Speaker 1: Sorry, it's just distracted by the dog right now, who
is trying to bite a builder. I think Tara's femeral
arterory out. No don't. I don't have a tourniquet. Oh damn,
he's dead.
Speaker 2: Anyway, go on, guys, ask not what your country can
do for you, Ask what you can do for your country,
mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Speaker 1: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Steven Hayward. I'm James Lilyax, and today we talk about
get this absolutely everything in the world. So let's ever
So it's a podcast.
Speaker 3: No more identity months, dei offices, dudes in dresses, no
more climate change worship, no more division distraction or gender delusions,
no more debris. As I've said before and we'll say again,
we are done with that.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, Episode number seven, one
hundred and sixty. You can join us at ricochet dot com.
By the way, if you wish, take a look at
the site and you'll say, hey, where's this been on
my life? I'm James Lilex in Minneapolis, where it is hot,
I mean it's hot, and Stephen Hayward is somewhere in
the world, and Charles CW. Cook, I imagine is in Florida, gentlemen,
Are things clement and pleasant for you on this fine
October day?
Speaker 4: Very much so. I'm back in California and it's a
glorious fall day here out on the coast.
Speaker 1: There's nothing like a Minnesota fall. I couldn't believe it
when I saw the tempts and I looked, what last
year did we have? Was it forty eight?
Speaker 5: On?
Speaker 1: Last year? It was eighty two? Oh? Well, what was
it two years ago? Two years ago was eighty nine?
I thought, if I completely rethought my missed my October
paradigms completely, No, this is still anomalous. And of course
I blame well, I blame climate change. And that's why
I'm happy that Bill Gates has come up with a
synthetic butter that will help us save the world. But
we'll get to that in a while. Charles, how are you.
Speaker 5: I'm doing well. It's very rainy here. Then it's rainy late.
It's not supposed to be rainy season, but it is
doing that delightful Florida thing of raining.
Speaker 1: While Sonny, yes, we used to call that the devil
is beating his wife when we were kids. You know,
it would rain in the sun. I don't know what
that meant or why we said it, but had been
passed down for generations. While speaking of the devil, we
have the federal government, which is at the moment inert
It has been shut down, doesn't exist. I don't know
if you guys are looking around and seeing the complete
absence of commercial and social activity as a result, but
here we are. The question is, gosh, why did this happen.
I'll let either of you jump in and tell me why.
Speaker 4: Well, I'll happy to jump in on this first, because
I'm very cranky on this whole subject. Now. First of all,
I like to point out governments shut down. Oh my god,
it's the end of the world. That's how the media
like to treat it. But I always like to ask people,
are your local police still patrolling? Are your local schools
still open? Is your local city government processing building permits
and business license applications? Well not in California, they don't
do that anyway. But you get the point. We have
I think in around numbers about fifty thousand government units
in this country. When you go in a nurse, federalist
system if you go all the way down to the
local mosquito abatement district in Duluth, and they're all still functioning.
And that, of course is the government that is closest
to the people in their day to day lives. So
government shutdown is one level of government.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: It is the biggest and spends the most money, but
for the vast majority of Americans does not really come
close to their day to day lives very often, unless
you're trying to get into a national park when Obama
shuts them down and so forth. The second thing is
it's not even really a complete government shutdown on the
federal level, right We're still sending out Social Security checks
and Medicare payments as I understand it. The military is
still getting paid and still on patrol. And I don't
quite know how this happened, but this has been the
case for many years now in their government shutdowns that
we seem to exempt the things that would really bite people, right.
I mean, if we really had a thirty day government
shutdown and social Security checks didn't get delivered, I think
you would see mass marches of citizens at their local
congress quitter's office and so forth. So we exempt a
lot of things that would make it really bite and
really hurt a broad swath, and so this has become
kobuki theater. I think there would be much less interest
in either party of having a government shutdown if it
really involved truly shutting down the federal government, and so
it allows this kabuki theater to go forward for both parties.
And so there's some kind of sinister bipartisan agreement there.
Speaker 1: And those are my.
Speaker 4: Opening bids about how cranky I am about all this,
although on the other hand, I was kind of like it.
I like Phil Graham's remark after the ninety six government
shutdown where he said, I thought our only mistake was
opening it back up again. And you can almost see
the Trump people have kind of that disposition, with Russ
Voyd going around saying, let's start firing people and closing
up programs because they're not funded well.
Speaker 1: I think in the last Obama shutdown they closed the
road going to Mount Rushmore. I think this time they're
letting people go through, but they have to wear extremely
dark glasses and they give them a white cane and
they can't actually see it, or they're draping a tarp
over the faces. I can't remember exactly which one it was. Charles,
Are you as cranky as Steve about this or have you?
Are you looking forward to the blood letting that is
supposed to come when people are laid off all mass
rif not just furloughed, and agencies are zeroed out during
this opportunity, because apparently there's some mechanism by which vast
swaths of the federal government can be deemed hey, don't
need it, and they can take they can zero them
out legally.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Steve is more depressed about it than I am.
In the last couple of days, I've committed so many
federal crimes. It's been glorious. Just one.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 5: I don't particularly care about it, except in so far
as it illustrates that we have far more federal employees
that we need. I don't think that it has been
reported particularly honestly. For once, it's not Republicans who are
shutting down the government. And what's really weird about this
from my perspective is I remember all of the shutdowns
since I moved to the United States in twenty eleven
because I have had to cover them, and it's odd
to see the Democrats shutting down the government, which is
what they did. It's not a value judgment, it's just
a statement of fact. The filibuster requires sixty votes for
this to go through. Republicans have fifty three of those votes,
and they need seven Democrats to join them, and those
seven Democrats haven't yet shown up. But having debated allowed
for eight months whether they were going to shut down
the government, and having then decided to shut down the government,
the Democrats are now pretending that they didn't shut down
the government. And all of the Democrats' friends in the
media and in NGOs are greatly offended by the claim
that the Democrats shut down the government, whereas all of
the times that Republicans have shut down the government in
the last decade and a bit, which is a lot,
they were the ones running out in front of the cameras.
I did that, I was made I did that. It's
not as if Ted Cruz pretended that he didn't shut
down the government. He would shut up about it. Republicans
when they do this, they go on and on and
on about it, and the base is even louder, and
they get angry with the people in the Republican Party
who suggest that the government should not be shut down forever,
or perhaps that the government's shut down isn't going to
yield the results that they want. So it's just very
funny to me to watch Democrats having done this because
Trump is a dictator and it's not normal, and we
can't go back to the status quo, and we have
to gain the extra health spending that we want, not
a continuing resolution extra health spending, And then to say,
how dare you suggest we had anything to do with it?
