Speaker 1: My opinion around here these days is laugh for while
Speaker 1: you can, monkey boy, ask not what your country can
Speaker 1: do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister gorbachaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 1: It's the Ricchet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Speaker 1: Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lillax. Today we're going to talk
Speaker 1: to Charlie Gasparino about his new book, Go Woke, Go Broke, on.
Speaker 2: The inside story of the radicalization of Corporate America. So
Speaker 2: let's episodes a podcasting.
Speaker 3: Grocery prices of skyrocketed.
Speaker 4: Cereals are up twenty six percent, bread is up twenty
Speaker 4: four percent, butter is up thirty seven percent, maybe formulas
Speaker 4: up thirty percent, flowers up thirty eight percent, and eggs
Speaker 4: are up forty six percent, and many items are at
Speaker 4: much higher rates than that.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast. Number seven oh
Speaker 1: who cares? Who cares what number it is? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not like you can go back and say you
Speaker 1: said something at seven oh two that I believe was
Speaker 1: contradicted by a guest in number two hundred and four. Now,
Speaker 1: no what he's keeping drat Okay, it's seven four and
Speaker 1: We're very proud we have got this far. It's a
Speaker 1: rainy day here in Minneapolis. I'm joined by Stephen Hayward
Speaker 1: somewhere and Charles CW which does not stand for conventional
Speaker 1: Wisdom Cook, who I believe is still being the ultimate
Speaker 1: Florida man down there. The nation's waning, and you know, gentlemen,
Speaker 1: it's those who forget history are doomed to repeat, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But how about a good round of price controls on
Speaker 1: food that's worked out so.
Speaker 2: Well everywhere it's tried.
Speaker 1: What do you think of a VEEP presidential hopeful, Kamala
Speaker 1: Harris's proposal to do that?
Speaker 2: And Hi, thanks for being here.
Speaker 3: Well, all right, I'll go first, since I'm at Steve
Speaker 3: Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson again. You know it's
Speaker 3: bad when even the Washington Post economics columnist Catherine Rampel says, well,
Speaker 3: her subhead is, it's hard to exaggerate how bad Mala
Speaker 3: Harris's price gouging proposal is. Yeah. I actually remember having
Speaker 3: done research years ago on Nixon's wage and price freeze
Speaker 3: from the nineteen seventy one and one of their problems
Speaker 3: was how do you enforce her set price controls on food?
Speaker 3: And one of the more comical elements was orange juice.
Speaker 3: The price of frozen orange juice wasn't defrozen, but oranges
Speaker 3: were not because they're seasonal, right, And so all became
Speaker 3: arbitrary and ridiculous. And I'm trying to remember there are
Speaker 3: a couple of other categories. I don't know, it was
Speaker 3: tomatoes or whatever, where they just it was chaos and
Speaker 3: you couldn't possibly make it work. So this is just
Speaker 3: an attempt to deflect blame for inflation that everyone's mad
Speaker 3: about and say it wasn't our fault, it was the
Speaker 3: fault of Albertson's and Kroger and Win Dixie or something
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 5: Charles Well, I think that's right. I think that's primarily
Speaker 5: why she did it. It's a political ploy, not an
Speaker 5: economic ploy. She is aware that, despite how many attempts
Speaker 5: to sinuate otherwise, he is still called Harris, that Harris
Speaker 5: being the Harris of the Biden Harris administration. She is
Speaker 5: in the office of the Vice President as we speak,
Speaker 5: and massive overspending later inflation, and people are angry. So
Speaker 5: she wants to point at the mustachioed man from Monopoly
Speaker 5: and say he did it. That said, although I have
Speaker 5: been a leading exponent of this idea that this is
Speaker 5: a political ploy not an economic one, I do think
Speaker 5: it's incumbent upon voters to take it face value what
Speaker 5: candidates say they want to do, and not least because
Speaker 5: although he hasn't gone this far, Biden has been with the.
Speaker 6: Federal Trade Commission doing.
Speaker 5: Some of this stuff already, And there are people within
Speaker 5: the FTC who are very much in favor of this
Speaker 5: sort of thing. And once again, Harris has not mentioned Congress.
Speaker 5: This is a running trend. She never mentions Congress. Back
Speaker 5: in twenty nineteen, she said over and over and over
Speaker 5: again she could do anything without Congress, including gun control.
Speaker 5: Even she was going to ban the AAR fifteen without Congress.
Speaker 5: So when Jason Furman, Obama's economics friend, said this morning, Wow,
Speaker 5: this is a terrible idea. So it won't happen, Yeah,
Speaker 5: under our constitution lawder that's probably true. But if she's
Speaker 5: going to leverage the administrative state, which is already poised
Speaker 5: to try this sort of thing, then you should be
Speaker 5: worried about it. And I think she should pay a
Speaker 5: price for having proposed it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's there's an epicycle to these things too.
Speaker 3: That comes up a lot here in California. When oil
Speaker 3: prices are high, the left says, oh, it's collusion, price
Speaker 3: gouging by the oil companies and the refiners. Let's investigate.
Speaker 3: The government at all levels has been investigating high prices
Speaker 3: and gasoline and so forth for forty or fifty years now,
Speaker 3: and they always come up empty because it's wrong. But
Speaker 3: then the other side of the mouth, they say, we
Speaker 3: should have higher tax on gasoline to discourage consumption. Well,
Speaker 3: which is it. It's actually an easy lesson. The left
Speaker 3: is only happy when high gasoline prices are because of
Speaker 3: taxes and not because of market forces. And the same
Speaker 3: thing's happening now on groceries. And you're right, though, Charlie,
Speaker 3: I mean again an old story. When the Reagan people
Speaker 3: came into office in nineteen eighty one, they found the
Speaker 3: Federal Trade Commission had an open investigation not of my
Speaker 3: dog marking in the background, but of the serial company,
Speaker 3: you know, Kellogg and Posts. And the argument was they
Speaker 3: were monopolizing shelf space in grocery stores and that had
Speaker 3: to be stopped. And the Reagan, people scratched their head
Speaker 3: and said, go away, this is stupid, which of course
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 5: If I could just very very briefly out another cycle
Speaker 5: to that which has amused me enormously, that is that
Speaker 5: when prices go up when a Democrat's president, it's price gouging. Apparently,
Speaker 5: big companies don't price gouge under Republicans. You think they
Speaker 5: would be more likely to do that because evil Republicans
Speaker 5: love corporations, but they price goug when Democrats come in.
Speaker 5: When the price is when the prices go down, that's
Speaker 5: because of the president. So we've seen the most hilarious
Speaker 5: trend under Biden where prices are gone and he would
Speaker 5: say this is outrageous collusion from the supermarkets and the
Speaker 5: meat producers. And then he would go down and he
Speaker 5: would say, happy Thanksgiving, Joe Biden wishes to tell you
Speaker 5: that your potato is a less than they would have
Speaker 5: been last year.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, how do you think that this Let's say
Speaker 1: she gets elected president and she does she decides to
Speaker 1: go around Congress to do this. How do you possibly
Speaker 1: think that would manifest itself as an executive order that
Speaker 1: would say what because I know that this is just
Speaker 1: thrown out there for as you said, for political means,
Speaker 1: but it is revelatory of what somebody wants to do
Speaker 1: and thinks they can do. How would she possibly keep
Speaker 1: the grocery stores profit margins within an acceptable amount for
Speaker 1: her executive order saying.
Speaker 3: What, well, I think Charlie put his finger on it.
