The Ricochet Podcast - You'll Be Back

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

It’s our last regular episode of 2021, but fear not! We’ll be back… With us today is historian Andrew Roberts, author of The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. Roberts takes us through the many inaccuracies that have captivated modern imagination and loomed over his legacy. We get into George, the man; why Great Britain lost; how the Georgian records are relevant to... Source

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Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalex and our guest is Andrew Roberts, author of the new biography of King George III. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 574. Join us at Ricochet.com, won't you?

Be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. And here is a reminder for all you Ricochet members, grab your favorite adult beverage and join us for a no-holds-barred Q&A with Ricochet co-founders Peter Robinson and Rob Long. It's coming up Tuesday, December 21st, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. That's Tuesday, the 21st, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. That's Tuesday, the 21st, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. Be there or be a cubular. You got to be a member to participate, though. So go to Ricochet.com slash join.

Find out how cheap it is and how many benefits you get. And of course, Rob and Peter are here with us now. Rob, I presume in New York where he's trying to buy a car and Peter in California, whereas a Californian, he drives one everywhere, heedless, laughing and paying sixty five dollars for gas. Right, Peter? Well, I'm trying to I own a car. Oh, OK. You're trying to find out what to do with it. Is that it? Are you only you're trying to register a car? Right. OK. Here in Minneapolis, that consists of just going somewhere and standing in line for about four minutes and then you're done.

I imagine in New York, it's a labyrinth of wonderful bureaucratic encounters because we know government does so many things so well. One of the things we kind of expect government to do is like make it so we don't die when we go outside from criminality. And all of a sudden you have mayors all across the country who are saying, hmm, for some odd reason, we can't quite figure out or put a finger on there's crime and we're going to stop it. The mayor-elect of New York has vowed to make New York City a safe city following the shooting of the Brooklyn bodega worker. Let's see, I think in the former Philadelphia mayor, Michael Nutter, great name, goes after the Philadelphia's progressive prosecutor and says that he's letting down the city. And of course, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who is at present painting the barn with the open door through which the horses went an

awful long time ago, finally wakes up, smells the coffee, as Annalanders used to say, and had this to say. And it's time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city. Destroyed, not is destroying, but has destroyed. And she swore to. So, gentlemen, what do you think? It's nice to see that finally some of that old time religion is working its way

back into the political structure to a little too late. Do they have the tools to do anything about You're in Minnesota, for example, all of a sudden our mayor is saying, we're going to fund the police more. We're going to prosecute the carjackers more. Too little, too late. You think it'll work? San Francisco politics sort of elude me because it goes from left to far left. My guess is that the mayor had a session with some business leaders who said, look, we just can't, we just cannot. The insurance rates are going up. Nobody's going to be able to do business in this town. You got to do something. So she gives a speech. She uses, somewhere the word that she used is still shocking, but not in San Francisco, I can assure you of that. So here's the question.

Did she name the DA? Did she accuse the DA of being too soft on criminals? There may be more that she said that I missed. I've heard more than we just played. As far as I can tell, she did not do what she needed to do, which is pick a fight with the DA, who is up in a recall election next spring. She needs to make it clear that she's against him and wants a new DA in there. Did she mention anything about supporting the chief of police? Was the chief of police standing in the back, standing next to her when she gave the

speech? Was she announcing more budgeting for the cops in San Francisco? No. So as far as I can tell, it's just pretty good talk. But as far as I can tell, it's just pretty good talk. But as far as I can tell, it's just talk. We'll see. Maybe more to follow, but for now just talk. Rob, you're in New York. Yeah, I mean, look, who knows? I confess I don't understand a word of what she said. I don't really know

what she meant. It sounded for a minute like she was saying she's going to get tough with law enforcement, like she was going to get tougher with the San Francisco Police Department, of which I think there are probably 12 more remaining members. I really have I'm kind of baffled by what the I mean, this is success. This is what they this is what I mean, is anybody I'm surprised it happened so quickly, but no one's surprised that it happened. I guess what I'm surprised about in New York City anyway is that people remember when it was much better a few years ago. This has not been a gradual change. And so you have a lot of young people who don't remember what it was

like in 1990 or 1987, for that matter, and are shocked that the subways seem unsafe they're not i mean that it's not so much that they are statistically unsafe although they are but it seems more unsafe and then the second thing i think which no one really talks about um is it's one in new york city san francisco is different i think um it's not crime that people are worried about here it's not crime like oh somebody's gonna mug me for 20 20 bucks or steal my watch that that at this point seems like a high class problem to have what what new york city we have is insane irrational people wandering around the city causing violent disruption and they're insane they're not trying to steal my car radio or my cell phone like that it's not crime it's something else it's a city spinning out of control and

becoming this this holding pen for ambulatory psych and drug users which is what yeah well sort of the same right like but like the the level of uncivilized behavior in san francisco i mean yes people are running in through the CBS and stealing things. And that is crime. But to me, that's like, OK, well, more cops on the street will probably solve that. But the crazy lunatics wandering around New York City. That's a separate problem. It still requires cops, but it's not it's not what people in New York City are worried about. And we're not worried about putting more locks on our doors and putting those weird little things.

We used to have those little metal sticks that used to be bracing the door shut. That's not that doesn't seem to be coming back, but it does seem to be coming back that you're on the subway, that there's just lawlessness there and insanity. And. That's much scarier in a weird way than somebody trying to steal your car. Well, the case of San Francisco, when you say more police might do something about the people going into Walgreens, not if it isn't a crime. I mean, if it's a misdemeanor to walk in and fill up a garbage bag with $950 worth of expensive cosmetics, the police are not going to spend a lot of time on that anymore. They're going to spend time on investigating somebody who broke a car window to steal all your stuff. You're overwhelmed. You have too many things're overwhelmed. Right.

Too many things to do. Right. But I'm just putting all of law enforcement. No, I know. I get that. But the thing is, is that the reason that they made stealing under a certain amount of money no longer a crime was because they did not want to penalize and victimize poor people who were forced, Jean Valjean-like, to steal cosmetics in order to get ahead of them.

And in New York, the legions of the insane and the drug users, all of these things are cudgels with which they bash the existing order. They're convenient. They're useful. It is useful to have crazy people wandering the street, poor people stealing things, because it shows that this capitalistic hellscape in which they refer to it has to be abolished, has to be done away with. Obviously, things are failing if you have crazy people in the streets, as opposed to saying, no, it's not a failure of capitalism. It's a failure of will and compassion to do something to take them off. How much money did de Blasio's wife

get to do something about this, Rob? You remember? She got lots. She got lots. She got lots. And what happened to it? It got spent. It got spent and nothing got done.