It does betray a certain level of insecurity.
Speaker 1: Well, Tim Wald's governor here tweeted out to that, you know,
the Republicans control all the branches of government, yet they
can't get this thing Through's that's on them, of course,
showing either willful or otherwise ignorance of the Senate procedures.
He also noted that he's being contacted by several politicians
and figures in Europe who are concerned about what's going on.
And I just have a hard time thinking that mccron's
got Tim Woltzon his speed dial and is calling up
to say are the reports in the Express true? Very so? Yes,
so there we are, but what is it over?
Speaker 5: Really?
Speaker 1: Do you think that people are understanding that the issue
here is the funding of care for people who are
not citizens. And they tell us that's not the case.
It's never been the case. They can't be funded. But
what we're talking about, aren't we as the reimbursement to
hospitals who take care of people who walk into the er, etc. Etc.
Is that not part of this which sounds to me
like funding of people who are not citizens. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, I mean, the political strategy here is pretty clear.
If you look at the polling on issues. Republicans lead
on almost everything, even education, which used to be a
democratic issue that they had slight favorability ratings on. But
the one place where Democrats still lead Republicans as the
party better able to handle the issue is healthcare. And
so they're going to push that and they think that
and apparently there are a lot of nervous Republicans, and
according to some press reports, even some people in the
Trump White House worried about this vulnerability. Now, what I
see here is yet another example of what's been famously
described as the ratchet effect. Democrats use COVID and then
the spending blowouts under Biden to ratchet up essentially the
welfare state. They want to lock us into a higher
level of spending for healthcare, and the Republicans quite rightly
scaled that back with the One Big Beautiful Bill, and
so the Democrats want to restore that upward ratchet of
spending because it always establishes a new higher baseline for
social spending. I do think it really reveals the failure
of Obamacare. It was supposed to solve this problem, supposed
to reduce cost. We remember all that flim flam from
fifteen years ago, and Republicans so far have not been
very effective in arguing about it. I think their best
argument is the fact that Democrats. There's this video is
going around from the twenty twenty primary campaign of Democrats
every candidate raising your hands saying their healthcare plans would
include coverage for illegal immigrants undocumented immigrants, right, and because
now they're running away from that, but I think Republicans
hold a high hand on that. So I don't know,
we're only what forty eight hours into all this, and
you're already hearing rumors or Republicans saying, well, maybe we
can make some kind of deal on Affordable Care Act funding.
And I sure hope they don't. But that's you know,
Republicans always, not always cave, but they tend to cave
on these things because, as Charlie points out, they're usually
the people who started. Well, this time, they aren't the
ones who started it, and I think they should sit
back and increase the pain on the Democrats.
Speaker 1: Well, Charlie, do you think that the healthcare for on
documented citizens is an electoral winner for do they believe
that it is or what is the dynamic here, because
surely they have to look at poles. Surely they have
to look at studies that are most Americans ualla generous
people and believe in immigration, are draw the line at
being obligated to take care of the medical bills of
anybody who walks through the border illegally. That can't be
an electoral winner for them. And then surely they have
to know that.
Speaker 5: Well, they do know that, which is why they're denying
that would be the consequences of their policies and describing
anyone who suggests otherwise it's a liar. And of course
it is true because money is fungible. It's quite difficult
to explain this to someone who's not that interested in politics.
But Obviously, if the federal government sends the states money
and then gives them flexibility how they use it, and
then they use it on illegal immigrants, and then they
get more money from the federal government and they can
replace one set of money with the other, and we're
spending federal money on illegal immigrants. It's worth saying, though,
that this is the Republican charge. It's true, but it's
a Republican charge the Democrats are denying. What the Democrats
are saying is that they want to keep Obamacare subsidies high,
and they pretend that the increase in subsidies will keep
the cost of Obamacare plans low. Well, of course it
won It will make them lower at the point of use,
but that doesn't actually keep healthcare costs low because taxpayers
are still picking it up. What I find the annoying
about this is that the Republicans for once have a
completely unimpeachable case. They have presented a continuing resolution that
is clean. Their view is we're not asking for changes
in the federal government, even though they have majorities in
both chambers and rather the presidency. They just want to
continue at the current rate and then deal with any
changes to the budget afterwards, and as the Democrats who
are saying, no, we wish to use our position to
make changes. Now, that's fine. I like the filibuster, and
I have been on record over and over again saying
you are allowed from the minority to demand changes. Congress
works like that. I don't want there to be a
structural change here. But the reason it annoys me is
that Republicans have been really admirably consistent on the filibuster
now for a long time. In the first Trump administration,
despite Trump suggesting a couple of times they should get
rid of the filibuster, Republicans didn't. They then got about
thirty six Senate Democrats on record saying that they like
the filibuster. Then the Democrats took over the Senate and
they said, we've got to get rid of the filibuster.
And it's only because Joe Manchin and Kirsten Cinema said
no that the filibuster survived. Now Republicans are back with
unified controller government. They confirmed yesterday they have no intention
of getting rid of the filibuster and the Democrats are
the ones using it. So having gone from we like
it when the Republicans are in power to we need
to get rid of it because it's a relic of
Jim Crow. They're now back at We will use it
when the Republicans are in power. The second reason they're
annoying me, James, is that although the details that we
just mentioned are important, this actually is not a shutdown
over an issue. They haven't really shut down the government
over healthcare subsidies to illegal immigrants or increased subsidies for Obama.
They are cross with Trump. It's a general thing. Their
base needs some action, and this is it. They are,
in the case of Chuck Schumer, trying to avoid a primary,
in the case of the Democratic Party in general, trying
to show that quote unquote they fight, and this is
just not a good reason to shut down the government.
If they had an actual demand, that's fine with me.
I'm pro Filibusta, I'm pro minority rights in the Senate,
go for it. But I don't think anyone really believes
this is anything other than an attempt to show that
they aren't supine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fighting, because there's nothing more. There's no stronger proof
that we live in an authoritarian Hitler regime than allowing
the opposition to just completely shut everything down without consequence. Well,
speaking of hardball, the OMB director has decided that, well,
we should make a while sunshines, never let a crisis
go to waste, etc. And preparing for a lot of cuts,
including some infrastructure cuts to chicag Go and to New York.
