Speaker 1: Now you sound so much better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, then we're good.
Speaker 1: Then that's the great James Lylax, not the airline pilot,
Speaker 1: James Lylyx. We were getting before.
Speaker 2: Like that.
Speaker 3: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
Speaker 3: what you can do for your country.
Speaker 1: Mister Grbachov, Tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Speaker 2: Stephen Haywood. I'm James Lylyx, and today we looked at
Speaker 2: Tim Carney about babies. Who's making them? Do we need more?
Speaker 2: Why aren't we?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 2: So forth? So let's have ourselves a podcast.
Speaker 3: I would like to know what your solution would be
Speaker 3: for gun violence.
Speaker 2: Great question.
Speaker 4: I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws,
Speaker 4: mental health support.
Speaker 2: And community engagement.
Speaker 4: We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections,
Speaker 4: making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It's about building
Speaker 4: a culture of kindness and understanding. What do you think
Speaker 4: about that?
Speaker 2: I think that's a great idea, Joaquin, I see dam
Speaker 2: people welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number seven
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty two. Why don't you join us at
Speaker 2: ricochet dot com? Why not? There is no compelling reason
Speaker 2: on this firmamentism and said that you shouldn't because once
Speaker 2: you go there, you're going to find the most compelling,
Speaker 2: stimulating conversation and community on the web, the place you've
Speaker 2: been looking for all of these years. Ricochet dot com.
Speaker 2: I am joined, well, I am. I should tell you
Speaker 2: that first, James Lilas here in Minneapolis, overcast, cloudy, wind
Speaker 2: in the trees, and I'm joined by two people I
Speaker 2: believe are probably in unbearably sunny climbs at the moment,
Speaker 2: Stephen Hayward in California and Charles CW. Cook in Florida. Gentlemen,
Speaker 2: how are you to date?
Speaker 3: I'm well, James, but it's cloudy and cold and overcast
Speaker 3: here in coastal California, believe it or not, so I
Speaker 3: share your pain.
Speaker 1: And well, it is monsoon season, dark, angry skies, constant lightning,
Speaker 1: the rumbling of under and rain rain, rain.
Speaker 2: Oh. I like that. Well, then we're all in somewhat
Speaker 2: depressing climbs, but all I assume in a chury mood. Nonetheless, Charles,
Speaker 2: do you ever have a bolt of lightning strike one
Speaker 2: of those perambulating four legged monstrosities you have down there
Speaker 2: and just blow it? Up. Does that ever happen? Does
Speaker 2: anybody ever seen a crock just get atomized by a
Speaker 2: bolt from the blue?
Speaker 1: I thought for a moment you were being rude about
Speaker 1: my dog. I have never seen that, and I don't
Speaker 1: know what would happen to analogate. We did have a
Speaker 1: lightning strike recently that came very very close to hitting
Speaker 1: our house, and it caused a brown out and everything
Speaker 1: turned off, and then some things took a while to
Speaker 1: turn back on again, and I put all sorts of
Speaker 1: expletives together and was not impressed. But thankfully everything came back.
Speaker 1: So thank you Search Protectors. You sacrifice yourself for my good.
Speaker 2: See. I would think that you tech, that you are
Speaker 2: man who no doubt has all of his cat's six
Speaker 2: cables arranged by color and cinched by tie zip, that
Speaker 2: you would have a generator, and that you would, like
Speaker 2: many men with a generator, be gladdened to the reaches
Speaker 2: of your soul by the fact that you actually could
Speaker 2: go over and trip on the jenny and enjoy electricity
Speaker 2: in the boons of modern line. But you don't.
Speaker 1: Well, I've considered it. Maybe it's in my future.
Speaker 2: As have I. I've also considered a battery backup that
Speaker 2: will enable myself to be powered for at least up
Speaker 2: to thirty minutes until you know, I have to go
Speaker 2: back into the darkness. Speaking of the darkness, we have
Speaker 2: democracy dying in darkness in Texas apparently, where the Democrats
Speaker 2: have fled rather than perform some sort of gerry manning,
Speaker 2: gerry mandering vivisection on the beloved state. And from what
Speaker 2: I understand, they've gone to Illinois, which, as someone once
Speaker 2: described it, as districts that looked like somebody gave an
Speaker 2: etcher sketch to a raccoon. It's an amusing little turn
Speaker 2: of events. We've seen it elsewhere in Wisconsin, where the
Speaker 2: legislators fled rather than perform their sworn duty. What's going
Speaker 2: on in Texas? And is this going to lead, Heaven
Speaker 2: Forfend to a nation wide reaction from the Democrats that
Speaker 2: will force them to go against their principles and craft
Speaker 2: districts that seem only to reflect to certain societal, racial,
Speaker 2: and ideological components.