Right. Nothing got done. Which just means you need to spend more. And there will be people who will profit out of that and people who will pocket. I mean, it's all of a piece. Every single piece of disorder that we have now is being used as evidence that the system doesn't work, as opposed to being used as evidence that the progressive approaches are completely incapable of dealing with civil disorder and criminality. I mean, what is Breed going to say when all of a sudden the activists point out that there's a disparate impact to our policies, that they're arresting the wrong people and people are becoming criminal justice system involved at a rate that they shouldn't be because it's out of sync with a proportion of the population. They've painted themselves into a rhetorical and intellectual corner from which there is no escape. Well, politics, we'll see whether people, we'll see

whether the Boudin, Boudin, I'm not sure I can pronounce his name, but the DA in San Francisco, the recall petition did get enough signatures. in LA. So while these are only misdemeanors, we don't have the, we're not going to prosecute. Okay. So a governor of the state of California, even Jerry Brown, I think might've done this. Here's what happened in California last week. Generators were declared illegal. I happen to pay attention to this because there was one time when our house in a terrible storm, the power went out. PG&E is no prize, as you may be aware. And we started to get flooding in the backyard. I turned on the sump pump, but I couldn't turn it on. So we had to borrow a neighbor's generator to keep our house from flooding. Can't do that now. Illegal. But what is legal? Looting Louis Vuitton in San Francisco.

Gavin Newsom, at this very moment, should, if he were a real governor, be calling the legislature back into a special session to enact new laws, making this kind of looting illegal, making it much easier for prosecutors to move against them and to have these laws take effect. The same date that laws usually take effect is January 1st. That isn't happening here. However, in Rob's great city of New York, Eric Adams, a former policeman, will become mayor on January 1st. We'll see what he does. I mean, why it should be that New York of all places should respond to the lawlessness that politics in New York seems to be working and they're not working in California.

Generators are illegal? Yeah, correct. Gas-powered generators are illegal. Why? Let me guess. Because, James, we, unlike you in Minnesota, care about our climate out here in California. It is madness. Yes, that's correct.

So the state, so the utility I gather is regulated heavily by the state. Heavily regulated by the state. So heavily regulated. And we're taking our last remaining nuclear power plant offline in some matter of months. Power outages are going to increase, not decrease. So they've made power to be undependable, like a third world state, and then forbidden you, the private citizen, to have a means of keeping your ice cream from completely melting. Does Nancy Pelosi have a generator, do you think, in that house of hers with a fridge with 25? I'm pretty sure there's a backup system of some kind. Who knows? Of course, the idea here is to push

everybody into getting these huge, big batteries to store in your garage for backup power that Elon Musk is selling now. Oh, my Lord. Anyway, don't get me started. You already have. I already have, and I'm glad that I did. Well, I'm stunned about that, that they would ban the generator. But then again, why not? I'm sure that they also want to ban gas ranges, right? Don't they have some new building? Oh, yes, that's right. That's right.

Because I just went through a six-month procedure to get a new range, and it has gas on top because it's the perfect cooking type you can use. Electricity is awful, awful, dreadful. And they want to ban that going forward because, of course, of the environment. And they want to take the nuclear power plants off. Got it. Okay. So it's all going to be the wind farms and the solar fields. Got it. I don't know why I'm laughing. To keep from weeping. Yes. Indeed. Well, Rob, before we go into our break, at least New York is beautiful at Christmas time, right? When the Fox tree is glowing in a way that just sort of.

Yeah, everything's lovely. It's like, you know, it's, it's, it's looks like, it feels like Christmas in New York, but I suppose that there are already signs that people are becoming terrified of Omnicon or Omricon. Was it? Omnicron was how Biden pronounced it. And that's what I'm. Omicron. Omicron or Omricon was it Omnicron was how Biden pronounced it and that's what I'm Omicron Omicron I keep saying it all could be Omicron so who knows how long it'll last but

um you know it seems to me like um you know the great unifier we're we're losing our great unifier at the end of the year Bill de Blasio who brings everyone together has never been a politician so universally loathed as Bill de Blasio uh I just it's just insane to me you can be uh you can be in a uber with a uber driver with a mega hat and you can be with you know marching in Washington Square Park with Marxist graduate students and they all agree de Blasio is the worst uh so it's kind of like kind of a Christmas kind of place Christmas unity um and I you know there's like there's a there is a sense of hope for Eric Adams that Eric Adams is like he whatever he's saying it seems to be the right thing and I was at a party of the weekend talking to somebody who

works for him actually and she's a state assemblywoman I say is that what we have here state assembly yes we do and she's a democrat but kept saying, I'm not an AOC Democrat. She kept telling me I'm not. I'm not one of those, which I thought was kind of interesting. And she said, oh, this guy is the real deal. I heard two things. The party I thought was interesting. One was that this guy's the real deal, which you usually say when you work for a politician. But she seemed convincing to me. And it kind of like it confirmed my priors about him, which he may actually be a good urban politician. He's a liberal, but he's a good urban politician. Law and order is pretty much the standard there. And the second thing I heard from somebody who's been working, was working in the Trump administration and is continuing that work in the Biden administration was sort of hopeful and cheerful and a cheerful sign of uh essentially of of economic um

uh economic defenses americans america's economic defenses against china which i think was he told me some stuff sort of off the record is it really interesting and he's been working very closely with mike pompeo he worked with mike pompeo under bush i'm sorry under trump and then continues to work with my pompeo now and i said what was he like you know this guy's gonna run for president we know he's gonna run for president you don't lose 60 pounds unless you're running he's gonna run for president so what's he like and he said he is really smart like really keep hearing number one at west point but one of his west point colleagues said he would have been the top of his class at West Point for 20 years before and 20 years after.

And then sort of just generally sort of a super brain and incredibly mathematical. Apparently, he's like can look at numbers and stuff. And this guy's in finance. So he's like, this guy is the smartest person I've ever met and would be leading the world's biggest bank if he wanted to. And I thought, that's kind of interesting. He's going to run for president. That's kind of interesting. He's going to run for president. That's kind of cheerful. And I just remember one other person telling me

who's worked very closely with the Florida governor, DeSantis, saying, DeSantis is really smart. Yes. So we're going back to the Ivy League. I think Pompeo is Harvard and DeSantis is Yale. But what I do like is that people are now, instead of saying things like, you know, he's like, he's really, well, you you know, that weasel wording we do on the right.

