I will do that after Rob and then after Long. You gotta put this
in part in the show. I really insist this part is in the show.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country. Mister gerbatchaf tear down this wall. Read my lips.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilax.
Today we're just going to talk amongst ourselves about banking, about this,
about that, but we got walkers do it from the Stanford to Review to
talk about what happened there. So let's rowsels a podcast. Let me just
say this to Stanford law students. I know federal judges at every level saw
this and has anchored them. It's going to hurt your clerkship chances. And
I would say to stanfordt donors, call Stanford University president and let him know
that this is unacceptable and you're gonna pull their funding of this if there are
not consequences here. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number six
hundred and thirty four. I'm James Lilac and absolutely ridiculously frigid Minnesota. Peter
Robinson is in California. Where I gathered that it's as usual temperate, moderate
state and Rob Long is in New York, which could be cold, could
be spring, who knows. But gentlemen, enough of the weather here,
we are welcome bank news. We know that Rob is chomping, I'm sorry,
champing at the bit to talk to talk. Before this, I was
saying, you know, none of us are going to want to talk about
this bank thing, because what do we know. All I know is that
when credits, when Swiss seems to have trouble, and you're saying the Swiss,
the Swiss are in trouble, that maybe I should be paying attention.
But what can I do? So Rob, you have something to say bank,
I would just say this about Credit Swiss. Credit Swiss is really not
connected to this at all. Credit Swiss has been on it's like last legs
for the past two years. I have a feeling that it's like when you
do a bad news dump on a Friday because you want all the bad news
out of a weekend. This is a lot of people are emptying their garbage
now because they can bury it in all this news. But I do think
that we are in a you know, I this will shock you James.
I am not a banker. I don't like lots of numbers or nor nor
arithmetic. But it does seem to me that, um, that the federal
government, the Janet Yellen has basically said, has announced that every single deposit
in every single bank in America at any number is now ensured by the federal
government, which sounds bananas to me. And it's again as a complete perversion
of what the FDIC was supposed to do, which is to protect people who
aren't rich from losing their life savings. Now, maybe that maybe two undifty
thousand dollars is too low, Maybe it should be three to fifty thousan dollars,
because you know Biden's inflations. Two and fifty thousand dollars isn't what it
used to be two weeks ago. It isn't what it used to be.
But the idea that we're now going to sure everyone's deposits all the time,
um, instead of investigating a pre market solution to this problem is a mistake
and a mistake that I think it's going to really make us pay. We're
gonna be paying a lot. Well, Peter, you would agree, wouldn't
you that if the government agrees to backstop absolutely everything. There's no way that
that would make anybody reckless in any way thinking that their errors will be covered
by Uncle Sugar. Right. Yeah, Listen, this is tricky for me
because this town is filled where I sit, northern California. This town is
filled with people who object to the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank on principle,
but are just delighted by it in practice. I know, I must be.
Half of my friends had my Quican Valley Bank, and well so did
Ricochet. Let's be honest, bank, so did Ricochet. Although less our
listeners get the idea, we would read the assured limit exactly the city council
right now as if one hundred million dollars just went down the shoote No,
no, no, but yes, yes, yes, of course that's correct.
It's if it's a question of if the federal government engages in blanket insurance
of all deposits through the banking system, that does not make the risks go
away. It places the risks on the shoulders of the American taxpayer where they
were not before, and it does not unleash the magnificent power of the free
market. If you have if you're trying to protect small depositors. I think
that's great. I think that's a I mean, that's a good plan.
FDIC is useful, right, But for people who had a million, two
million, three million, four million, five million dollars in deposits or more,
which I found bizarre to find out why a company would have fifteen or
twenty million doll dollars in cash in a bank. But whatever, Okay,
that's not I'm not the CFO. I don't get to judge that. But
if you do, then you should be allowed and encouraged, in the fact,
maybe even fiduciarily compelled to purchase private insurance for those deposits. There's no
reason why you couldn't do that. That's particularly why we have a system called
titles insurance. And if you're a rich person, you should be insuring your
fancy bank account the way you insure your fancy boat and your fancy mansion.
And then that would actually unleash insurers to say knock on the door of Silicon
Valley Bank and say, hey, wait a minute, now, listen,
you seem to be kind of exposed on your long term paper that you're holding.
We're going to charge your depositors a little bit more for their insurance,
and then the depositors get the build like, wait, why am I paying
this much more? Maybe I shouldn't be a Silicon Valley bank, and then
maybe Silicon Valley bank, and that feedback loop that would happen would start to
unwind. It's incredibly incredibly foolish positions in you know, Treasury, and you
also you mentioned a moment ago exploring a free market solution to the problem.
Over the weekend, one of the arguments we heard and argument being made by
friends, friends of mine, people I know this town was really nervous very
there was. It felt, it felt panicky. So one of the arguments
was, this is not a panicked argument. This is an argument argument that
banking. If you're trying to read up on a bank and you're trying to
read its financial statements and you're trying to make some judgment as to how risky
the bank is, it's almost impossible for an ordinary depositor to do so because
banks are such complicated institutions. Bill Ackman, the big finance guy in Wall
Street who was writing about the need to backstop and bail out SVB, said,
look, I'm a very sophisticated financial investor. I can't read the bank
statements. David Sacks made a similar argument, and then lo and behold,
it turns out there's really only one number in this kind of circumstance. There's
one number, and that number is Silicon Valley Bank. Nine of its deposits
were uninsured. Now that number was striking to me, because very quickly the
little tiny bank where I do my personal banking thought, good lord, there
may be a run on that bank, and they immediately sent out a note
to all of their depositors saying, eleven percent of our deposits are uninsured.
