it now. Is the emerging Cold War, I don't know that it's going to be a Cold War, but I can't see

how it can avoid becoming a serious struggle between us and China. Is that likely to lift us out of decadence? If that doesn't do it, what is the way out? Let me just say that. What is the way out of this decadent cul-de-sac? I mean, the answer to the second question, the sort of broad question, is you want a bunch of things that happen at once and feed on each other the way the forces I'm describing have fed on each other over the last few decades, right? So you want technological innovation and religious revival and political reform happening together and sort of furthering and encouraging one another. So that's the big picture answer. But there's no sort of easy switch you can flip to get that. On China, I think absolutely, absolutely that what China offers and may offer even more once this crisis is over is, you know,

a more and more plausible alternative model of ordering a modern civilization, right? One that is much more focused on surveillance and control than Westerners or Americans have ever found acceptable. One that for now persecutes religious people, Christians, Muslims, religious minorities, and one that is sort of governed by a kind of theoretically meritocratic central party, as opposed to by we the people, right? And that contrast, we haven't had that kind of contrast since the Cold War ended. We may be stumbling towards having it again. And out of contrast can come a sort of recollection of

the cause, the purpose, what it means to be American, what we stand for. So that's the optimistic, in certain ways, answer. Not that a new Cold War, again, is something to be wished, but to the extent that it could sort of provoke us out of decadence, that could be a good thing. That being said, there is also the world that I talk about in the book, where you have a kind of convergence between the U.S. and China, where we have our own mechanisms of social control and surveillance that aren't as authoritarian as theirs, but are real. You could imagine a post-coronavirus world where everyone becomes a little more authoritarian, where surveillance becomes a little more ubiquitous. We also have our sort of meritocratic ruling party, right? It's not, you know, it's not the communist party. It's not a unitary force,

but it exists and has grown in power in certain ways. And, you know, so you could imagine a darker timeline where the U.S. and China are enemies, but we both are sort of oligarchic surveillance states and we have a little more rhetoric of liberty, and they have more rhetoric of authority, but we aren't so very different. So that's the really dark, decadent timeline since I'm trying to offer both optimism and pessimism at the same time. Great. All right. Oligarchical collectivism. All right. Emmanuel Goldstein. But ours won't be as – East Asia will be totally different from those jerks over there. Well, ours won't work. Ours won't work.

That's right. Ross, we look forward to your next book, Decadence, Schmecadence, How America Found Its Mojo Again. But for now, we'll enjoy the innumerable insights in your book, Decadence. And thanks for joining us here on the podcast today. And good luck with your own podcast. Good luck staying healthy, and may all things go well in New Haven for you. Thank you so much, and may I see you guys in California at some point when transcontinental flights are normal once again. Definitely. Good luck two weeks from now, in particular. Thanks. Thanks, Russ.

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Simply search for Bound by Oath. And our thanks to Bound by Oath podcast for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, gentlemen, a couple of things here before we wrap up. First of all, we have I'm sort of slowing here so Yeti can scramble to the board to drop it in. We have the James Lydx Member Post of the Week. This is part of the beauty of it. It really is. One of these days we're going to get this as finely tuned as a Johnny Carson golf swing at the end of the monologue.

But that day is not here today. Anyway, Johnny Carson golf swing at the end of the monologue, but that day is not here today. Anyway, a lot like the post of the week from the membership area. Joshua Bissey, The Great Toilet Paper Diaries, being a semi-fictional narrative of the great wipeout, as he calls it. I don't recall when I first heard the rumors of a toilet paper

shortage. Folks were going into stores and buying it all up pretty soon. If you wanted some, you had to go to a shitty-looking fellow on a street corner and say, hey, man, you got any white? It's a humorous look, complete with an Indiana Jones reference at the beginning that just made me smile, just a picture that just cracked me up. And why did I choose this one? Because I think the great toilet paper crisis has passed. It's diminished somewhat. You can still find it back on the shelves. And one of the interesting things that I learned this week is that the problem with the supply chain wasn't necessarily that they didn't have enough. They had a lot. But the demand for