Sometimes when our candidates are showing up in the high wire act, we're worried about what they might say. Suddenly we're saying things like, no, no, no, no, no. He's really he's the smartest guy in the room. And that's I don't know, as we enter 2022, maybe that's good to hear. Interesting. Well, sometimes this morning. I can't help noting, by the way, how much of Rob's politics over the years he has arranged around the imperative of avoiding cringing when we have debates. Yeah, no, no. The high wire act that we we engage in or not, we I mean, I maintain studious independence politically, but the high wire act that the Republican Party engages in is so weird. Considering how smart some of the candidates are, it's just an interesting thing. And I suspect that with these guys, we're not going to have that problem. If they run, I mean, who knows?

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thank stamps.com for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Andrew Roberts. He's a visiting professor at King's College London and a visiting research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His contemporary commentary has appeared in the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator. He's written well over a dozen war histories, including the acclaimed Storm of War. Today, he's here to tell us about his most recent book, George III, the life and reign of Britain's most misunderstood monarch. Some of us only know him from the history books or from the Madness movie. Then there's this musical approach. You'll be back, soon you'll see. You'll remember you belong to me. You'll be back, time will tell. You'll remember that I served you well.

Andrew, you've dealt with this one before. Well, I love the show. My foot was tapping just as much as any Americans at that point. By the way, before you tell us the ways in which that portrayal is incorrect, I should note that the London Times chose, what's the title? No, I get confused because there are two different titles, one in this country. George, The Last King of America is what we need to tell our listeners to look for. The Last King of America. The Times of London shows it not as one of the books of the year, but as the book of the year. And Victor Davis Hanson has taken to

referring to you, Andrew Roberts, as the finest biographer working in English. All right. Having got those little trifles out of the way, what's wrong with that portrayal of George III? Well, the first thing that he says, of course, is that you'll be back, as though he couldn't face the fact that America had become independent. In fact, of course, in June 1785, he said this to John Adams, the first American ambassador to London, I'll be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to the separation, but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I've always said, and I say now,

that I will be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power. Pretty gracious, I think. Totally unlike Lin-Manuel Miranda's statement. The second one, obviously, is the bit about sending the battalions to kill friends and family to remind anybody of his love. He was the exact opposite of that kind of sinister, cruel and vicious tyrant because he wasn't a tyrant at all.

I've got another couple of questions and then Rob Long and James Lilacs want to have at you two of the pleasures of the book. Each of these questions refers to one of you two of the pleasures of the book. Each of these questions refers to one of the pleasures that I found in the book. One is, and I'm going to ask you to do something in 20 seconds that you spend 600 pages doing in the book, but one is for an American, we think of the American Revolution, we are, of course, perfectly understandably taught the revolution, and your three hosts are old enough to have been taught the revolution. Who knows what happens in schools today? But of course, we're taught it from the American point of view. And what the book makes so clear is the larger historical context

as seen from London, that it's a world war, which you're about to explain, and that the government, George III is king, he has a government, the government is not only fighting Americans in North America, they're fighting English politicians in the House of Commons. That's very, yes, it's a bit like the end of the Vietnam War, really. The war was lost in the Congress, just as in the American War of Independence, the war was ultimately lost in Parliament. The radical Whigs withdrew the funding for the conflict and therefore it had to end. The second pleasure of the book is finding out what an enjoyable human being George III seems to have been. So here's one way of getting at that in brief. What was Christmas like in Buckingham House, as it was then called, during the reign of George, when he's in his prime and has his children around him?

Well, actually, it's his wife, of course, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who brings the Christmas tree to England. It's often thought of as being Prince Albert who did that in Queen Victoria's reign. But Charlotte did that, it was a very sort of German tradition and it was jolly. They were a large family, they had 15 children, they were a loving family, the king and queen were the only two Hanoverian king and queen actually to love each other and for the king not to have any mistresses and so on. And so it was actually a rather lovely time of year at Christmas in Buckingham House. And now I relinquish you to Rob Long with the warning that he has Republican tendencies.

Well, not really. I guess what I would like to know, so if it wasn't George III, why'd you lose? Oh, right, because it was an impossible war to win. Once it was clear that the Continental Army wasn't going to be captured in either Manhattan or New Jersey. Right. Although the history of the war is pretty much unbroken defeats for the Continental Army. Absolutely.

But they're never captured in the way that Burgoyne is at Saratoga and of course Cornwallis was at Yorktown. The Fabian strategy of George Washington in avoiding any battles that would end the war was a brilliant one. And also his own stamina and his charisma in keeping the army together at Valley Forge was another huge factor in our defeat. So just as you mentioned, the rule is don't get involved in land wars in Asia, don't get involved in land wars in the- 3,000 miles away, where you've got these lines of communication that are 3,000 miles and every soldier needs one third of a ton of equipment and food and uniforms

and ammunition and so on to be shipped out those 3,000 miles. It becomes logistically an incredibly difficult war to win, especially when the British generals make a series of terrible strategic errors. Right. So if they had made better choices early on, Do you think it would have gone a different way? I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've always imagined and correct me if I'm wrong, this may just be a completely pointless point statement, but that the person who won or who lost the colonies for the British or won them independence, the Britain who did that was Edmund Burke. No, I would take issue with you on that, certainly.

The person who lost the war for Britain, unfortunately, was Sir William Howe, because there was a perfectly good plan, the germane plan, which was to bring Sir William Howe, because there was a perfectly good plan, the Germain Plan, which was to bring Sir William Howe up from New York, up the Hudson, at the same time that Sir John Burgoyne was coming down from Canada to meet at Albany and try to split, use the Hudson Valley to, command of the Hudson, to split the New England colonies off from the rest of the colonies. And instead he veered off eastwards without orders to capture the rebel capital of philadelphia it was a as an american we we tend to think of it as sort of this philosophically inevitable thing that there's a bunch of sort of uh you know republicans far enough away from

london and far enough away from sort of the the aura of of the royal aura to be thinking, you know, bold thoughts about the rights of man, etc. And that inevitably the birth of this nation was sort of inevitable. It's going to happen because people are free. And you're telling me now actually it was a, you know, this this or that tactical blunder. No, I don't. I don't disagree with you, actually. I think ultimately it would have been inevitable, but no war is inevitable. There are so many things going on in war that that, frankly, either side can usually win under certain circumstances. But I agree overall, certainly by the 1770s, you know, you have two point five million population. You've

got a year on year growth burgeoning economy of about seven percent year on population, you've got a year-on-year growth burgeoning economy of about 7% year-on-year, you've got as many bookshops in Philadelphia as in any other city of the empire apart from London, and you have no French threat left on the North American continent after the Treaty of Paris in 1763. So, no, I do agree that insofar as anything's inevitable, American independence is.

