This is the Babylon Bee weekly news podcast for the week of 4/1/2020. In this episode of The Babylon Bee podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle are joined by the editor-in-chief of Ricochet, Jon Gabriel, as they discuss the week's big stories like using worthless dollar bills as toilet paper, China being so awesome and great at everything, and the government accidentally banning itself when it bans all non-essential business. They also discuss reading really old books by dead guys to gain perspective during hard times. You can hear more Jon Gabriel on his podcast: The Conservatarians. In the subscriber portion, Kyle, Ethan, and Jon Gabriel talk about our awesome subscriber portion intros that you're missing out on if you are not a subscriber, pacing while talking on phone calls, ten questions on life for Jon, and also analyzing some list of the top 100 20th century novels. Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Show Outline Introduction - Kyle and Ethan welcome Jon Gabriel to the podcast. Stuff That's Good - Ethan- Rise of Jordan Peterson documentary Kyle- Tuttle Twins Books Jon - A Confederacy of Dunces Story 1 - Toilet Paper Crisis Solved As Government Prints Trillions Of Fresh, Soft Dollar Bills According to Thomas Massie this isn't a $2.2 Trillion stimulus; it is a $6 trillion stimulus when you factor in all the unaccountable actions by the Federal Reserve and US Treasury The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to 0% and set reserve requirements at banks to zero. When Americans get a $1200 check, but the bill is $2 trillion, each American's tax burden to pay it off will be $13,333. Inflation is the increase of the money supply, not the immediate increase in consumer prices. Effects won't be felt immediately and equally dispersed throughout the economy's industries. Austrian economics teaches that this is how bubbles form in certain industries and systematic malinvestments of resources take place in the first place. The higher forms of production get bid up first, they have the first crack at the "free money". They go crazy building factories and end products that there are no real savings to buy at the end of the road. Boom and then bust. Story 2 - China: 'We've Completely Cured Coronavirus And Everything Is Fine Here And No One Is Allowed In To Check' Their numbers are pretty low. They told World Health Org coronavirus wasn't spreading from person to person and the WHO tweeted that out January 14! Why does WHO defend China as in this CNBC article? China stopped their lockdown protocols but then suddenly closed movie theaters again? Orders for urns much greater than reported deaths? Story 3 - Government Accidentally Shuts Itself Down With Ban On Non-Essential Businesses I really miss Adam Ford. Now it's just the libertarian bee. How are we deciding what is essential or not Is it dangerous to cede the idea that church is "non-essential" Topic of the Week - Talking to Jon Gabriel about reading old books to gain a sense of perspective. Love Mail/Hate Mail/ Feedback - Ethan almost doxxes Joe "Flowerbed" Paid-subscriber portion (Starts at 01:02:47) Ten questions for Jon Gabriel Time's Top Novels Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
Dropping truth at your front door like Amazon Prime.
You're listening to the Babylon Bee with your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
Yes, this is the Babylon Bee Podcast.
I am Kyle Exotic, sitting here with Ethan the Bear King.
And coming in digitally is I got nothing for you.
Nothing for John.
I didn't plan it this out.
John Gabriel.
Coming in hot.
John Gabriel, who has nothing to do with tigers.
Yeah, as far as we know.
What's your spirit animal, John Gabriel?
Sea Otter.
Okay.
The sea otter king.
I just saw him at the Monterey Aquarium.
Yeah, I love otters.
That'll work for me.
Why can't those be pets?
There's so many animals.
Why do we pick dogs and especially cats?
I don't understand why cats got so popular.
Well, sea otters, you probably can't.
Well, otters, they can just stay overnight in the bathtub.
It'd be perfect.
They need a little pond or something.
I like river otters personally more.
They're the more wily ones.
I think they're the otters.
Can we say that word?
Sea otters.
Yeah, are we allowed to?
Sorry.
I have no idea.
I don't know.
That's why I get called on Twitter a lot.
We're getting bleeped.
Getting bleeped.
My wife likes to feed the raccoons in our backyard.
Yeah, you said lately she's been, what did she leave out there for them?
Like cat food.
Okay.
Do you have cats?
Yeah, but we have, you know, a lot of extra.
So she feeds the cats in the house.
She puts food out back.
Because the raccoons will kill your cats.
Do your cats go outside?
And I keep telling her, it's going to bite you.
You're going to get rabies.
And I'm going to have to put you down.
You're going to have to put your wife down?
Yeah.
Wow.
There's no cure for rabies.
Yeah.
But do you have to kill a person?
You just let them be rabid and just chain them up in the shed or something?
Like the end of Sean of the Dead.
Yeah, exactly.
It's one of those situations.
Still be your buddy.
Yeah, I guess it'll be friends.
Just got to wipe their chin every once in a while.
Keep a cloth handy.
You're foaming again.
Don't bite me now.
Definitely like a walking dead or Sean of the Dead thing here.
Yeah.
Well, John is the editor-in-chief of Ricochet.com.
They have a whole host of great conservative content podcasts.
He's from the Conservatarians podcast, which you can, if you want to find a great episode of that, you can find the one that I was on.
There's also one Frank was on.
Yeah, you can find the one that I'm on, except they've never invited me.
They don't like Kyle.
So kind of awkward.
Yeah.
So we're just going to have John join us for the news show this week.
Yeah, guest host.
Guest host.
We got to change things up so that it's not always just me and Kyle and everybody's bored.
They're like, ah, it's just two white guys again.
Well, our podcast downloads have been like declining.
Because of the coronavirus, though.
Because nobody's commuting and not listening.
But I assume also that just kids they don't like us.
Yeah, we always assumed it was going to happen.
I'm shocked.
We just actually, did I mention this already?
That we passed 1 million downloads?
Yeah.
I don't think you mentioned on the show, maybe.
I can't remember if I mentioned on the show or not.
You told me.
Of the overall podcast, but of every episode.
We're over a million now.
That's crazy.
So, John, have your podcast downloads been declining as well?
Or is that just us?
A little bit the past week, actually.
And I really think it is, just lack of commuting.
I noticed just in, you know, I subscribe to way too many podcasts.
But yeah, I'm falling behind in it as well.
Just life is just busier.
I'm used to being home all day alone and now have my two kids here.
My wife, who usually works from home a day or two a week, she's here all the time.
So we're all trying not to get the Rona.
So yeah, it seems like I just don't have all the downtime or just like running errands, running the kids around to listen to podcasts.
So I think that is hitting it a little bit.
I do love this.
I would never miss the Babylon B podcast nor the conservatarians by own, especially the Babylon B podcast with me as the guest.
I think that's a must-listen for most people.
It's the tiger king of the podcast world.
Well, I've always been very happy to know that you like Audio Mullet as well.
And I thank you for that.
Oh, love Audio Mullet.
Thank you, sir.
Quick plug.
So you like the Babylon B podcast, but you love audio mullet.
I want to be clear on this.
It's like choosing between children.
I'm not going to make a big thing out of it.
Perfect.
Okay, well, let's dive into the Babylon B podcast.