There's not going to be a run on a bank where only eleven percent of
the deposits are uninsured. Right, All you need, all you need is
one number. Now, of course, a few more numbers, you might
want a little more information than that. But the notion that it's just impossible
to judge the risk in a bank when you're putting in a deposit, it
seems to be just untrue on the face of it. But a little bit
of information, and I would actually add this, is that I don't know
how to wire, I don't know how to look at a wiring plan for
a house, or look at wires in the house and decide if they're unsafe
or not. I don't know how to do that. I'm not good at
that. I don't know how to look at a foundation and judge its soundness
or not. But I know a home insurers do it all the time,
correct, And they charge me for risk, and they charge me at the
end of the year for risk or monthly or whatever it is. And it's
simply injecting some additional insurance that you have to pay above and beyond what the
federal government is saying, we are guaranteeing this from our bank examiners. Seems
to me to be the ultimate and perfect solution if you want to hold a
whole lot of cash in a bank. The alternative is the government pays for
everything, you pay for you, meaning we pay for everything, or we
decide we don't. We don't want smaller banks anymore. We just want four
or five big banks. And that is a solution that a lot of people
are arguing before. I think it's dangerous. I don't. I don't think
we want four or five big banks. So probably based in money centers deciding,
um, you know, banks are too important to be left to the
you know, rich people, and you I mean, and I don't want
to sound paranoid, but if you're a paranoid, if you're a paranoid person,
if you're a paranoid conservative, you might say, well, what how
much power do these banks have to defund, d list, uncredit somebody they
don't like? So yeah, so why not just so A lot, a
little A lot of smaller banks are good um and short deposits for small depositors,
good large depositors with large cash positions should be able to purchase independent free
market insurance those assures should. There's the problem right there, rob using those
words independent, free market, crazy notions, liberty, and individual decision,
because those can cause harm at the end of the day. There can be
harm when all of those actions do not have the proper outcome. So what
we have now is an attitude of safety ism that says, well, instead
of having this this crazy pill ma red and tooth and clawed dog eat dog
world where individual companies can do as they like and purchase the insurance or not,
we just need to know that everything will be backstopped, because that will
make everybody hole and it's it's it's it's safe. It assures the outcome that
everybody wants. And yeah, I mean small banks are good before the FDIC.
It's always instructive to go to you know, you go on Google street
View and you look at any small town and you will find what used to
be the bank. You will find to be you will find it. You
will find a building that is. There are two styles. One of them
is Richardsonian Romanesque. It's on the corner, it's got squat pillars and it
says bank and it's chiseled in stone over the door, and that place is
long gone. Or there's the second Farmer's Mutual, which is on Main Street
with its Roman temples, looking like an embassy of the Empire. And it
went down in the Tin panic or the depression, or when somebody tried to
corner the flax market or something like that. So yeah, I mean there's
I think, however, that the instinctual desire, the instinctual fear out of
you know, it's a wonderful life of the run. The panic in the
rest of it, of the small bank that goes under is kind of done.
That we assume that because of FDIC, with that nice little sticker in
that sign that we see in this when we go to the bank, that
will be made whole. But this is a whole different thing to say above
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a whole different thing. Yeah, James,
you're touching out something very important to my mind. I'm no banker.
I don't understand in any great detail. We both said the same thing,
which is less. I don't know, but what you do kind of like
you do like yeah, well, I mean here was not a but but
I scanned a postcard of a holiday in last night. So yeah, exactly.
No. So think of those banks, those community banks scattered across the
Midwest. The nature of agriculture has changed. Farms and buy and large gotten
bigger. There's a lot of big agrib business. Agribusiness of at scale doesn't
need small banks. But there are still family farms and the town banker who
knew the families, who knew who was responsible and who wasn't, and who
understood the rhythm and farming. You borrow, you buy your fertilizer, You
buy your seed. Who you know what the market is going buy, You
place your future sales. You repay them. People know it, and then
when it comes time I need an addition on the house, the banker says,
no problem, I know you. I had a banker buddy who used
to claim plausibly to me that when he was driving through the middle of the
country, he'd come to a small town and it would look as though it
was just sad. Houses hadn't been repainted, lawns were being taken care of,
and two or three towns further along there'd be a town that looked in
pretty good shape, and he would claim you could tell it a glass.
The difference was the bank The banker knew his customers and was willing to lend
to them, and there was a sense of trust that extended to financial trust
in the community. I think he's wrong. I think he's wrong. I'll
tell you why in a second. Yere, but he may be right.
But here's my thought on that. Harwood, North Dakota, is where my
family is from. It's a little town about ten miles north of Fargo,
and it's infinitesimal. It's got a vhu's got a you know, Veterans of
Foreign Wars Club, it's got a big elevator, it's got the general stores
when I was a kid, and a scattering of houses. It's absolutely tight.
It's a hamlet, it's a burg, it's nothing. Where's the school,
Well, the school is down at the schoolhouse property, which was you
know, because when they platted out in North Dakota, they would they would
reserve room for the schoolhouse. And even if the schoolhouse had been destroyed thirty
years before when they consolidated the district, everybody still referred to that land as
the schoolhouse land. It's funny you mentioned that. But there was one bank,
and the bank was built in the sixties, early sixties. It looked
like Madmen style international architecture, Mecy and architecture dropped down in this little North
Dakota hamlet, tiny but a jewel box of modernism. Was just beautiful.
And you're right in that instance, the guy, the people who ran it
knew everybody around. They knew how the crops were doing, they knew what
the prices were. Hardwood still didn't prosper until they became a bedroom community of
Fargo. But you're right, they had a band and just the fact that
the only modern thing that had been built in fifty sixty years in this tiny,
little non existent town was this beautiful little bank I always found fascinating.
But the reason that some towns look bad and other towns look better maybe the
banker. It's also because those towns were founded on the distance of horses,
how far you had to get from them from the farm to the place where
you bought your stuff. And then cars come along, and the cars shorten
the distances, so about every every third town prospers and the other towns don't.
And the one that has the little nucleus of business downtown, that that
one hung on and the rest of them withered a bit. And I think
it more has more to do with automobile and distance and where the farmer goes
on Saturday to get his feed in his shoes. But that's you know,
that's maybe everybody looks at it from their own particular angle and seas you know,
I, I know, we got to move on, but this is
actually stuffing. I've never asked James about it. I've kind of always wanted
to, And I know we're sort of far afield on the idea of banks.
But I think in general this comes unto the heading we all think,
or we think or I think, whatever that multiple banks good, a few
money center banks bad, federal deposit insurance for the small deposit or whatever we
wanted. We can define that up if we want to, But you know,
not zillionaires seems good. UM, And anything above that this comes up
has cast either those people either have to find other ways or they lose their
money. That's what happens in capitalism. UM. Losing your money is something
that happens. UM. Okay, so that but because we're talking about the
actual physical banks. When I was in college, I was studying architecture.