I believe that there's a tunnel in New York that
will not get funded, and I believe that there's infrastructure
projects in Chicago as well. And a lot of this
is saying that you have not eliminated your DEI programs,
and since you're going to character you're going to carry
on allocating spoils by a racial nature, we're not going
to fund it. And some people regard this as more
examples of the punitive overreach of the authoritarian state. Again,
not spending money on infrastructure does not sound a lot
like the guys who built the autobah, but do go on,
So what do you make of this? Is this just
more political punishment from a vindictive regime or is this
using the opportunity to trim things that ought not to
be spent on in the first place.
Speaker 4: Charls, you go first on this one.
Speaker 5: Well, I think both. I think there's no doubt that
this administration and the last one wants to will use
its power ways that I would rather they didn't. I
think that we have entered into a period in which
the enormous latitude that is given to the executive branch
is abused. At the same time, if the specific complaint
is that there is racial discrimination, then it is entirely
reasonable for the federal government to say not on our watch.
Not only does the Fourteenth Amendment quite clearly prohibit that,
and if it doesn't, the Civil Rights Act does. But
we've now had Supreme Court decision after Supreme Court decision
that has made that clear. And I understand that progressives
seem truly, in many cases to earnestly believe that racial
discrimination of the sort that they like isn't racial discrimination,
but it is affirmative action. Is racial discrimination. Granting particular
distributions of public money to particular groups because they are
of that particular group is racial discrimination. So if that
is the proximate cause of it, I am on board.
I do think though, that we have got far too
comfortable in America with Congress writing laws that are vague,
and then with the executive branch using the power that
it's been given to help its friends and hurt its enemies. Right.
Speaker 1: I agree with you, you know, and I think a lot
of Americans would be okay with some affirmative action if
they actually felt that it was efficacious. But I think
a lot of people suspect that in New York and
in large cities that the money goes to cutouts, and
there's this incredible amount of corruption and cronyism that's actually
going on. But it is illustrative to say the administration
is going to withhold funds because you are racially discriminating,
which sounds like the sort of thing that Americans ought
to get to behind, and the previous administration would say,
we're going to withhold funds unless you adjust your title
nine athletics to include men who believe that they are women.
The balance on those issues and the popularity of them,
I think is striking, Steve. And you've now had enough
time to come up with your response, and.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean what I do like about it?
I mean, I agree with Charlie in the abstract. In practice,
I kind of liked the scene we're seeing the Trump
administration using the tools liberals devised against the left. I mean,
I mean, the left in power especially has used all
these civil rights tools to bully people public and private
alike for decades now. And this is some old history,
but you know, the reg administration won a very big
Supreme Court case, I think in nineteen eighty eight or
maybe in the eight nineteen eighty nine, the Adoran case,
saying that we can't have quotas and timetables and all
these things for federal contracting. And what happened. The Republicans
immediately crumpled under the charge that this was racist, and
they signed on to under the first President Bush, the
Civil Rights Restoration Act, which essentially nullvied the progress that
the Supreme Court was moving by inches to where they
are today. So not this time. The Trump people, and
I think Republicans have learned their lesson, are not only
saying no to that, but are saying, we don't care
about you. The racism charge has lost its sting. And
one last point, James is, I don't know if it's
on your list of topics you want to bring up today,
but an example of how people are fed up with
affirmative action out of control is this extraordinary story out
of Iowa where what a school district hired as a
superintendenty at three hundred thousand dollars a year, an illegal
alien who had a deportation order and a criminal record
and a false CV claiming he had a doctorate when
he didn't, and they hired him anyway, knowing some of
those things, not everything about him. And you know, it's
pretty clearly now that the Left has been running a
racial spoils racket for a long time. And so while
I also agree in the abstract that you can make
a case for affirmative action, and I think, Charlie, I
don't know if you brought this up on law talk,
but someone who actually defends affirmative action and college admissions
is Richard Epstein amazing. But I've also listened to why
he thinks that, and he makes the only cojin case
I think for it. Nonetheless, I think now it's such
a corrupt racket that we want to be done with
it once and for all. Kill it by any means necessary.
And by the way, all the Supreme Court cases that
Charlie referenced are going to make it hard to bring
it back under a democratic administration, although they will certainly try.
Speaker 5: I have to say, just as a quick aside, I
love being called a racist for opposing decisions made based
on race. I think this is the most extraordinary thing
that happens. When affirmative action was finally overturned, eighty percent
of the American public said great, and the left set
that's racism. So a you think that it's racism to
say that you can't discriminate based on race, and be
your position is that eighty percent of the American public
is racist. It is just an extraordinary example of how
they've lost their minds on this.
Speaker 1: Well, I do believe that eighty percent of the population
is racist. And what's more, you know, the idea somehow
that affirmative action is racist is nonsense, of course, because
you cannot be racist against white people. You need to
have power. There's this whole complicated and rather you know,
two clever by half definition of what racism is and requires,
and it has to do with the measures of power
and ability and privilege and the rest of it. And
it's a carefully calibrated to make sure that only this
group can be racist. These people are not. So I
get what you're saying, Charlie, But of course I wouldn't
you know if the word is thrown about so much
and applied to so much that it is rapidly becoming
meaningless and we'll have to come up with another one.
Used to be bigoted, I remember back in the Archie
Bunker days you would say bigoted, which I think we
ought to return too, because frankly, if they want to
do the whole power imbalance thing with racism, fine, but
anybody can be bigoted. The Iowa story is fascinating. I mean,
because this guy was caught, you know, speeds off his car,
runs away, hides in the tall grass. Everybody rallied to
him because he was a charismatic and wonderful person, because
the kids loved him. And when you look the fact
that he had gun charges and I know, Charlie, this
is where your ears per c Cup had gun charges
in the past, and he had a gun charge pending
right there and then because as a citizen with a
deportation order, I don't believe that he was allowed to
have that firearm.
Speaker 6: But even if he was, if it was in his car,
doesn't that mean that he had taken the gun to school?
And so if that's if that's all true, then you
have people waving away a law.
Speaker 1: Now when you have a horrible thing happened. And then
they pass a law you can't bring guns to school,
and there, we've done something. It's it's a law named
after somebody who died, it perished, and and you know,
mission accomplished. We've passed a law. And then you have
a guy who literally breaks the thing and they wave
it away and they don't care because they actually personally
like him. It's almost as if the whole process of
getting the law in the first place is Kabooki theater.
