Welcome to episode

of the episode 5 of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast. This episode is diametrically

striped. So if you have a phone or a computer that supports diametric striping, make sure

you turn that on at the outset.

Today I'm going to talk to Andy McCarthy about whether or not we should abolish the FBI.

I'm a yes, he's a no, and I'm sure that the crackling noise at the end of the line we were

talking on was just a coincidence.

But before we get to that, here is a section on superstitions.

On Sunday morning, I confessed in my weekly newsletter, which you can sign up for at

charlescwcook.com, that i am ridiculously superstitious when it comes to sports and when i say

ridiculously i'll happily put the emphasis on ridiculous if my feet are on the couch when the yankees

hit a home run i'll keep them on the couch for the rest of the game,

even if I get cramp. If the Jaguars start winning when I'm drinking beer, I'll make sure I

have a beer in my hand for the rest of the game. Or at least that's my excuse. If I get Chipotle

for lunch and the Gators lose, I won't get Chipotle again during college football season, because it was obviously my getting Chipotle for lunch. And the Gators lose. I won't get Chipotle again during college football season

because it was obviously my getting Chipotle that cost them the game and so on and so forth.

Now, I know intellectually that there is no mechanism by which one of those things can lead to the other, but I also don't really

care because I can't affect the game in any other way. That's all I've got. As I wrote in the

newsletter, I suspect that those superstitions are a means by which I can try to manage my own stress. Sports are unusual in that

you end up, or at least I do, caring about them enormously, but you also have absolutely no

control over the outcome. And that doesn't happen very much in life. That's a rare circumstance.

And so to mitigate the anxiety, we start making stuff up. We start seeing patterns that don't

...