However, that particular war had some things, had Bunker Hill, for example, gone radically differently, things might have just taken much longer to have panned out. You know, the 1619 project from the New York Times assures us that America was founded for slavery, in slavery, of slavery, etc. And then surely that must mean that the bloodthirsty, cruel tyrant George III himself was way pro-slavery, that being soaked into every aspect of the American experience. That's wrong, isn't it? It's totally wrong, yes. In fact, Her Majesty the Queen has allowed 100,000 pages of George III's private papers, his correspondence and memoranda and essays and so on, to be made available since 2015. And I discovered in that huge cornucopia of new information absolutely nothing to support the 1619 project's statement, essentially, that it was to protect slavery that the founding fathers rebelled, because there was no plan

of John George III's side to extend abolition to the... I mean, slavery wasn't allowed in Britain since Magna Carta, and certainly since the 1772 Mansfield judgment, but they weren't going to extend that either to the West Indies or to the American colonies. And in those papers, there's also a particularly fascinating attack that George III makes when he's Prince of Wales in the 1750s on the arguments in favor of slavery. In a fascinating essay he's written on Montesquieu's Essays on the Laws. Do you mind if I just quote one sentence from it? Please.

Have you got time for that? It's very... Which you just happen to have right there, almost as if you said this. I sure do. I carry it around with me everywhere, just in case I'm asked this particular question. What shall we say for a European traffic in black slaves? The very reason's urge for it will be perhaps sufficient to make us hold such practice in execration. For an inhuman custom wantonly practiced by the most enlightened, polite nations in the world, there is no occasion to answer them, for they stand self-condemned. So, so George III never bought or sold a slave, never owned a slave, never bought

any of the shares in any companies that did that. And of course, he signed the legislation that ultimately ended the slave trade. An execration. It sounds like the work of a thinking, sensitive, intelligent man. And we are led to believe somehow that the European monarchs were all a bunch of inbred, hemophiliac, weak people with limited intellects. How would you compare George III to his contemporaries? Was he as smart as, smarter than, more enlightened? Well, he was certainly an enlightened monarch, and a highly cultured monarch in terms of painting and architecture and literature and bibliography and astronomy and all of those enlightenment subjects. He was one of our most cultured monarchs.

And yes, he's been made out, you're right, he's been made out by generations of Whig historians to be thick, basically. But when you actually look at it and you see the essays he was writing in Latin at the age of eight and so on, he wasn't thick in the slightest. This is just a rationalisation later by the Whig historians, unfortunately, seems to have stuck there. Compared to his other contemporaries, well, he did have some impressive contemporaries in Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great,

who were also, you know, enlightened despots, essentially. But he wasn't one, he wasn't a despot at least, he just was enlightened. Andrew, this is a point, when we recorded our interview for Uncommon Knowledge, which will air soon, you touched on this point, and it's been going around in the back of my mind since. And you made the following point, that at that moment, the Americans had great figures. I was very struck that these figures that we're taught are great, do stand up as great. Washington, Adams, Jeff, these are, they had their faults, Jefferson, many faults, of course, but they were remarkable figures. And the British leadership was by

contrast at that time quite weak. Then it occurred to me afterwards, George III is insane at this point, but as the Napoleonic Wars get wrapped up under his son as Prince Regent, written by this point has Nelson and Wellington. And I think to myself, if anybody knows what calls forth great figures, it's the biographer of Napoleon and George III and the man who wrote Masters and Commanders about the leaders of the Second World War. So the question is, we go from Thatcher and Reagan to Boris and Biden, and you get the feeling that the whole world, the whole English-speaking world is waiting for something new, for some kind of leadership to reemerge.

What calls forth the great figures? Well, I think you're absolutely right, especially when you look, it doesn't just start with Nelson and Wellington. You also, at that same period, have Castle Ray and Canning and Pitt, Pitt the younger of course and Spencer Percival in his own way was a was a pretty impressive leader until he was assassinated so it has to be doesn't it and it's also the same with Churchill who of course would never have become Prime Minister had it not been for the World War that there needs to be the threat that is commensurate with the people who come forward, with Winston Churchill, it's obvious, with Reagan and Thatcher as well, it's obvious. Unfortunately now, and I don't know the reason for this, people are not seeing the, for me, completely obvious totalitarian threat posed by

Xi and Putin and Iran as being the North Korea, as being the kind of existential crisis that the West is having to face for now the fourth time since 1914. And until we do recognize that, I'm afraid we are going to wind up with frankly second-rate leaders. Well, does this period remind you of, sorry, we'll get back to George III in a moment, but does this period remind you of say the, we'll get back to George III in a moment, but does this period remind you of, say, the 30s in Britain when the whole establishment just didn't want to look? They all wanted to look the other way. I do see the equivalence, yes. I mean, you see it particularly, I think, with the Iranian nuclear situation. People just want to be as optimistic as possible and rather than

realistic. And it just doesn't work. You know, you have to sometimes actually listen to what leaders, your opponents and antagonists say. And when you listen to what the Iranian leaders say about Israel and about the great Satan and the little Satan and so on, occasionally you ought to actually believe that they're being genuine, just as we ignored the threats from Hitler and indeed Stalin again and again, however loudly and often they were made. And what happened? The result was global disaster. So I said a moment ago that toward the end of his reign, George III was mad. If Americans know

two things about George III is that he lost us and that he was mad. But you are- And that wasn't put the two and two together. Yes, yes. He wasn't mad as the porphyry or some strange. What do we now understand about his madness, the medical causes and the effects it had on his policies, if any? It was not porphyria. We know that now. The medical view is pretty much uniform in saying that this was a terrible misdiagnosis back in the 1960s because the team who gave the doctors the statistics and facts actually gave a deliberately misleading series of symptoms.