One of the most beautiful, the most beautiful kind of UM, a genre
of architecture we study were, of course Midwestern banks, and the most beautiful
ones were made or designed by an architect named Louise Sullivan. And you're still
around and I haven't. I've never seen one in perpose in person, but
I assume that James has. And I want James to tell me if there
is beautiful in person, And they are they and they are as like extraordinary
like works of art, but also works of like a symbol, symbolism,
like you can trust this place and it's there, and they're kind of they're
they're not classical they're not like, they're not you know, they don't like
but they seem real right, yeah, utter and total break with with with
American architectural norms. And it's not just Sullivan elmously. There's a whole bunch
of guys who were working in the Prairie School and the Sullivan School who farmed
out over the Midwest and made a whole bunch of little banks, not a
lot, but enough so that you are surprised when you find one, or
you make a trip to go see one, and they are gorgeous. They're
square, they have none of the classical ornamentation. They're broadly new in an
American way. They have this organic style of decoration that that nobody had done
before that Sullivan came up with, which is appropriately called Sullivan esque. And
what it says is this is a progressive place. This looks forward. This
place has made an utter right from the past. Now, whether or not
that actually sends the message you want to send, I don't know. Because
if you're the farmer coming into town, do you want the one with the
pillars? Because the pillars are a Roman and they go back two thousand years
and all the big banks in New York have the pillars or do you want
the one that looks like this efflorescence of new ideas? What are they doing
in there? Who are they giving my money to? So while we love
them for their esthetic appeal, I just wonder whether they're not a lot of
farmers and said, that's the craziest, ugliest looking thing I ever saw.
I put my money in this place over here? What got the pillars and
the Corinthian leaves at the top. So I think the farmers like the Louis
Sullivan Bank. That's what I think it could have been because it was organic.
It could have been because a lot of the farmers were progressive in the
sense that they joined movements that had co ops. And in the rest of
it. The idea that they're all bid bound folks ain't so. But we
can inclosing. In closing, we can agree I don't know whether it's every
third town that still needed these up. Fine, I take that point.
That's an interesting point. But in closing, we can agree that we'd rather
have the community banker in the Louis Sullivan Bank, if even only half of
those dozen of them needed anymore. In North Dakota, we'd rather have that,
than have farmers have to deal with JP Morgan Chase, Yes, and
have the local rep in North Dakota always looking over his shoulder in Manhattan.
We really don't want that, do we. And right, and I'll tell
you something else. And at least in those days, you could go down
to the bank. You got out your bank book, your little passport,
you know, your passbook savings, you dealt with somebody at the at the
teller cage that you may know when you sat down with a banker and he
opened up the stuff and you wrote down some numbers. You weren't looking over
your shoulder because you thought somebody who was going to steal all your information and
take and drain your account, which is what it feels like sometimes when you're
banking online. I got to huddle around my laptop and throw up all kinds
of walls in case nobody gets me and seize my precious numbers. Oh no,
that's why you know. You don't want to be exposed. Your information
doesn't want to be exposed. And sometimes it feels like using the internet is
just like leaving your laptop exposed and open at a coffee table. Right,
fantastic, Yes, I just yeah, yeah, you wouldn't leave your laptop
open at the coffee shop. I mean most of the time, you know,
you got to go to the can. Could you watch my computer?
You'll be fine, You'll be fine. But what if you come out one
day from the bathroom laptop's gone. Well, every time you connect to an
unencrypted network, it's cafes and hotels at airports. Any hacker on the same
network can gain access to your personal data like your passwords, financial details and
so forth. And I'm gonna amaze you how easy it can be for a
half intelligent correct the hack. Yet they just need some cheap hardware and an
unsuspecting medicine who does not have Express VPN. Well, Express VPN creates a
secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet with that's simple tap to
turn it on. Now that hacker needs a supercomputer and a billion years to
get past Express VPNs encryption, and I don't have that, and that's not
going to happen. So it works on all your devices, which is great.
Turning it on is as easy as firing up the app with one to
tap. That's what I love about it, no matter what device I have.
I just said you know why am I standing out here naked in the
public square. Turn on my Express vpn hit the button. There we go,
got that tunnel. We're encrypted. We're fine. I can relax and
you can relax too. You can secure your online data today by using express
vpn dot com slash ricochet. That's e xp R e s S vpn dot
com slash ricochet and you can get an extra three months for free on us
on them at express vpn dot com slash ricochet. And we thanks Express vpn
for sponsoring this the Ricoche Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Walker
Stewart, editor of the Stanford Review and member of the University's College Republicans.
And you're thinking, oh, was he there? Bus you dere Charlotte Walker.
Thanks for joining us today. Of course, everybody's talking about what happened
at Stanford Law, appalling as it was. Bring us up to date,
you know, tell us what happened and then bring us up to date.
Sure, yeah, thank you for having me on. So last week one
of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals I was scheduled. The Federal Society invited
him to give a talk on COVID uns and Twitter. You know, altogether
kind of innocuous topics important but not exactly point and basically the like some campus
activists didn't like that. I think he didn't give proper deference to transgender ideology
in one of his opinions last year, and the activists at Stanford Law School
did not like that and decided basically too And we can discuss this more collude
with administration to shut down Judge Duncan's talk. And so last Thursday he was
like, he came to give his talk, he was being heckled and shouted
at, and then the diversity an inclusion dean of the law school came up
and gave a pre prepared speech, after which the event was completely shut down.
And so that kind of gets to update on what happened last Thursday.
But it was a complete violation of any sort of university norm surrounding free speech.
And yet nobody's been pun to, nobody's been disciplined. Eight days later,
just to review the central points, it's Judge Kyle Duncan, federal judge.
Big deal if you're a law school student to hear a federal judge speak
Fourth Circuit. And it's not as if he said something controversial during his talk.
It's that he wrote in an opinion that certain law school students found controversial.
They never even permitted him to start his talk. Is that correct?
Yes, he was heckled the entire time he was trying to speak, to
the point that he asked for an administrator to speak to the students trying to
calm things down. That administrator was ended up being Dean Steinbeck, who basically
to shut down to talk after the other thing about which I want to be
very clear is that, and which I'm not clear, You said student activists.
So these were students who came from outside the law school, Stanford students,
but they came from outside of the law school, or these were students
at they were lost students who heckled him. So my understanding is that it
was primarily law school students that were the ones heckling Judge Duncan. There could
have been, you know, an undergrad or business school students slipped in there,
but you know, generally it was undergrad rescued to his law students.