And secondly, it's almost as if the applying the laws
equally to all doesn't matter if you like him and
the kids like him, and he and he has an
engaging smile, but he's going back. I mean, if you
looked at his vita. One of the things I think
he claimed in his biography his autobiography was that he
was a hired killer for the gan and military, you know,
sort of a special Forces green beret type who was
a security guard print for Queen Elizabeth. And I kind
of doubt that, I kind of do. It sounds like
one of those fabulous resumes you get from the sociopaths
who will tell anybody any story in order to get attention.
Speaker 4: Can I add the cherry on top that we neglected
to mention is he was registered to vote as a
Democrat in Maryland. We're told that never happens. But okay, all.
Speaker 1: Right, we're gonna have a guy with gun charges who
was registered to vote and probably getting medical care and
all the rest of it. But it doesn't happen. But
it does. Even if it's true, it doesn't matter because
he was a great guy and he's a contributor to
the society. Well, one of the other things that's being
cut in addition to the infrastructure, we were talking about
a whole batch of green deals, a whole lot of
energy programs, and I generally applaud this because I don't
regard them as particularly useful or necessary, and I think
they're all predicated on a hysteria, which itself is sort
of a scientific and I don't buy it. I don't
buy it. No cirtain, So I guess that's me. I'm hopeless.
But what do you guys think we need energy? And
without a concombinant rise in fossil fuel production and crack
crack effort to get more nuclear online, aren't we shooting
ourselves in the foot by not building vast solar farms
and putting those wonderful windmills up in the.
Speaker 4: Countryside, well, not a bit. I mean I would volunteer
to help take some of those down, or to block
the whatever, block the trucks going there to put up
new ones. I am worried about one thing, though, and
I hope the Trump administration is on top of this,
and I think they might be, and that is with
the growth of all the AI data centers, which are
going to use fabulous amounts of electricity. I mean, some
of the comparisons are, you know, one data center, it's
something like this, one data center will use more electricity
than the entire city of Columbus, Ohio, or things like that.
It's truly staggering. And already we've seen electricity rates all
over the country spike very sharply the last few years.
And that's part because we're dishonest about how supposedly cheap
wind and solar are and and a lot of these
data centers, you know, they're in a pretty good position
to negotiate utilities for fixed price contracts, probably at a
higher price, but nonetheless that they can outbid other consumer
facing utilities. And I do worry that there could be
a electricity shortages in the next two three years and
or price spikes, and that's not going to be popular
with the American people. And the remedies right now are
well from the Greens. It's let's build more battery storage,
and that really doesn't work. It doesn't pencil out if
you do the math on it very well. And so
you really do need to do is build a whole
lot of natural gas plants. They can be built quickly,
they can be turned on quickly, they're very efficient, they're
very blow polluting. The problem is is that there is
enough demand for the just the equipment that apparently there's
like a tour for your backlog to get turbines from
General Electric and the other Semens and the other manufacturers
of gas turbines. So we could be in for a
real problem here coming down the road at US. And
it really is the fault of the green energy mania
of the last decade. But when you're in office, you
own the problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't want to be sitting in the dark
with a brownout because hell nine thousand up the street.
It requires the Jews to do some cogitating and tell
somebody some fabulous story. I read the other day a
story of the BBC that there are people who are
using AI to generate vacation itineraries and they get there
and they find out that the place does not actually exist,
that it was just dreamed up by a combination of things.
I mean, honestly. It discussed a couple in Peru who
had gone to this place, and they were looking at
the map and sitting in a cafe somewhere, and some
local guide had to come over and tell them, no, no, no,
that road up there will leave you nowhere at an
altitude of four thousand with no self. You're gonna die,
so don't. Yes, I'm not as thrilled AI as I
used to be, and I never particularly was. Charles, What
do you think a lot of this as we know
we have this? There was this feeling in the seventies,
of course, when we had the oil shocks, there was
a feeling of impotence. There was nothing really we could do.
They weren't good alternatives. We were pretending that they were.
There were stories in the newspaper and the Time magazine
about well, maybe tar sans will do it, maybe synthetic
oil will do it, maybe even twenty years, but there
wasn't any sense that there was an imminent solution. We
know now that there are imminent, workable solutions such as nuclears,
such as gas that Stephen talked about. It's a failure
of will all of the prak as with so many
of the other things we have. It's not a failure
of ability. It was a failure of will by our
political class to make sure that we didn't that we
won't find ourselves in a brownout situation.
Speaker 4: Well, now, Jame's gonna I just offer one slight modification
to your otherwise completely correct litany, which is we did
have one solution in the late seventies and it was coal. Yeah,
people have forgotten that. Jimmy Carter said, I remember the
we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. And it was
the late seventies and into the eighties that we vastly
expanded our coal fired capacity for electricity on purpose, and
that got us all. You know, we used to starty
to be a nerdy policy wonk geek on this, but
when all this oil shocks started, when we were young pups,
we got twenty percent of our electricity from oil. From petroleum,
and then when it got expensive, we said we got
to stop that in a hurry, and now it's close
to zero percent from petrol. Occasionally there diesel generators are
turned on here and there. But and what replaced it
was coal, And of course then fifteen years later, oh no,
coal is the devil because of clients range right, acid right, Well,
that was a turned out to be a phony and
overestimated problem, as they so often turned out to be anyway,
So we did actually have one, and it turned out
to be the one that is the most hated by
all enlightened people today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, next to nuclear coal first, then nuclear right, Charles,
I don't know. Do you have many turbine wind turbines
in your neighborhood You are.
Speaker 5: Thankfully not. And we bury the power lines too because
of hurricanes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is a great idea.
Speaker 5: I have just one thing to add to this, which
is this is not a solution that will fix the
whole problem. But I do think that we ought to encourage,
where possible, those who are building enormous server farms that
will be used to make profit for them to build
their own power plants as well. And we've seen this
in I think Pennsylvania with Microsoft, where it's reopening the
three Mile Island nuclear facility in order to power an
absolutely enormous data center. I like this sort of thing
without re litigating the question of Rhondascentis and Disney. I
differed on this in some respects from many conservatives. The
original reason that Disney in nineteen sixty eight was given
control over that massive, two county wide tractive land that
it built Disney World on was that both Orange County
and Osceola County were very poor and they simply could not,
via taxation or any other means, pay for the infrastructure
that was necessary to support Disney World, which required an
enormous amount of energy production, among other things. In fact,
it's very interesting if you look through the original grant
from the Florida legislature in nineteen sixty eight, it gave
Disney the ability the authority to build a nuclear power
plant there in case that's what it needed to run
Disney World. That was because the locals in Oscila and
Orange Counties, which at that point were rural or land
that didn't really exist, they didn't want to be on
the hook. They didn't want some bonds drive for the
private profit of the Disney Corporation. So I understand that
this won't work for everything, but it's not unreasonable for
our states and counties to say to open AI or
Microsoft or Apple or whoever. You know what, if you
want to build seven million servers and use so much
energy that it will start to affect everyone around you,
put in your own system. Now you have to at
that point deregulate. You have to allow the process to unfold.