But what we also know is that because he only had a prodrome attack of what really ailed him, which was bipolar disorder, effective type 1, In fact, he had that in 1765 at about the same time as the passing of the Stamp Act, but then absolutely nothing for 23 years. He was totally sane all the way through until 1788, which of course was five years after America became independent. So it had no bearing whatsoever on the American Revolution or on the American War of Independence. In all these instances, we've seen a re-evaluation of him, the pendulum swinging the other way. Oh, and speaking of pendulums, the way you feel can go back and forth. And sometimes that's because your diet's off, you're not exercising. But you know,

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off. And we thank Pendulum for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Rob? I guess I'm also drawn to what ifs, Brandon, what if things. What if they made a deal? There was a deal to be made, right? There certainly was, yes. And in fact, they did hope, the British government did hope to try to make a deal when it sent out the Carlisle Peace Commission in 1778. But by that stage, too much blood had been shed and there was too much water under the bridge and too many Americans recognized that they did have independence in their grasp for any deal to be done. But let's go back, say, to the time of the Boston Tea Party. Instead of the Intolerable Acts in 1774, you had some kind of very forward-thinking agreement between Lord North and Benjamin Franklin negotiated, which gave them essentially a kind of Commonwealth system. It doesn't really come into effect in Britain until 1931.

But if you have a Commonwealth system whereby there is a centralised Parliament and America entirely makes up its own laws and taxes itself, but keeps the king and stays as part of the British Empire, then that, of course, would have meant that the English-speaking peoples would have been so powerful. The combination of what became the American Republic and the British Empire would have been so powerful by 1914 that the Kaiser could never have declared war against the English-speaking peoples. Certainly 100 years later would have been an incredible juggernaut, but obviously that 100 years, things would have happened.

I was wondering if you were going to do a what if, they make a deal, there's kind of a special arrangement with the colonies that the United States just seems to be allowed to grow and it sends tribute back, you know, like back to the mob boss back in London. You keep sending your kicking the money upstairs. And then I was just thinking that in the Clayton Christensen sense of the innovators dilemma, right, that there's a disruptive technology, a disruptive force within your organization that needs to be fed and watered and nurtured. And eventually that disruptive group will take over the whole. So if your IBM had they put more money into laptops early on, it would have taken over

their mainframe business. That would have been a good thing for IBM. Could that have happened to Britain? Would there have been this moment where, I mean, now we have it in Farris where the second prince is living in Santa Barbara with a TV star. I mean, who would have changed whom? In a sense, it already had happened to Britain because George III was the Elector of Hanover and his great-grandfather had only come over from Hanover 46 years previously.

So we'd only had them for 46 years. Had they then moved on to New York, he could have treated Britain in the same way that when he was king of britain they treated hanover which was very much as a as a um a province and then it's hard not to imagine the united states in the uh the end of the 18th and throughout the 19th century wouldn't be this tremendous, tremendously attractive place for the best and brightest and most entrepreneurial Englishmen to get on a boat and come here and make your fortune. Yeah.

I'm like, God, it's crazy to think about. And lots of them did anyway. And then take it one stage further than that. You also have large numbers of these essentially liberal-minded Englishmen who've been brought up under the common law, under Magna Carta and under the Mansfield judgment, essentially starting to deconstruct peacefully and with economic foresight, deconstructing slavery in the 1820s and 1830s.

We got rid of it in 1833 entirely throughout the British Empire. Now, if America managed to do that and save the 700,000 or so killed in the American Civil War, imagine what a powerhouse these two groups would have been by the time of 1914. But it is also possible that the British at home in London, in a unified sort of Anglo-American economy, would have thought, well, why don't we let slavery die out on its own? There were some economic imperatives there. So who knows what would happen, but it would be very interesting

to know just who would have changed whom more. Although both of these countries and cultures have had an enormous impact on each other. We know that America would have far worse breakfasts. Are you kidding me? We'd be getting up to beans and black pudding. Oh, God, full English, sign me up. And that bacon of theirs.

Yeah. And so unfortunately, you'd have not been able to have had those stacks of pancakes that go nine up. Right. Yeah. That's the horror of it. That's fine. We've been at silver dollar pancakes, we've been at silver sovereign pancakes. There's nothing better than a full English breakfast, that's for sure. I know, I love an English breakfast once a year too. Andrew, people love

to read a biography that goes against the conventional wisdom because they learn that their eyes are opened. They see that what they were told before was wrong for a variety of reasons, either propaganda or incompetence or the rest of it. I remember many years ago, I read a new biography of Nero, which was actually quite startling because it said a lot of what you're hearing,

our typical idea of the guy is a drunk, dissolute man who played the liar while Rome burnt. Let's back this up and look at why he was treated the way he was. And ever since then, I've sort of had a skeptical eye at some of the received wisdom when it comes to historical characters. And I imagine that you probably are looking at somebody else. Who would you like to write another biography about, a world leaving the past, who you think we got wrong? Well, I am actually already, I haven't signed the contract yet, but I'm about to write a biography of Disraeli, the great Benjamin Disraeli,

who started off as somebody who was poor, almost completely bankrupt, again and again, who only entered politics in order not to be arrested for bankruptcy, who was Jewish, of course, and therefore a complete outsider to the very snobbish and racist Victorian aristocracy of the mid-19th century, and who was also not a public school boy. He didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge. And so he was a total outsider. And yet, through his own wit and brilliance and great timing and political foresight, he managed to become the head of what was then the largest empire in the world. So I think that's going to be, it's not necessarily going to be terribly

revisionist. I don't know. It depends on what I find in the evidence, but nonetheless, it's a hell of a story. Andrew, you're on with three writers. I want Rob and James to hear from your lips, because it would be otherwise incredible, your writing schedule. You're obsessed with this, aren't you? I am. Every time I see you, you bring this up. I am. I start work at, well, today it was 3.30 in in the morning it's usually between 4 30 and 5 in the morning and uh i find that i can get a good four hours five hours sometimes sleep before anybody phones you up or in sorry work before anybody phones you up or in any way uh sort of annoys you and then i make sure i have an hour's nap or three quarters of an hour's nap every

afternoon which i find can um squeeze out some more time in the evenings. And so I tend to be able to write about 4,000 words a day when I'm writing books, that is. After you visited Hoover, Andrew, I tried the Roberts regimen. Three days. Wow. I lasted three days. I was so miserable miserable my wife told me to just sleep in stop this nonsense last question i'm exhausted now yeah and your last question so it happened the altar although i can see the glint in rob's eye georgian new york the musical there will be

notes made of the book by andrew roberts libretto by Rob Long I can see it coming but it did happen the breakup did happen and here we are all these years later facing these threats that you just mentioned Britain has reasserted its sovereignty by enacting Brexit by breaking away from the European Union what residual value is there in what we still call the special relationship? Well, I've read a lot of obituaries of the people who've written the obituaries of the special relationship. I think it has a lot more still to go for it, so long as Britain does take advantage of its newly found sovereign independence away from the European Union to rebuild bridges with America and to be more supportive of America. I think that we've got a real opportunity now for the Anglosphere, for America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom to act more closely together.