Okay, And what's happened since then? There was an apology tell us about
that, ya. So Stanford released an apology where they had basically said what
happened was inconsistent with our policies, and we're taking steps to ensure that something
like this doesn't happen again. What steps they've actually taken? And that letter
was signed, the letter was signed by the president of the university and the
dean of the law school. Correct, yes, yes, that's correct,
Okay, And then what and the response to that letter has been so on
Monday, so the dean of the law school every week she teaches a sixty
person seminar on Mondays. And this past Monday, fifty out of the sixty
students in her seminar wore black man asks in protest of her apology letter.
And so what that's saying is that you know, eighty three percent of you
know her. The people in this Dean Martinis's class were in support of shutting
down Kyle Duncan's talk, which is truly remarkable. And they thought the outrage
was not that a federal judge had been refused the opportunity to speak at Stanford
Law School. The outrage was that the dean of the law school had apologized
to the federal judge that he had not been permitted to speak. Correct,
all right, yeah, their movement was on. You know, where is
his apology referring to an incident last year where my understanding was that there was
a law student that was trying to docs members of the Federal Society and ended
up getting in trouble with the administration and that was one of their like these
activists rallying cards, rallying cries. After was no oh, the university apologized
to Judge Duncan, but they didn't to the student who is behaving badly last
year. I have one last question before I remand you to Rob and James,
who are going to ask you about what it all means. I will
be listening intently. And the last question is this, in Stanford Law School,
we are discussing an institution which regularly, I mean year in and year
out, ranks among the top five law schools in the country. Is that
correct? Yeah, it's typically right number three in the world law school Dale,
Harvard, Chicago, Stanford's. It's a group right at the tippy top,
year after year, right, right, Judge Duncan. I mean when
I read it the first I was in between cycles, so I read the
thing that I had a news after the disastrous appearance and before the apology,
part of what their argument was was that he was a jerk, right,
that he was a jerk to the students who were protesting. I mean,
the protesters are. It was like we were protesting and disrupting his speech and
he was a jerk to us and told us to shut up. Some version
of that. He was rude and that is true, right, I mean,
that's that is kind of true. He was sort of rude and kind
of a jerk. And later when they called him on it, someone reporter,
he said, yeah, they were trying to shut him. Yeah.
I don't apologize for telling people that are talking over me to shut up and
they're stupid. I'm just just just watching the goalpost move, right. So
it starts with he is no, he should not be allowed to speak here,
and then the official Standford position is, well, he is allowed to
speak here, and you're also allowed to protest his appearance outside the hall where
he was speaking, and then the protest. Then the goalpost moved to and
he's not allowed to be a jerk. If you interrupt him, he's got
to be meek and polite and shut his mouth and take it. And then
the goalpost moves the third time too, and the dean of the law school
can't make a statement in which she reaffirms the basic you know, I would
I would think the most Anna Dyne boilerplate law school belief, which is that
speech should be protected and everyone has a right to be heard. So the
goalpost now has moved from he's a jerk because he's he's conservative too, he's
a jerk because he was rude to the kids who were screaming at him,
to the dean of the law school has got to be removed. So my
question to you is this, They can't remove the federal judge, but they
can probably get rid of her right. They can probably get rid of the
can they? I mean, I guess them. What are her like if
you were like putting a bulls eye on her back? How big is that
bulls eye? How much? There are two deans in question here. Rob
One is yeah, I mean the D I D. I mean the Deana
law Sah, I mean I think she probably a D. Martinez is probably
fine. I think that really with we've seen with the university president in the
provost, especially where really what these activists want isn't necessary to get the person
fired. But They want the person to be scared and to take their side
again the next time. And that's really actually if you read the piece that
one of our writers put out in The Stanford Review two days ago about how
Dean Steinbeck actually in January she was moderating a panel with about free speech with
a sort of judge that the Federalist Society had invited, and a lot of
these student activists were very dissatisfied with her for being too accommodating to that conservative,
right leaning speech. And that is really what we think motivated Dean Steinbeck
to end up being behaving so poorly last week was that she needed to sort
of get back in the good graces of the law school activists at Stanford Walker.
The Stanford Review is online. Listeners can read about this online, Yes
they can. Yes, It is our most recent article about how the entire
event last Thursday was premeditated. The Dean knew about it, other administrators knew
about it, the students knew about it. They were all working together into
hoots to shut judge Duncan just google on Stanford Review and it'll pop up.
Yes, got it? Okay, Sorry, Rob, I got I know.
James Watson and I got one more. So my my my usual posture,
right when I hear about stuff like this, of course we hear about
stuff like this every couple of weeks, is to sort of shrug and say,
look, you know, what's probably you know, I mean, yes,
it's terrible, it's terrible. But in all these schools, it's like,
you know, twenty loudmouth pains in the ass, and everybody else has
got their heads down, just wants to go to class and get the law
degree and then go or get a you know, Sullivan and Cromwell and make
a billion dollars. Most people are just kind of like, yeah, whatever,
man, just keep it down. I gotta do some reading. Um.
And that's what that is. A lullah bay I think I'm telling myself,
But then you tell me no, no, no, no. Eighty
percent of her class showed up wearing masks and like whatever, like blindfolds or
something. This is not a few troublemaking loud mouths, a little babies,
emotional babies at Stanford Law. This is the student body of the Stanford Law
School. So am I full of it? When I like say, oh,
come on, you're absolutely not. I mean, it's or when you
say, come on, like, it's only a couple of people like these
are like fifty of the students in our class. It wasn't like a passive
action they took. They actively went out, they got their masks, they
got there like little signs. There people protesting outside of the classes, mind
you, like a seminar on some legal topic. I think it's like property
You are something kind of obscure that people, these students made an active choice
to protest. The other thing on note is that these are not like,
you know, nineteen year old immature little kids. These people are twenty four,
twenty five years old behaving this way. And that's what I think is
most remarkable. And not to say that they can't protest, but the fact
that they're choosing to do so, I can still say is absurd. It's
odd that they think that somehow manifesting this behavior is not going to affect their
employment in the future, that when somebody does little Google search on them or
whatever looks for their face, it looks what they do say, Oh,
this is a person who causes an awful lot of trouble. I don't want
this person bringing this set of values to our office because they're just going to
be difficult and there are other people to bring. But it makes me wonder
is there a code of conduct that students are required to sign. We know
that it's like the license agreement on your iPhone or any software. You simply
scrolled at the bottom and tap. I agree, But is there anything that
says thou shalt not exercise the Heckler's veto? I mean, of course wouldn't
say that, but is there anything that says we expect you to behave?