Speaker 3: That'll use things like the Federal Trade Commission to harass
Speaker 3: big business and the grocery Chaine and so, I mean
Speaker 3: they aren't The Justice Department is trying to block a
Speaker 3: big grocery store merger right now. I think it's I
Speaker 3: forget it's Albertson's and somebody. It might be Kroger, I
Speaker 3: can't remember, but they'll do that kind of thing. And
Speaker 3: you know that that always has some effect. But what
Speaker 3: the effects that we will see as consumers are shortages
Speaker 3: hoarding black markets pop up. It's the old story, especially
Speaker 3: with supermarkets and low margin items, is that's why you
Speaker 3: run out of toilet paper when there's price controls.
Speaker 5: For example, I mean, the profit margin for supermarkets in
Speaker 5: the United States is about one point one eight percent,
Speaker 5: it's the latest figure. One point just very low relative
Speaker 5: to most American businesses. That's lower even than health insurance,
Speaker 5: which always get told that they're making gobs of money,
Speaker 5: which they're not. One point eight percent. So the actual
Speaker 5: capacity of the Federal Trade Commission to do anything here
Speaker 5: is limited, and as Steve says, the product of that
Speaker 5: will not be a change in profit margins, but shortages.
Speaker 5: But that doesn't mean that the attempt won't be extremely difficult.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's a bit like being sued. Even if
Speaker 5: you're right on the law. You could be one hundred
Speaker 5: percent right on the law, but if somebody decides to
Speaker 5: make your life hell, the process becomes the punishment, and
Speaker 5: you end up having to spend all your time.
Speaker 6: Complying with this or that and paying lawyers and frankly
Speaker 6: just worrying at night.
Speaker 5: And I think you know, if indeed I am right,
Speaker 5: which I am sometimes, and this is a political rather
Speaker 5: than an economic thing, then that sort of harassment will
Speaker 5: be more likely, not less, because she'll want to point
Speaker 5: to it and say, look at all of the stuff
Speaker 5: that I'm doing. I'm an outsider, I didn't have anything
Speaker 5: to do with this. I'm trying to stop it, and
Speaker 5: that will make it worse for publics, not less.
Speaker 1: People don't understand the percentage of the American workforce that
Speaker 1: it is involved in compliance. It tells you something about
Speaker 1: the reach and the power of the regulatory state when
Speaker 1: you have so many, when you have entire departments as
Speaker 1: companies engaged in compliance, the name of which just sounds
Speaker 1: as if we're in a state of constant servitude with
Speaker 1: our heads bent and arms manacled. But you're right about
Speaker 1: the profit margins, Charlie. They are absolutely thin. And how
Speaker 1: do they make their money then.
Speaker 2: Well, with really highjacked up stuff that people pay for.
Speaker 1: I mean the profit margins on ready to eat meals.
Speaker 1: You walk into the store and you see a sandwich
Speaker 1: for twelve dollars, you see an entree for fourteen or something,
Speaker 1: and people pick it up because they can and it's
Speaker 1: convenient and the.
Speaker 2: Rest of it. And that's where the profit really comes from.
Speaker 2: Because the margins are so huge, Is that in itself gouging?
Speaker 1: Are we to have the never blinking eye of the
Speaker 1: pentopticon fall upon the deli meat section and called their
Speaker 1: margins too fat? If it all ends with people, as
Speaker 1: you said, a black market, people in going to an
Speaker 1: alleyway some or where somebody sells them a plastic baggy
Speaker 1: full of Captain crunch. That is not exactly the America
Speaker 1: I signed on for. Then again, I'm speaking as one
Speaker 1: of those people who owns a house and isn't troubled
Speaker 1: by the market today, which is very expensive and bad
Speaker 1: for first time homeowners. I think the best way to
Speaker 1: stabilize the homeownership market, get more people in, and bring
Speaker 1: the price down is to give everybody twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars if they're buying a house.
Speaker 2: Some say ridiculously that that would just mean that twenty
Speaker 2: five thousand dollars would be tacked under the price. I
Speaker 2: don't understand this.
Speaker 1: Thing called echoonomics, but that's what they say. Is this
Speaker 1: another serious proposal or is it just another bit of
Speaker 1: political grand standing?
Speaker 2: And I think we know the answer to that.
Speaker 3: I mean, wage and price controls are one thing, but
Speaker 3: proposing this kind of substy for housing really does remind
Speaker 3: us once again how economically illiterate leading Democrats have become.
Speaker 3: I mean, one of the reasons, in fact, one of
Speaker 3: the main reasons thatigher education costs have risen I think
Speaker 3: at twice the rate of healthcare is the government subsidizing
Speaker 3: student loans, having lots of grants and the colleges are
Speaker 3: even though they're nonprofit quote unquote institutions, they capture those
Speaker 3: subsidies in higher prices and can get away with it.
Speaker 3: And why you would think that wouldn't happen in housing
Speaker 3: is beyond me. And you know, the rent control proposal
Speaker 3: is also that Biden has already floated and Harris is
Speaker 3: doubling down on, will have the same effect on rents.
Speaker 3: It's just gonna raise prices or raise rents.
Speaker 1: And I don't know what remind me again with the
Speaker 1: rent control proposal is because we've had it here.
Speaker 2: In the Twin Cities and it has been disastrous.
Speaker 1: They put a I mean they captained at three percent
Speaker 1: or something like that over the course of X number
Speaker 1: of years, and what it meant was that just about
Speaker 1: everybody who's going to build something said, nah, no, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna do that. I'm I'm gonna go build it
Speaker 1: over here across the border from your tout.
Speaker 2: It never works.
Speaker 1: But are they remind me again, because I've had a
Speaker 1: busy week and I have been able to follow every little.
Speaker 2: Detail of rent controlled national rent control laws well as I.
Speaker 3: Understand that the Biden proposal was to apply this to
Speaker 3: large corporate owners of multi family housing, so that would
Speaker 3: be you know, your large apartment reads like avalon Bay
Speaker 3: and people like that. But also supposedly hedge funds have
Speaker 3: been buying a lot of residential property, both single family
Speaker 3: homes and apartments, and so they want to gouge the
Speaker 3: big guy. But eventually that's going to trickle down to
Speaker 3: the little guy. It just has to, because it seems
Speaker 3: to me if you're going to be consistent about it,
Speaker 3: which they have been in places that have rent control,
Speaker 3: like you know New York. From New York's rent control
Speaker 3: started as a temporary measure in World War One, just
Speaker 3: to remind people, and we still have a century later.
Speaker 3: So there are a few liberals. I'm surprised to find
Speaker 3: them out here in California, and maybe, James, you have
Speaker 3: some in Minneapolis who are been saying I never thought
Speaker 3: I'd live long enough to hear this, that the problem
Speaker 3: with housing is we over regulate land use and building
Speaker 3: too much. And there's actually so of this left wing
Speaker 3: it's actually here in California called the NIMB movement, NIMB
Speaker 3: Meeting or nimby sorry, yes, in my back back yard,
Speaker 3: and they actually say pretty sensible things along with a
Speaker 3: lot of nonsense about you know, segregation and redlining and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. But you would think that this would
Speaker 3: trickle up to the Biden administration or Democrats at the
Speaker 3: national level, but so far not much progress on that front.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is this has cracked me out. It's like,
Speaker 5: you know, you have someone who's a heroin addict, and
Speaker 5: he's like, it's causing me all sorts of problems being
Speaker 5: a heroin addict. I'm I'm late for work and I
Speaker 5: can't remember to do stuff and my work's really low quality.