But now, this week's edition of stuff that's good.
That explosion.
Whoa.
Bombs are good.
It's a lot to follow up.
A lot to live up to here with that explosion.
Yeah, so this week I'm going to give my free slot of advertising to a book series called The Tuttle Twins.
The Tuttle Twins.
And I have the set of a picture.
There's an entire stack in Florida.
I have a huge stack of Tuttle Twins books.
These are books for parents to teach their grade schoolers about liberty, economics, free market issues.
Sort of brainwash them.
Basically, you brainwash them into being crazy libertarians who live in the middle of the woods.
Let me just see one of these.
They're colorfully illustrated.
They're good for kind of grade school.
They also have a series that's for that's for older kids, like high school, junior, high age.
I've got their set of choose your own adventure books that they do.
So something with Indians and it says revenge, blowback, revenge.
I don't know what that's about.
That's the one about the golden rule.
Okay.
Teach your kids about the golden rule.
But they do some that are like retellings of classic books like Bastiat's The Law.
They've got one on the road to serfdom.
We've got to do some books like this, Kyle.
I can grow.
Yeah, I mean, we could totally do something like this for any issue we want, theology.
Yeah, I always love the idea of trying to teach kids stuff that's a little more, you know, how do we know some apologetics type stuff.
I would love to like that.
So I knew that these books were good because my son was reading the one about the Federal Reserve when he was like seven or eight, and he was sitting in the back.
And he goes, hey, dad, this book is about a giant monster that steals all your money, just like the government.
So check out the Tuttle Twins.
I'm a huge fan of this series.
This has not been paid for in any way.
Although I do have to say that the Tuttle Twins guy found out that I was a fan and sent me some of the books.
Full disclosure.
And there was like a $1,000 bill.
There's a $1,000 bill tucked into the pages.
Okay.
There was none.
For mine, I just recommend I watch that Rise of Jordan Peterson documentary.
It's actually included with Prime, so don't get tricked by I got in YouTube or whatever.
It costs a bunch of money.
If you have a Prime account, it's free.
I found it enjoyable, but I find Jordan Peterson fascinating.
And attractive.
And they actually did a, I think they did a good job of showing different sides of the whole thing.
They interviewed people that were on the other side of controversies that he was involved in.
The wrong side.
Yeah.
So what's the name of the documentary?
It's called The Rise of Jordan Peterson.
It's kind of like he's rising like Batman out of the smog.
Batman is in Smaug.
I think he's in like... Batmist.
He's right.
He's out of the Bat...
The Bat...
That's like the smoke bombs.
Well, all the bats produce mist because they're warm and it's cold in the caves, there's this bat fog coming off the bats, and then he rises out of it.
I think that's how it works.
So Jordan Peterson rises out of the mist of the tears of Marxists, Marxist sweat.
I don't know.
It's nothing to do with anything.
It was good, especially if you're like, you've never really looked into this Jordan Peterson guy.
You've just kind of seen clips here and there.
It's a nice, well-rounded presentation of, you know, and behind the scenes because they seem to have followed him around through like a lot of all the insanity he went through.
That's good.
That's all I have to say.
If you have any interest in Jordan Peterson, because I know that a lot of times you see a documentary about a topic that you care about, you kind of don't want to watch it because you assume they're going to have a bent and it's going to be some kind of propaganda of some kind because a lot of documentaries are.
Well, it even felt like I like when someone's seen a documentary lets me know, it's not that propaganda-y.
It's worth watching.
Well, I even watched Tiger King because he recommended it.
See?
And even at the end, it got a little like, we need to ban the private ownership of animals.
Yeah.
And my children stood up and they had read The Tuttle Twins, so they said, no.
Wait, you let your children watch Tiger King?
No, I didn't.
He just lets them own tigers.
I just let them own tigers, which is good.
Because I'm a good libertarian.
Well, John, do you have anything that you would like to promote today?
Yeah, free.
I have something that's quite old, and we'll talk about reading older books later on.
But everybody's told me to read so many books, and I always ignored them because reading is for losers.
But I'm finally catching up the past few years.
And I read The Confederacy of Dunces, which was published like in 1981, I think.
But the guy actually wrote it in the 60s and it couldn't get published.
It's all this crazy story behind it.
But I have to say, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read in my life.
It is absolutely fantastic.
It's set in New Orleans.
Every character at first is kind of unlike Bully, but you get to like him as it goes, so stick with it.
But the main character is just this pompous, overeducated goofball who's a medievalist and thinks everything in the modern world is conspiring against him.
But very funny book, eminently quotable, and I highly recommend that.
You don't learn anything other than maybe slang terms that New Orleans people said in the 60s, but very entertaining book.
Yeah, you're a fellow Chesterton lover, and I know that I'm always fascinated by how much he can make me laugh when he's talking about modern day in his time 100 years ago, and I'm just still, we'll read it together.
We have our Chesterton group, and there's always a number of times we'll all laugh.
Yeah, that's all I have.
Yeah, there are very few books I laugh out loud at.
Chesterton.
Yeah.
Definitely his books.
Yeah, we'll talk about it.
Read Orthodoxy by Chesterton.
It's awesome.
We'll talk more about it when we get to our topic, but it's always interesting to see how those things are so timely, even though they're decades old.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's our stuff that's good.
This has been stuff that's good.
That's beautiful.
Stories now.
Yeah, do we do that like a stories of it?
How does it happen?
I don't know how this works now.
We just changed our podcast.
Does it just jump straight to stories, Dan?
I'm trying not to pick my nose because we're on camera now.
Yeah, on camera now.
Kyle's ravenous with that nostril.
I'm digging for gold here.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
Our first story of the week.
The toilet paper crisis in our nation has been solved as the government printed trillions of fresh, soft dollar bills.
Problem solved.
Have you ever wiped with something that's not toilet paper?
Like a thing that was not intended to be wiped with.
Okay, so not like flushable wipes or...
Like I used to have a roommate who's a surfer hippie guy and he just refused to buy his share of toilet paper.
So, like, I would buy the toilet paper, but then once it ran out, he would just rip pages out of a surf magazine and use those.
See, that feels like it would be too shiny.
Yeah, shiny and crumpy, but he just dealt with it.
And one time I decided I was going to just see if he would write it out.
I'm watching, I go in and I would just use the shower because I wanted to see like who if I could break him and make him buy some.
And he went through like a couple magazines and I finally gave up and I bought more toilet paper.
But it was unspoken.
We never had the conversation.
Yeah.
So, John, have you ever wiped with anything that's not toilet paper?
Well, I'm going to upload some videos here to the show notes.
No, I hate it.
I am not a Philistine.
But yeah, it's just use toilet paper.
That's why God created it in the garden.
There was toilet paper everywhere.
You didn't see empty shelves in the supermarkets in Eden.
And I think you guys would admit to that.
You've done the work.
You've done the theological research.
But yeah, that's kind of nasty.
And come on, magazines, that's like paper cut risk.
I know.
No one needs that.