So? I would say there is, but it's about as valuable as the
Cuban Constitution in that it's not worth the paper that it's printed on because it's
not at all enforced. And so there's all sorts of great promises that we
make as students in the university makes to us, but when push comes to
shove, there's zero enforcement. And so you know, yeah, we sign
saying we're going to behave in well in the university says they make their promises
to us, but it doesn't actually in practice mean anything. The great thing
about the Cuban Constitution of what it's printed on is a very low quality paper
that makes for a good bathroom tissue. It's not that stiff veloped. It
does at least have some use. Yes, So Walker, what about this?
Is this is to pursue Rob's question. Presumably Judge Duncan is done looking
for clerks from Stanford Law School. So I guess I have the big firms
that recruit from top law schools. Are they alert to this or is it
just going to be half a dozen federal judges who came up through the Federalist
Society who say, actually, if you send me a resume for from Stanford
Law School or from Yale Law School, you have a burden to overcome and
demonstrating why I should consider you from my chambers. Well, I can see
that. For it seems as though Judge Duncan is going to I've heard that
he's writing a piece in which he's going to explain himself and he may say
something like that. But that's a handful of federal judges, now, Clarence
Thomas maybe one of them. I mean, there may be serious figures in
the judiciary who say that's it, We've had enough. But is that enough
to make any difference? Does does does the institution have to worry about its
reputation? Will the big firm still just go right on hiring. What do
you think Unfortunately, I mean the answer I think we've seen over the past
five or six years, as things in college campuses have gotten crazier and crazier,
and it hasn't been to firms like it used to be. You know,
you'd say, oh, you know, people get kind of crazy in
college, but you know, once you get to the real world, you
know, then it you kind of calmed down. But now I've noticed two
things. The first is that kids arrive on campus already you know, totally
ingrained in this like leftists, you know, anti speech philosophy. A last
year, the two leaders when Mike Pence came to speak on campus, the
two leaders of like the shutdown Mike Pence protest, were both freshmen in college.
These weren't kids that you know, came from their good family and they
came to college and you know, they went crazy. This was these are
kids that were already you know, fully like for your convenience, yes,
exactly, they're pre crazed. And the other thing is that on the other
side of things, that these law firms, these companies, these corporations that
they're hiring all these students coming out of colleges. And it's not that the
students are changing, it's the companies that are changing. And you can see
that in the various statements that come out. You know, anytime there's some
sort of social issue that, you know, every company feels the need to
comment on, you know, how bad things are, you know, how
much they support X group or Y group. So my next National Review column
is about a Yeah, my next National Review column is about an Iowa grocery
store convenience chain that felt compelled to speak out about the Iowa trans bill because
everybody needs to know where the gas station stands on that issue. Can walk
it before you go? What's your major major in computer science? Oh?
Good, something useful? Absolutely? All right, great, fantastic code.
Let's listen to a coder. Yeah, and Stanford code has got to be
the most rarefied, special kind of code you can possibly imagine. So that's
that's like, that's cool. Walker. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, James,
I've been stepping in with one last question because they just can't resist.
You have just demonstrated that you think about the world, the issues of the
day. You have demonstrated that you are very articulate. There is an argument
that a young man such as yourself twenty years ago, maybe even ten years
ago, would have gravitated toward classics or an English agree or political science or
history, and instead you're moving right into the technical stuff. Is that because?
Well? Why is that? Just? Why? Well? I think
that it's it's quite unfortunate that, you know, the liberal arts have been
completely hollowed out, and especially at Stanford, the class there's a few good
classics courses, a few good history courses. I've taken them and have taken
them, but there's just it's kind of few and far between. Unfortunately,
there's you can look up on the Stanford course catalog if you look at the
word queer, you'll find one hundred and fifty different classes about, you know,
various queer topics. Meanwhile, you look up Bible, you look up
like Christ, and there's maybe fifteen. And so that's really what's happened to
the university. It's kind of subtle, you know, taking out the courses
that are meaningful and inserting pure ideology basically. And five of those classes on
Christ are going to be a deconstructing the head or normative relationship between the Disciples
queering John the Baptist, I mean, even though it's fifteen, are completely
safe water. Thanks for joining us today. Good luck, and when you
get a job, make sure to drop babt or you know, go back
to your alma mater and spread the gospel about practicality. Of course. Yeah,
thanks having me only appreciate it nice Walker. Now go go tell everybody
at the Stanford Review to join Ricochet. Yes, there we go, go
to a little cross marketing. Walker, all right, take care of I
should talk. You know, I was an English major, so what have
I actually provided? It's a tangible use to the world. But when I
look back in college, even you know, when I went to the college,
the college in late seventies, early eighties, and I was there for
a long time, it still had the feeling of we are passing along to
you Western civilization. And I like that. And I look now at the
purpose which seems to be to deconstruct it and to replace it with all of
these brave and bold and wonderful new ideas that are so much better than the
archaic colonialist, imperialist, etcetera. Isn't soaked stuff we have before? I
feel old and out of place and my world is gone. But the question
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this the Ricochet Podcast. Now in the background, I don't know if you
guys can hear it, but there's a siren, which is nice indicates that
there's actually some life downtown. I was walking in the lobby today and I
heard this high pitched wine sound that I could not place. Now, this
is a big bill and it's a fifty story office structure, and there's nobody
in the lobby, there's nobody up in the skywaye level, and there was
just this whining sound that seemed to echo and fill the lobby. Couldn't figure
out what it was. I thought, I'm gonna have to ask my buddy,
Colt Luger about this. Is this maintenance guy he goes out for a
smoke. I go out for a cigar sometimes to we bump into each other
and I talk about, you know, how's the building doing. He always
says, well, if you see me running, run with me. He
tells me what's broken, what's fixed. It's always you learned something about where
you are by talking to the guys who were respond once about for keeping it
up. And I thought, I'm gonna have to ask what that wine is.