Speaker 5: Well, I guess I'll go first.
Speaker 3: First of all, you can hide a lot of Texas
Speaker 3: legislators behind Governor Pritzker of Illinois, so that was probably
Speaker 3: a shrewd place to escape fat shaming.
Speaker 2: Fat shaming not allowed on.
Speaker 3: This Okay, First of all, this is so ridiculous. Jerry
Speaker 3: Mandering has been done forever. Everyone knows that it only
Speaker 3: became a threat to democracy when Republicans got good at it,
Speaker 3: which they got good at it starting twenty years ago
Speaker 3: or so, I'm so old. I remember in the eighties
Speaker 3: when out here in California it was generally acknowledged that
Speaker 3: the aggressive jerrymandering netted Democrats five House seats above the
Speaker 3: intrinsic Votingsfore what a more neutral map would have produced.
Speaker 3: And Republicans, I think at least three times in the eighties,
Speaker 3: put very expensive ballot initiatives on the ballot to try
Speaker 3: and get fair redistricting and lost all three times. It
Speaker 3: never just moves the needle with voters very much. It's
Speaker 3: easy to campaign against. And yeah, so I mean Phil Burton,
Speaker 3: he was the famous congressman from San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi's
Speaker 3: predecessor in that seat. He called the California Maps his
Speaker 3: contribution to modern art, because you know, like the Illinois
Speaker 3: districts are all very you know, I went around here
Speaker 3: and there. The two things interesting about this. At least
Speaker 3: two is Democrats don't have much running room. If you
Speaker 3: look at Illinois or Maryland or Massachusetts, where you know,
Speaker 3: Republicans got thirty five to forty percent of the total
Speaker 3: vote for House seats, have zero House seats. It's been
Speaker 3: so skillfully jerrymandered that you know, they can't jerrymander it
Speaker 3: any further if you're a Democrat. And then beyond that,
Speaker 3: if you look ahead five years in the next census,
Speaker 3: the blue states are going to lose I don't know,
Speaker 3: something like ten House seats, California is gonna lose three
Speaker 3: and so forth, and all the seats are going to
Speaker 3: go to guess where, Texas, Florida, Tennessee. They're going to
Speaker 3: go to mostly red states where Republicans are going to
Speaker 3: capture the lion's share of them.
Speaker 5: And so one little.
Speaker 3: Tippet is, if you ran the reran the twenty twenty election,
Speaker 3: I think this is right. With the vote splits that
Speaker 3: you had, Donald Trump would have won the electoral College
Speaker 3: because Michigan's going to lose a seat and you know
Speaker 3: some of the other Pennsylvania is going to lose two seats,
Speaker 3: and so suddenly the Democrats are looking at wipeout beyond
Speaker 3: the next census in all likelihood.
Speaker 5: So I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly why the Texans decided to do this,
Speaker 3: except I think they looked around and said, you know
Speaker 3: what we can, so let's try it.
Speaker 1: Charles Well, I keep being asked by people if I
Speaker 1: care about this, by which they mean am I upset
Speaker 1: about it? And the answer is no. And the reason
Speaker 1: that I'm not upset about it is this was just explained.
Speaker 1: The Democrats have already done this. We already live in
Speaker 1: a world in which gerrymandering is the norm. The term
Speaker 1: comes from Elbridge Gerry, who's a founder, So this has
Speaker 1: been a political question as long as the Republic has existed.
Speaker 1: The ability to gerrymander has been increased by the advent
Speaker 1: of powerful computers, which is why you're seeing this arms race.
Speaker 1: But it's just totally bizarre to me to see these
Speaker 1: complaints for a couple of reasons. First, the Democrats keep saying,
Speaker 1: while if you do this, then we're going to have to,
Speaker 1: uh what you already did it right? And two, we
Speaker 1: already have a census that is out of whack with
Speaker 1: the country as it actually exists. And I've said this
Speaker 1: over and over and I'll say it again. I am
Speaker 1: so sick of hearing about our democracy. Our democracy usually
Speaker 1: means that those who won power have done something that
Speaker 1: progressives don't like. It's not really a question of democracy,
Speaker 1: it's a question of policy. Defund planned PARENT and defund
Speaker 1: NPR are what you will. This is actually a question
Speaker 1: of our democracy. This census mess up. This is the
Speaker 1: gears of how our system works. It affects the presidency,
Speaker 1: it affects a House of Representatives, and by extension, it
Speaker 1: affects the Supreme Court. So I can't get upset about this.