Speaker 5: And you say, well, what are you going to do
Speaker 5: about that? And they go, I've seen you getting up earlier. Well,
Speaker 5: this is certainly one option. Well, okay, any other ideas well?
Speaker 5: I was Thineking of setting alarms that tell me to
Speaker 5: do my stuff. You know, I'm going to take some nanacs.
Speaker 5: Maybe stop being a heroin addict.
Speaker 6: Like it's it's.
Speaker 5: Obviously a complicated issue, but one of the core problems
Speaker 5: with housing in the United States is that it is
Speaker 5: so regulated, especially in places like California, and union rules
Speaker 5: and environmental rules make it so difficult to build at
Speaker 5: cheap prices that people are struggling to get into the market,
Speaker 5: and the fact that the inflation that we cause led
Speaker 5: to high interest rates has not helped people get into
Speaker 5: that market either. And the one thing I mean, she
Speaker 5: says nothing for a month, nothing. She's an avatar candidate.
Speaker 5: The press does all of her work, and she says,
Speaker 5: I'm going to make a big speech, and the one
Speaker 5: thing she can think of is give people money. On
Speaker 5: the demand side, you can't see, you can't see all
Speaker 5: of the stuff that everyone's been talking about.
Speaker 6: You want to give people money on them.
Speaker 5: It's just astonishing, totally inability to see the problem.
Speaker 1: Well, at this point, of course, everybody in her side
Speaker 1: are saying, well, what about Trump and troosts, And that's
Speaker 1: another versation. We can have all of these conversations, but
Speaker 1: at the moment we have our guest, and our guests.
Speaker 2: Popped up and we're glad that he did.
Speaker 1: It's Charlie Gasperino, senior correspondent for Fox Business, also columnist
Speaker 1: for The New York Post and an author, most recently
Speaker 1: of Goo Go Broke, The Inside Story of the Radicalization
Speaker 1: of Corporate America.
Speaker 2: Charlie, thanks for joining us today. Charlie.
Speaker 1: I know that this is a this is a nation
Speaker 1: that has many problems that afflict it, many deep societal
Speaker 1: problems that were eager and keen to grasp with some
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 2: Some of them we are too painful and we turn away.
Speaker 1: But I know that when I want guidance in where
Speaker 1: the soul of America should be headed, I look to
Speaker 1: tractor companies and motorcycle makers. So let's talk about the company,
Speaker 1: the ones that I just mentioned, for example, the problems
Speaker 1: that they face may not be.
Speaker 2: Instantly knowable to the people who aren't on Twitter and
Speaker 2: the rest of it.
Speaker 1: But Harley Davidson is the most recent company for people
Speaker 1: to look at them and say, wait a minute, iconic
Speaker 1: American brand, symbol of the open road, the throaty engine, roar,
Speaker 1: the smell of the gas, the great American icon, and
Speaker 1: they're they're lecturing us about the need to reinvent capitalism.
Speaker 7: Sadly, they're not alone.
Speaker 8: I mean, I mean, one of the things in my
Speaker 8: book that I point out is just you know, how stupid,
Speaker 8: just just how pervasive wokeness is at companies. And now
Speaker 8: you would think corporate America is a right wing pursuit
Speaker 8: right capitalism. Uh, it is within the confines of wokeness.
Speaker 8: At least lately. I mean, all these companies have evolved
Speaker 8: into sort of messaging the the cultural dynamics of the left.
Speaker 8: And I know this sounds really sort of academic when
Speaker 8: I explain this, but you read the book and you'll
Speaker 8: both get a laugh out of it, because watching corporations
Speaker 8: do stupid woke stuff is really fucking funny.
Speaker 1: Right, it's a New York Post.
Speaker 2: We mentioned New York. It absolutely is. It is.
Speaker 1: It's amusing and its cluelessness and their and their inability
Speaker 1: to read the room and the rest of it.
Speaker 2: Let's go down.
Speaker 1: Let's go down some of the examples you talk about
Speaker 1: in your book, and then let's also get to the
Speaker 1: important question, do they really go broke? I mean, Disney
Speaker 1: still trading, Harley still selling cycles, that farm supply guys.
Speaker 2: You know, they may have taken a little hit, but
Speaker 2: they're going to be still around.
Speaker 1: Do they really first example, your favorite example of a
Speaker 1: company that went woke for no good reason at all.
Speaker 8: Well, it's gotta be Budweiser. Well, you know, it's it's
Speaker 8: a brand. Budweiser is a brand in the people. The
Speaker 8: Anheuser Bush owns Budweiser. It's it doesn't. It's sold that
Speaker 8: two thousand and nine, I go through the buyout. The
Speaker 8: Bush family became very rich by selling it for billions
Speaker 8: of dollars to a company called ab Imbev, which is
Speaker 8: essentially a bunch of Brazilians and uh and uh and
Speaker 8: Belgian you know, the businessmen very Davos who bought the
Speaker 8: brand and uh. And you know, that's where you could
Speaker 8: trace the increasingly sort of progressive branding of Budweiser and
Speaker 8: there and other brands to that purchase. And you know,
Speaker 8: it reached its sort of high or low part point
Speaker 8: with the Dilla mulvaney trans woman in a bubble bath
Speaker 8: drinking a bud light you know, yeah, which, yes, did happen,
Speaker 8: but I, you know, sort of that to me was
Speaker 8: the most infuriating and the funniest and also it just
Speaker 8: really captured you know, why this is this this occurred.
Speaker 7: And I'll tell you why.
Speaker 8: I you know, I covered this when it went down
Speaker 8: in twenty twenty three, and the company tried to blame
Speaker 8: it on you know, a couple of misfits in the
Speaker 8: marketing department, and as I found out, it was much
Speaker 8: more than that. It was literally those misfits in the
Speaker 8: marketing department. First of all, if it weren't such misfits,
Speaker 8: were actually good marketers. But they were under some pretty
Speaker 8: strict sidelines too, to impose DEI diversity equity and inclusion
Speaker 8: in various parts of the branding of their of their beer,
Speaker 8: including the use of influencers. So what happened was they
Speaker 8: want they abm that was increasingly going there. It wanted
Speaker 8: to include in its you know, in its DEI mandates
Speaker 8: for influencers. Uh, trans you know, the trans community essentially
Speaker 8: as part of that DEI mandate.
Speaker 3: And if you're going to go to the.
Speaker 8: Trans community to sell beer, you know, Dil mulvaney becomes
Speaker 8: like someone that you go to even though the company
Speaker 8: like sits there and says, oh, we've never heard of
Speaker 8: this person before. I mean, Dil Molvaney is a famous transactivist.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 8: She interviewed Joe Biden before the before those ads hit,
Speaker 8: and you know, and and it became sort of a
Speaker 8: cultural touch touchstone, the whole the whole Budweiser lap or
Speaker 8: bud Light flap. She chronicled on Twitter or on Facebook
Speaker 8: and Instagram and TikTok her three hundred and sixty four
Speaker 8: days of Man of becoming.
Speaker 3: A woman girl.
