Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, John Ketcham, and Nicole Gelinas discuss the NJ Transit strike, the Palm Springs car bombing, and the New York Knicks.
Audio Transcript
Ilya Shapiro: Nicole, are you saying that we learn more about collective bargaining with private sector unions than we do with public, which is, you know, bass ackwards?
Nicole Gelinas: We don’t but we don’t really need to know anything about private sector bargaining. I mean, it’s between two private parties. So if you’re, you know, assuming there’s no federal bailout of the company involved It’s an auto company and the union and they both have an incentive to keep the company in business and not to push prices so high that the customer won’t buy the product. So it’s kind of like yeah…
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, whereas in the public sector, it’s two wolves and a sheep negotiating what’s for dinner, with the sheep being the taxpayer.
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are Ili Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute, John Ketchum, other law guy at the Manhattan Institute, and our guest, Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, columnist at the New York Times, contributing writer, opinion contributing writer and author of Movement: A History of New York City’s Fight to Reclaim Its Streets from the Car, which I was told just before this call just won the Gotham Book Prize. So congratulations, Nicole. We’re very happy to have you. I’m going to jump…
Nicole Gelinas: Thank you, Charles.
Ilya Shapiro: Are we plugging our books? Because I can plug Lawless. It didn’t win any prize yet, but here we go.
Charles Fain Lehman: Ilya is the most aggressive book plugger I have ever seen. I once watched Ilya walk right up to Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, and be like, would you like a copy of my book? It was impressive. You should also buy, listeners should also buy Ilya’s book, Lawless, on sale all sorts of places. I want to now take us into the news. Over the weekend, New Jersey Transit workers reached a deal to end a multi-day strike that saw transit in the Garden State shut down and tens of thousands of travelers unable to get into and out of New York City. This is obviously sort of a New York City-focused story, which is natural for the City Journal Podcast, but it’s also a story about transit and a story about the often maligned influence of public sector unions. John, Nicole, you’re our transit experts. What can you tell us about what went on, what we should take away from this story?
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, well, I’m not sure if we haven’t been taken for a ride, that this wasn’t all just a setup. Or not taken for a ride because they announced a strike. The Locomotive Engineers Brotherhood announced a strike. Go out Friday morning at midnight. Friday is not a big commute to work day. They have these high stakes negotiations all weekend and lo and behold, they come up with this contract in time for people to get fully back to work tomorrow on Tuesday. So, you know, what was the point of all this? It’s not really clear. And we don’t actually know what the terms of the agreements are, which is a problem with public sector labor negotiations. The public doesn’t really know anything, except for what one or both parties want to selectively leak, which can be accurate and can be inaccurate and are generally self-serving. We won’t know the details of the agreement until it’s too late.
So what was the union allegedly asking for? They wanted parity with New York Locomotive Engineer pay at the Long Island Railroad and Metro North in Westchester. That would be absurd because they, it’s ridiculous work rules that push up overtime, that push up pay at the Long Island Railroad. There would be no reason why any rational organization would want to emulate that. And New Jersey Transit management says that’s not what they got. They’re ensuring everybody that this isn’t going to cost the riders or the taxpayers any more. And that’s through some kind of reforms of work rules to go along with the higher pay. That doesn’t make tremendous sense and we just kind of have to take their word for it for the moment.
Ilya Shapiro: Nicole, are you saying that we learn more about collective bargaining with private sector unions than we do with public, which is, know, bass ackwards?
Nicole Gelinas: We don’t but we don’t really need to know anything about private sector bargaining. I mean, it’s between two private parties So if you’re you know, assuming there’s no federal bailout of the company involved, it’s an auto company and the Union and they both have an incentive to keep the company in business and not to push prices so high that the customer won’t buy the product. So it’s kind of like…
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, whereas in the public sector, it’s two wolves and a sheep negotiating what’s for dinner, with the sheep being the taxpayer.
Nicole Gelinas: It’s nobody’s business and in the public sector they can take the public hostage. I mean the entire point of the railroad strike is to make life so miserable for so many people that the state ends up capitulating, which we’ve seen over and over and over, either the state, usually New York, caving to avoid a strike. That’s why we’ve never gotten any reforms of Long Island Railroad work rules because there was a long strike in 1994. The first Governor Cuomo stepped in and said, we surrender. we’re going to stop asking for these changes. And then 20 years later, his son, the other Governor Cuomo, just gave up entirely on asking for work rule changes to avoid a strike. So just the idea that you can inconvenience people trying to get to work, it kind of gives the union an unfair advantage to start out with here.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, I hope this goes better for y’all than what we have in the DC area with WMATA as it’s called and, you know, fires on trains and the solution to declining ridership and therefore less revenue is to of course increase prices. Very effective.