Speaker 1: If you ask me a different question, which is do
Speaker 1: I like this trend? Do I think there will be
Speaker 1: some negative consequences of this trend, I would have a
Speaker 1: different answer. Yes, I do think there will be some
Speaker 1: negative consequences of this trend. One example will be the
Speaker 1: creation of more safe seats and therefore more people who
Speaker 1: are unresponsive to democratic pressures and more people, frankly on
Speaker 1: both sides, who are crazy. But we cannot live in
Speaker 1: a country in which this is only a problem when
Speaker 1: Republicans do it. And that is the way that this
Speaker 1: has been cast. And I'm not playing along. I'm glad
Speaker 1: Texas is doing this. Have you seen Mayorland And the
Speaker 1: fact that they flew to Illinois, the most erubunted state
Speaker 1: in the country, is just the icing on the cake.
Speaker 1: And none of the media outlets that have covered this
Speaker 1: appointed that out. It's like fleeing to Arizona to escape
Speaker 1: the heat.
Speaker 2: Well, two things in respond to what you just said.
Speaker 2: When you said that, the Democrats have said, well, now
Speaker 2: we have to respond. You hear this again and again.
Speaker 2: The Republicans do something that is outside of their usual
Speaker 2: parameters of action, i e. They're pushing back, they're actually fighting,
Speaker 2: they're actually standing up, they're actually not just acquiescing to
Speaker 2: some incremental dimunation. And all of a sudden, the gloves
Speaker 2: come out, and the Democrats say that, you know, up
Speaker 2: to now we have been virtuous and clean and full
Speaker 2: of fair play, but now, regrettably, with a deep sense
Speaker 2: of dismay, we must now get down in the trenches
Speaker 2: and fight as dirty as they do, as if somehow,
Speaker 2: And I hear this all the time for people on
Speaker 2: the Democratic side, that they're always being rolled by the
Speaker 2: Republicans because they play virtuously the idea that either side,
Speaker 2: of course has clean hands is ridiculous, but I find
Speaker 2: that self delusion to be just hilarious. The second is
Speaker 2: is that you said, when you're jerrymandering that it comes
Speaker 2: from who it comes from a name of a guy,
Speaker 2: but his name is spelled is pronounced with a heart
Speaker 2: G as opposed to the soft G of jerrymandering. It's
Speaker 2: like gif It's like the whole gift debate that we
Speaker 2: seem to keep having back and back. Just as the
Speaker 2: gift debate was spoiled by the inventor of the gift
Speaker 2: coming out with an absolutely wrong answer to how it's pronounced.
Speaker 2: I expect that somebody will say on the mid the
Speaker 2: you know, the the guy who is the origin of
Speaker 2: the gerrymander word, and and throw his his his hat
Speaker 2: in with a with a soft G. So I'm going
Speaker 2: to say Gary Mander from now on and have it,
Speaker 2: and people will look at me in a peculiar fashion.
Speaker 2: Can I just add that I hope no, you can't, Stephen, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I can't.
Speaker 3: I just hope that Texas will preserve a seat for
Speaker 3: Jasmine Crockett because I want her to be the face
Speaker 3: of the Democratic part for as long.
Speaker 2: As possible, if not the rhetorical wellspring right. One more
Speaker 2: point before we go to a guest here. There was
Speaker 2: recently a crime in d C which was broken up
Speaker 2: by big balls. And you don't often get the chance
Speaker 2: to say that, especially when the person to whom the
Speaker 2: nickname applies seemed to be the opposite of but that's him,
Speaker 2: and there was, since it was Doge related, since it
Speaker 2: was in a nice neighborhood I can't remember, since the
Speaker 2: combatants were not the usual sort that you find in
Speaker 2: DC crime stories. There have been calls by Trump and
Speaker 2: others to federalize d C, to yank away some of
Speaker 2: the tenets of home rule and say, no, we're going
Speaker 2: to make this place safe again. We're going to make
Speaker 2: DC walkup a Liverpool, et cetera. Uh, what do you
Speaker 2: think about that?
Speaker 1: I'm totally fine with it. DC is a federal district.