And when I got upstairs, I realized what it was. It was
one of the maintenance people, janitorial people, vacuuming the floor. There was
so little life in this building, so few people, that the sound of
one person just pushing an electric vacuum back and forth was the only dominant which
echoed throughout the whole thing and filled it with this great fill the emptiness,
with this empty wine. And I thought that's apt. Now that we are
practically at the three year anniversary of the hammer coming down, of the lockdown
coming down, I wrote about this on Ricochet. People can go and read
it if they wish, and then join Ricochet. Please thank you the three
year anniversary about how much came back to life and how much was just broken
for good, snapped for good. And I want to ask you guys,
two weeks we kind of figured, all right, we're gonna do this thing
for two weeks. We're gonna bunker. We're gonna hunker. We can do
it. And I actually kind of enjoyed it, aside from the terrifying prospect
of going outside, which was at first because nobody knew of coming downtown,
of crossing the street. When you saw somebody going to the grocery store and
say, oh, lots of protos, that's great. Oh there's no flower,
there's no pot. It's a weird time. But I was home,
my daughter was home, We had our exchange student, and it had it
was an interesting time, and we all bunkered and bunkered and bonded. But
when they said another two weeks, that's when something was sundered. That's when
something was broken. And I don't think we've ever stitched it back. Did
you guys feel the same way? Did you feel when we went from two
weeks to well, we got to keep going, and everything piling on,
and the news just getting the ventilators into this, and the eye erected at
the bleach, and the press conferences and the rest of it. Um,
what did you think three years ago? Yeah, it kind of was three
years ago, right, Yeah, it was three It's the anniversary of fouctually
coming out and making a speech, grinning practically ear to ear about all the
things that they have to do, right Crum sitting there with his chest puffed
out, grinning as well, smiling about what the you know, the lockdowns
or the closing of this and that that burks and other Oh god, right,
well, I'm kind of studying this now, so I'm kind of Um,
it's interesting that there's a bunch of do we have a bunch of pivot
points that we chose as a culture, you know and en mask to have
a panic attack? And one of them was, I mean was when we
found out I think I maybe I were talked about this, But like,
the most interesting place, um for me in this isn't you know, Washington
or the CDC or Sweden or Italy. It's Santa Clara County. In Santa
Clara County, our own Jay Baticharia was just a study with among other people,
and he looked at simply how many people are infected with COVID and what
the what the rate of COVID infection was and was enormously high, which sounded
like bad news. So it was good news because the rate of the hospitalization
and illness and you know, people's suffering was enormously low, much lower than
we expected. And his conclusion was, okay, panic over tideaway's coming.
We now know we're all going to get wet, but we're not all going
to drown. Most of us aren't. A lot of us aren't. And
we know the people who we need to protect and we should be protecting them.
And that is when, um, you know, either you follow along
and that used to follow that path and you say, okay, that we
have we have all the information we need now to run an effective, focused
protection plan for the country, or you say the studies rigged. It's no
good. The data is not real, it's not science. It's even a
little bit corrupt because a guy who runs an airline gave five thousand dollars to
it, so he must have some you know, secret plan to get the
planes flying again, which is what you do when you're having a panic attack.
You freak out and you ignore the evidence in front of you. And
then there was one county, so one county. A study of one county
had all the answers we really needed. And you know what county had the
most Draktonian COVID restrictions and still does in many places. Santa Clair County's the
book ends the entire tired nationwide freak out. The answer was right in Santa
Clara County, and they were so unwilling to see it in Santa Clara County
that they I don't think they I think they closed churches for they find churches.
Tens of thousands of dollars would be in Santa Clara County, and they
were thought of during the during the crisis Capital c crisis as being a model
county for how restrictive. They were. Um, I mean, you know,
if you look at you wrote this, we'd say, come on too
on the nose too, this is too perfect, too too symmetrical. Can't
be that. But that is exactly what happened. I think the problem with
Jay and his cohorts was that they issued their statement from the location of Great
Barrington, which made it sound as though their Barrington Declaration was itself great.
Heres are great terrific, right, but Barrington, if if they've issued it
from the County of Hyde and panic. If they'd said this is the Hyden
Panic declaration, the freak out people would have loved it because they thought,
here are more reasons to hide and to panic, and they would have taken
all of the advice and say, well, then we have to do this
too many people. I think my wife watched Contage in the movie while we
were in Mexico. She'd never seen it before, and she stunned to see
exactly how the movie presciently seemingly predicted what would happen. But the fact is
is that so many people had seen the movie Contagion when they started to hear
about the COVID coming their way in December or January, looked at the movie
and behaved as though that was the actual template, as though Laurence Fishburne was
driving this fricking thing instead of the anyway, Peter, you're going to say,
well, just first of all, listeners should know why why is Rob
going into this in some details? Because Rob is working on what I'm sure
is going to be a brilliant a long form a series, a podcast series
on this very subject, and so I can't wait for Rob to do that.
As far as I can recall, Rob, now you've talked to Jay
and you have the details, you have the facts in the front of your
mind. They're no longer in the front of my mind. But I recall
when Jay did that study I think it's called a zero prevalence study. Yes,
zero prevalence study in Santa Clarence. Okay, so the public health authorities
back in Washington, we're already announcing we're going to have to shut down,
We're going to have to mask, we're going to have to close the entire
American economy. And Jay said, well, wait a minute, let's see
how bad this is. Let's see how many people are infected. Jay,
our friend Jay whose office is just one hundred yards from mine where I sit
right now. And as far as I am aware, Ja Bodicharia, not
the NIH, not an ASID or whatever the letters are, none of those
huge, multi billion dollar operations back in Washington. But Ja Bodicharia conducted the
first zero prevalence He's the first one who said, well, let's just go
look what the science is. Let's do an empirical study. And then he
just covered wait a minute, lots of people have already been infected and that
means two things. One, it's not nearly as deadly as they're telling us
back in Washington. Far more people have been infected and had no not shown
up in the hospital, had only minor sympits, are none at all.
First of all, this thing isn't that dangerous as dangerous as they're saying.
And second, if this many people have been infected, it's over the horses
out of the barn, shutting down the economy wearing. It's been a ripple
the whole country. Anyway, those two findings by they say little Jay Potatari,
He's not little, but it was just his own enterprise, not these
massively funded operations back in Washington on which we rely do this kind of sting.