You can't say and you can't do it. But I
think this is an underrated development that we've seen with
Microsoft and nuclear power, and I hope it happens more elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Are we sure that Disney didn't build a quire actor, Well,
as far as we know, they didn't. Well, if you
look at the some of the early drawings in Disney World,
it wasn't Splash Mountain, it was scram Mountain.
Speaker 5: So you know exactly.
Speaker 1: I leave with this. The last experience that I had
with AI, I'd learned that there was a massive new
development going in in north of Fargo, North Dakota, a
huge industrial facility, and I want to know where it was,
because Fargo was making noises about annexing the land up there.
And our family farm is up there, and I wanted
to know if our family farm was going to survive this,
and so I asked AI about the location of this.
I asked GROC, and when it came back with the location,
it put a square in Trollwood Park, and I don't
think that was the case. And I told GROK, no,
you're wrong. You put this massive industrial facility in a park.
Control what that's not it, And of course it apologized
and apologized, I'm very sorry. Of course, I'll go back
and look at the PDFs. And it took four runs
at it, and it kept putting this thing in parks
all over town until I finally gave up and said,
you were absolutely useless. You were giving me absolutely wrong information,
and it apologized again. The amusing part of it is
for me, is that the industrial facility that I was
asking GROC to find is a proposed AI server farm.
So maybe it was just trying to hide the fact
that it was done at all, or it was regarded
it as its enemy and didn't want to tell about it.
Speaker 5: James Sky is building itself and it doesn't want you
to know.
Speaker 1: That's that's precisely it. And you know the more you
think about that, it really is stupid. That an awful
lot of that is just very very dumb, like Aliens
two movies and the rest of it. Forget it. Speaking
of movies, one of my favorites, of course is Full
Metal Jacket for the commanding first half of it were
our Ley Army gives the definitive performance next to Jack
Web of course in di I as a drill instructor
who just absolutely embodies for any of us, what that
role with that job, what that personality is. Heg Seth
did that too. We think he gathered eight hundred generals
in Virginia, which at first was sort of rooted about
in the Internet as oh, this is worrisome, what's what's
what's going on? Is something planned? Is the balloon about
to go up? But no, it turns out he was
going to tell them they're all fat and they need
they need to lay off the jelly donuts because they
are discussing fat bodies, and that we're not going to
have the long hair, we're not gonna have eyelashes, we're
not can have men addresses, and we're going to go
back to a warrior. Ethos and I have heard wildly
diverse opinions about the speech, partly because of the man
who gave it, but partly because well, I'll just you
guys are Sivyes, tell me how it struck you, Stephen.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 4: So I did not see it. I've read about it,
and of course that's point number one is the mainstream
media is going berserk about how terrible it was, and
the general rule that whatever the mainstream media is reporting,
you want to believe the opposite I did. By the way,
just see a headline for a survey out in the
last few days saying that public trust in the mainstream
media is down to twenty eight percent. I haven't actually
looked a thing up to see if it's a quality
survey or not, but I can believe that that high.
And yeah, yeah, right, yeah, it's really a bad survey
if it has that high.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Good point. I do wonder sometimes, I do wonder, lads,
and so many other things Trump administration does if they
deliberately calculate some of their spectacular events like this to
drive the wedge wider between the American people and the
media and the you know, for the establishment that they hate.
You know, I know some people in the military and
you know, I have a hunt. First of all, remember
that the rank and file of the military lean Republican
by I think a fairly substantial amount. I mean it's
not eighty twenty, but I think it's like sixty forty.
And I think an awful lot of them have probably thought, yeah,
we went too far with the woke military, and all
I do hear anecdotes over the last couple of days
of a lot of serving men and women saying, you know,
this is long overdue and we really like what we heard.
That will not be reported in the media. How many
people in the mainstream media have ever served in the
military at all? I think the number is as symptotically
close to zero as you can get without some calculus
derivative for the tiny gap. So anyway, I kind of
like the I mean I wouldn't have done it, but
I kind of like the way everyone has, as usual,
have got their knickers in a twist about.
Speaker 1: Charles.
Speaker 5: The event was classic Trump in that it was an
innovative thing to do in the first place, most presidents
don't convene all their generals in one place, and then
it featured both flowering of common sense that eighty to
ninety percent of the public must agree with, coupled with
a few completely insane comments that didn't need to be
made and probably won't be acted on the substance of
what Hexas said was not only correct but should be obvious.
That is that the military exists to fight, and that
people who are charged with fighting should be fit and
healthy and strong. This is only controversial on college campuses
and in those parts of our political culture that don't
like the fact that people are different from one another,
whether that's men and women, or fat people and thin people,
or tall people and short people, or strong people and
weak people. I am still astonished that we have ever
got into a position in which this backslid to the
extent that it did. Then you had Trump saying terrible
things about using the cities as testing grounds HEXIT as well,
and promising to go into this that or the other
part of the United States with the federal government or
possibly with the military. Now it has to be said
Trump has not done this. He has done two things.
One is that he sent the National Guard into d C,
which is absolutely entitled to do. It's a federal district.
It's no different than the Northwest Territory. Constitutionally, and he has,
especially on the West coast in California and Ore and
sent troops out to defend federal employees, which is also justified,
whether or not one thinks it's a good idea legally.
So if he did start using Chicago as training for
the next Fallujah, that would be very bad. But he
hasn't done it. I just wish that he had focused
on the substance of Hexas' remarks. I wish that were
the thing that had come out of this, because then
you would have had an absolutely beautiful juxtaposition between people
who said, oh my god, all off the generals have
been summoned, this must be the beginning of Nazi Germany,
and this guy who is obviously fit himself, the Secretary
of Defense, Pete Hexath, saying I think it would be
good if in the military we've focused on being the military.
The juxtaposition would have been very, very good for Trump
because people would have said, so, not only did we
not get Nazi Germany, we got the thing that we've
wanted all along. Unfortunately, they have to do the stray voltage.