Speaker 1: It is under the plenary control of the federal government,
Speaker 1: and if it wishes, it can set up a secondary
Speaker 1: delegation of power to a bull or a mayor, or
Speaker 1: really whatever form of government it wishes. That it's not
Speaker 1: a monarchy. So if that secondary delegation, which is optional,
Speaker 1: is not working out, the federal government can take control
Speaker 1: of the federal district. There are some questions as to
Speaker 1: whether or not Congress needs to get involved in this
Speaker 1: that are important, but as a structural question it seems
Speaker 1: to me self evidently allowable. Steve, Yeah, I mean it.
Speaker 3: Was decades ago, actually in nineteenth century when I guess
Speaker 3: Congress ceded the Virginia side of the Potomac River back
Speaker 3: to the state of Virginia. And I've long thought that
Speaker 3: the best solution to all this is to take most
Speaker 3: of the District of Columbia and cede to the state
Speaker 3: of Maryland and just make it part of Maryland, and
Speaker 3: then the federal government would control really the mall and
Speaker 3: the sort of core federal buildings, you know, the parts
Speaker 3: where the footprint is, you know, between Independence and Constitution Avenue,
Speaker 3: maybe extending K Street. I don't know, but I'd be
Speaker 3: small and compact and then let the rest of the
Speaker 3: city be part of Maryland, and it's Maryland's problem.
Speaker 2: From a resident of DC, I couldn't agree more. The
Speaker 2: idea that it somehow we become a state was always
Speaker 2: the most laughable thing that you can think of. Before
Speaker 2: we go to our guest, though, one little note as
Speaker 2: far as big Balls goes, and you just don't often
Speaker 2: get to hear somebody say that legitimately on a Ricochet podcast.
Speaker 2: Do you guys know his real name?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Edward Korstein. Let me read you from his Wikipedia page.
Speaker 2: Corstein was born in December two thousand and five. His
Speaker 2: father's Charles Korstein, the CEO of a company called Lesser Evil. Okay.
Speaker 2: His maternal grandfather, Valerie Martinov, was a KGB lieutenant colonel
Speaker 2: executed by the Soviet Union as a double agent.
Speaker 1: Well who knew.
Speaker 2: After his execution, his widow moved with their children, including
Speaker 2: Korstine's mother Anna, to the United States. His grandfather was
Speaker 2: popped in lu Bianca by the KGB for being a
Speaker 2: double agent. Yes, I know the things that you learn
Speaker 2: sometimes when people get the bleep beaten out of them
Speaker 2: in the DC environs, we now go happily to Tim Carney,
Speaker 2: Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute of senior columnist
Speaker 2: for The Washington Examiner. He is also the author of
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen's Alienated America and more recently, Family Unfriendly. How
Speaker 2: our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs
Speaker 2: to be. Tim, welcome back.
Speaker 6: Hey, how's it going.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about falling fertility rates, because that's what everybody
Speaker 2: wants to hear in a weekend, is yay or nay.
Speaker 2: I remember growing up with a four horsemen of the apocalypse,
Speaker 2: one of which was going to be overpopulation, starvation, planetary despoolation.
Speaker 2: We got to stop ZPG all the rest of it
Speaker 2: a start. Contrast to what happened after World War Two,
Speaker 2: and everybody came home and said, here are these vast
Speaker 2: potato tracks in Long Island. Let us fill them with
Speaker 2: houses and populate them with kids running gambling about the
Speaker 2: lawn on a Saturday afternoon. Was a different view of
Speaker 2: what families should do. And now the West faces this
Speaker 2: disinclination to have children. Why and what do we do
Speaker 2: about it?
Speaker 6: You got three minutes, million places to go with there,
Speaker 6: I'll start where I usually don't start, because you mentioned
Speaker 6: the baby boom. I think that the most underappreciated factor
Speaker 6: in our baby busts is civilizational sadness. That's a term
Speaker 6: I came up with for the belief that we're just
Speaker 6: not good. We being whatever humans Americans, white people, middle
Speaker 6: class people, Brooklyn hipsters. We are just not good is
Speaker 6: the answer that so many people in the West, in
Speaker 6: Canada and Europe and the US, etc. Give And when
Speaker 6: did we feel the opposite of this? The most in
Speaker 6: nineteen forty five, when our guys got off the boat,
Speaker 6: just having defeated two evil empires. Our women met them
Speaker 6: on the pier, just having made all the weapons and
Speaker 6: kept the economy running, and they smooch on the peer,
Speaker 6: go back to the chapel, get married, and have a
Speaker 6: ton of kids, because more than ever before, ever since,
Speaker 6: we knew we were good. And guess where the baby
Speaker 6: busts in the West started in the twentieth century. It
Speaker 6: started in Germany and Japan and Italy, places where they
Speaker 6: couldn't answer that question.