commercial toilet paper, the big rolls, which is a different standard, just evaporated. So they were stuck with all of this stuff that they couldn't reposition into the retail chain. That was part of the problem. So that's a fact that people hoarded and the psychology of it all and the hoarding, shaming and all the rest of it. It's a great little part of this. And it seems like an early part, a bygone part that we can now look back on and say, wow, there were different phases to this. There was the toilet paper hoarding phase. And now there's the phase that we're in, which subsequently will have a name and a signifier that maybe we don't know yet. But he did a funny job of writing about it.

And so that's why I gave him the post of the week. I think of Joshua Bissi as an outstanding student in the school of lilacs. Oh, well, brilliant, brilliant writing about day to day. I thought it was just wonderful, wonderful and not surprised that it caught your eye as well. And I thank you, Peter, for that compliment as well. That's it. But the reason that I chose it is to show people that Ricochet is not just people hitting each other on the head over various positions in the center right, is that it's all things, and it's cultural, it's spiritual,

it's communal. The variety of stuff that you find there in the community that's in the member section is unrivaled on the web, period, because it's self-selecting and it behaves. It ain't Facebook. It ain't the YouTube comments. It ain't Twitter. It's a good community. But you've got to cough up to join. So, you know, hey, times are tight. Everybody's looking at their tight belt beam.

Everybody's looking at their job and saying, am I going to have it? But I tell you what, there are lots of things that, you know, if my wife loses hers and my paper folds and the rest of it, and I'm staring at a bleak economic landscape, I'm still going to cling on to a few things that give me connection to the rest of the world. Because without them, what do you got? Just yourself and your four walls. So go to Ricochet, sign up, and you'll never be sad or sorry that you did. And now the last thing that we have to talk about is, well, we're going to talk about what you're watching. But before, I got to say this, because the minute that I start to say this, everybody turns out.

Two things. One, please, please take a minute to go to Apple Podcasts. I mean, it's just killing me that I got to say this every week, but I'm doing it again. And leave a five-star review. Why? Because we're not some society like China, some tightly top-down controlled society that has server farms somewhere with a bank of iPhones with people's, you know, with robot fingers tapping on five fingers in order to surface this podcast. We don't have that kind of oligarchical totalitarian heft. We rely on you, you, to go to Apple and give us five stars.

Why? Because that way the podcast gets more popular, more people see it. It shows up on Apple's pane of things to look at. And the next thing you know, we got more Ricochet members and more listeners and everybody's happy. And the second thing is, is this podcast was brought to you by The Zebra and the Bound by Oath podcast. Support them for supporting us.

And now the last thing we're going to say, which is, gentlemen, what are you watching? Peter? I'm, uh, I'm, I love it so much that I'm actually disciplining myself and watching one episode per week. And that of course is this final season of better call Saul, which I just love. I I'm behind one week and I came close to watching two episodes. No, no. I thought this is the final season. I'm no more than one a week. I just love it somehow or other. The acting is brilliant. The writing is brilliant. The camera angles are somehow, I don't know enough about the business. You or Rob would know more about how the camera angles are always fascinating. And it feels fresh. It's an old story. Drug cartels, good guy getting mixed up in bad business, but somehow there's a freshness

about it all. And the intermixture of shocking violence with really lovely lighthearted humor is astonishing. I love it. Bob Odenkirk is going to be one of the great actors of our generation, or his generation. I will not gainsay that. Rob? No, it's a great show. I especially like it because it's exactly what you want from this kind of niche television. I mean, it's not for everybody. So it's not, you know, a lot of people aren't, I mean, it isn't a huge hit.