Okay, a couple of weird stories.
So this guy that he was a new hire at our warehouse when I was working in construction.
And he would bring his own baby wipes.
Oh, yeah.
And he would leave them in.
I understand that addiction.
But he would leave them in the bathroom, like on the hey, nobody touched my wipes.
And they would be sitting there.
And then I had a college roommate who would not wipe.
Well, I guess he would wipe, but he would take a shower after every time he used the bathroom.
Wow, that's he's clean.
So if he had to go like three times a day, it was like, oh, another shower.
That's a lot of work.
Hop in.
It's like a full-body bidet going on there.
Full-body bidet.
That's what it was.
Wow.
Shout out, Batman Dan.
That was you.
I do have to say I use the One Wipe Charlie's from the Dollar Shave Club.
This is not a paid advertisement, but I'm pretty hooked on those.
They're minty.
But first, let's talk about your shave.
Yeah.
With Dollar Shave Club.
The minty.
But the problem, they have not figured out the technology.
You pull out one wipe, like 30 of them come out with them, and they're expensive.
So I'm always very delicate about getting them out.
But then, when, especially when Ezra was younger, you know, he's around five or six, and he'd want to use them.
He'd just pull the entire thing out and waste them all.
So they need to fix that.
Anyway, continue on other stuff.
It's more that I don't know what to say.
When I first wiped my kids, learned how to change diapers, I would use like 30 wipes.
Oh, yeah.
And my wife was like, no, no, no.
And she showed me how to be real efficient.
And she can do like one or two diaper first.
That's what that was the trick.
You use the kind of the clean part.
Basically, no, you use the, well, I don't know.
I use the.
This is going to get gross.
No, just this is.
The peed part of the diaper, you wipe their beehine with it.
You're going to wash it all off anyway, but it's already, it's like a wet wipe.
If you're clean.
I don't use their pee as the pee as the white flu.
Yeah, but I learned that from watching women.
Like they lift the legs up.
Kind of like a woman.
You poke your head in the window while we're in the water.
No, I noticed one day because I hadn't ever paid attention until I started changing diapers and I was watching it.
It may have been, I don't think it was Jess.
It was somebody else.
It might have been a relative or something, but I saw somebody changing a diaper.
And for the first time, I was really paying attention to their technique.
I was like, oh, she lifts the legs up and then she wipes with the wet part of the diaper, a very thorough long wipe.
And then that gets the bulk of it off.
And then the rest is detail work.
I need you all.
I wish you guys could all see the hand motions.
Unless you're watching the video feed.
Yeah, we got a video feed.
We're working on getting it finalized here.
Yeah, but you know, the federal government did print a ton of money.
And there's some, like Thomas Massey was saying, it might be up to $6 trillion after everything's factored in.
That seems crazy.
That's an unfathomable amount of money.
What is our good thing is we went into this crisis without any national debt.
So it should all work out.
Oh, wait.
What is it?
$22 trillion now?
Yeah, it's a good thing we saved up money for a rainy day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rainy day fund.
So we're all going to get $1,200.
Is that how this works?
I think it depends on kids and how much you make.
And it may scale back at some point.
I think I'm going to get nothing.
Yeah.
Because they're basing it on things from like two years ago when I worked construction and not that I'm a writer.
But if we all pay this off together, that costs us, the tax burden for each American is $13,333 each to get $1,200.
That's what one person was saying.
That seems reading things off a thing that Dan put together.
That seems pretty efficient.
Yeah.
No.
You trade $13 of something and you get $1,200 of something.
Yeah.
I don't know.
We need an economist to tell us about this stuff.
Yeah.
Guitar Casio-Cortez on here, maybe.
Yeah.
Are you an economist, John?
Are you an economist, John?
Do you know anything about it?
No, I just read a lot about it.
Bastias the law.
Read Henry Hazlett Economics in One Lesson.
That's my.
Fantastic book.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
And yeah, it just, whenever the government gets involved, it's going to be ugly.
This is not quite a stimulus because the government ordered everybody to shut down their business.
So now they got to pay people for doing that.
But I just get, you know, and all the experts are saying, oh, we need to do it.
We need to do it.
But I always look back to the Wall Street bailouts.
Was that 12 years ago now?
And everybody said, we can't discuss it.
We can't think about it.
We just need to pass it.
And then after it was passed, everybody's like, wait a minute, what did we just do?
So when Democrats, Republicans, the press, the kind of approved experts all agree on something, I grab my wallet.
Yeah, as G.K. Chesterton once wrote.
What?
I don't know.
I was hoping you guys were.
Oh, there you're getting something.
I was hoping he probably said it in a more clever fashion.
Yeah.
He said.
Wait, you really got something?
Yeah, he said basically what John just said.
Oh.
He's stealing my work all the time.
It's really annoying.
That's pretty common of Chesterton to just.
Yeah.
I think he took most of C.S. Lewis's stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know how he does that because we were so many years past him, but he figured out how to steal our stuff.
He said, when conservatives, liberals, and socialists all agree, it is time for the larger and more harmless part of mankind to look after its pockets.
We need a GK Chesterton soundbite, is what we did.
G.K. Chesterton.
There it is.
Dan was on.
I got a lot of complaints that we never played that during our Chesterton episode.
Chesterton topic, and they never once used the soundbite.
Sad.
Yeah.
Not good.
But what do you guys say to like?
Because if you're really truly a capitalist, would we just all have just got this coronavirus sort of destroyed us?
Did we need the socialism of paying everybody from the government?
Like that's my, I have a buddy's a socialist.
He's like, ah, it's a joke.
Capitalism is a joke.
Because without socialism, we couldn't have given everybody this money.
We'd be destroyed.
Do you have a point?
John, your thoughts?
Well, if we had socialism, we would be dealing with it the way Venezuela would, where they just have no money, no one will loan them anything anymore.
Yeah.
And that'd be it.
And all the zoo animals are already gone.
So still have a zoo animals.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like we would be starting off in an even worse situation than we are now.
And it's pretty bad.
Yeah.
Well, you can already look at like the totalitarian Chinese government and how they handle things.
I mean, it's true.
I got to praise China, you know, because they had a great response.
They just welded everybody into their houses, walked through the streets with a giant Lysol cannon.
Walked down the street and weld the door shut.
And everything is fine there.
And we're not allowed to go check it out.
Yeah.
That's a great transition to our next story.
Let's do it.
China is saying this.
We've completely cured coronavirus and everything is fine here and no one is allowed into Czech.
Are they like French?
I didn't want to do a full accent.
I don't want to get in trouble.
They were vaguely European there.
But I do want to know when they're privileged enough that we can do the accent and it's okay.
You can do Scottish and stuff.
Well, they already need to set all the test scores and stuff.
Yeah, so you'd think pretty soon it's going to be okay to do like a funny Chinese accent again.
We can only hope.
And nobody will think that you're racist.
Just like if you do a Scottish one.
Yeah, because then you're punching up.
Yeah, you're punching up.
But not yet.
We're not there, I guess.