Speaker 2: Are we good?
Speaker 6: They couldn't affirmatively say that they either felt ashamed or
Speaker 6: they felt guilt. And so where does that guilt come from?
Speaker 5: Here?
Speaker 6: Well, climate guilt is like the surface manifestation of it.
Speaker 6: But I think it's a deeper guilt that's inevitable in
Speaker 6: a post Christian, post religious society.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting thesis. Is Steve Heyward out in California.
Speaker 3: Tim And by the way, I couldn't help when you
Speaker 3: mentioned that civilizational sadness. The social scientist in me says, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: how do you quantify that? And I know there are surveys,
Speaker 3: but I also remember, and James may remember this, in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty four, Walter Bondale would tick off the list
Speaker 3: of interest groups that he was had affinity for, so
Speaker 3: you know, blacks, women, gays, and the sad.
Speaker 1: But he was.
Speaker 3: We said that I'm the candidate for the sad and
Speaker 3: of course really he was just a sad candidate, as
Speaker 3: we know. But so though there's something to that. I
Speaker 3: think I've long thought that there was something to that,
Speaker 3: and I actually can point to data, right. I mean,
Speaker 3: something I point out to students is if you look
Speaker 3: at the long term surveys, they really start in the
Speaker 3: fifties of people who say they had high trust or
Speaker 3: confidence in American institutions, especially the government, it was up
Speaker 3: around eighty percent, you know, eight zero. Today it's around
Speaker 3: fifteen percent. And that's public sector, private sector, right, And
Speaker 3: there's a lot to all that, but that's a huge change,
Speaker 3: and I have lots of theories about that. But nonetheless,
Speaker 3: if you are, if you're in a sour boot about
Speaker 3: your current circumstances and gloomy about the future. Of course,
Speaker 3: it's going to depress fertility rates. At one more thought,
Speaker 3: and maybe you've written about this, is after the big
Speaker 3: blackout in New York in nineteen sixty six and then
Speaker 3: again in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 5: Guess what, nine months later there were full maternity rooms
Speaker 5: because what do people do now? That didn't happen.
Speaker 6: During COVID the pandemic, correct the pandemic.
Speaker 3: And the reason was is that people knew in sixty
Speaker 3: six and seventy seven the lights are going to come
Speaker 3: back on, We'll get back to normal, life will return
Speaker 3: to norm will be good.
Speaker 5: So let's make whoopee.
Speaker 3: Whereas during the pandemic there was not that confidence that
Speaker 3: you know, what's going to happen after this? How long
Speaker 3: is it going to go? Sorry, go ahead, I.
Speaker 6: Was gonna say. And there was the isolation. And so
Speaker 6: you were talking earlier about trust in institutions, trust in institutions,
Speaker 6: trust in neighbors, trust in humanity, something to lean on,
Speaker 6: whether it's a church, a community, something like that, all
Speaker 6: of that really matters. Like the undertaking of getting married
Speaker 6: and raising children is not a solo undertaking. As a
Speaker 6: wise woman once put it, it takes a village to
Speaker 6: raise a child. Right now, she met the Department of
Speaker 6: Health and Human Services. But anybody out there who's raised
Speaker 6: kids knows it means their neighbor, it means their pastor,
Speaker 6: it means the older kids down the block who babysit.
Speaker 6: It means the younger family down the block who hires
Speaker 6: your kids to babysit and mow the lawn. It takes
Speaker 6: so much support to raise a family, and so you
Speaker 6: need to trust that people are good. And then COVID
Speaker 6: was it was really a sad period. I mean I
Speaker 6: remember during the lockdowns thinking, we're not gonna like want
Speaker 6: to talk about this, We're gonna be embarrassed. I mean
Speaker 6: I spent almost a month like just I had a
Speaker 6: nice backyard and letting my kids run around the backyard
Speaker 6: and not seeing other people. And then I thought, what
Speaker 6: in the world did I just do? And so so
Speaker 6: many people just look back on that with a little
Speaker 6: bit of embarrassment and shame and don't want to talk
Speaker 6: about it. But it was deeply sad and it was
Speaker 6: a lack of connection. And the people who thrived were
Speaker 6: the people who said, all right, most of our neighbors
Speaker 6: are being crazy. We're going to get together and we're
Speaker 6: going to form a pod. And what was a pod?