It's just a big success for that network. And that allows them to do things like just go off and tell some shaggy dog stories in an episode that don't necessarily all wrap up perfectly at the end but give you this kind of great novelistic sense of this man's life. And it also helps that you know how it ends. You know where he's going. He is on a trajectory, and we know where it ends up, and he does not. And that really – that's also one of the pleasures of that show that I think. And of course, Odenkirk is, was a sketch comedian.

That's how he started his career. Oh, is that so? Yeah. So it shows you once again, if you can do comedy, you can do anything. Mr. Shade. Thank you, Rob. You're absolutely right. So what do you watch?

I'm trying not to watch too much. I watched, I stayed up way late last night watching TCM was replaying the Taking a Pell on 123, which is this terrific movie. The original? Oh, my God. And then after that, they showed Clute, which is a really, really super dark noir thriller, psychological thriller with Jane Fonda. She won the Oscar for it. And it's great because it's like a lot of terrific Hollywood hippie dialogue. Like, what's your bag, man?

I can't psych you out. Like stuff like that, which is great. But mostly I'm actually trying not to do too much of that because I feel like it's always it's like scrolling through Instagram. You know, there's always that feeling at the end of it that you're kind of sick. You spend too much time watching TV. So I'm actually trying to get give myself a diet of only good news stories that tangentially reflect or talk about the virus, right? So there's one in Texas Monthly that I'm doing a project for

Texas Monthly now, and they sent me this great piece, which I will recommend to you, inside the story of how the HEB grocery store changed, the grocery store changed based in Texas, how they planned early on for this pandemic by talking to their suppliers in China in January. They were way ahead of everybody. And this is one guy ahead of planning. It's just what he does. And it turns out he's really, really smart.

And they had plenty of stuff and they had planned for it. So it's not all incompetence from sea to shining sea. The guys who run the grocery store in Texas knew what was going on and they planned for it. And those are good stories. That's the stories I like to read. It's not all incompetence from sea to shining sea. We're seeing extraordinary just levels of everyday heroism and activity that give me great heart. May I ask, Rob, I know we're running long, but the heck with it. Talking to you guys is for sure the high point of my day today, even though it's the first thing happening. Rob, what are you cooking? That's the saddest thing I've heard.

You said something really interesting to me because you said friends of yours are doing a lot of baking. And that twigged with me because my wife came home the other day and said for some reason there was no flour in the grocery store. No, no. Do you guys find yourselves doing a lot of cooking and baking? Well, I don't like to bake too much. It's in general. It's not my thing. But I did notice there's no bread flour in the supermarket.

There's no, there's no AP flour. There's no flour. People are baking. And if you go on Instagram, if you, you know, basically I,

you know, I have a very, very specific Instagram feed, which is mostly dogs and food and all the crossword puzzles, all the chefs that I follow. This is a great chef in France. His name is Guy Martin,

Guy Martin. And he runs this, I think, two or three star Michelin restaurant called Le Grand Vifour in Paris. And it's set in the Palais Royal. It's like, go there. If you're somehow win the lottery and you want to go have like an incredible slap up French dinner in an incredibly historic room, that's the one you go to. But he's in his home kitchen and and every day he just cooks something for you. And it's in French, so it's sort of like the actual amounts are hard to figure out, because he also has a Savoy accent. But he cooks these things. They're really simple. They're not fancy. They're really easy. But it's just great to see this guy in his kitchen. I think Jacques Pepin is doing the same thing in his kitchen, like making food and saying, all right, well, try this.

And it's not complicated. They're all really simple stuff. And he shows you exactly how to do it. And there's something about that I really think is amazing. I mean, a lot of my friends are showing their complicated dishes that they're working on. But I think that what the great thing about this sort of national crisis is you have absolute carte blanche to eat rich comfort food all you want. Yeah, the people who are saying, here's my exercise regimen for making sure that I come out of this with an eight-pack. Okay, fine, sit down. And I'll have a little ice cream sandwich at the end of the day, and maybe I'll extend that to half of Reese's peanut butter cups

because I don't give a bleep. Who knows what happens tomorrow? Rob, from what I'm watching, Rob, imagine that you're giving this pitch. Now, you had the meeting, right? You've finally gotten to see the guys with the money. Is it the guys with the money you talked to or the guys who know the guys with the money? The guys who could say yes. I only, I only, my, my rule is I only pitch to people who can actually say yes. I don't. Okay. Yeah.