What we've also got to do is make sure that we push up defence spending higher than the pathetic 2% that we have at the moment. We can seriously, like America is a superpower, like yourselves, we can't just carry on nickel and diming on our defense. And if we do have some foresight to sort of try to reconstruct that English-speaking people's vision of Churchill's, I think that we could have a very happy future together. Andrew, knowing what time I go to bed after doing my evening writing and knowing what time my nap is imminent, I'm just working out the schedule for you. You probably have a nap on route soon, and I don't want to get in front of any man's restrative slumber. So off with you. Thank you so much. George III, the life and reign of Britain's most misunderstood monarch. Enjoy your siesta, Andrew. And Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. You know, Rob's question about the continuing cultural economic influence of Britain on America had we had a longer relationship is fascinating. I was at a wedding a couple of weeks ago, and the dress was just amazingly formal in ways that I

could not come up to. I can't, I don't have swallow cut tails that I can fit into my suitcase to schlep my halfway across the country. But some people added a little detail, like a ruffle, a ruffle, a cravat, which was so 19th century. I thought that was pretty cool. Not many people can carry off a cravat. The groom could carry off a certain style of morning coat, whatever the hell those were. And sometimes you just have to stand back and say, that person has style. They do. Personal style, frankly, it defines who you are as a person and it helps you express yourself as well. End of the year, yes, this is a pretty good time to take a look at your closet, your style, and decides what's working and what isn't.

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likes to be in America because that's where he saw West Side Story. I was talking about this with Andy Ferguson as we were driving around a couple of weeks ago, a great writer that we all know and admire. And we all came back to the same thing. He wanted to know how well they handled the music in the dance scene, because that's one of the greatest pieces of 20th century music that Lenny ever did. It's just absolutely great. The two cultures, the two sounds, it's wonderful. What I heard from the soundtrack didn't make me happy because it lacked something that the original had. They did a pretty good simulacrum of the original spirit, but for example, in the Jets song, they just sounded like musical theater guys as opposed to a bunch of toughs who'd come off and were sort of off-key warbling this tune. But Peter, you've seen it. Tell us what you think.

Well, you guys haven't seen it, so I won't go on and on and on, although there's a lot there. The music struck me as really wonderful, although now that you mention it, it could be because I was in a theater with Dolby Sound, with the kind of sound system that wasn't available in 1961 when the original came out. But the music struck me as just wonderful. Steven Spielberg can stage a scene with a lot of action in it. And so the dance scenes are big and colorful and I thought just sensationally good. Here are my quibble about the movie is that the changes didn't seem to me to improve it. The changes are of two kinds. One, a note here and a note there to make it more politically relevant didn't seem to work to me

to enhance the drama. And the second kind, I'm just mentioning this without a spoiler, that the certain deaths take place earlier in this version. They really moved around the script, the timing, the sequence, and it affected what followed in the last third or so of the movie in ways that I didn't think worked. I didn't see any improvement on the 1961 original. Well, that's...

John Pot... Sorry? John Potthorne calls the 1961 original unwatchable now, and I just don't get that. What? Anyhow, the saddest bit is we went to see it in

the Cineplex and they put it in the big theater. So there were 300 seats and the reclining seats with heating in them and you can get order meals. In other words, this was as inviting a setting as you could possibly have. 300 seats, 12 people in the theater, 12 people in the theater for the big holiday release. That business is gone. I don't mean to be a Carl Pilkington here, but do we need it? Why did we need this? Exactly. Why did we need this movie or this business? No, no, the business. I love movies. I love, but why did we need to do West Side Story again? What was it about the original that we were lacking? Pod Horse calls it unwatchable because it's stagey because it's obviously

the set under the freeway where they have the rumble is unconvincing. I think, I've seen the original recently, and it's still an absolutely fantastic movie. I think it stands up myself. We'd have actually, who knows? Is there a new guest in this?

Should we have John on to fight about it? Yes, we should. You guys talked about it on Glop, Rob. We talked about it on Glop for, well, he talked about it for 45 minutes. Oh, okay. I guess I get the picture. Notice my studio silence here. I have no more energy to talk about this.

Well, the thing is, we had a thread about this on Ricochet in the member feed, which everybody should go and join, of course, because we've got a lot of fun stuff going on there that never hits the front page. We're talking about West Side Story, whether or not it's woken us, killed it, whether or not it was that I just wanted to say, having not seen it, I'm disappointed they didn't get Tony and Riff back in this one. They're still alive. They're still working. The guys were great in Twin Peaks.

And for that matter, Glad Hand was the name of the social worker who started the dance at the gym. Do you remember that? He's the guy who comes on and makes all these earnest statements about the kids and how they're going to have great fun. And who played that character? Adam's family. Gomez, right. John Astin. He's still alive.

He's still alive as well. Maybe Spielberg did. Maybe somewhere in a chair in the back of the sequence, there's John Astin grinning at the fact that he got to do it again. But I want to see it again because it is one of the great, great American musicals. And I also don't want all the movie theaters to go away. Hey, last episode here of 21. We got 22 coming up. I suppose we should do find that sounder. Next year's big story. We'll be talking about what we think is going to happen in 22. I don't want to put my previous predictions on the record here because I'm sure I'll be shown to be a complete and utter failure at prognostication, but I'll give you guys the

opportunity. So do you think the Republicans are going to retake Congress? Definitely. Definitely. I know, what is it now? 11 months. 11 months is an eternity in politics. I can't imagine any way that this turns around for the Democrats. The economy may improve a little bit, but inflation is going to be better and nothing can restrain the hard progressive woke left of the democratic party and the american people at the this is going to be a national upchuck get these people out joe biden is talking about a winter of death and suffering words to that effect as is everybody else because Omicron is going to lay low. I think it was CNN that said the other day that they're looking at the early months of 2022 are going to look like March 2020, which is remarkably anti-scientific and irresponsible to say, too. But they love it. They love it.