I don't know who makes these rules.
Unless you're Steve Crowder or something, you just do it.
Then you just don't care.
So, yeah, China.
Yeah, I saw a Twitter story this morning.
It said U.S. doubles the number of China cases.
Yeah.
And it was just presented straight.
And I'm like, really?
Really?
I don't know.
I'm sure John is being paid by China.
So why don't you give us the what propaganda are they paying you to say now, John?
Well, Bat Soup is phenomenal.
A little braised pangolin is a wonderful addition to every meal.
No, how can anybody trust these people?
Yeah, they were welding people into their apartment blocks, and yet when I do it in my life, I get in trouble.
Wow.
I didn't really.
This is a real story.
They're welding people's doors shut.
Yes.
They were like welding outside.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, yeah, you can't trust anything they say on this.
And then they're sending quote-unquote relief aid to people, and the masks don't work, and the COVID tests don't work.
So you just kind of wonder if they're trying to not let a crisis go to waste and just say, well, it's damaged us a lot.
Let's make sure it damages other people as well.
So President Xi.
So we can't trust him.
President Xi said, everything is great here.
In fact, we've completely eradicated coronavirus.
Cured it even.
Yep, cured it.
We found a cure.
But it only works on the Chinese, so we can't give it to you.
That's the ticket.
China only cure can't share it.
But everything's perfectly all right now.
We're fine.
We're all fine here now.
Thank you.
How are you?
During the press conference, a lot of commotion was heard, such as shouting and explosions outside.
Xi remarked on it.
What you hear outside is a party, a great big party.
Everything is so great we're having a party, but no one else is allowed in to see it because it's a private party.
China only party, but it's got dragons and fireworks, you know, typical Chinese stuff.
I'm sure you can all imagine it and don't need to see it.
So anyway, we defeated the coronavirus, which is made by the U.S. military and has nothing to do with us.
And everything is great and we're having a party.
But you all have to get out now and leave us to it.
And stop saying I look like Winnie the Boo because I don't.
I look like Tom Cruise.
Xi then ended the press conference and took no questions since he explained everything perfectly.
American journalists quickly reacted to the news.
China is so much better than the stupid U.S.
I wish we were China, said an editorial in the New York Times.
If we weren't banned from seeing Insign China, we would live in China.
And at Trump's next press conference, the Times writer's first question was, why can't you be China?
It's a reliable source, Batalon B.
Now, apparently, the urns, they sold a lot of urns, a lot more than the reported dead.
They say that one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, even though they only reported 3,299 coronavirus deaths.
That's just one funeral home.
That's a little some funky math.
Interesting.
Tidbit.
Guys, what do you think?
Yeah, it's just, you just can't trust anything out of there.
Xi also said that he would have invited his hot girlfriend to the party, but she lives in Mongolia.
So she couldn't make it.
She goes to another school.
Yeah, she goes to another school on its way up in Mongolia.
She's a model.
Mongolian model.
Oh, yeah, we have some other things that they claim.
Yeah, they claimed.
Yeah.
Chinese claims.
They claim that they landed on the moon and built a colony, but it's on the dark side where you can see that they're going to be on that side.
Yeah, they have a whole six flags park and everything.
Yeah.
He actually claimed that his uncle works for Nintendo and gets free games all the time.
President.
Zhi.
Is it Zhi or she or she?
It's like she.
You say she, which confuses me because then it sounds like she.
But I hear John say she.
His preferred pronoun is she.
Yeah, that's what I was wondering.
Preferred pronoun is poo.
They claim that they've tripled their economic output.
Wow.
That's impressive.
Over the past week.
They created a Lazarus cure for coronavirus, but it only works on Chinese people.
It's a Lazarus cure.
Is that where it is?
I guess they just bring him back to life or something.
I don't know.
We don't know.
We don't have it.
That was named after the famous Carmen song, Lazarus Come Forth.
Wow.
He's referencing Carmen.
Good job.
Yeah.
I can't help but feel your pandering at this point.
Have you met Carmen?
I have not met him.
I have not had that honor, but I do remember watching the Lazarus Come Forth video on real videos on TBN.
Wow.
That's where I got most of my theology.
Oh, good.
Chinese researchers also say that they've discovered why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch.
And finally, they've invented a new panda, but it's invisible.
I don't know what the point of that is.
So you can't see it.
Yeah, you just watch out.
It's like in Wizard of Oz.
In the later books that didn't get made in movies, there's a whole land of invisible bears.
And the people are invisible too.
Because if you can see them, the invisible bears will eat you.
So they need to eat this fruit that makes you invisible.
Somebody's like torn.
Like, do we want to be invisible?
So we don't get eaten by bears?
Anyway.
This sounds made up.
No, it's all.
I mean, it is, but it's made up.
It's straight up real Wizard of Oz.
It's like the fourth book, maybe.
Can't remember.
Anyway, you know, that's a good segue to when we talk later about reading old books.
But you can't segue into something that's coming up in 10 minutes.
You have to wait.
Yeah.
Just remember that segue, and then we'll use it later after this story.
Perfect.
Next story.
Government accidentally shuts itself down with a ban on non-essential businesses.
Hmm.
Wah, wah, wah.
Libertarian Kyle again.
Yeah.
This was Dan's idea.
No.
Libertarian Dan.
Yeah.
So how are we deciding what's essential and what's not essential?
Because that's like the weird thing to me is it feels like by churches not getting together, we're admitting that we're like, we're saying, yeah, that's pretty optional to be.
Yeah.
You can just shut us all down if you want to, and we'll be fine.
It's all good.
Yeah.
I'm not used to couch church yet.
Yeah, it's not working.
I feel like kind of guilty just sitting there in my shorts and sipping coffee and laying back on the couch.
And I don't know.
I feel like I should be up and at them a little more.
Yeah, I'm not a fan.
And I never did the live streams.
I never did virtual church.
Never watch.
If we missed a Sunday for church, it was just like we're missing this Sunday.
I'm not going to get everyone on the couch and watch it on TV.
That's not church to me.
So it's weird to do a day.
You try to preach a sermon to your family?
We've done like family worship where we'll sing some songs with a guitar and we'll do a little study, but it's not a sermon.
It's like we'll just read something and talk about it.
We have such a rough mix.
Our kids are either too young to read or they wouldn't be able to sing alongs.
They'd just be like throwing things around the room.
And then our 13-year-old's at this, like she would roll her eyes, roll her eyes.
She would not sing.
So it would basically be me and my wife singing while our kids stare at us or destroy the house.
So that wouldn't work, I don't think.
Yeah, but you got to do it anyway.
Got to do something.
Yeah, just do it.
Yeah.
Anyway, we tried to do the watch the video, the church video this week, and we lasted about 10 minutes.
My wife got up and goes, I'm going to go for a run.
Does she do that usually at physical church?
Yeah, no, she doesn't.
I think I'm going for a run.
And it was, I mean, it was like, you know, it's like trying to watch a pretty because there's even like an energy when you're with real people and just a guy talking in front of the room.