Speaker 6: A pod was a sort of a creation of something
Speaker 6: that used to be a little more natural, which is
Speaker 6: a bunch of different families hanging out without having to
Speaker 6: schedule anything. And so a huge part of what I
Speaker 6: write about in my book is like, that's what is
Speaker 6: missing is the informal support from neighborhoods and from something
Speaker 6: that you belong to, like a church.
Speaker 1: Most importantly so Atim Charles Cook, and of course we
Speaker 1: talked about this on my podcast. I love the book.
Speaker 1: Those are two different things you're describing. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: you have loneliness caused in that case by COVID, but
Speaker 1: more generally we're told people are sad and lonely and
Speaker 1: civilizational under confidence. I understand why the Germans felt bad
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty five, frankly, I think they still should
Speaker 1: as the Englishman in me. But I don't understand why
Speaker 1: so many Americans have come to believe that their country
Speaker 1: isn't good and have started to say things like, well,
Speaker 1: really raised children in this world? When we are, for
Speaker 1: all our problems, very rich and fun and dynamic and
Speaker 1: stable why do you think that has happened.
Speaker 6: No, I think that's a great question. So, first of all,
Speaker 6: it hasn't happened equally everywhere. White liberal women are the
Speaker 6: people who are most depressed about our society, least hopeful
Speaker 6: about the future, most negative, have the least trusts of
Speaker 6: everybody else. Church going people, while less happy, less trustful
Speaker 6: than a generation ago, are more happy, more trustful than
Speaker 6: almost anyone else.
Speaker 2: Let me let me step in for a second here.
Speaker 2: Could it be that that first group that you mentioned,
Speaker 2: the unhappy ones, are not having children because nobody wants
Speaker 2: to have children with them.
Speaker 6: I think it goes both ways. Your attractiveness is definitely
Speaker 6: uh is influenced by how how negative and unpleasant you are,
Speaker 6: and how you look at everything as an aggression, a microaggression, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, and I see problematic, endless tiktoks with these people
Speaker 2: in their cars with very large glasses and perhaps a
Speaker 2: septum ring and maybe a little, you know, kool Aid
Speaker 2: colored hair or something fulminating about this that or the other.
Speaker 2: The idea that somebody would look at that and say
Speaker 2: that is the person with whom I want to conjoin
Speaker 2: my genes and bring up a new generation. They have
Speaker 2: self I'm serious, they have self isolated by being such
Speaker 2: miserable people and keeping the bubbles.
Speaker 6: Were the misery. The misery is rooted in ideology. I
Speaker 6: think Charles was hinting at that, maybe, but I definitely
Speaker 6: think it is. And I think it's rooted in a
Speaker 6: particular flavor of materialists secularism, that people who try to
Speaker 6: find heaven on this earth always fail and so they're
Speaker 6: always unhappy, and that when autonomy becomes a god, then
Speaker 6: you're never going to give it up. I mean, what
Speaker 6: was the recent New York Times piece, the problem with mankeeping,
Speaker 6: and the big crux of the piece was the idea
Speaker 6: that some women are finding that their husbands really rely
Speaker 6: on them. And then there's all the there's all these
Speaker 6: other stories that are like that, and it's about creating,
Speaker 6: and it's frankly, and this is a good topic to
Speaker 6: talk about. A hyper individualism. Individualism is central to the
Speaker 6: American dream, it's central to our identity. It's a lot
Speaker 6: of conservatives you should just call ourselves individualists, right like
Speaker 6: fifty sixty years ago. But also that's always been in
Speaker 6: the US in the context of tightly knit civil society
Speaker 6: and community. So to get back to Charles's point and
Speaker 6: to mention an older book I wrote, Alienated America. It's
Speaker 6: that we know each other less. The bowling alone stuff
Speaker 6: that Robert Putnam laid out twenty five years ago is
Speaker 6: still true. So the world is sadder if you don't
Speaker 6: belong to stuff, if you don't know your neighbors, because
Speaker 6: then you start to introduce new replacements. And so instead
Speaker 6: of being involved in your community, what the left does
Speaker 6: is they try to change the world. They get involved
Speaker 6: just in politics, and guess what, they fail to change
Speaker 6: the world. Trump gets reelected and Amy Cony Barricket's on
Speaker 6: the Supreme Court. And then when they fail to change
Speaker 6: the world, they get all depressed instead of going and like,
Speaker 6: you know, helping build a new playground at the at
Speaker 6: the local park.