The only thing better for ratings than Trump would be COVID. And they're going to ride that one as long as they can. Rob, what say you when you look ahead to the year? Yeah, that's kind of what I think it's going to be. I mean, I think it'll be the final conclusion to COVID. Whether whether they won't like it or not, people are just done. They're done with it. And Omicron is I mean, even even than even coming up with such an idiotic name that sounds scientific, but really isn't.

It's just you're you're it's hard to keep scaring people for two full years when the evidence of their eyes and ears is something different. And it's going to be just really, really difficult. And I think that at some point someone's going to do what Jay Bhattacharya says to do, which is to declare victory. And that will not be somebody on the left. It's just impossible. That will be somebody on the right and probably somebody with some firsthand experience managing the COVID crisis for the past two years. And I mean, and that will be leadership. I mean, look,

if you ask America, you say the Americans did did did the infrastructure bill pass or not? Did the build back better bill pass or not? Did these things are these things? People have these things are just evanescent. They're gone from your memory. Everyone just wants these things to be over and wants to turn the page, as Peter said, and change the channel. And I would just hate to be the channel on the TV right now when the people want to change it. Well, the Atlantic had a piece about how there will be no return to post-pandemic normality. And the author who seems to be projecting his psychoses and neuroses on the entire world is just feeling as though it is a never ending change that has come about that we will never be able to feel normal again.

And it was put on Twitter. It was followed promptly by 500 tweets by people who said, dude, I've been living normally for a year. And I mean, all of these people chime me in and saying, you are living in an extremely constrained little place that amplifies and self-rewards all of the things that you think get out in the world. It's a big country. People are living normally here all over the place. Even here in Minnesota with Omicron raging, I walk through the skyways and I see all the young people who've gone back to work in the office. They're maskless.

They're just not going to do that anymore. They're just not. And so Rob's right. Somebody is going to declare it over. And it may be a Democrat because I think you've seen in Colorado and elsewhere, you see them saying we're not going to reimpose. It's we're going to go on. And like crime, they got to come around. But, you know, the thing is, is the media is going to give the left credit for bringing down crime, because when the right said anything about it, it was for the wrong reasons. Likewise, when the right says anything about returning to normal after COVID, it's for the wrong reasons because they wanted to just kill off the marginalized people and deny science. So it'll be applauded as a sentimental, as a sensible thing when somebody on the left says it.

On the end of COVID, could I try out a thought on the two of you? I stipulate that I'm no epidemiologist. I stipulate further that I actually have thought less about this than Rob. And I think James has thought about it more than I have as well. However, here's what occurs to me. And this is because I'm scheduled to get my Moderna booster shot next week. I've had two Moderna shots. Each one took three days out of my life, two days in bed feeling just miserable and another day feeling too groggy to be effective in work. Okay. I read about whatever it's called, Omnicron, or it sounds like a new studio to me. Omnicron, apparently it spreads extremely quickly. It confers the same immunity that

really getting COVID, it's a form of COVID, and the symptoms are extremely mild. So if the symptoms of this Omnicom thing are at the level of my Moderna reaction or lower, isn't this God's vaccine? Doesn't this just get us past it? Shouldn't we almost be grateful that we've got this much, much, much apparently less dangerous version of the vaccine, I beg your pardon, of the virus, running or galloping around the world, making everybody, conferring immunity on everybody? Or am I just utterly insane to say such a thing? To some people you are, because you are denying the fact that people will get it, not know it, give it to their child who will go to school, who will give it to the teacher, who will then promptly go to their 80-year-old mother with comorbidities and cough in her face. That there's always going to be that. You still have to worry about the very old.

Well, no, you still have to worry. That's just it. As long as it's out there, you still have to worry. And that means that you still have to do a couple of things that show that you care. If you don't wear a mask, you don't care. And you want people to die in the system to be overwhelmed and no one would be able to go to the hospital. So you have to, what you are saying, Peter, is correct. I think that's how pandemics run their course. But it's unfortunate that this has become socio-politicized,

that unless you do certain things to show that you still take it seriously, as seriously as you took it when we knew nothing, that you are an antisocial element who is incredibly selfish and doesn't care. I mean, for you to say, isn't it great if we all get it and we can move on, is to these people this horrifying thing. Because a, they're terrified of getting it. They're just terrified of getting it. And they always have been. And two, well, you know, you can't move on. We shouldn't move on. We've learned a lot. And so, I mean, they're, they're, they're, they're terrified. And they also believe that if you get it, it's a moral failing.

I mean, it wasn't a more, if somebody went out in the 80s and did all the things that they knew that we knew by 86, 87 gave you AIDS, there would still be no moral stigma attached to it at that time. But now somebody who's done all of the right things supposedly and gets it still feels compelled to apologize and justify and proclaim that I did all the right thing it's just it's a bizarre inversion of the way that things go rob omnicron yeah no look i mean i i said so with jay batacharia these this is that it is the worst part of this is that that

people we've lost the ability to celebrate good news because we don't understand anything we have a pill we have a pill we've got that pill right and and we've lost the ability to celebrate the good news that we have which is uh omicron is in fact good news um weak low impact version of the virus spreading quickly like a common cold um pretty good that's pretty good compared to like killing old people although it probably will kill old people too if they're not vaccinated so if you're old get vaccinated that's why you should get vaccinated peter because you're old um then i mean but but but i guess what i'd say is like after two years right you'd think that this world nothing has happened in the world this big since world war ii This is the biggest conversation, worldwide conversation since World War Two.

Really, that's nothing else. You could go anywhere you want in America, in the world, I mean. And people will be talking about this. They will be saying Pfizer, Moderna, Omicron, Delta. They'll be seeing the same words, PCR, antigen test, all that stuff. The Q-tip they stuck up my nose in Milan is the Q-tip they stick up your nose in Mumbai.