I wish they would stop, but do I worry that
they're actually going to start going door to door in
Des Moines.
Speaker 1: No, No, I don't either, but I think it's into
For the first time in my life, it's like the
Third Amendment suddenly seems to be relevant. But you know,
they don't have to some of the generals to you know,
to one room and make them swear allegiance to the leader.
To be Nazi Germany. All you have to do to
get that Nazi thing going for people is to insist
that everybody drill correctly and be fit and have a
haircut and march in order that to that that very
manifestation of the most basic facts of military behavior is
enough to make people worry. If you go back to
the seventies again, and I hate to keep bringing it up,
there was this notion that the Navy was the place
where you know, guys that mustaches and long hairs and
they smoked a lot of dope. And I mean that
was kind of the feeling I got from the guys
I knew who went into it and came out of it.
And we don't want that. Charles absolutely right, There's there's
nothing fascistic about insisting that there'd be discipline and comportment
and the rest of it. I mean, the number of
times I've watched a TikTok of somebody who was spilling
over their uniform looks like the michelin man has been
put into BDUs and is complaining about something, and they've
got long hair and a piercing and the rest of it.
It doesn't really strike you as being particularly and you
just wonder, why don't these people go into the military anyway.
Speaker 5: David, can I just complain about something?
Speaker 1: Yes? Here For.
Speaker 5: When I was in high school taking exams, there was
a guy in my class who got given extra time
because he wasn't good at exams, and I remember thinking,
hang on a minute, though, the purpose of the exam
is to test what you do in the circumstances of
the exam, which can then be extrapolated out into your
life or other academic work. If you give him extra
time because he's not good at exams, you don't get
a good example of his abilities or lack thereof. And
I think the same thing is true of the military.
And I would draw a distinction between that and say trials.
If someone is on trial but they can't hear, it's
totally reasonable to say, well, we'll present them with a signer.
If somebody is in a job that requires them to
get around and they can't walk, it's totally reasonable to
give them a ramp. But there are certain circumstances in
which the other side is never going to give you
the leeway. And I think the biggest thing for me
that I took away from Hex's speech is the sheer
number of people in the press, and unfortunately it seems
to be in some of the upper echelons of the
military as well, who have forgotten that the enemy gets
a vote, that they get to impose their will on us.
And if you give people extra time or you give
them special leeway, they don't care. They'll just shoot them
in the face. And I worry that we've forgotten about it.
And I just mentioned that because I didn't see that
anywhere in the coverage, any acknowledgment of that. Every New
York Time Times article on this that it was controversial,
but they never explained the pro argument for it, which
to me to be really self evident and crucial.
Speaker 1: Well, they are all notions of humanity and empathy, and
they have nothing to do with preparedness. Switching our gaze
to the other side of the Pond, Britain is going
through one of his periodic convulsions. There was a geod
attack in Manchester. Two Jews were killed at the synagogue
on a high holy day for being Jews. We may
never know the note of motive of the man, whose
name was literally Giod, I think, but this was celebrated
with spontaneous rallies in all sorts of cities waiving the
Palestinian flag such as it is demanding that Israel be
destroyed river to the sea. That's what it means. Don't
tell me otherwise. Not a great day for Blighty, would
you say? Or is this completely irrelevant?
Speaker 5: And I think it matches. I don't think it's nothing.
And I based that in part on the realc action
that I've seen from my family and friends in England
who are appalled by it and seem to think that
what happened is more indicative of certain attitudes than should
be the case in a Western country. And this guy's
name was Jihad al Shamey. Is that right? Yeah? How
could you possibly have expected that you would see a
terror attack on a synagogue from a guy called Jihad
al Shamey. I don't know what to do about it.
I mean, if I were dressing this in the United States,
where it has happened, I would say that people who
go to synagogue ought to start arming themselves, as many do.
But you can't do that in England. You apparently can't
complain about it, or you get visited by the police
and prosecuted for hateful speech.
Speaker 1: One of the things the protests had was I believe
the full fate of Greta Thunbergen or flotilla. Steve, you've
been following this story minute by minute is unfold.
Speaker 4: Well only from the semi period interest of watching a
total farce unfold, and so actually it's too ridiculous to
waste too much time on what Charlie said though about
I mean, first of all, I think the easy prediction
is is Nigel Faraj's poll numbers just went up by
another five percent.
Speaker 5: Second, and that's.
Speaker 4: Because the British government's response has been so weak, and
you know, well, Britain now looks to me to be
the most flaccid of the major European countries. Even the
French and the Germans are performing better on this issue,
not very well, but better than the British are. And
that's why I think that Faraja is most likely to
win the next election of things if nothing changes at all.
And this Labor Party certainly does not look like it's
going to change course in any meaningful way. And so
question back to Charlie. One thing to keep hearing from
Afar ears as well. This is really just localized to
some of these heavily immigrant neighborhoods in Manchester and Birmingham
and certain parts of London. But A, I mean is
that reasonably accurate? Or B how much longer you think
that will remain true? Is this spreading very fast?
Speaker 5: So that is true, and that's something I've said quite often.
If you go to the vast majority of England, you
won't notice any difference between now in nineteen eighty or
really eighteen eighty or seventeen eighty in my parents' village,
maybe sixteen eighty where my parents live. But I'm not
sure that that is particularly reassuring. A for those who
live in the regions that have become dominated by what
is an ideology that in many ways is incompatible with
traditional English law, And B if you have an archipelaga
of activists who will do anything to protect the bad
actors and I will say this till I am blue
in the face. That's the biggest threat in Britain. There
is this conception out there that what has happened in
Britain is that people since the nineteen fifties have moved
in from other parts of the world, predominantly from the
Third World, and they have brought with them a preference
for censorship. But that's not true, or at least that's
not the important part of the story, because they're still
massively outnumbered. What has happened is since the nineteen fifties,
Britain has imported a lot of people from the Third
World who don't, shockingly enough, carry with them a copy
of the First Amendment, and then a massive number of
powerful British people in elite positions have determined that those
people must be protected by the law, and so they
have passed all sorts of laws making it illegal to
criticize anyone based on what is falsely deems to be
their immutable characteristics, but actually is their political preferences or ideology.
And that's the problem. If the British wanted to pass
a whole bunch of free speech laws, make it clear
that they will not tolerate grooming gangs, surveil people who
say allow that they hate Jews or want to kill
people who are different. They could do that, but the
British government, for goodness sake, is full of people who
don't want to do that, and who recoil in horror
the minute anybody says, I don't think that this is
all positive and look, I am a squish guys, I
am a small l liberal. I am a pluralist. But
pluralism only works when you insist on the culture of
pluralism that predated the need for pluralism. And America does
that really well in most but not all places, and
Britain and Europe too have got really bad at doing it.