All right. So you sit down and this is what you pitched to them. All right. This is a story about a grizzled, cynical old reporter who's about to retire. As a matter of fact, he can't wait to get out of town, but he gets pulled back into the business for one last big story. And he gets paired with an idealistic young reporter who's determined to get to the truth, even though his father, a highly placed government official, wants him to step back.

Oh, and his wife's pregnant? She's probably a lesbian as well. The two of them, this unlikely pair who hate each other on sight the first time they meet, study and get to the bottom of a murder of a young girl whose implications may go all the way to the top. Would you

pitch that? Maybe it's a comedy. Because it's like every other single show I've ever seen. I mean, you just sit there with a checklist and go, yep, cynical, yep, one last story, yep. It's great.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's great. It's called The Mire, and it's Polish. You should have led with that. I already like it. Well, no. I mean, what I want to do is set up what a cliché fest it is. But the fact that what's fascinating about it is they don't tell you what day it, when it's set, because they don't have to.

It's apparent from the very first scenes of the movie, this is set in the 80s in Soviet-controlled Poland. And so it's got that sort of, if you loved Chernobyl, as much as anybody can love that, you will like this because it has the same gray,

doer, beaten-down, bad fashion, cheap, garish simulacrum of Western civilization. It's all there. And since it's Polish and they lived through that, they have access to all the artifacts, to what things actually looked like. So it's got that feel of their similitudinousness that makes it feel like a documentary. And the actors are good. And it's just interesting. It just, it is. It's like a little historical document

into the, you know, the bad old days of the Soviet Union. And as such, it's well done. And it's only five episodes, I think. And so, you know, yeah. I've been trying to steel myself to get back into Babylon Berlin, which is by Weimar era Germany,

the first two seasons of which were fantastic. But I just don't feel like marinating in, well, decadence. Maybe that's the word I'm looking for. That's Rob's deal. We should have asked him how American decadence compares to Weimar-era decadence, because he might have put the image in our mind of

you know, oh gosh, Nancy Pelosi wearing the fishnet stockings and the top hat at the Kit Kat club. It makes you know, oh gosh, Nancy Pelosi wearing the fishnet stockings and the top hat. Oh, no, no. At the Kit Kat Club. It makes you wonder, and Chuck Schumer doing the Jewel Gray bit. No, we don't want to go there at all.

We want to go as far away from that as possible. So, guys, have a good weekend. Stay safe. Stay healthy. That stupid thing that we say to people, like we say, have a good flight, you know, okay. In as much as I'm sitting passively waiting for nothing bad to happen, I will, um, uh, just, uh, I gotta go out now and I gotta get some stuff.

It's my wife's birthday. I gotta get some dog medication and, uh, I don't mind. Wait, your wife's birthday, the dog medication are not related, right? Uh, no, not at all. They, they are not. Although I could probably are not related, right? No, not at all. They are not. Although I could probably, you know, wrap up some flea and tick preventative and give it to her because it's not like there's a lot of stores that I can go to. And Amazon, if you're buying something, they say, yeah, great idea. Get it to you on the 29th of April because, you know, and we understand that. Right, right. Get that. We get it. But as I said at the beginning,

I understand all this. I'm getting a little itchy. Getting a little angry. Yeah. There you go. All right. Full circle. Guys, been a pleasure.

See you next week. See everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, fellas. Next week, fellas. Great. Great. Standing tough under stars and stripes we can tell. Great. On that train, all graphite and glitter. Undersea by red. 90 minutes from New York to Paris.

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