Charles Fain Lehman: This is the, I mean, this is part of why I thought the story was interesting is the public being held hostage angle, right? It’s like, and this got massive coverage in local press, but of course, local press is the New York Times, the New York Post, where there were thousands of people who were unsure how they were going to get home on Friday because of the transit strike. But that’s like, know, the obvious, as Nicole’s alluding to, that’s the obvious point of leverage is like, you can take advantage of the fact that people are so dependent on this public infrastructure. This is part of why, and John you were telling me about this, this is part of why public sector unions allegedly can’t strike in New York state. They can in New Jersey and it’s sort of a fraught question.
John Ketcham: Well, they still do in New York, as Nicole just said. So we have the Taylor Law in New York City, which was passed in ‘67, which basically allowed for public sector collective bargaining in exchange for banning public sector strikes. But we’ve had two MTA strikes since the Taylor Law was enacted, in 1980 and then in 2005.
Charles Fain Lehman: And the prison guard union just went on strike. Which is crazy.
John Ketcham: Yeah, I mean, public workers are going to strike when the circumstances suit striking if that means that the leverage will get them what they want. In this case, we have 450 workers potentially holding up 100,000 commuters. Now, the Brotherhood hasn’t struck a deal with New Jersey Transit for five years, but that’s partially by design. They were a holdout. All of the other unions struck deals. And so now you have a situation where you have a holdout that got a better deal and is therefore rewarded for that strategy. The problem, you know, in a game theoretical sense is that you’re just going to have more of that in the future, which is just going to raise wages and therefore costs to the public.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, and you know, Charles just brought up the prison guards. I mean, that was state, but you bring up, you remind me of something, which is we’re going to get a Rikers Island receiver. This person appointed by a federal judge after this decade-long process theoretically can...
Charles Fain Lehman: Rikers being the New York City jail, just for listeners who don’t know.
Nicole Gelinas: Right, yes. This receiver theoretically can open up these collective bargaining agreements, which result in unlimited sick time, terrible work practices, and so forth. But the Union could threaten to strike. I mean, that would be very interesting to see how the city and state government respond to that. Do they effectively back down and say the receiver can’t do anything here because we just can’t have a Rikers Island strike? Or does the governor try to come in with the National Guard or some other way of dealing with this? Because if not, you just have the Union running the place.
Ilya Shapiro: I wonder if Trump would get involved there because he kept talking about reopening Alcatraz. Well, we have an “Alcatraz Light” in Rikers and in his backyard where he grew up, whether he’ll take a personal interest.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, in some senses, that’s, you know, the argument for receivership for Rikers, which I think is connected to the transit strike, is second, is that so what’s happened is there’s a there’s a suit that’s being brought against the city. They’re in federal court. And in some senses, the feds have a lot of power to end run state and local collective bargaining agreements that the state and local governments do not have the power to end run. And so this is, you know, one of the few ways around the kind of bottleneck that John was referring to is that the federal government can get involved. But that just creates new layers of complexity and insanity. John’s point I thought was very evocative. It’s like 450 people can stop 100,000 people from traveling. I think a lot about there’s been this discourse on the left about abundance. And we need to have government doing more and creating more.
But the major issue is that government has not provided enough physical services, including transit. And it’s like, that’s often because when you put these functions in the public sector, there are easily available veto points that exist by virtue of the exercise of coercive authority that don’t exist in the private sector.
John Ketcham: Absolutely. And you raise abundance. Well, as Nicole mentioned, the circumstances are very different between MTA workers and New Jersey Transit workers, right? MTA workers live in New York City and the downstate suburban areas have much higher housing costs too, right? They’re compensated more to account for those higher costs of living. But now you have New Jersey Transit workers trying to get a deal based on a higher cost of living area, which really sets a worrying trend of having one deal set the pattern not only for similar deals in the state, but also intrastate as well. And that again is just going to raise costs even more.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, and there was this editorial in the Daily News yesterday. You know, I generally agree with their editorials, but this one I didn’t, that said, well, New Jersey Transit, it’s underfunded and they need a revenue stream just like New York Transit system has a revenue stream and it’s on New Jersey to approve some kind of tax to fund the transit system.