Speaker 1: You were going to say something about immigrants.
Speaker 6: That's before I realized you were on the show, and
Speaker 6: I didn't want to offend you. No, immigrants are more
Speaker 6: hopeful in general in the US, and so people will
Speaker 6: point out that immigrants have a slightly higher birth rate
Speaker 6: than native born Americans, but that's entirely You could predict
Speaker 6: it all either by their more hope for the future
Speaker 6: of America, or by the fact that they're more religious
Speaker 6: than the native born. And so it's not I mean,
Speaker 6: Europe might have a different issue, but it's not you
Speaker 6: know these you know, swarthy, unkempt masses coming out and
Speaker 6: breeding like rabbits. It's people who kind of are a
Speaker 6: little more like the Mormons getting off a boat and
Speaker 6: showing up in the US. But it's only a slightly
Speaker 6: higher birth rate because they often assimilate to our low
Speaker 6: birth rate model here.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 3: So Tim, we said, I'm going to go there's sort
Speaker 3: of two different questions, one basic fertility and the other
Speaker 3: some of the wider social networks that are important. I
Speaker 3: think one question that may unite those two. Somebody's going
Speaker 3: to say this is a cliche four guys on a
Speaker 3: podcast saying isn't part of the problem as always women
Speaker 3: went to work. But you know, the point is if
Speaker 3: you're working, you know, you're not out doing the pta
Speaker 3: like my mom did, you know during the Boer War
Speaker 3: and all the rest of that. And and then and
Speaker 3: also it's more of an economic trade off to have
Speaker 3: more than one child. And so there's that to reflect on.
Speaker 3: And I'll do this sequel Somewhere in the last week
Speaker 3: or two I saw a story I can't remember if
Speaker 3: it was The Times of the Wall Street Journal that said, huh,
Speaker 3: feminists have grudgingly conceded that you can't have it all,
Speaker 3: But guess what conservative women do seem to be having
Speaker 3: it all. And part of the hatred for Caroline Levitt,
Speaker 3: just to pick the most representative figure, is she's a
Speaker 3: very young mom, and boy does she look happy in
Speaker 3: fulfill She's having the time of her life. And that
Speaker 3: must absolutely outrage the sort of feminist left and so
Speaker 3: forth right, So I don't reflect on that. I mean
Speaker 3: the women workplace and stuff, right, go.
Speaker 6: Ahead, work, gender, community, birth rates, all these stuff interacting
Speaker 6: one hundred ways. Just to list a couple, you refer
Speaker 6: to the volunteering. Emma Green, who has written for The Atlantic.
Speaker 6: I'm not exactly sure where she is, but she wrote
Speaker 6: a piece a couple of years ago on how all
Speaker 6: the volunteering in the US has basically been done by
Speaker 6: mothers who no longer have really little kids and they
Speaker 6: don't have a full time job. Now, some of this
Speaker 6: was bad, like prohibition, but most of it was good, right,
Speaker 6: even abolition, A lot of that was driven by stay
Speaker 6: at home moms, right and so, and then in the neighborhood,
Speaker 6: I was think of the how many people my age
Speaker 6: who we were the most sort of running around unsupervised
Speaker 6: super generation possibly, how many of us have the story
Speaker 6: of doing something stupid getting yelled at by somebody else's mom,
Speaker 6: and then thinking can I get home to explain it
Speaker 6: to my mom before she gets a story from this
Speaker 6: lady on her front porches. Right, and so that safety
Speaker 6: provided by the fact that you know there's other people
Speaker 6: out in the neighborhood watching your kids during on a
Speaker 6: summer afternoon, that's huge. One of the ways I try
Speaker 6: to broach this difficult situation of talking about, well, yeah,
Speaker 6: when both parents are working, they're less likely to have
Speaker 6: more kids, they're more likely to put off kids is
Speaker 6: to point out that there has that. It's one of
Speaker 6: the problems has been also men not putting family first.