Speaker 2: No, it's called being a girl.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean it was really and and by the
Speaker 8: way she did doing it was pretty off brand if
Speaker 8: you did any research into her, her brand was bizarre
Speaker 8: because it was so activist. I mean, no, I listen,
Speaker 8: I have trans friends, no problem with people that want
Speaker 8: to go there, and that's your business. I have a
Speaker 8: problem with proseetizing, obviously, but you know, you could make
Speaker 8: a case that you might have proselytized kids. There was
Speaker 8: a Ted Cruz told me, and it's in the book
Speaker 8: the Senator from Texas about how she had some did
Speaker 8: some skit on on Instagram or TikTok about her name
Speaker 8: being Eloise and she's six and she's dancing around. I mean,
Speaker 8: it's it's I mean, it's just it's bizarre that that
Speaker 8: Budweiser go there. But if you know d you understand
Speaker 8: why they went there. And that's part of the whole
Speaker 8: corporate woke movement. Now when I say go woke, go broke, listen,
Speaker 8: I mean, obviously I'm not prone to exaggeration here, but listen,
Speaker 8: there is a there is a brokeness to this. Budweiser
Speaker 8: went from the number three brand, number one brand to
Speaker 8: number three best selling beer brand. Disney Stock has not
Speaker 8: moved since now since twenty fourteen. You know that I
Speaker 8: can go down on the line. Target took a hit
Speaker 8: to its bottom line. You know, we can go on
Speaker 8: and on, and you know, I don't think this stuff sells.
Speaker 8: I mean, I don't think my book Bruce doesn't sell
Speaker 8: And it's so stupid.
Speaker 7: That you wonder why they go there.
Speaker 8: But then you have to kind of get a handle
Speaker 8: on the woke ecosystem, which I tried to get my
Speaker 8: hands around.
Speaker 3: So, Charles, it's Steve Hayward out in California, and I
Speaker 3: want to I wanted to take us back to the
Speaker 3: very beginning a little bit of how this happened. What
Speaker 3: were the invade routes. I've had two theories about this
Speaker 3: that are complementary, but I've only really worked on ones.
Speaker 3: As an academic, I used to say, yeah, it's really
Speaker 3: bad that our universities are so left and into identity politics.
Speaker 3: But if you ruin the English department, in the philosophy department,
Speaker 3: it's no big deal. But it broke out of the
Speaker 3: confines of the campus and found its way into the
Speaker 3: corporate boardrooms. Starting My point is the Silicon Valley fifteen
Speaker 3: years ago, and I think it's the HR departments are
Speaker 3: large part of it, because if you've got a degree
Speaker 3: in gender studies, you can't actually do anything in a
Speaker 3: real business, but you can go in the HR department
Speaker 3: and the new DEI Department, which it's one thing to
Speaker 3: have an HR department that's trying to advance civil rights
Speaker 3: and affirmative action and all those problems. Right the DEI people,
Speaker 3: what do they do there? Just exists to make trouble.
Speaker 3: And I haven't gotten into your book very far yet,
Speaker 3: but I'll bet you've got lots of stories. And I
Speaker 3: keep hearing stories of DEI offices that tie units of
Speaker 3: companies in knots with their MAOIs struggle sessions over and
Speaker 3: what statements they should put out and tyway. And then
Speaker 3: I think the big business lobbies at the other end
Speaker 3: of this world economic forum also put pressure. Oh and
Speaker 3: CEO wives I think are a big problem. I don't
Speaker 3: know if you get to that or not. But how
Speaker 3: did this happen? Take us from the top?
Speaker 8: For us, well, I did trace how it happened. Again,
Speaker 8: this is not a history book, but history is important.
Speaker 8: Here in my view, listen, like all cultural revolutions, that
Speaker 8: happened slowly at first, and then you know, you know,
Speaker 8: so I traced, I tried to trace. When was the
Speaker 8: first time I've heard of ESG. You know, that's a
Speaker 8: key plank bokeness, environmental social governance investing. The first time
Speaker 8: I saw it was in you know, when I went
Speaker 8: back in my in databases, was nineteen ninety five. Now, coincidentally,
Speaker 8: in nineteen ninety five, I was hired as a reporter
Speaker 8: for the Wall Street Journal. I spent nine years there
Speaker 8: and covering corporate scams and you name it, all the
Speaker 8: stuf uff that and the reporters do at the Wall
Speaker 8: Street Journal. And I noticed at the time I was
Speaker 8: covering mutual funds, and in nineteen ninety five there was
Speaker 8: this sort of sort of small but kind of growing
Speaker 8: movement of social responsible investing.
Speaker 7: And it wasn't like quite a thing.
Speaker 8: I mean, you know, when I got hired at the Journal,
Speaker 8: as I remember, it was literally I was in the newsroom,
Speaker 8: you know, I got offered the job. Today Netscape went public,
Speaker 8: and I don't know if you remember Netscape, it was
Speaker 8: like the first browser, right and at the time the IPO.
Speaker 7: So, you know, I spent a.
Speaker 8: Lot of time initially covering you know, these you know
Speaker 8: tech funds that were blowing up, people were getting involved
Speaker 8: in dot com stuff. But there was this sort of
Speaker 8: side business over here about social responsible investing, and I
Speaker 8: remember stuff like the Dominie Index that would bring company
Speaker 8: mutual funds under social responsibility. So it started to grow
Speaker 8: out of that. Now you know, why wasn't it just
Speaker 8: ignored and thrown to the side. Well, there's a lot
Speaker 8: of there's a lot of factors because of that. Okay,
Speaker 8: So you there's a group think on in corporate America.
Speaker 8: There's no doubt about them. Right, So part of the
Speaker 8: group think gets together in Davos, and like all bad ideas,
Speaker 8: you know, I find that all bad ideas begin at
Speaker 8: the UN, all bad court company ideas, and most ideas
Speaker 8: begin at the UN and maybe Davos, right, Yeah, it
Speaker 8: all starts inculcating these sort of classrooms of of influencer
Speaker 8: professors like Jeff the jeff Sonomfeld to the world at
Speaker 8: Yell where you know, progressive corporate responsibility become a huge thing,
Speaker 8: and and corporate responsibility was defined broadly in terms of
Speaker 8: your left wing policies in the boardroom.
Speaker 2: Right, what?
Speaker 3: Right? Well, I remember Charles that around two thousand, what
Speaker 3: caught on for a while before ESG solidified was you
Speaker 3: may remember this too. It was the triple bottom line.
Speaker 3: There's some profit people and planet. It's the same thing
Speaker 3: as the SG and the name changed. And you do
Speaker 3: pick up on one thing I think is quite important,
Speaker 3: and I think more should we said about this. You
Speaker 3: quite rightly single out the people who call themselves stakeholders.
Speaker 3: This has been around for a while, but you know, shareholders,
Speaker 3: We understand that there are people with skin in the game.
Speaker 3: They bought the stock. Who is a stakeholder? And how
Speaker 3: do you become one? It seems very sinister to me.
Speaker 3: But give us your take on.
Speaker 7: That, well, stakeholders.
Speaker 8: You know, the whole notion of stakeholder capitalism started to
Speaker 8: seep in around the time that you mentioned two thousands.
Speaker 8: You know about that where we actually, you know, live
Speaker 8: in a global community. It's and and CEOs need to
Speaker 8: think more holistically, not in the Milton Friedman fashion of
Speaker 8: shareholder capitalism. And I think the two thousand and eight
Speaker 8: financial crisis took in another step further. I mean, you
Speaker 8: did have congressional pressure on companies, the emergence of Elizabeth
Speaker 8: Warren at a powerful leftist progressive force in the US
Speaker 8: and others. And then you had business caving into it.
Speaker 8: And I think two thousand and eight was one way
Speaker 8: to cave into it. You know, it was what because
Speaker 8: remember what happened with big business. There was massive government bailouts.