But these are two separate issues. You know, first of all, the governor did approve a corporate tax surcharge last year to try to get New Jersey Transit on an even footing. That’s fine, but there’s a difference between one tax revenue stream and 12 tax revenue streams. And we’ve seen on the New York side, we started off in the early 80s, okay, the transit system has been neglected. Let’s implement some taxes here to get it on an even financial footing. But the union agreements always manage to outrun these tax revenues. So every couple of years you need a new tax revenue, even though all these existing tax revenues keep up with inflation, they keep up with job growth, they keep up with economic growth. So theoretically, once you’ve got your core taxes there to fund transit, you should never need another one. That hasn’t been the case. Governor Hochul in New York just increased the payroll tax on downstate jobs for the MTA.
So for people to say, “oh, New Jersey Transit, they need to fund the system better.” That’s an entirely separate issue from do they want to go down the road or the rail of New York style contracts. The other issue with regards to that is New Jersey is just not as dependent as New York is on transit. Like that’s just the reality. And so could they have withstood a longer strike? There are other ways to get into New York. There’s the PATH train, there’s bus service. More people take bus than New Jersey Transit rail into New York City. And of course, within New Jersey, where a lot of New Jersey Transit riders just stay within the state, a lot of people just drive. You could set up a carpool system, you could offer extra van service. Would it be possible to get through a long strike without devastating the economy? Probably not something that…
Ilya Shapiro: I think people are overlooking another driver here and that’s that Princeton Reunions is coming up and alumni nationwide descending on the Garden State. There are concerns in various listservs that I’ve been involved in. I think that exacerbated things.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, there’s general, right, like the tri-state areas. It has a lot of influential people who want to get to New Jersey.
I want to take this out, so I’m going to ask everyone, as usual, a little prediction of the future. I feel like we’ve touched on this already, but do we expect this, based upon the incentives that were introduced by the deal, and we don’t know the full terms yet, but do we expect there to be more transit strikes of this nature over the next several years? John, what’s your prediction?
John Ketcham: So I think we’re going to see more copycat activity. even if we don’t, we’re going to see some of the other New Jersey unions potentially getting the benefit of this brotherhood deal because of what’s known as “Me Too” provisions. If you have similarly situated contracts and one union gets a better deal than another, well, the “Me Too” provision kicks in and gives the benefit to the other. So no matter what, I see higher cost pressures here and that’s going to be bad for public finances.
Charles Fain Lehman: Nicole, what’s your gut instinct? Are we going to see more of this?
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, I think, you know, to the extent, again, we don’t know the details of the agreement, but if it turns out that they are rewarded for the strike and that Murphy was just, the governor was just terrified of the idea of coming back to the Tuesday, more people on the train to need some way of getting to work and not wanting the bad press. And Murphy’s thinking, this is my last year in office. You know, I just don’t want to deal with this and that he just backed down, then yes, I think it does give the New York unions and other unions in New Jersey more incentive to strike. And it’s the end of a trend and the potential beginning of another one that for the past 15 years, you know, since the 2008 financial crisis, I guess it’s 17 years now, both the Republicans and the Democrats in New Jersey have been a little less friendly to public sector labor. Both former Governor Christie and to some extent, even Murphy with some of the health care benefits have been less reluctant to give away the store to the unions. Murphy has been making the full pension payments, which takes away from other resources you could give in just straight pay. So they’ve kind of held the line on increasing public sector pay and benefits. And does this start the opposite trend? Who knows, but it’s certainly a risk.
Charles Fain Lehman: Ilya, what do think?
Ilya Shapiro: I don’t know, I try to... I’m in my suburban abode, I just drive around everywhere, I try to avoid the metro when I can.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair.
John Ketcham: You know, good leadership is Ed Koch walking across the Brooklyn Bridge saying, we’re going to work and we’re going to stick it to these guys.
Nicole Gelinas: Mm-hmm.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, think that that’s the thing to watch is what does the next governor of New Jersey say? And that’s a hot race right now. And are they all going to capitulate? My guess is yes. It’s unfortunate.