It still gets a little bit tired, but when it's a guy staring into a webcam, giving a sermon, just staring like he's, you know, got a gun on him.
My two-year-old, my four-year-old, or five-year-old did not last very long on that.
Well, the church, our church has been doing like they hold the whole service in the building.
Oh, yeah.
But there's nobody in the seats.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They sent us recommendations for our worship.
They just said, here, watch these YouTube videos.
And it was like music videos.
Reckless love.
Reckless love.
And it was Craig Nugga says, Reckless Love, Oceans, and then Goodness of God.
I like that Goodness of God song.
Not bad.
Well, we always compare God to natural disasters.
So I wonder what the too soon is before we start hearing like God's love is like a plague.
Yeah, a plague of disease.
The pandemic love of God passing from one to another to the next.
Yeah.
John, anything?
Yeah, it's the tough thing for me because, yeah, this is the first time I've ever, you know, watched live feeds of church because it always felt like I was cheating before.
But I always watch videos like, I don't know, if there's a good speaker or an educational thing on YouTube, and I always watch everything at like one, one and a half speed.
And so they need to do like an app in Zoom or something that speeds up real time for like one and a half time because I'll hear people talking that I've just listened to in 1.5 speed.
I've noticed this on podcasts too.
And when I'm listening in real time, they all sound drunk.
So it's kind of, it's funnier, but it like takes too long.
Yeah.
So I kind of want them to get to the point.
All right, let's go.
Yeah, you're talking or listening to somebody talking, like, you can finish their sentences before they can.
You know what they're getting to.
You just want to like.
Can I help you finish talking?
Yeah.
My five-year-old is at that.
She'll start a sentence and get like three words in.
And I know what she's trying to say.
I keep trying to help her along, but then she'll repeat.
She'll stop and start over again.
And it'll take her like forever to finally say a sentence.
Come on, come on, come on.
Spit it out.
Tat, tat, tut, tad-day, Junior.
That's an Adam Sandler thing.
Oh, right?
That's what it was.
No, he's like making fun of a kid with a stutter, I think.
It was actually really mean.
So here's some of the essential businesses that they've included in these lists: supermarkets, grocery stores, big box stores, pharmacies, convenience stores, garbage collection, healthcare operations, daycare, hardware, gas stations, banks, post office, vets, farmers' markets.
I mean, churches must be on the non-essential list, right?
That's what I was trying to find.
It's so disputed.
I don't think they dare put it.
They actually label it non-essential, but depending on what region you're in, I think it's more, you know.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Seems like church feels pretty non-essential to people in Southern California most of the time, to be honest.
But it is weird.
It's like deciding what is essential and what's not.
It breaks things down in this weird way.
Yeah.
Because I think everything I'm not interested in is non-essential.
Yeah, exactly.
So stuff I don't like, just shut that down.
But the stuff I like, the government should keep them all open.
That'd be the smart way to handle it.
Well, I kind of wonder how effective it even is because you close down 90% of the businesses in the town, and then everybody just goes to Target.
And now you have this extremely crowded instead of like a bunch of stores that are more spread out.
Have you had to stand in line at your supermarket?
Yeah, and they do the tape?
I haven't had to do it.
I see the sign up that says we're only letting 50 families in at a time.
I haven't seen that, no, but I have seen that they put tape on the floor when you're waiting in line to.
Oh, yeah, in the line.
Yeah, you have to stand six feet apart.
Yeah, I pulled up to Winco, and they had the line out front.
I said, screw it, I'm not doing that.
Yeah.
Well, so, John, do they have groceries in Arizona?
Yeah, they do.
We go to the general store, walk along the wooden sidewalks, and got the hitch and poach out post out front.
And yeah, we just get our vittles.
So it's a good system out here.
It's very neighborly.
Do they have those cowboy doors?
Yeah, yeah.
You just swing in and then you stop and look around the room.
That's kind of required.
You give a steely gaze left and right, and then you walk forward, shake the dust off your boots, and then get moving.
There's a little gunplay involved, but it's worth it for toilet paper.
You usually end up getting tossed out the window at the end.
Yeah, that's how you know you've been there too long.
That's standard procedure.
And they'd have a whole stock of windows because as soon as they throw you out, they just put up another one.
That's right.
They're the breakaway glass, though, so it's not like it hurts or anything.
It's just kind of embarrassing if, you know, one of the madams is walking by in her big fluffy dress.
That's why I like Arizona.
It's kind of that old-timey feel.
Yeah, that's great.
It's too hot, though.
All right.
Well, you want a topic of the week.
Topic?
Let's do it.
Okay.
And now, the Babylon Bees Topic of the Week.
Well, today we're sitting here with an old man discussing old books.
Yes.
So, John, you brought up this topic, and you thought of the idea of reading old books and how that helps us gain a sense of perspective.
So why don't you take it away and then we'll chime in and make jokes and make fun of you.
Well, yeah, I'm really late to this because I spent high school, they had all these important books that I was supposed to read, but I, you know, at the time was just reading Hit Trader's Guide to the Galaxy or the DD Monster Manual or something.
You know, a true classic.
And just, I just went through the clip notes and wrote a bad report.
Which edition of DD?
Oh, gosh, I do not know.
What year was it?
Oh, gosh.
80.
When would I have played that?
Probably would have been 82, 83.
I had like a year and a half of severe dedicated nerddom.
Sorry.
And I also listened to Rush.
I think you do Mad Magazine, then you listen to Rush, then you play D D, and then, okay, now I can be cool, or at least attempt to be.
So, yeah, so I'm coming to it late, but my oldest daughter is in a charter school out here that was like a classical academy prep school kind of model.
So they're reading all the old books, and I've looked through her syllabus, like of the whole high school experience, and I'm like, I think I might have read one of these.
So she's going to be way smarter than me, and I'm going to feel like an idiot when she wants to talk about this.
So I have to get to it.
And I thought it would be like eating my vegetables.
You know, I just want to eat chicken wings, but you got to do the important stuff and eat your vegetables.
But I ended up really liking them.
And then I got kind of addicted to reading more and more and lost interest in your daily news cycle.
What was your gateway book?
The Iliad.
Because I was like, this is the granddaddy.
If I can make it through this, I can read anything.
And that's the thing.
I was like kind of surprised.
I like it.
And then I realized, oh, that's why these are classics.
They're still pretty good.
That was like crazy violent, though.
I couldn't believe something that old.
I was like, man, they couldn't even turn this into a movie.
It's just blood and gore.
But yeah, I read that.
And then I was like, oh, I kind of like this fandom.
So I'm going to read The Odyssey so I can be up with up with a fan base on all this.
And that was great.
Then I read, gosh, what was it after that?
The Anabasis by Xenophon, which is awesome.
And I cannot believe they haven't made that into a movie.
It was like the first behind enemy lines kind of story.
And the more I read, it just gave me a lot more perspective on the news of the day.
It's, you know, everybody's freaking out about everything non-stop.
Every hour there's something new to be outraged about.