Speaker 8: You had a wicked sort of backlash, populous backlash of
Speaker 8: tea partiers, but mostly Occupy Wall Street, which was you know,
Speaker 8: just you know, galvanizing cities. And these CEOs started to like,
Speaker 8: you know, essentially virtue signal to buy to buy themselves
Speaker 8: covered from from the left, the populous, you know sort
Speaker 8: of revolt that.
Speaker 7: Was going on.
Speaker 8: And there was something interesting that happened in twenty eighteen
Speaker 8: or twenty nineteen, I can't quite remember. They was twenty
Speaker 8: eighteen is when the Business Roundtable, which is the business
Speaker 8: lobby group, right, it's where the one hundred top CEOs
Speaker 8: you know, essentially set the agenda for or public companies.
Speaker 8: The Fendistry did Milton Friedman and shareholder capitalism for stakeholder
Speaker 8: capitalism where you are we think more broadly, and that
Speaker 8: was Jamie Diamond of all people, the great banker at
Speaker 8: JP Morgan, who actually turns out to be kind of woke.
Speaker 8: I mean, it's a funny scene in my book, you know,
Speaker 8: during the George Floyd, by the way, the George Floyd,
Speaker 8: and this just shows you how absurd it is. A
Speaker 8: cop kills maybe accidentally, probably accidentally, but whether he used
Speaker 8: brute force too much forces a matter of contention, a
Speaker 8: guy that was trying to pass a counterfeit check in
Speaker 8: a convenience store in Minneapolis. That's George Floyd. The guy
Speaker 8: has spent it all in the system and he resisted
Speaker 8: the rest. Now I'm not saying he deserves the death penalty,
Speaker 8: far from it, but you know, in that struggle, he dies,
Speaker 8: but that death sparked these riots and all this sort
Speaker 8: of It was like a weird, woke, come to Jesus
Speaker 8: moment for every corporate ceo, like they need. It was
Speaker 8: so absurd that Jamie Diamond, Brian moynihan, a Bank of America.
Speaker 8: I go down the list all of them that virtue
Speaker 8: signals about this, you know, use that example that the
Speaker 8: country isthmically racist in need of change, and they did,
Speaker 8: and like, how does people how do people that are like,
Speaker 8: supposedly smart Jamie Dimond, graduate from Harvard Business School, runs
Speaker 8: a big bank.
Speaker 2: He's not.
Speaker 8: He's very smart. How do these people go there? Because
Speaker 8: it's actually quite stupid if you think about it. My
Speaker 8: conclusion in the book is they did that for for
Speaker 8: virtue signaling reasons, to gain good publicity, to get higher
Speaker 8: because there is a corporate woke ecosystem that's developed. The
Speaker 8: Human Rights Campaign grades businesses and it does have impact.
Speaker 8: ESG is now catching on in twenty twenty, and the
Speaker 8: G and ESG and the the S and ESG is
Speaker 8: very much about social justice. And so Jamie Dimond, so
Speaker 8: Brian moynihan, a Bank of America, doesn't you know, tells
Speaker 8: all his direct reports to read the collective works of
Speaker 8: Roger Chetty. I don't know if you know that name.
Speaker 8: That's a yeah, that's an.
Speaker 7: Economist that at very progressive.
Speaker 8: And then he says we're going to start at one
Speaker 8: point five billion dollar fund for you know, for racial equity, right,
Speaker 8: and everybody's like, well, how we're going to hand out money?
Speaker 8: I just get it to the communities fast, so they're
Speaker 8: just low interest loans. Jamie Diamond reads that and says
Speaker 8: we're going to do bigger one, We're going to do
Speaker 8: thirty five billion.
Speaker 7: Dollars and he does it. You know, so I raised
Speaker 7: with them. Okay, so are you telling me that George
Speaker 7: Floyd had a low interest loan.
Speaker 4: That day?
Speaker 8: And Neil and their answers, I meant, I put their
Speaker 8: answers in the book. It's stupid, you know. And what's
Speaker 8: also interesting about this is like Jamie Diamond and you
Speaker 8: know at the time, was was he went to visit
Speaker 8: a branch because remember this was during the COVID lockdowns.
Speaker 8: He went to visit a JP Morgan branch at Mount Kisso,
Speaker 8: New York, and he was in the took a picture
Speaker 8: of him taking a knee and it like went viral
Speaker 8: and we all asked, you know, it was like a
Speaker 8: group picture, and we all asked, We said, you know,
Speaker 8: he is he like, now, you know, a social justice warrior?
Speaker 8: And they were like, well, you can write whatever you want.
Speaker 8: You know, we're not going to call you know, So
Speaker 8: they had no problem letting let you know that that
Speaker 8: impression for four years. So when I went back and
Speaker 8: I checked and this is in the book, I said, yeah,
Speaker 8: I'm just saying, oh, I'm gonna write about this, and
Speaker 8: the pr people at JP Morgan were like, oh no, no,
Speaker 8: Jamie didn't take it. Just wanted to make it clear
Speaker 8: Jamie is not a BLM supporter. He took a knee
Speaker 8: merely to fit in the photo because he was didn't
Speaker 8: want to obstruct the people behind him. And I said,
Speaker 8: that's so stupid. Why'd you wait four years to tell
Speaker 8: me that?
Speaker 5: Well, I just had a question for you child's cook care.
Speaker 6: So how do we fight this?
Speaker 5: Because there's a paradox in that you're right to identify
Speaker 5: a host of examples of where companies that have gone
Speaker 5: work have suffered to some extent, and yet it's still spread.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's still an ecosystem that in some sense
Speaker 5: seems to be impervious to outside influence. And in so
Speaker 5: far as the examples you've given are of a diminished
Speaker 5: fortune for a company that's gone work, they're not going
Speaker 5: under right, I mean, Disney, it still exists. It's flatlining
Speaker 5: in the stock market, you're right, and the movies aren't
Speaker 5: doing so well with one exception. So if you're a
Speaker 5: consumer and you can't do what was done to Budweiser
Speaker 5: with the Dylan Malvanian nonsense. How do we fight this
Speaker 5: so that it goes away because its influences pernicious.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 8: One of the things I noticed about the Target situation,
Speaker 8: which is kind of interesting, is that for many years
Speaker 8: Target would have these very sort of expansive.
Speaker 7: Pride Month celebrations, right and.
Speaker 8: The they do it, and there was there was increasingly
Speaker 8: there was stuff on social media about like parents being
Speaker 8: outraged and you know, I'm taking my kid to the Target,
Speaker 8: and you know, I see this and that, and you know,
Speaker 8: I don't I just want to shop there. I want
Speaker 8: to know, I want to get diapers, so to speak,
Speaker 8: you know, which is why you can shop at Target,
Speaker 8: right right, So you want you know, good good, you
Speaker 8: want some quality at a low price. They reached a
Speaker 8: tipping point in twenty twenty three, when you know, woke
Speaker 8: reached it's I guess a potheosis that the best way
Speaker 8: to put it. All the stuff's happened in twenty twenty
Speaker 8: three where you know, people had enough and literally people
Speaker 8: took to social media and the company was totally caught
Speaker 8: off guard to just sort of do what the press
Speaker 8: would most of the press wouldn't do. The media wouldn't
Speaker 8: do and just report about what was going on inside
Speaker 8: the store, which was at another level, literally rainbow colored
Speaker 8: ones I mean, first off that the probably it wasn't
Speaker 8: just I have just you know, I have no problem
Speaker 8: with pride display. I you know, I don't and I
Speaker 8: don't have kids, So that's a whole other story. But
Speaker 8: if I go to a Target and I see a
Speaker 8: pride display, I will walk by it and it probably
Speaker 8: might not even register with me, but it does with
Speaker 8: a lot of a lot of Middle America American people.