All right. I want to turn us to our other news, a little under attended, but very much on the City Journal, well, the City Journal domestic terrorism beat really, which is a major focus of ours. So over the weekend, 25 year old Guy Bartkus detonated a car bomb near a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, Florida, leaving himself dead and four injured, and a manifesto released online after the fact. Bartkus indicated he did it because he was an antinatalist who believed that being born is a fundamental injustice. So I find this story sort of interesting in part... Yes.
Ilya Shapiro: He apparently had a gripe against his parents for allowing him to be born without his consent or something like that.
Charles Fain Lehman: The great injustice being born without his consent. This is part of a broader stream of philosophy. It’s sort of a very online way of thinking about things, which I find very interesting. Part of why I wanted to talk about this story is, you know, this is a guy who was clearly sort of radicalized by this sort of particular, online, ultra-utilitarianism that says, is only sometimes good, pain is always bad.
Therefore in total, all lives are bad. Therefore life is intrinsically not justifiable and we should end it as quickly as possible. So I’m curious for the group’s takes, what do we make of this broader trend of, think about Luigi Mangione for example, this broader trend of online radicalization. Is this part of that? Is there a coherent story there?
Ilya Shapiro: I mean, it’s very nihilistic. It’s the definition of nihilism. Everything’s bad. The best thing to do is nothingness and embrace the void. It’s dark. Certainly, kind of online digital mechanisms accentuate whatever instincts or dynamics that one might have. It’s kind of a spiraling echo chamber, if you will, to mix metaphors.
John Ketcham: Have these people never experienced some benefit or some positive outcome through adversity and suffering? I mean, it seems to me that everyone from, you know, the child touching the hot stove to someone who maybe failed at a task or a test of some sort and then did better and wound up stronger because of it would recognize experientially that the premise of antinatalism, that pain is always bad, just doesn’t hold. I mean, just logically too, it’s irrational. You have to exist in order to conceive of the idea that nonexistence is better than existence. I mean, existence is a prerequisite for everything.
Charles Fain Lehman: Antilogical proof.
Nicole Gelinas: It’s kind of like the... I don’t know if it’s the opposite or the same thing as the philosophical tenet that murder has no victim because the victim doesn’t exist. And it’s a very strange way of thinking. I may get my Russian nihilists mixed up, but didn’t Dostoevsky say it would be better not to have been born at all? So it’s just a very strange way of thinking. And I just think it’s weird that you can get radicalized into your own thing that nobody else cares about. I mean, there’s so many things that people get radicalized about, and there’s a large group of people, but you can also just get focused on your own one strange thing and not even need a group of people supporting you, which is also very strange and probably not very good.
Ilya Shapiro: You know, when I first heard about this, I thought it might have been somebody who was really against IVF. You know, the moral argument about killing embryos or something. But no, apparently just against all life. I mean, you know, is this a big thing online? I clearly am not hanging out in these darkest corners of the dark web, what have you, but this is just bizarre.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think there’s been a really interesting pattern, and this goes to Nicole’s point and Ilya’s point, of sort of bespoke ideological radicalization. There’s this story, there’s Luigi Mangione, the guy who shot and killed Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO. There was, I think, an attempted school shooter a few months ago who was just sort of hanging out in far-right, racist, nihilist spaces and she was motivated by this for sort of incoherent, indiscernible reasons. There was a cult of radical anarchist vegans, the Zizians, who shot and killed several people. They killed a border patrol agent, I believe. And I’ve been thinking about, Ross Douthat had a book a few years ago called The Decadent Society, which touched on a number of themes. One of his arguments was that the internet has been sort of a suppressant of this radical terror, that we’re spending all of our time on our phones and that becomes the outlet for our most destructive impulses. And that seemed true at the time. And it increasingly, it seems less and less true that there are all of these bespoke individualized terrorisms that have cropped up over the past five, six months that suggest that there is something weirder going on there.