They just went off on and a power trip. And Jay said,
well wait a minute here, I actually have done a study. I've actually
sampled human beings, and we was just not only was he ignored, he
was denigrated to ride it. Yeah, I mean it sounded you know the
Santa carst that he was about April twenty twenty. April April you say,
April twenty twenty. April twenty twenty, Okay, I you just have to
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It's just it's just the it's the absolute worst. We think it's going
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Anyway, Sorry, I Rob, I interrupted you. April. I'm
glad you did welland Branch they're they're they're fine advertising. They've been support us
for a long time. Um. So anyway, the Great uh Sarah Clark
studies about April twenty twenty, Um, Great Barrington by the bye bye just
by the way, it was October that year, so Great Barrington was quite
late in the in the crisis, um. And the irony was that Great
Barrington was seen as this radical, weird thing um to say and to weigh
out there, when in fact it was you know, October of twenty twenty
where we did have enough information to make those arguments. About a third of
the things, roughly a third, I think, are the things that people
criticized the the Santa Clara study four. We're legitimate. There were things that
Jay would you know say, yeah, well, obviously it was April,
so we didn't have great testing kits. We didn't have um, we didn't
have the technology that we had for testing that we did later. Um,
all that all that taken, the numbers still point in the same direction.
It's directionally correct. So the argument should be to the science community, let's
not try to Let's not spend all of our time trying to poke holes in
the Santa Clara study. Let's spend at least half of our time trying to
prove it correct. Because if it's correct, that is good news. In
other words, it is good try to try to repeat it, try to
replicate it, and that was not going to happen. So that that just
just interesting way you know, these systems work. And the problem really is
that the best news. I mean, I think I was saying this before,
but I mean I was playing between maturely that COVID this is good.
COVID was good news for us. It was a dry run. I mean,
if it COVID is something more serious. I mean, but what's interesting
that COVID was that everyone who gets it doesn't go to hospital. You can't
really say that about ebola or about you know, the next thing. On
a way, COVID was in many ways a perfect a perfect lesson, and
the lesson shouldn't be we need to stockpile masks, or we need to,
you know, make sure we have hospital boats, although we probably should.
The lesson should be we need to not panic and we need to not freak
out. And the people who are tasked with the non panicking and the non
freaking out are supposed to be the ones in charge. And it was a
crazy reversal. And I think this is a crazy reversal we're seeing everywhere in
our lives now, to be broad a sixty ft view of the bureaucrats and
the administrators and the scientists losing their marbles while ordinary people who don't know anything
about infectious diseases or how respiratory viruses work, or what the sero positive even
means, they somehow knew that this was a mistake what we were doing.
They somehow knew. Somehow they knew because they were not seeing what they've seen
in the Chinese videos. People roasting on the street, twitching, men walking
down in white suits, hosing down the streets with bleach, which is what
you do if if ebola is abroad in the land. Now, the suffering
and dying went on in the hospitals, in the nursing homes, out of
sight, so it was limited to the people who were told what had happened
because they couldn't go see them. But still, the fact that there was
not this massive collapse of everything told everybody that this is not this is not
this is not the thing in the Omega man that makes everybody clutched their throat
and dropped to the ground. And once you had and it wasn't based on
science necessarily, it just was based on this sort of mutual just revelation,
everybody kind of agreed. Oh, because everybody at the start was thinking,
we're gonna get this. I don't want to get this. It's gonna be
sick, I'm gonna be horrible. But then day after day you would wake
up and you weren't sick. Day after day you would you would go to
the store and see the guys who were working their stocking shelves and running the
cash registers, who are still there. If this was that bad, this
grocery store would not be open. This fiction of six feet apart, this
idea of opening for an hour early to let the elderly in all of these
things that you know, these walking around with yardsticks, so we don't no
if it was this bad, this would not be open, none of this
would So everything that came to be safety theater TSA idea, TSA mind set
applied to the entire world struck us as bs because obviously this is not doing
anything and we're not going and it's not that bad. So, I mean,
nobody knew by looking at Jay's study, nobody knew by looking at a
paper or something like that. There was just this. We intuited that this
was not the end of the world because we'd seen contagion. Then we did
not have the armor down the street from where I work here filled with dead
bodies, including Kate Winslet. So no, no, that's absolutely true.
That you're absolutely right. I'm actually looking there is a number. I saw
it and I have I'm re searching for it. That has then the rate
of I mean, this is I mean, this is all old news for
people, but the rate of infection among the people who worked at you know,
grocery stores and drug stores right they were open, they were open for
business, you know, necessary whatever they call necessary workers. Um, the
rate of infection for those people compared to everyone else. That my initial research
suggests that it is the same, meaning that the Santa Clara studies vindicated it
was a tidal way. We all got wet, only some of us drowned.
And have we spent a little bit more time trying to protect the people
who were uh gonna be drowned. Um, we might have saved a few.
It's not like if a bullet comes here and they say they stay indoors.
If you stay inside your house, you probably won't get ebola, right,
but if you it's not gonna help. You're not gonna have any to
do with your with your your COVID chances. Anyway, any any public health
emergency that declares me to be an essential person has got something wrong from it
goes all I can say. I had my paper so I could go downtown
to the office and write made up funding human columns. Haha, Well,
we know you gotta go. You're gonna carry on for a few minutes bravely
without you. Um, I'll do all the meet up stuff. You don't
have to worry about that often New Orleans mid April. I'll be there,
are you will? Will you know? I will be Yeah. It doesn't
come to Minnesota, but he goes to New Orleans. All right, Rob
will talk to you next week, Peter, and I will sold your on
all you Rob Long fans are. I know you're tuning us off right now,
but we're gonna soldier on best as Yeah, there aren't any see you
later before we go. Um, there's not some obligation to talk about the
oscars and I could not care less about the oscars? WHOA when? What
was best picture last year? Do you remember? I don't have a clue.
That's right, neither do I. So we're the worst person, worst
people to talk about the oscars, so we won't. However, we are
massively entitled credit and credential gel political experts not so we can pick apart perhaps
what De Santa said, I think in a sense you know what De Santa
said about Ukraine? Um, I like the guy. I think you may
have to politics. We'll see. I'm not particularly upset that he ate putting
with his fingers, which apparently is the most important thing to a lot of
people right now. Um, I think Amy didn't Aimy clover Shart eat a
salad with a comb or something like that. I don't know, it doesn't
matter, but his statements on Ukraine. If you want to say, is
this a matter of high national interest. You can talk about well, debt,
orders, taking care of our people are necessarily more important because those are
the priorities of the government than the government is a year for us in an
ancillary sense, though, you know, we live in a world and you
got to deal with what's happening. So I support pretty much what we're doing
with Ukraine. So I'm not really worried about what he said. I'm not
sure he would he would have acted differently than Biden if he were president.