Speaker 8: When they see a rainbow colored onesie next to a
Speaker 8: tuck friendly bathing suit for men who haven't transitioned, next
Speaker 8: to a row of books about you know, children transitioning,
Speaker 8: that rubs them the wrong way. There's a cultural there
Speaker 8: is a cultural they're proselytizing the cultural change that most
Speaker 8: people hate. And they took to social media and guess
Speaker 8: what happened. Target backed off it. Budweiser backed off it.
Speaker 8: Now here's the funniest thing with Budweiser. Because I did
Speaker 8: a lot of reporting on this, they tried to blame
Speaker 8: it on the the you know, the poor the two guys,
Speaker 8: the two people in the marketing department, which it's much
Speaker 8: more than that. But if you want to know how
Speaker 8: absurd the overreaction in Budweiser is right now, So they
Speaker 8: go from Dyla mo'vaney drinking Budweiser half naked in a
Speaker 8: bubble bath, right, and there were social media spots now there.
Speaker 8: Now they cut some massive deal. They actually paid up
Speaker 8: wickedly for it with the UFC, right, the Dana White,
Speaker 8: the very unwoke Data White, very unwoke you know, cage
Speaker 8: match boxing, right, guys ripping their head off, the bud wise,
Speaker 8: the antis of Bushes, the main sponsor that as part
Speaker 8: of that, they're thinking about one of the antiser Bush
Speaker 8: brands is thinking about partnering with one of Dana's other
Speaker 8: side hustles he's doing right now, which is called power Slap.
Speaker 8: That's literally two big guys slapping each other in the
Speaker 8: face until one falls. Now, think about that. The guys
Speaker 8: that brought you Dyla movaney a year ago, almost a
Speaker 8: little more than a year ago, is now are now
Speaker 8: back and now supporting or promoting and sponsoring something where
Speaker 8: two lunatic guys smash each other in the face. That's
Speaker 8: how bad their brand has been damaged and how They're
Speaker 8: to put them Genie back in the bottle. And that's
Speaker 8: how much the consumer backlash did work. Now you're never
Speaker 8: going to put companies. Putting companies out of business is
Speaker 8: very difficult. As someone who's covered business for years. I mean,
Speaker 8: you know, you know, Lehman Brothers, Bearsterns, you know that
Speaker 8: sort of stuff. I broke a lot of stories. Dart
Speaker 8: a financial crisis. There's a whole bunch of reasons why
Speaker 8: that happens.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 8: I don't think Budweiser is going, you know, necessarily going
Speaker 8: to go out of business tomorrow, but slowly but surely they.
Speaker 7: Are losing a lot of money.
Speaker 8: Disney stock, the fact that its stock hasn't moved since
Speaker 8: twenty fourteen will tell you something.
Speaker 1: Disney's getting hammered for what it did to Star Wars.
Speaker 1: Target is getting hammered for what you said exactly. I'm
Speaker 1: here in Minneatolis so I was here during George Flood's
Speaker 1: still here, and the Target headquarters I can see it
Speaker 1: up my window if I crane minex so I'm in
Speaker 1: the epicenter of all this. You're absolutely right about what
Speaker 1: tapped to Target. For years, they had pride displays and
Speaker 1: nobody really cared. Suburban moms didn't care, you know, they'd
Speaker 1: go in, they'd see it, they'd wave whatever. But it
Speaker 1: was when they went specifically, really heavily lean into the
Speaker 1: trans stuff that the moms who shop at Target all
Speaker 1: of a sudden reared up and it became known on
Speaker 1: social media and elsewhere that one of the artists with
Speaker 1: whom they had partnered, who sold stuff in the Target
Speaker 1: website was actually, you know, a Satanist, which is you know,
Speaker 1: tiresome and had was giving little buttons that had Satan
Speaker 1: all respect your pronouns, that had a guillotine for the turfs.
Speaker 1: Target completely completely misread the fact that when this got out,
Speaker 1: the moms who would just absolutely who would show up
Speaker 1: at the Pride parade when I went down the suburban street,
Speaker 1: would look at this and say, wait a minute, hold on,
Speaker 1: hold on too far. And I don't think that any
Speaker 1: of them have come back in the same way because
Speaker 1: I used shop at Target all the time, and now
Speaker 1: on the back of my head.
Speaker 2: I hate to use the word, but they're just weird.
Speaker 2: The whole feeling I get about the place. Is it
Speaker 2: just that they did that and they're just you know,
Speaker 2: they're weird and they got their options.
Speaker 1: But you're right, they do come back and they try
Speaker 1: to tell us that they're not that anymore. As if
Speaker 1: I see Kid Rock blowing up some you know, some
Speaker 1: cans of beer of the competitor with a shotgun and
Speaker 1: then saying I'm a bud Light guy myself, Like I'm
Speaker 1: going to just robotically turned towards them again and say
Speaker 1: all this forgiven. No, we all remember, it's going to
Speaker 1: take so long for budd Light to come back. It's
Speaker 1: going to take so long for Disney to regain the
Speaker 1: trust that they've lost amongst the Pontes.
Speaker 7: What problems bud Light has is that it's kind of
Speaker 7: a shitty beer.
Speaker 2: You know, that's part of the problem there too.
Speaker 8: Yes to go to keg parties and buy bud because
Speaker 8: it was like you know, Spuds McKenzie and everything. I mean,
Speaker 8: it was that was in my head. You know, I
Speaker 8: don't like if I'm going to drink a beer, I'm
Speaker 8: not going to drink bud. It doesn't taste very good.
Speaker 8: But you know, so if there was an image that
Speaker 8: bud you know, it just gives you an impression. If
Speaker 8: you really get into buttet which I did. There's this
Speaker 8: amazing add they did with the Clydesdales right after nine
Speaker 8: to eleven, right where the Whitsdales walk up in a
Speaker 8: field and you see the twin towers and then you
Speaker 8: see them gone and then Clydesdale's take a knee and
Speaker 8: I still get shivers like watching that ad. It was
Speaker 8: a just amazing As someone who worked listen, I was
Speaker 8: two minutes. I worked at the Wall Street Journal at
Speaker 8: the time. We were across the street from the Trade Center.
Speaker 8: You know, I remember that day very well. I mean
Speaker 8: I was I was at a doctor's appointment, like five
Speaker 8: blocks uptown, so I saw the whole thing unfold.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 8: That was chilling and just and you go from that
Speaker 8: to dyl mulvaney, and I think that will.
Speaker 7: Tell you, you.
Speaker 8: Know why so many people who revolted and we'll still
Speaker 8: revolt now.
Speaker 2: And it tells you about the shape of the overculture.
Speaker 1: Charlie, we gotta, we gotta get out here and U
Speaker 1: but we got to tell people to buy your book,
Speaker 1: which is Go Woke, Go Broke, the inside Story the
Speaker 1: Radicalization of Corporate America. And I hope there's a second
Speaker 1: edition and it has some addendum at the back that
Speaker 1: tells us more because it's not over.
Speaker 2: It's not done. It's still going to ripple through our
Speaker 2: through business.
Speaker 3: For a while.
Speaker 2: But thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure,
Speaker 2: my pleasure.
Speaker 7: Thank you guys.
Speaker 2: Bye bye. The Yeah, it's going to keep on going.