John Ketcham: Well, Charles, you’re right that there are smaller groups that have had critical masses emerge through the internet to sustain continued conversation. But I do think that there are more mainstream contributors here. The idea that human beings are responsible for so many of the world’s ills feeds into this kind of philosophy. You know, environmental advocacy, for example, used to be predicated on the idea of preserving a beautiful and healthy world for posterity sake. Now it’s largely about blaming humanity for things like climate change, right? And that’s a troubling turn because it downplays human wellbeing as a defensible and desirable goal of our actions. And I think that’s troubling and it’s feeding into all of this.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think that’s very plausible. I think you see this sort of as an undercurrent in all of those stories, the sense of like, A, that there is no intrinsic meaning that humans are harmful. And then B, the thing that you do in order to have some impact in the world is sort of like a bold political gesture, an often sort of nihilistic or destructive political gesture. Think about… I’m trying to get a less recent example, but there are a couple of high profile shootings that seem to have been motivated by this sort of nihilistic desire for historical relevance. So again, I think this gets to much deeper themes of like, this turns to the antinatalism, and this is John’s point, like, you know, if you aren’t situated in like family structure, if you aren’t situated in sort of a continual process, if you’re just sort of an isolated individual, this stuff starts to make sense. And the internet is a like, a consistency enforcing machine, right? Like what the internet often mandates that people do is sort of come up with the most radical versions of their beliefs. And so I think it makes sense that you’re starting to see this cascade.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, well the Las Vegas bombing around Trump’s inauguration. I mean, another thing is, it’s just... People can just figure out how to build a bomb very easily. And that also, like, you used to be able to buy, like, the Anarchist Cookbook or whatever, but it was... It took some more work. And the barrier to entry to doing this is lower, which is also not very good.
Charles Fain Lehman: We ran a piece at CJ a few weeks back that I really liked and I think didn’t get enough attention. So listeners go read it about exactly this problem. The three authors, Canadian academics, the lead author was a criminologist, Laura Huey. And their argument was that technological innovation and AI in particular is making the work of policing and managing domestic terrorism much, much harder because you are lowering exactly those thresholds. the way I like to think about it is like, the human capital costs of getting into domestic terrorism, the opportunity cost is pretty high. That’s why you don’t get a lot of domestic terrorists, because like anyone who’s good enough to be an effective domestic terrorist can probably do something else. But if you lower the barriers to entry into the field of domestic terrorism, you will get more people doing it, because they can like jailbreak ChatGPT, and have productive conversation about how to commit a terror attack.
John Ketcham: So the answer to that is more proactivity. This individual, Bartkus, was a disturbed young man. I mean, he set his family’s house on fire. He went through a very bitter divorce through his parents. And so the warning signs were there. So I think a greater proactivity and prevention is going to be critical in addressing the problems that you just laid out, Charles.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, I want to take us out. I want to know, again, we’re going to ask for a little bit of prediction, but I think we’ve seen this pattern over the past, I will assert, we’ve seen this pattern over the past six months to a year where, after honestly a multi-decade lull in domestic terrorism, those numbers have been steadily creeping up. That’s a very, that, those numbers often get co-opted sort of by a partisan narrative on both sides. But I’m curious if people think, are we, you know… I think back to the 1970s, there was this period of extraordinarily high terrorism in United States, hundreds of bombings every year. We sort of entered into this lull. Are we returning to a higher equilibrium level of terrorism and civil disorder? Is it like sort of a guaranteed part of the historical cycle or is this just sort of a blip? As always…
Ilya Shapiro: Well, we’re at a time of low societal trust and anomie of various kinds. And, it’s, you know, kind of a, I don’t even know how to describe it, but it’s, it’s, it’s a weird period. And when there are weird periods, that’s a social-scientific term, we, get this kind of disorder, of various kinds. So some of it is tied to politics. Some of it is tied to kind of cultural shifts of various kinds. But yeah, it’s not a pleasant thing to think about.
Charles Fain Lehman: John, what’s your prediction? What’s your take on it?
John Ketcham: When we don’t give our young people hope in a better future, and an attainable future, and when we don’t convince them of the goodness of our civilization, I think we’re going to have problems like this. The social media effect is just going to amplify it. As you alluded to, Charles, there were attempts on Queen Victoria’s life for similar morbid reasons. Now, I think you will see that kind of effect amplified because social media is increasingly becoming the barometer of success. How many Gen Zers and Alphas want to become influencers? And that could take a rather distressing turn for the worse. And as Ilya said, it’s partially political too. There’s this perception that our political system can’t handle our big issues. And so you need to take matters into your own hands, a la Luigi Mangione. And this hagiography that’s just been created around him will feed narratives that I fear, and hope not, but I fear that will lead to more of these types of incidents.
Charles Fain Lehman: Nicole, what’s your prediction? What do you think?