And it just gives you a broader perspective on, well, just like this coronavirus thing.
It's just like, do you know how much worse people have had it?
Even like, you know, I don't know, go back 50 years, 100 years, let alone thousands of years.
They've had it so much worse than we have it right now.
Yeah, they have like Cyclops, Minotaurs, crazy stuff.
They were all over the place back then.
This is nuts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They just could not get enough of it.
Yeah.
But one of the books I read too is, because I would read a lot of like, I don't know if you'd call it like pop Christian books or whatever.
You know, you go to the Christian bookstore.
Yeah.
This present darkness.
Yep.
Tal Protect Me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know what we're talking about.
I read one friend credit.
Okay.
Gotcha.
They did the audiobook.
Yeah.
One book I read, though, like started reading just old Christian books.
And I read Athanasius on the Incarnation, which, you know, I don't know when he lived, 350s or so in Alexandria, Egypt.
And the intro introduction was by C.S. Lewis.
And I didn't even know he knew Athanasius.
Yeah, I didn't know he's reading it in 350.
It was like whatever edition I said, there was this essay by C.S. Lewis at the start that he did an introduction to it.
And he says, look, for every new book you read, try to read an old one.
You know, you should read the new books too, but the old one just gives you a perspective.
And he said, and he was kind of stressing, especially for Christianity.
He's like, if a book came out yesterday, it hasn't really been vetted by years of time.
And he says it's not like they made less mistakes back then, but they made completely different mistakes.
And yeah, yeah.
And you can kind of, I don't know, balance out your knowledge over the course of time because it never, human nature doesn't change.
And that's the first thing you realize reading these old books.
You know, it's kind of a liberal attitude that humans are being perfected over time.
And no, it's like the exact same arguments, the same petty disagreements way back when, but human nature never changes, shows that it's been far, far worse than what we're dealing with.
And it also shows that after they had even worse stuff happen, it always got better.
You know, in the end, it all worked out.
And so it just kind of changes you from worrying about the drama of the moment and realizing the big arc of history.
It just kind of puts what we're going through now in perspective.
You sound very Tom Bombadil-esque.
Thanks, man.
You're welcome.
Yeah, we did an episode about books, and that was one of the things that I had said was that I love in Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil's this character who kind of sits outside of time.
And he, because he's thousands of years old, and he's seen dark lords come and go.
You know, and he tells the characters, like, yeah, Sauron's going to get defeated.
So don't worry about it.
You know, and that's kind of, that's kind of what, to me, what reading literature, especially old literature, does.
You go, oh, they were dealing with the same problems in the 50s and the 1800s, you know, and the 1500s and all the way back.
So.
Yeah, and it's not good for politicians because they're always like, you know, when there isn't a crisis, they're like, oh my gosh, net neutrality, that's the worst thing we've ever faced as a race.
And it's like, no, no, it's not that big a deal, actually.
Relax.
But yeah, when you just kind of chill out and bombadil out on this stuff, it doesn't translate into webhits, really, but it keeps you sane, which is more important.
Yeah.
Well, it's the closest thing to time travel we have, too.
I mean, you can suddenly be basically sitting in a room talking to somebody from history.
Like, I can sit down because writing is the most intimate form of art, right?
You just, they're right.
They wrote it.
You're reading it.
It's the closest thing to having a conversation with somebody who's been dead for hundreds of years, you know?
Yeah.
So it's fascinating that, and we live under this pressure.
Like, I've been thinking about this because the Tiger King documentary on Netflix, you know, everybody's watching it.
And I'm usually out of the loop on things.
I don't, I don't keep up to date on stuff.
So it feels weird to me to be in the loop on like what everybody's watching because every, you know, everyone, like my wife was just at Target and some lady was like yelling into her phone, Carol killed her husband.
I know it.
We were laughing.
Maybe that was unrelated.
Maybe that was a different game.
Yeah, it could be a different Carol.
But we, it's, there's a lot of people that live in whatever the thing is to everybody's talking about right now.
Like, it's pointless.
The targeting's stupid, but it's something to talk about.
And you could jump lily pad, lily pad to the next thing that everybody's talking about and completely live in a world of meaninglessness if you stay up to date on whatever everybody's talking about.
These old books, you can step out of that and you can go back in time.
And it's like an escape to me.
Yeah, I think Stephen King in his on writing, he talked about how it's like, it's like, what's the word when you have telekinesis?
Yeah.
Well, no, no, no.
Telepathy.
He said, writing is telepathy because it's like I picture something in my head and I can transport it to your head, even though you're reading it years later.
Maybe he was quoting someone, I don't remember, but that's always stuck with me.
Yeah, so how do you because though I completely agree, I really struggle with reading old books.
I have got the Chesterton bug.
I've read a lot of Chesterton, but there's still plenty of Chesterton that I have a really tough time with.
But like, I've tried a couple of times to read Brothers Karamazov, however you say it.
Oh, yeah.
That was the first Russian novel I read a couple of years ago.
It was.
Yeah, the only reason I stuck with Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, it wasn't that it was well written or it was deep or it was, you know, this classic of literature.
I read it so I could tell people that I read the brothers Karamazov.
And then for like the next year, my family loved this.
You know, whatever they'd be discussing, I'd always start with, well, as Dostoevsky wrote, this pizza is very hot.
And they couldn't fact check me because they hadn't read it.
And I was like, no, it's in there.
And they would just kind of be a little ashamed.
And I'd go, there, see, I'm better.
So it's the same reason.
So that's the best thing about reading Dostoevsky.
It's just like dropping in a fake quote by him all the time.
And people just kind of nod because they should have read it.
And they kind of feel guilty they haven't.
So they just nod, yeah.
That was a very good part of that book that I read.
That's hard.
I mean, every character has like three or four different names and they're all these really hard to even read names like that's wonderful.
Well, why don't you get the E-version or like a PDF and you can do like a find and replace?
And just name them Bob.
You should do a simplified version.
Yeah, where it's all the Deep South version or something.
And kind of I did like them.
And I wrote like a book report on it when I finished it because it took forever to finish and I needed to tell everybody that I read Dostoevsky and how smart I was.
And yeah, but I did have critiques like there aren't really many explosions and no car chases.
And I know they didn't have car chases back then, but make them like, I don't know, carriage races or something.
And maybe, you know, some buxom peasants cheering on the various teams and some swashbuckling action.
But yeah, it was mostly people talking about deep things, you know.
So that's, I don't know how you would turn that into a movie.
Is that the most of the Michael Bay thing?
It hits a certain point and it's almost all conversations.
Oh, yeah.
There'll be like entire conversations of just five guys who are each referred to by five different names, like you say.
Yeah.
And they're all really long Russian names.
And then they're just discussing the problem of evil for like 14 chapters straight.
But it's one book, though, after I did read it.
And I was kind of joking about it that, you know, I was like, oh, my gosh, I finally got through it.
I have thought of scenes from that book at least weekly for two years.
Something will pop up.
So it's one of those things that sticks with you.