Speaker 1: You know what I find interesting is we were talking
Speaker 1: before about Charlie was talking all we're talking about how
Speaker 1: they don't sometimes realize that what they believe to be
Speaker 1: the absolute proper way to think is actually no, the
Speaker 1: luxury beliefs of an overclass that are not.
Speaker 2: Shared by everybody else. And I find this most notable
Speaker 2: in the media, where there are words.
Speaker 1: That do not have quotation marks around them all the
Speaker 1: time the meaning is accepted. Climate change is one of them.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's indisputable that it's happening. Equity is another
Speaker 1: equity has replaced equality. You guys notice that that whenever
Speaker 1: somebody talks about equity, it's an automatic, positive good, and
Speaker 1: nobody seems to.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: All I know is that if you want to feel
Speaker 1: as good tomorrow as you did the day before when
Speaker 1: you wake up, and that's a form of equity, isn't
Speaker 1: it equality or something like that. We got to be
Speaker 1: careful about how you actually do your party.
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Speaker 2: Well, gentlemen, we have a few minutes here before we
Speaker 2: wrap up. Ah, I've been asked.
Speaker 1: To mention the Ricochet Fantasy Football League. And as much
Speaker 1: as I do love football, I don't do the fantasy
Speaker 1: football thing. I don't even know where I would start.
Speaker 1: I don't need that in my head. I don't need
Speaker 1: to worry about it. I don't need another way to lose.
Speaker 2: As a Minnesota Vikings fan. Shall we say, but Charles,
Speaker 2: of course you are a great football guy. What is
Speaker 2: this Ricochet Fantasy football thing about?
Speaker 5: I love fantasy football. In fact, I won my family
Speaker 5: league last year, which means I expect to do really
Speaker 5: badly in the Ricochet Fantasy Football League. Not that I
Speaker 5: will be included as eligible for the prizes, but I
Speaker 5: will be taking part, and you too can take part,
Speaker 5: providing that you are a member of Ricochet. It is
Speaker 5: a member's only fantasy football league. I think we had
Speaker 5: a post up on it last night. And as far
Speaker 5: as I understand, the idea is to get as many
Speaker 5: leagues together as Sweeney and I think that's probably a
Speaker 5: limit on how big each one can be. But we
Speaker 5: can have five or six of them, we can have
Speaker 5: divisions and then at the end of the whole thing
Speaker 5: to hand out prizes. Now, am I right in saying
Speaker 5: Steve you're going to be involved in this too?
Speaker 3: I am. You know, I've never really understood or participated
Speaker 3: in the fantasy baseball or football leagues, but I want
Speaker 3: to learn about it. And you know this sounds like fun,
Speaker 3: so I'll be all in. But I have to say, Charlie,
Speaker 3: I haven't heard yet. If Henry Olsen is going to
Speaker 3: be part of it. He probably will look out for him.
Speaker 3: He does fantasy baseball, Oh my goodness. He absolutely kills
Speaker 3: every year in fantasy baseball. I know, because he's such
Speaker 3: a numbers geek. And I'll bet he'll be just as
Speaker 3: good football.
Speaker 5: So look at you know, one of my favorite things
Speaker 5: is to be checking Twitter and some random evening, you know,
Speaker 5: Thursday night or something. And Henry Olsen is giving extremely detailed,
Speaker 5: granular analysis of the election in Lichenstein and saying things like, well,
Speaker 5: of course when you he went to the Palace region,
Speaker 5: then the party de from Boise is expected to do
Speaker 5: well this year given support for the bat two platform.
Speaker 5: That was anything, Wow, I know you could do this
Speaker 5: in America. How can you do this in every single
Speaker 5: country in the world. So it doesn't surprise me that
Speaker 5: he's extremely good at fantasy baseball.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then and on the other hand, John, you
Speaker 3: will just bet on the Philadelphia Eagles. He'll just do
Speaker 3: hometown stuff, so he'll be easy to pick his pocket.
Speaker 1: Yes, well, I was going to show up as I
Speaker 1: walked to my computer to sign up. Actually, I tore
Speaker 1: my meniscus, and so I'm going to be.
Speaker 2: Out for the.
Speaker 6: Your quarterback new quarterback.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep, one game. That's all. We're dead. We're dead.
Speaker 2: We're absolutely dead. Yeah, it does, but that's part of
Speaker 2: being a Minnesota Viking fan.
Speaker 1: The self delusion that is required year after year, week
Speaker 1: after week is really quite extraordinary. It says something about
Speaker 1: the character of the state, either our ability to be
Speaker 1: deluded or our tenacious loyalty, or a combination of the two.
Speaker 1: You know, I was going to ask, for example, that
Speaker 1: we're coming down to the end of summer. Here, you've
Speaker 1: got a fortnight left. I guess, if you want to
Speaker 1: look at it, calendrical summer, that is, meteorological summer will
Speaker 1: last way into September. But nobody in these parts believes
Speaker 1: that at all. I just thought it's kind of ridiculous
Speaker 1: to ask you fellows how you feel about the shank
Speaker 1: of summer since Charles is in Florida and.
Speaker 2: Steve when you're in California.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, I mean, you guys live in a in
Speaker 1: a perpetual bliss of clement weather. You know nothing of
Speaker 1: the character that develops when the when when the world
Speaker 1: itself turns and paints itself into these most beautiful ways.
Speaker 5: Yes, can I can contradict you slightly. I include know
Speaker 5: something of it, which is one reason I now live
Speaker 5: in Florida.
Speaker 6: We're up in England for twenty six years.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, I imagine so. And it was that that
Speaker 2: drove you away. Is the English? Is the English faull?
Speaker 1: Does it lacked that bittersweet I thought, with Keiths telling
Speaker 1: us the fruits, the mellow fruits of autumn and all
Speaker 1: the rest of it.
Speaker 2: Or is it just another dismal, drizzly interval.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's dismal and drizzly and gray.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: I looked this up recently. The closest analog I find
Speaker 5: to being rather as Seattle. And for years I said
Speaker 5: to people, so, what's thing them like? What's the weather like?
Speaker 5: And I would say, it's like Seattle. Seattle has one
Speaker 5: hundred days more of sunshine. So even the one example
Speaker 5: that I could find, there's actually a really good map
Speaker 5: I saw that shows how much sunshine places in the
Speaker 5: world get, and America in general, even you know, you're
Speaker 5: joking about Minnesota, but Minnesota too they're just so much
Speaker 5: lighter and sunnier and brighter than all of Europe, with
Speaker 5: a couple of exceptions. And it has to affect the
Speaker 5: national character in your outlook.
Speaker 2: Oh, it absolutely does.
Speaker 1: I mean I was in England in the end of
Speaker 1: July or the end of June and the beginning of July,
Speaker 1: and we had five six glorious days in Suffolk.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just it was hot. It was actually hot.