Nicole Gelinas: I always wonder, and I never know which side to come down on, I go back and forth, is how much this is similar or different to the 9-11 era Islamist attacks, where people argued, this is a one issue action, you know, like Osama bin Laden was mad about US bases in Saudi Arabia and all this stuff. And this is specifically to do with issues related to Islam as it was interpreted. Or was it just the same nihilistic young men where it was also the same economic demographics, where these were never, these were never the people who were worst off? And if you followed that philosophy, the most likely to engage in suicide bombing or other nihilistic actions. But these were people who had education and had other opportunity and they, in some cases, made it to the West and they still chose to do this. How much is that the same as Luigi Mangione and other instances that we’re seeing? And how much is it different?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, think the interesting thing here at 9-11 is that it’s almost the outlier and that Islamic radical terrorism was always the outlier in that relatively benign period otherwise. I think that’s part of why it was so shocking. I mean, I guess the way I think about this is I wrote a piece for The Free Press a month or so ago, two months ago, the thesis of which was basically, you know, political terrorism happens, political violence happens because we let it, that you see this sort of permission structure that authorizes it. And then once that happens, it becomes easier to do, and so you get more of it. And so we have less will to deter it. And so it gets harder and harder. And you get this runaway effect. And we saw what happened with this in the 1970s. And I’m concerned that we’re at the start of this cycle again. To John’s point, this is why prevention matters. And this is why cultural messaging matters. If you have leaders…
Ilya Shapiro: Maybe that means we’ll get some good movies out of Hollywood again.
Charles Fain Lehman: No, but you know, if you have leaders who are like, actually, you know, there’s a, Luigi Mangione has a good point. If you have Elizabeth Warren and AOC saying that, there are going to be more of them. It’s not a, it’s not a huge surprise.
John Ketcham: I wonder if Bartkus could have bought a house by 25, would he have been so frustrated?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I think that’s right. All right, on that very cheery note, let’s talk about happier news to New Yorkers. Everyone on this Monday is in New York is still cheering, following the Knicks stunning game six win over the Celtics on Friday. New Yorkers, are you following along with the Knicks? If not, what sports are you following?
Ilya Shapiro: Charles, I must say this is triggering and really a micro, if not a macro aggression because of course last night my Toronto Maple Leafs lost yet another game seven, seven in a row at this point, or eight in a row I think, game sevens, going back more than two decades. The last time they were in the conference finals was 2002, similar to the Knicks, and it’s just very painful.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’re standing in solidarity with you, Ilya. We’re allies to your Canadian identity. It’s valid.
Ilya Shapiro: No, no, I prefer my Maple Leafs blue, not red. This has nothing to with Canada. It’s just the vestigial home team. And I tell you what, I’m also a Caps fan, of course, because we’ve discussed this. I’m a sports bigamist. And the Caps also went out a couple of days ago. In fact, of the last eight games by those two teams, only one win. So that’s been my last 10 days, Charles.
Charles Fain Lehman: Nicole, John, do you have happier news on sports front?
Nicole Gelinas: I understand when it comes to things like the Knicks, how people can go through life not knowing who the Vice President is because I just entirely skip those pages of the newspaper so I would have no idea, name even one player on either team. I couldn’t do it. But I did watch the Subway series where the Yankees took two games and the Mets only one. That’s not very good. We’ll see if the Mets maintain their position as we go into the summer.
Charles Fain Lehman: Interesting, okay, Mets fan, got it.
John Ketcham: So I’m not really a sports follower, but part of the reason is I love New York so much already that if I were a Yankees fan, I would just be completely intolerable. Like it’s just too much. But my loyalties are based on my proximity. So I am a Mets fan because Citi Field, I still call it Shea Stadium, is about a 10 minute drive from me. And so I have my affection to home like everything else. And baseball for me, it has this sort of magic that there’s no time limit. It could just keep stretching out into the night. Football is just so visceral, so violent, and it’s more, I think, tied up with pop culture. You know, I’m like, don’t care about Kelsey and the Swift. I don’t care about the Super Bowl halftime. Just take me out to the ball game. America’s great pastime.
Charles Fain Lehman: So what I’ve taken away from this is that we need to do an MI poll and see how many people are Yankees fans and how many people are Mets fans. Because that’s really, that could be a dividing issue within the greater Manhattan Institute sphere. All right. On that note, that’s about all the time that we have. Thank you to our panelists. Everyone should go buy Nicole’s book and also Ilya’s book. Just buy all the books, really. Thank you, as always, to our producer, Isabella Redjai.
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