I hope they disinfect it first. Yeah, well, it's your own. You get a new Q-tip. I mean, we've all been having the same conversation for two years. So ask yourself this. Do you know more or less about it? And if you know less, as I feel I know less, whose fault is that? And I think when you look at the front page of the New York Times, as I do every day on my way

to the crossword, what I expect is a really simple fraction. How many people testing positive for whatever COVID is today are sick? And how does how does that sickness and how do we get, how did you get to the numerator? How'd you get to the denominator? Cornell university shut down because they had something like 800 cases, 800 people. Now Cornell is a, as a university has mandatory testing.

So they're getting their denominator is their, their denominator is the same. and the numerator is getting up. How many of kids in at Cornell or people in the Cornell community are in the hospital with severe COVID zero, according to Cornell today. So we, we know less because, and you, and you, you have to do the math yourself. Like if you write these articles, you really have to look in the like. Like if you write these articles, right? I couldn't agree more.

And they're like paragraph nine and nine and a half, maybe extends to another page. Then you're like you're comparing them. There is no information that they're giving you. We are not being informed. We are being bamboozled or baffled or told stories, or maybe it's more interesting the way they're doing it. But no one is giving you, there's no, the world knew how many people died every day in Vietnam, let alone World War II. And where the allied forces were on their way to Arnhem in World War II. And we have

no idea who's got it, what that means, who's in the hospital. We hear, oh, hospital beds are filling up. That's what they say, they're filling up. What does that even mean? So the utter and total failure of the news media, of our information services to give us any information, whereas I was told that with the internet, you get all the information you want at your fingertips. We have no information.

Well, I do. I mean, I go to a variety of sources. I hate to say it, I i hate to say i do my own research which is always which is what you have to do your own math that's for sure right but now that means you're an idiot and a science denier no rob you're right we don't know more in general because of this the media's approach has always been it's bad it's going to be worse so you knew cases are going up and you need to do this. And this is either masking or social distancing or disinfecting or, so you need to do this. And then when you move that down the road and all the things you did

really didn't have that much of an effect, then it's bad. It's going to get worse. And now you need to do this. That's been the set. And it's just, it's just been good. These goalposts have just been continuously moved along. And now where are we? It's bad in the North. It's going to get worse because of Omicron. And you need to do this, which is to have the booster and to still continue to mask and the rest of it. There's no end point to any of these people, at least with World War II. We

knew there was an end point. Hitler shoots himself in the noggin and they burn his body in a trench. We don't have that point here. We just just don't it'll have to be an election right i i couldn't agree i the show's gone on and we all don't want to start our christmas holiday but i agree with rob one to me i'm still i'm still i'm still retained the capacity to be shocked by this the total breakdown in journalism yeah and the unwillingness to i mean it's been more than two years of this now. Two questions for you. One, the difference between dying of COVID and dying with COVID. They've had two years to sort out how they're going to do that statistical analysis or to tell us that in fact, it's impossible when people die die they die of so many people die of such a

complicated set of symptoms that we but tell us we're the journalists asking the cdc why do you keep saying so and so many people died with code so you don't know so weird so we and then the other one i asked this this came up with jay when he and i did an interview, what was it, a month ago now, I guess, he said, Jay, wait a minute, masks. What do the studies say? And Jay said, well, actually, we still don't have any good studies on whether masks are effective or not. Still don't have good, the CDC has a budget of billions of dollars, billions. Why don't we know? They've had two years to run these studies. Why aren't journalists challenging Fauci? It's just staggering to me. Well, they say that there have been, that the Bangladesh study decisively produced said that they were good. And then there's a

new Cato study, which says, nah, cloth, nah. But Fauci's out there again today saying that cloth is great. Look look we can go on and on and on i just pray to god in a year from now we are not repeating these same things and talking about covid i see i don't think we're gonna because i think people are at their breaking point yeah i don't think we're gonna have to worry about that's my big story for 2022 right when people finally say you know what give it to me i'll take it i'll take covid and the the sort of the the the safety police will say no you can't oh my god you can't don't go outside it's like this what is that horrible movie that i said it

was forced to see it on some point snowpiercer where the whole thing is just an idiotic movie the train goes around the world for no reason other than it's just normal apocalyptic movies don't make any sense and like well you can't go outside you go outside uh the the environment outside the train will kill you. And you know from the first reel that the environment outside the train will not kill you. And that will be something that the people discover. They will discover. So everyone in the Snowpiercer train apparently has never seen a movie like Snowpiercer.

I've seen a movie like Snowpiercer. So I knew you could go outside. So they go outside. They're like, oh, my God, we've been lied to. And this is what it doesn't last that long. Americans are already already discovering that you could go out. You can live your life. If you're fat or old, get the facts, get the booster.

If you just want belt and suspenders, get the backs and the booster. Live your life. Always a moment in the old science fiction movie where somebody takes off his helmet and breathes and says it's breathable. I felt that way the first time I took off my mask in a public building downtown last year, and I didn't die on the spot. We are still here after 574. We'll be hitting 600 in the year to come. Can't wait for that. Some surprises about where we might hold it, but are we on next week,

guys? Are we doing new year's Eve or no? We're not on next week. So, you know, my advice, we're going to have to put this at the top of the program. Everybody play this one at one half speed in your podcast app. That way you can spread it out and savor it over the next fortnight. Peter, Rob, I want you to know and everybody else to know this was brought to you by Stamps.com, by Pendulum and by Indochino. Support them for supporting us and it'll make your life easier better and more stylish too and join ricochet

today why because it's fun and it's great and once you discover the member community you're going to realize this has been on the web all the time and i didn't find it go there give us those five stars on apple podcasts if you will of course and of course stop back when next we do this again merry christmas peter and rob merry Merry Christmas to everybody who's listening. And we'll see everyone in the comments. Merry Christmas. I'm going to try to set up Rob. Happy holidays, my friends.

Happy holidays with whatever your faith tradition. And so as Tiny Tim declared, Rob. God bless Ricochet. Every member. Happy New Year, boy. Merrymas and happy new year christmas happy talk to you next year season's greetings happy holiday happy holiday

while the merry bells keep ringing may your every wish happy holiday Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. May the calendar keep ringing. Happy holidays to you. Ricochet. Join the conversation.

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down the stairs and come to Holiday Inn. If you can't find someone who I'll be back. Don't get worse, grab a hair nurse and come to Holiday Inn. Happy Holiday, Happy Holiday. While the merry bells are ringing, may your every wish come true. Happy Holiday, Happy Holiday. May the calendar keep ringing, Happy Holiday to you.