Speaker 1: People were putting on shorts and they were fanning themselves
Speaker 1: and complaining about the lack of air conditioning and all
Speaker 1: the rest of it. Although the place where I stayed
Speaker 1: had ac because it was by civilized, sane people. But
Speaker 1: then of course we get in the train and we
Speaker 1: go to Glasgow, and Glasgow rained. But as in Minnesotan,
Speaker 1: I don't understand the sort of Scottish rain until I
Speaker 1: get there, in which it rains and then it doesn't,
Speaker 1: and then it rains a little bit, and then it
Speaker 1: miss for a bit, and then it rains very heavily,
Speaker 1: and then then the clouds blared through like trumpets from barrios,
Speaker 1: and then they cloud slam shut again with a claak,
Speaker 1: and the rain comes in and again over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. And I think the Scottish must haves
Speaker 1: have had as many names for rain as the Eskimos
Speaker 1: do for snow. That that old canard and it said, no,
Speaker 1: they don't, it's just rain, which was followed by four glorious,
Speaker 1: four glorious days in Edinburgh which it barely rained at all,
Speaker 1: and everything was absolutely wonderful. But Glasgow, in the rain
Speaker 1: and the griminess and the and the sort of sodden,
Speaker 1: care worn nature of the place, really brought through the
Speaker 1: spirit of it in a way that if I'd gone
Speaker 1: there during nothing but sun, I don't think I would
Speaker 1: have understand understood much. So I'm glad my vacation was
Speaker 1: completely rained in Glasgow.
Speaker 2: I understood it a bit more, and I understood it.
Speaker 1: Why perhaps that shaped the Scottish temperament as it did Steven.
Speaker 1: Your summer it's been going fine, I assume make it
Speaker 1: interesting to everybody in the next few minutes that we have.
Speaker 3: Oh that's hard to do. I mean, summertime for an
Speaker 3: academic is when you try and catch up on unfinished articles,
Speaker 3: read books that have been piled up in a corner,
Speaker 3: try to get outside and enjoy things. I will say
Speaker 3: that this climate change business can go on forever. But
Speaker 3: this summer has been very unusual. Where I live on
Speaker 3: the Central Coast, it has been thick fog almost the
Speaker 3: entire summer until this week. And that's partly because our
Speaker 3: producer Perry visited me, and I think he brought some
Speaker 3: good weather with him. It's sunny outside and beautiful right
Speaker 3: now and I'm looking at the ocean. But part of
Speaker 3: it is get off on this for a minute. You
Speaker 3: and listeners may remember about a year and a half
Speaker 3: ago there was that enormous volcano eruption in the South Pacific,
Speaker 3: and the honest climatologist said, ah, this is going to
Speaker 3: affect the planet's climate over the next two years. And
Speaker 3: so there's a little wlag in it because it threw
Speaker 3: up so much high altitude water, vapor and particulates, and
Speaker 3: it's going to have both the cooling and warming effect
Speaker 3: depending on where you are. And I think that accounts
Speaker 3: for some of the weather patterns that otherwise the media
Speaker 3: is freaking out about this summer, which are to be
Speaker 3: entirely expected. If you're honest about it.
Speaker 2: It's going to make it cooler or warmer.
Speaker 1: That is just a climate change of advocate dream because
Speaker 1: you can go in to absolutely everything. And also, but
Speaker 1: it means that if you're looking at coughed up water
Speaker 1: vapor in particular, and you look at subterranean jets coming
Speaker 1: out from the depths of the ocean warming things up,
Speaker 1: and if you look at the fact that the Great
Speaker 1: Barrier Reef seems to be doing okay, and if you
Speaker 1: look at the fact that Antarctie ice is not a nightmare,
Speaker 1: and you consider that sunspots, that big, huge glowing nuclear
Speaker 1: furnace up in the sky.
Speaker 2: Might have something to do with our climate.
Speaker 1: It means then that all of the stuff telling us
Speaker 1: to do to get out of our cars into evs, which.
Speaker 2: Are powered of course by some magic that's generated somewhere.
Speaker 1: Uh, that that that that falls on deaf ears, and
Speaker 1: we can't have that, because we've all got to have
Speaker 1: an electrified future, right. That's one of the things that
Speaker 1: I fear the most about a Harris administration would be
Speaker 1: the continuing war against the most effective means of generating
Speaker 1: power you possibly can. Then again, maybe she'll be pro nuke.
Speaker 1: Then again, maybe whatever. I don't particularly trust the gray
Speaker 1: matter behind those sparkling joy filled eyes. And by the way, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm tired of hearing joy. You know, I'm really tired
Speaker 1: of hearing joy, not because I'm not a joyful person,
Speaker 1: because they're about this close to saying that America will
Speaker 1: achieve strength through joy, about this close without realizing.
Speaker 3: James, are you really pining for the sour countenance of
Speaker 3: John Kerry? Is that you're nostalgia?
Speaker 1: Now I better better lurch than this, this, this empty effervescence.
Speaker 2: Charles.
Speaker 5: I just hate being told this stuff that we all
Speaker 5: know is not true. It's it's it's an in junction.
Speaker 5: They are joyful, they're not joyful.
Speaker 7: You know what.
Speaker 5: It reminds me of that old nineteen nineties version of
Speaker 5: Superman with Dean Kin and Terry Hershe.
Speaker 6: So I watched this when I was a kid.
Speaker 5: I love this show and there was this particular episode
Speaker 5: in it where this guy, I think, I guess in
Speaker 5: the show he was running for an elected office and
Speaker 5: they found some brain control technique that would allow him
Speaker 5: to broadcast out to the people of the city. There's
Speaker 5: one phrase that he was a darn nice guy, and
Speaker 5: so everywhere Lois went during this episode, she starts to
Speaker 5: notice she woulday, what do you think of this guy?
Speaker 5: And they would say, well, you know, I think he's
Speaker 5: a darn nice guy.
Speaker 6: And everyone said it and it just got really, really creepy.
Speaker 6: This is the joy thing. The people who are promulgating this,
Speaker 6: they are happy.
Speaker 5: They are joyful because there was a period of a
Speaker 5: few months where they thought they were going to lose,
Speaker 5: and they thought they might lose Minnesota, in New Mexico
Speaker 5: and New Hampshire and Virginia, and so they were crying
Speaker 5: themselves into their breakfast cereal. And now they're all happy
Speaker 5: because they've got this candidate who looks like she's marched
Speaker 5: in the ahead, and they feel joy. But they're using
Speaker 5: this brain control technique where they're trying to convince everyone
Speaker 5: else that they feel joy and they see joy and
Speaker 5: what this is is joy and it's joyful. And the
Speaker 5: thing that defines it is this joyfulness. And I keep
Speaker 5: watching these rallies and I'm like, what are.
Speaker 6: You talking about, you weird people?
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, no, no no, no. Weird is the right. Joy
Speaker 2: joy joy is the left. These are the two words.
Speaker 2: It's joy versus weird, Joy versus weird.
Speaker 1: Just repeat that to yourself until you are convinced, and
Speaker 1: vote accordingly and correctly. That'll do for us, folks. Thanks
Speaker 1: guys for showing up your thanks for Zibiotics for sponsoring us.
Speaker 1: Go to Apple Podcast give with those five star reviews,
Speaker 1: five big bright stars so more people can find Ricochet
Speaker 1: and joyful about it, though very joyful about it. Yes,
Speaker 1: press hard with joy and join us joyfully at ricocheted dot,
Speaker 1: where if you're a part of the member feed, which
Speaker 1: means you're a member, you get all sorts of stuff,
Speaker 1: not just the fantasy football, but you get the meetups
Speaker 1: and you get to have conversations that you know. They're
Speaker 1: in private, and they're all over the place, and it's
Speaker 1: a great community. I was just there last night about
Speaker 1: twelve o'clock or so, typing out and reading.
Speaker 2: And go there every day a couple of times.
Speaker 1: So I'm not just a flap and mouthpiece here. I'm
Speaker 1: an actual contributor and I'm also a flap and mouthpiece.
Speaker 2: Thank you, guys. We'll see everybody in the comments at
Speaker 2: ricochet for point zero well next week