You can't have a pluralist society that doesn't insist on
pluralist values. And that's the problem in Britain. It's not
that it has been taken over or that anywhere you
go you will see foreign language spoken. That's not true.
It's the British have given up. They're terrified to say,
you know what, we had a pretty good thing going.
You're welcome to come here. We don't care what the
color of your skin is or what gods you worship,
but here are the goddamn rules. They won't do it,
and they're suffering from it.
Speaker 1: Well, this will all be mood very soon, because of
course they've had a Palestine has been recognized, and b
there's a new ceasefire proposal on the table, which they
no doubt will accept it because the idea that the
Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity is
our chaic old thought. They will accept it, of course.
In Hamas will then disarm and release the hostages and
everything will be fine, or they will say no and
the war will continue. And Donald Trump said that I
think the deadline is Sunday afternoon, Sunday. And what did
he promise? Hell? He promised, Hell like no one has
ever seen before will break out. Hell. Mind you, if
they turned this down, that this is their last chance,
and I think they will. I believe that they will.
And I don't know what's going to happen after that, Steven,
do you have any ideas?
Speaker 4: No, except I think you're right. I think Hamas would
rather go down in what they think is a blaze
of glory and kill all the hostages and be wiped
out themselves. Than give in at all because they're you know,
Nihilis fanatics. That's actually too mile to turn for them.
I do think, though, that this is very typical Trump.
He's set things like this before about Iran, although in
that case he did follow him by bombing the nuclear facilities.
He set things like this about Hamas, but then another
time saying, gosh, this is what needs to make peace.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: You know, I've often credited the crazy man theory of Trump,
and that does have its use as in international affairs
now and then, oh, couple this by the way of
this statement a week ago at the UN that oh,
maybe Ukraine can win back all its territory, which is
a real uphill order. So at some point I think
you get diminishing returns from the crazy man Trump and
from his erratic pronouncements, because you could see, I don't know,
the Israeli operations, something going wrong, you know, a hospital
getting bombed by mistake for real instead of the Hamas propaganda,
and then Trump could go all squishy on it. And
you know, I think that the inconstancy of Trump's pronouncements
at some point gets to be a problem.
Speaker 1: The Ukraine situation is interesting, by the way, because they
are having what the end result of a long campaign
of targeting infrastructure and now petroleum infrastructure is seeming to
pay off. Was it last week where I sin I
think that Russia said they're not going to export any
gasoline and diesel for a while because they've lost something
like I don't know, twenty eight to thirty percent of
their refining capacity. I see all of these videos now
on Telegraph about lines and lines and lines and lines
of cars outside of stations, as if we're trying to
become California. Yeah. Yeah, well we've gone back to the
nineteenhi with that reference too. This whole podcast, it's just
saturated and studded with nineteen with references to that horrible decade.
It's a good thing we're not going to talk about
the days when, like in the seventies, there were people
roaming the country in armed bands, killing cops and banks
and the rest of it for to fund the glorious
communist revolution. Oh wait a minute. Assana Shakur, who was
hiding out in Cuba, died and the Chicago Teachers Union
put out a memorial tweet, rest in power. I hate that,
rest in peace, and applotted her for all the things
that she did for marginalized people. Now you may me ask,
what is the organization devoted supposedly to instructing the children
of Chicago doing wasting their time on this? Why is
the mayor of Chicago noting this? Well, it's off a piece,
it really is. I mean, it just tells you that basically,
these people are the worst sort of old school nineteen
late sixties, early seventies radicals who wanted nothing more than
in the destruction of this order and its replacement with another.
But hey, give them a lot of money, give them
fabulous pensions, and have them teach your children. Did you
guys see that tweeted? If so, I don't think it's
surprised you, given what we've seen from the Chicago Teacher's Union,
which I think the last tweek they had misspelled the
word Chicago.
Speaker 4: Talk about pattern recognition. I'd never heard of this person
until this week. And oh, I know, yeah, Well, I
keep thinking I'm stealing myself now, James, for when who's
that guy's wing in jail in Pennsylvania forever? That's a
big cause of the left, Mumia Jamal s Yep, yep,
you know there are universities that have either wanted to.
I know one case actually in the state of Washington,
where that crazy Evergreen State College wanted to have Mumia
as their commencement speaker about ten twelve years back by video,
of course, couldn't come live, and the Democratic governor called
the president and said, look, you have a First Amendment
right to have this person, but I cannot stop the legislature,
a Democratic legislature, from cutting your funding if you do
something this stupid. And they changed their mind over it.
But the point is, when that guy dies, it's going
to be ten times bigger. I think, can see such
a cost celeb another call.
Speaker 1: Every every time I see those posters, I think, free
moumea with qualifying purchase.
Speaker 4: But I mean this is now, I mean, this is
not news, except you know, let's remember that for a
while there, maybe still today, the prime qualification to get
a job at elite university is to have been some
someone like Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dorn, who's the who's the
lady down the street from you in Minnesota, James who
went to.
Speaker 1: Princess in Salaiah, Kathleen Jenials enerals right, and.
Speaker 4: Then you know she got a university job after she
finally served her sentence. I am waiting for and maybe
it's already happened. I just missed it. But I can't
wait for some universities to establish the George the George
Floyd Chair of Racial Studies, because that's surely coming at
some point.
Speaker 1: Well, there's a piece by Thomas Chatterson today, I think
it's in The Atlantic talking about how you know the
writer has been looking for their own George Floyd and
founded and Charlie Kirk, and I think the amount of
conversation that topic requires is absolutely zero. The only I
want to end with and we will end with this here,
and it's because it's on the rundown. And I should
note that these podcasts are made possible by the tireless
and extraordinary work of our producer, who does prepare for
us a framework for discussion. Now we go off it,
we say it around it, we sometimes trash it up
and ignore his questions entirely, but it's absolutely essential and
gives us the framework for our chat. And he ended
with this. He ended with the Screen Actress Guild condemning
Tillie Norwood, an actress who does not exist. Somebody ginned
up an AI actress and gave her a voice and personality,
and now apparently she's available for movie roles and television
and commercials and the rest of it. And they don't
like it, No, sir, they don't like it at all.