So I did an audiobook of one of his other ones, which was a lot easier.
It was called The Idiot, and it was easier to read.
And it wasn't as quite as dense, but still, he just, you know, he always has like 15 different characters and they have these Russian names and it's kind of hard to keep track of.
But that's another one where just little moments in it just pop to mind and it's like, wow, okay, this book kind of reveals itself over time.
And one thing too is if you're having a hard time, some of these books suck, you know, they're like, this is a classic, like The Great Gatsby.
Everybody, oh, it's brilliant.
And I hated that book.
I've read it three times and I hated it.
So everything is in your cup of tea.
And I read one, I went through those lists, like the greatest hundred novels ever written or something.
And some of them, like Oscar Wilde, it's like, yeah, he's clever for a quote or two, but it just, he annoyed me, his writing style.
So everything's not going to float your boat.
I love ancient history.
So all the super old stuff I just thought was cool.
How, you know, the perspective that they had on how life worked and how the gods worked and all that.
That just naturally is interesting to me.
But there's periods of time that I'm just like, like late 18th century and not Chesterton, but kind of these comedy of manners like Oscar Wilde.
And it's just, I don't like that, that whole scene.
I'm not interested in that part of history.
So yeah, if you're reading something, you don't like it, toss it aside and read something you do because not everything is going to is going to really fit in.
But stick with the stuff that you can brag about having read.
So do you read a lot of Jane Austen and like fan yourself?
No.
And drink tea.
Yeah, I've always read Jane Austen.
No.
Yeah.
I've, yeah, it's just, I don't know.
It's kind of like my mom tried to make me, this was cruel and abusive, but she, her favorite book was Little Women, and she tried to make all of us kids read that when we were young, and I was just about to scream.
Because it's just, I don't know, it just doesn't do anything for me.
And I'm sure it's great.
I'm sure a lot of people like it, but it's just not my theme.
And so I, you know, there weren't any blood and guts that I saw coming up when I started Little Women.
So I'm like, no, I'm out.
Which is not Jane Austen, just to be clear.
No.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
People who like her just love her.
My daughter loves her, for instance.
She's like, no, you got to read it.
It'd be really good.
It might be great, but it's like, okay, I could read like, you know, I don't know, some cool story about war or something.
I'm a dude.
So I want explosions.
Yeah, probably the most down the path of old writing that I've gone is mostly like fairy tales and stuff.
So I've read all the Grimms and a bunch of stuff like that.
All the old original, you know, like I'm blanking on the, I don't want to say one that's not that old.
Like, you know, the original Peter Pan, all the old Wizard of Oz, those, those ones aren't that old.
But anyway.
But still, it gives you a perspective because you're dealing with like a hundred plus year span.
Yeah.
And just kind of realizing that, you know, especially, you know, kind of from a Christian perspective, that humanity doesn't change.
We're the same dorky idiots that we've always been.
We always have a few people who can rise to the occasion.
You kind of get those bigger, more lasting lessons.
Yeah, a lot of our modern philosophy kind of is based on the idea that humanity is growing and progressing and changing, and we aren't those knuckle-dragging fools we once were.
Right.
We were animals and then we were idiots and now we're advanced modern man.
But when you read old writing and you kind of intimately have this conversation with somebody from hundreds of years ago, you go, wow, we aren't that different.
In fact, a lot of them feel much wiser than we are now.
Right.
Yeah, I like that.
And that's the thing, too, like older Christian books.
Like I started reading like the Desert Fathers and all these people from the early centuries of Christianity.
And I'm just like, you know, I'm complaining that I have to sit through an online church and they're like, yeah, after 40 days, the fast gets easier.
You're just like, dang, you know, and it's just the wisdom that they have just by, you know, contemplation and dealing with life and death, you know, people trying to kill them or St. Ignatius reading his work when he wrote this book, which was basically a series of letters as he was being dragged from Antioch to Rome to be thrown to the lions.
And the whole time he's like saying, I'm so happy.
And this is basically really like me getting born again.
You know, this is it because now I get to go to heaven and don't try to stop them.
And encouraging people who are sick and this and that.
I'm just like, oh my gosh, what have I been doing?
You know, I'm listening to, you know, sermons that feel, you know, how to succeed at work.
And I'm like, okay, well, I'm not learning how to be thrown to lions and have a good attitude about it.
Yeah, well, you know, it's just really, again, just that perspective.
Yeah, you're persecuted too.
Like your coworkers might think you're weird.
Yeah.
If you're a Christian.
This guy one time, he said something mean to me on Twitter.
So yeah, that's lots and prayers.
Right.
Lots of prayers.
I liked one of the things that got me into old writing when I was like in middle school was the old sci-fi from like 100 years ago.
It's turned to the century.
Jules Verne, H.G. Wells.
And then I started getting into the pulp fiction of Robert E. Howard and that other guy.
And yeah.
It was just like super interesting to me that there was like, there was almost this cynicism about the advancement of science and everything.
It kind of permeated.
There was optimism too, but there was also like these warnings of things that were going to happen.
So I think that it's interesting that we can still apply those lessons today, and people are still falling for it.
We're advancing, we're progressing, we must progress.
And you look back and you say, people were shouting about this 100 years ago.
On the Christian front, I mean, Pilgrim's Progress, you know, I don't know what that is now, 500 years old, was huge.
The Confessions of St. Augustine.
I mean, that's.
I'm going to just try to one-up you on how old the books are that I read, John.
You know, if it's not written in hieroglyphics, then.
Well, I, of course, prefer the epic of Gilgamesh.
That's about as old as you can go, right?
But yeah, I only read it in the original.
That's pretty short, though.
And the names are really funny.
So they're complicated like Russian names, but they make you laugh.
Like the chief bad guy of memory serves, or maybe I can't remember if he's a bad guy or good guy.
His name is Inky Doo, which is really fun.
That's really fun to read about a guy named Inky Doo, and everybody's afraid of him.
It's like, dude, the guy's name is Inky Dew.
He's not going to hurt you.
Awesome.
Yeah.
And then I don't want to get too spiritual or weird, but I read my Bible every morning, and there is a sense in which it like it plugs you into like, especially the Psalms.
David is this guy who's going through struggles that I go through today.
You know, he's feeling emotions that I feel today.
You go through your enemies trying to kill you.
Yes.
Yeah.
Exactly.
But he has emotions like one of the Psalms is about he can't go to the temple.
Now, his problem wasn't a virus.
It was probably people were trying to kill him.
But he's talking about how, oh, I'm groaning and I'm drinking my own tears because I can't go worship.
You know, it's just interesting that you kind of, before the day starts and you have all this crazy news, you have this connection to something that's far bigger and far older than anything that we're dealing with today.
Yeah.
And also, too, just that he's willing, you know, because I kind of have a tendency to, uh-oh, I'm talking to God.
I got to be very serious and keep button down.
And some of those, and not, you know, obviously to make light of him or the scriptures or anything, but it's like, wow, I thought, you know, he's just like sometimes just like, God, I'm ticked off.