You may have some things to learn about this, but I don't know.
I like the guy, and I support Ukraine, and I just kind of
shrugged this one off and kept walking. That seems to me to be the
right reaction. He's a working politician. He doesn't know much about foreign policy
yet, He's never been been in a position in which he had to learn
about foreign policy. Now he is. He's trying to thread the political needle,
meaning he has to eat Trump for the nomination without driving away Donald Trump's
supporters, and that is going to be a trick and a half. That
is what dominates his thinking, not Ukraine. At the same time, it
was disappointing and disappointing, not even at the level of policy. Should we
back them? Should he said, a border dispute between Ukraine and Russia should
not be a high American priority. It's not a border dispute. She knows
it's not a border dispute. So that Santas Rondo, Santas Yale undergrad,
Harvard Law School, two tours in Navy intelligence, knows better. It's a
false step when a smart guy sounds stupid, and he did so. It's
a stumble. It's not a fatal wound. It's a stumble. He's learning.
We're watching it, We're watching him learn. Everybody gets one of those.
I remember Trump blowing a question about the nuclear triad, you know,
back in the day or right right. He didn't even had no idea what
it was clear idea. And I remember who would ask him a question about
the goods forces and he was and he thought that he was talking the Iranian
goods forces, and he thought he was talking about the Kurds and went off
in another direction. It was really angry when he corrected him on it,
like it was a trick. Got your question. It happens. They're going
to stumble from time to time. When they get out of the gate what
matters. And you're right, it goes to instincts, and in this case,
instincts and knowledge not that you know, not that heartening, but we
got some time to go in some seasoning to do Trump. I think,
Um, when you talk about Trump supporters alienating them, it's true, you
can't. But I think a lot of what Trump is tweeting these days is
alienating former Trump supporters, and by supporters, I mean people who voted for
him once, probably with maybe you know, not great enthusiasm, and then
the second time voted for him with enthusiasm because they were trying to stick it
to whoever had end up the Russia Gate. Everybody that was coming down on
the response that the people who wanted to foist Biden upon him. So they
went in and said, you know, you call me to plorable, healthy,
Yeah, I'm gonna vote for Trump. Take that. Or the people
who were really enthusiastic the first time and a little less so the second,
because you know, they got this and they got that. I mean,
so there's all kinds of people who voted for him who would vote for him
again if he were not. But the number of enthusiastic people, I think
has declined, and a lot of the people just simply don't want him to
run because the trump that's coming out of these you know, everyone says,
well, at least no mean tweets, that's true. But man, the
stuff that he posts on true Social can be just eyewateringly inane and just dumb
name calling and weird and cranky. It's like, I this is not the
most intellectually a vivacious opportunity to a choice that we got out there. So
so no, and I got I've been I've been saving a whole bunch of
them up and there's no reason to read them. But it was. He
was talking about ethanol in one of his one of his truth Social postings about
the necessity of alpha ethanol is a huge boondoggle. It's an immense boondoggle for
the agricultural industry. We don't need, we don't want it. We don't
want that stuff in our gas tank. So the fact that that De Santus
is against it, he's one of those, Oh, I thought, that's
sort of kind of what big government does is it mandates things like ethanol and
pours government money into it and forces people to buy it, So you're for
that? Why exactly? And so forth and so forth and so forth.
Anything al Speer in this week that you would like to discuss or should we
just mercifully let the audience get on to going in the comments and telling us
where we're wrong about this and wrong about that? Yeah? No, I
always read the reader comments and learn a lot. What should we watch this
weekend? James, we're out of I'm so desperate that my wife went off
on a scheme trip with a couple of kids. And here's what I found
myself watching. I called up Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy nineteen seventy nine version right
with Alec Guinness and it's available for free on YouTube. And the pictures a
little bit grainy, and you have to adjust to the pacing, because boy
did serial television move at a different pace in nineteen seventy nine from the pace
it moves at now. But by the time you're ten minutes into it,
you've settled into the pace. And it's just an amazing thing to watch a
great actor underplay every It was just an amazing thing. But I thought to
myself, Wow, we're supposed to be in the Golden Age of serial television,
and I can't find anything. So I'm going all the way back to
nineteen seventy nine. That can't be right. What am I missing? Yeah,
I'm missing nothing. It's all a matter of taste. There are shows
that I've told people to watch that they come back and they put their hands
gently around my neck and say, speak no more to me ever again about
anything, because they just hated it so much. Then there are shows that
my daughter will recommend that I will absolutely adore, and my wife will look
at them and she'll roll her eyes so hard backwards that she falls over in
a chair. So it's all a matter of taste, and I'm not going
to recommend anything to anybody. I'm finishing up the last of Us with a
diminishing enthusiasm. I'm continuing to watch Hello Tomorrow, which is this wonderful retrovision,
retrofuturistic vision of where nineteen fifties the aesthetics and ideas pretty much got locked
in place as we technologically progress to computers and moonshots, and it's it's it's
actually just a Willie Loehman salesman story with incredible graphics that are so far up
my alleyway that I just think that you know, they were reading my mind
before they made it. And other than that, I have nothing to say
except you listening should go to Ricochet and joined because we're going to be here
for a while. Yes we are, and your membership will help us continue.
And that's the only place, the only place on the entire Internet,
I'm telling you, folks, where you're going to be able to find people
like yourself who enjoy a civil conversation which sometimes gets a little salty and spicy.
Yeah, but that's what friends do when they talk. So when I
say we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet four point zero, that suggests
that we haven't gone off the diamond. There's not revisions. No, what
I'm gonna say is this week we will see you all in the comments at
Ricochet four point zero. However, first of all to thank Bowl and Branch,
Youth Switch and Express VPN support them for supporting us. Give us that
five star review at Apple, and you know we'll see you in the comments,
says I said it Ricochet four point zero, but it won't be four
point zero for long. Tune in find out later. See you Peter next
week and on that note of intrigue. Next week, James Ricochet joined the conversation