The Welcome to 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

Charles c. W cook.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 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, I suspect that those superstitions are means by which I can try to

manage my own stress.

Sports are unusual in that you end up, or 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 stop seeing patterns that don't exist.

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