And I just think it'd be fascinating if in the
future you have somebody who's so obsessed with an AI
generated actress that they storm an AI data center desperately
looking for the speeding hard drive and what she resigns,
or they hate her someon us that they blow up
the data center and cut the power. I'm not particularly
worried about this with my list of AI things to
worry about, simply because I don't know any stars really
that I care if she replaces. I mean, I think
Tom Cruise is one of the few people in movies
I can actually point to a name, because he seems
to understand the role of what an old star should be.
Are you guys worried about this exactly? Or are you
you do you fear creeping AI saturating our entertainment until
the line between reality and fiction is utterly completely lost.
Speaker 5: Well, my problem with Tilly Nord is she's a racist.
Why would that be in high school, she said all
sorts of times.
Speaker 1: All right, yes, yeah, well that's true. We probably have right,
they probably have read kind of backstory that No.
Speaker 5: But this is what I would do if I were
a cynical actor on the left who didn't like Tilly Nord,
I would spread rumors about her and then try and
cancel her and see how many people went for it,
because I think there would be a non zero percentage
of the population that was, oh yeah, Tillian, Yeah, I
heard that Tillian Norwood was a terrible, terrible anti semi
in school and she used to buildy the other girls
in the locker room. I reckon you could get twenty
to thirty percent of the American public to believe this
if you just said it enough.
Speaker 1: Would do you think it'd be possible if somebody found
out something about the people who programmed her found if
people found wrong think about her programmers, whether or not,
that would spill over as some sort of guilt by association. Steve,
and I know that you're a big movie fan, and
are you Are you worried about I think I'm not
worried because I find what people respond to these days
are things that have an element of truth to them,
that actually feel as though they occupied, they ought they
were shot in real places, that there's a feeling of
reality to them. We are so tired in Avenger movies
and the rest of the marvel stuff, seeing this baffling
nonsense on screen, none of which meant any thing, all
of which we knew was false. We're no longer. We
don't have the ability anymore to be wowed by what
they can do. I think maybe Tron I'm actually thinking
of seeing this Neutron movie in Imax because it makes
no pretenses to be real. It is, of course the
tronoverse or whatever they want to call it. But I
think the desire for real, for authenticity is the killer
app that humanities have, and that will fly to fiction,
that will apply to movies, that will apply to arts
and all of these things once we get past this
AI craze. I mean today, I think open AI was
valued at half a trillion. I think it hit five
hundred billion. Its valuation hasn't made a dime, hasn't made
a dime. So we have a bubble about to pop,
and if it takes you know, a lot of Avatar
type movies with it, I'm not sure I necessarily care. Stephen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so if our founder Rob along with with us,
I think he would be skeptical in the future for
a couple of reasons. Now maybe special pleading on his
part because he thinks a I can't write a joke,
z said on this show several times. But I also
think that, uh, you know, for an awful lot of cinema,
certain things I think AI probably can't replicate, which are
the subtleties that really skilled actors bring to a role
and the interpretations.
Speaker 1: Of a role.
Speaker 4: And maybe AI might get good at that in the
fullness of time. But I also think that this has
been coming for a very long time. Yeah, if you
go all the way back to I'll think of just
two movies in particular. First Zelling from you know, the
mid eighties that.
Speaker 1: Was right, absolutely all with film stock and treatment of
that that was.
Speaker 4: Right, and and actually the the the that wasn't yet
CGI A lot of that note well, I will skip
over that except to say that some of the way
to render a film looking you know, with Woody Allen
standing next to Calvin Coolidge, they take the film that
they shot and composited together and stomp on it. In
a dirty floor of the studio that was there. That
was their technique for trying to make it authentic film.
And then of course for us Gump was when you
began to see uh a cgi to you know, put
words in the mouth of Lyndon Johnson and John F.
Kennedy and so forth, John Lennon on the Cavit Show
one with Forrest Gump and all that was very amusing,
and then you could really see it was obvious what
was happening. But now the technology is getting so good
that it'd be it's much less obvious. So but I
think I probably share rob skepticism that although and of
course the movie and TV business being about making money,
this is a cheap way to put out product that
will generate some revenue. It's gonna happen, but I don't
think at the end of the day, and it might
nick the salaries of people like Tom Cruise down to
ten million dollars for picture instead of twenty or whatever
he charges. But I don't I don't know. I think
I'm with Rob. I don't think it's going to replace
human beings completely.
Speaker 1: No, to end it all, not to end it all
something I'm considered When I tired of asking the AI
exactly where the AI server farm in North Dakota was
going to be and I couldn't come up with an answer,
I did something that was very human. I texted my
brother in law, who is there, and I said, where's
it going to be? Is it going to be on
our land? And he texted back and said, no, it's
going to be on the other side of the freeway,
by the road by the grain elevators, which I knew exactly.
And AI would never know that I knew that particular intersection,
or that describing it as on the other side of
the road by the elevators would describe precisely where it
would want to be. Maybe it will someday. Maybe one
day you'll tune into this podcast and all of us
will be dead and we'll still be nattering away here,
and won't that be fun? But we have to teach it,
like Rob how to interrupt the segue, and we have
to do a variety of other little fine tuning things.
In the meantime, I think we'll be able to get
one thousand podcasts with still one hundred percent authentic human
beings here taking up your time. And I appreciate you
taking the time to listen to us. By the way,
we were brought to you by ricochet dot com. You
can support the site, the podcast and all the other
things we do by going there and not just looking
at it, but signing up. It's cheap, lot, it's cheap,
and what you get as a member side that is
the communities I keep saying you've been looking for all
these days on your Internet. It's not Facebook. It's not
as banale that, it's not as crazy fire hose of
nonsense as Twitter next can be. It is a sane, civil,
center right conversation. And we love all those sibilings because
they are important. If you can leave us a five
star review at Apple Podcasts, we'd like that very much.
Thank you. And that's about all I have to say
except I'm out for a couple of weeks. I leave
you guys to your own devices and I will see. Oh, Charles,
you know what I'm gonna ask, don't you or don't you?
Speaker 5: I looked it up.
Speaker 1: Okay, So uh, this is Ricochet Podcast, the Ricochet and
number version.
Speaker 5: What four point fourteen point fourteen point two? That's what
that last week you said you knew you were going
to ask, and I thought I did know that, and
I didn't look it up so this week, and then
you nearly didn't ask, and I thought, wow, I've got
it wrong both weeks, but now I haven't.
Speaker 1: That's where we are four point and then a whole
bunch of fourteen's. That's where we'll see you at ricochet
dot com. See later, guys, Goodbye,