I'm whiny.
Things are not going well.
Everybody's mad at me.
They're jerks to me.
They keep saying rude things behind my back.
And it's just kind of refreshing to go, wow, even David, you know, he woke up on the wrong side of the cave, I guess, when he was running from Saul, and he just poured it out.
And it's kind of a reminder to me.
It's just like, no, God can handle it.
He doesn't need you to dress in business casual and, you know, try to use formal speech all the time.
It's just sometimes you're going through a tough time and sometimes it's a real tough time and sometimes you're just ticked off about life and laying on him.
He can handle it.
Yeah, he was totally like an emo pop punk songwriter.
Writing that hit song, Aload in My Principles.
My chemical romance.
Yeah.
A little my chemical romance.
Okay, so if somebody wants to get into old books, what are like the three that you would recommend?
Recommendations?
Give us three.
Oh, gosh.
I'm going to just give three that, yeah, I would say in the incarnation, on the incarnation by St. Athanasius.
And that, again, you can find that free online with the intro by C.S. Lewis.
A lot of these books, that's the thing.
They didn't have good copyright laws in the old days.
So yeah, just get them free.
We got free audio copyrights on YouTube.
But free, you know, you just go to YouTube and there's some dude reading it and you can do it that way if you want.
So I'll say that one.
I will say The Anabasis by Xenophon, and that's with an X-X-E-N-O-F-O-N or P-H-O-N.
That's right to me.
But it is fascinating.
And yeah, I was talking to people online about it after I read it.
I'm like, how on earth hasn't this been a movie?
It's Xenophon, is this guy who signs up as a mercenary with some errant Greek who decided I'm going to attack and take over the Persian Empire, basically.
And he goes there.
And in the first battle, most of the army gets killed, including the leader.
So you have, you know, 10,000 Greek soldiers going, huh?
Now what?
We better get home and quick.
And so it's just this adventure.
It's just like a diary of them trying to escape because now everybody is out to kill them.
They're in a hostile country.
They don't know where they are exactly.
And they have to somehow work their way back, you know, a thousand miles to Greece or whatever.
And it is like fascinating adventure tale.
And it's not difficult to read.
It's just very kind of here are the facts.
Trying to think of a third one.
I would say actually maybe The Idiot would be a good intro into Dostoevsky.
And yeah, if you, you know, it's something you can read a while and then put it down.
Or one thing you can do out of the Brothers Kiramazov, there is a chapter called The Grand Inquisitor.
Best part of the book.
One of the best things I've ever read.
You can find that again, free online.
There are translations that are like modern language, so it isn't kind of weird to listen to.
But yeah, read or listen to The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoevsky.
It is, it'll absolutely blow your mind.
It's like philosophy and theology and politics and all that in this kind of philosophical statement.
It's really good.
So yeah, just do that to realize that, yeah, there is some gold even in those super long books.
Awesome.
Are you using the restroom right now?
It sounds like.
No, my daughter is getting water right now.
You are either making meatless.
I know.
Yeah, so you fell down and then they're peeing.
It's like, oh, if you need to go pee, just let us know.
Yeah, we can.
Okay, so there's your recommendations.
We're going to move on to hate mail.
Here we go.
I really miss Adam Ford.
Ah, this is from Joe Flowerbed.
You're not supposed to say that.
Oh, yeah, I can't say their last name.
Bleed that.
Joe Pat.
Flowerbed.
I wanted to say that last name.
It sounds like Gilgamesh.
Hey, John, do you have access to this hate mail?
Are you on the document there?
Yes, I do.
Can you read it for us?
Yeah.
Let's see here.
Who in the world came up with this idea for this dumb juvenile internet feature?
Obviously, you are so stupid.
You don't recognize the difference between witty humor and offensive rhetoric.
Thanks, Joe.
Like I almost said whitey humor.
Whitey humor.
That would have worked.
That would have worked.
I would have called it a dumb juvenile internet feature.
Like it's a feature of the internet.
Like they built it up.
This week on the internet.
Yeah.
Featuring.
They've added a new feature to the internet called the Babylon B. Babylon B.
I get called stupid all the time on Twitter, which I'm like, well, yeah, I'm stupid.
I don't, yeah, I have a lot to learn.
But I've read Dostoevsky.
Yeah.
We need to start getting our guest hosts to bring their own hate mail.
Yeah.
Bring some angry comments or messages and bring them.
Well, what I do, because I wrote an article I write for The Arizona Republic, which is the paper here in the Phoenix area.
And I wrote this very mild article just about how politicians are responding to coronavirus.
No bombs thrown, no, you know, no red meat or anything.
And I just got deluged by hate mail on LinkedIn, of all things.
I'm like, really?
LinkedIn?
Wow.
I barely ever post my stuff there.
So yeah, just these people screaming at me.
And one guy sent this like 1800-word screed about how stupid I was and I'm probably ugly and blah, blah, blah.
And so I just reply, thank you so much for reading.
And then I get like a 3,000-word reaction to that, just screaming even more.
It's just like, okay, here's how writing works is like, especially if writing for a newspaper, send it in on Wednesday, gets published Saturday.
I've invoiced them on Monday.
By the time I get your message, I'm done.
You know, it's like, okay, I don't care if you didn't like it.
It's an opinion column.
Of course you don't like it.
Yeah.
I'm cool with that.
I've had a few people.
But you clicked on the link, so I got paid.
So thank you.
I have a few people that they've emailed in like a big long criticism, and I'll reply, like, I'm not going to argue with you, but thanks for the feedback.
And then they'll reply, even matter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then they'll say, like, oh, you were dismissive.
Well, I didn't have to do that.
I had time to write you an essay in return.
I guess technically I did dismiss your comment, but I wasn't trying to be.
You say dismissive like it's a bad thing.
You are dismissed.
Perfect.
Okay.
Well, let's go on to our paid subscriber portion.
Yeah.
And this is going to be fun.
We have a couple of things that we're going to do with John here.
We're going to ask him our new 10 questions.
Yeah, we have a good title for this.
The 10 question manmans.
The 10 ultimate questions.
10 ultimate.
Yeah.
10 questions for life.
Yeah.
And he's going to answer them honestly.
And then I've got a list of the top 100 novels from Time.
We're going to go through some of them.
And John's going to tell us if they're not.
John's going to tell us if they're terrible or not.
We'll read all of the 100 novels out loud in audiobook form for you listeners.
Awesome.
Just listen to them in one and a half.
With footnotes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The complete top 100 novels abridged.
Read aloud by Ben Shapiro.
So it's like a 15 minute.
And then it's done.
Yeah.
Well, thanks for listening, everybody.
If you want to check out John Gabriel's work or just check out John Gabriel, you can go to Ricochet.
You can go check out Ricochet.
Ricochet.com.
Yep.
Beautiful.
All right.
Let's do this.
Let's move on.
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Until next time, this is Dave D'Andrea, the voice of the Babylon Bee, reminding you to go forth and buy up all the toilet paper before anyone else can.