Speaker 6: Now I have to spend more than forty hours a
Speaker 6: week working, thankfully some of it I'm like today, I'm
Speaker 6: doing this from home. But family is more important. Like
Speaker 6: all you men listening, your family's more important than your job. Okay,
Speaker 6: you might have a specified role in your family of
Speaker 6: being the primary breadwinner. But that's like, you know, if
Speaker 6: anybody specialized role. I make the analogy to Apple. Apple
Speaker 6: has stores that bring in all the revenue. That doesn't
Speaker 6: mean the stores are more important than the design. And
Speaker 6: so I think valuing stay at home wives, acknowledging stay
Speaker 6: at home dads. They're a small minority making life better
Speaker 6: for stay home wives. And actually my old county, Montgomery County,
Speaker 6: which I hate on all the time, actually had a
Speaker 6: lot of really good library and rec center programs for
Speaker 6: stay at home moms and their little kids. There's a
Speaker 6: lot of things we can do besides saying, all right,
Speaker 6: you know, things were better in the nineteen sixties when
Speaker 6: you had single breadwinner and because women didn't have as
Speaker 6: much of an opportunity, right, men had like a sort
Speaker 6: of affirmative action. So guys, you gotta man up, compete
Speaker 6: with the women, get a good job, but then acknowledge
Speaker 6: that your family is more important. And I think if
Speaker 6: I haven't, I'm not sure of this, but I think
Speaker 6: that when I lead with that, then it's more easier
Speaker 6: to explain to women, not the radical feminists, but to
Speaker 6: normal women also women stay at home wives and moms
Speaker 6: because that's most of whom stays at home. They're good
Speaker 6: for society, they're good for your marriage, they're good for
Speaker 6: the kids, but they're good for everybody else's kids, and
Speaker 6: not everybody can afford it. So you're actually doing a
Speaker 6: benefit if you could afford it and you pull that off. No.
Speaker 2: I was a stay at home dad for many early
Speaker 2: years of my daughter, and the idea that somehow that's
Speaker 2: sitting with her and playing and watching Elmo and having
Speaker 2: lunch and going shopping and going to the park. Somehow
Speaker 2: that that was insuperior, that that was not as good
Speaker 2: as being in an office somewhere where somebody was putting
Speaker 2: together a spreadsheet and a slide deck to talk about
Speaker 2: maximizing strategies for the quarter to come. It's insane, it's
Speaker 2: so much better to be home with your kids. But
Speaker 2: we have been told, however, I mean the society in general.
Speaker 2: The lessons over the last twenty thirty forty years have
Speaker 2: been that work is the is where you get your fulfillment,
Speaker 2: and somehow the idea of girl bossing your way through
Speaker 2: an email job until you're thirty two thirty three is
Speaker 2: preferable to actually check out a little bit earlier and
Speaker 2: taking time with the kids. I don't see that message
Speaker 2: changing anytime soon unless women start to ask for something different.
Speaker 6: And I see some positive signs. And now part of
Speaker 6: it is, you know, it's in conservative subcultures that you
Speaker 6: see these positive signs. But I do think that, yeah,
Speaker 6: that the idea of that marriage and family can be
Speaker 6: fulfilling with normies, that's what we have to worry about.
Speaker 6: Right There are going to be people who are going
Speaker 6: to be one girl bosses, but also it's an opportunity
Speaker 6: for schools to do something different. I always think about that.
Speaker 6: You talk about careers, does anybody talk about which careers
Speaker 6: are more family friendly than other careers. I always think,
Speaker 6: on the one hand, something has a ton of flexibility,
Speaker 6: like being a writer. On the other hand, something that
Speaker 6: has just sort of infinite demand and a different type
Speaker 6: of flexibility, like being a nurse. Nurses if they're like, oh,
Speaker 6: I'm not going to work for the next four months
Speaker 6: and then I'll call you and you'll give me shifts,
Speaker 6: they can do that. And it's just going to get
Speaker 6: more extreme as the population agents. So when you're in school,
Speaker 6: when you're in leaving high school, going into college, are
Speaker 6: you thinking I want to be a parent, which career
Speaker 6: not only can make money, but also in one way
Speaker 6: or another fit well within family life. Schools could lead
Speaker 6: the role in planting that idea in people's head.
Speaker 2: How about this, Let's posit something contrapositive. Let let's let's
Speaker 2: say that what we've seen in the last X number
Speaker 2: of years and is an expansion of the opportunities open
Speaker 2: to women, and that this is good and that they
Speaker 2: are no longer locked necessarily into a profession where they have,
Speaker 2: you know, a life where they have to be a
Speaker 2: secretary for three years and then go home and stay
Speaker 2: there forever until the kids are out, and then they
Speaker 2: either do the Betty for damn thing and pop pills
Speaker 2: or they join in our class or whatever. We have
Speaker 2: a new paradigm where they could work, where there's more flexibility,
Speaker 2: more understanding of diverse roles for women. And if the
Speaker 2: consequence of this is a lower birth rate, that's not
Speaker 2: a bad trade off to make, because we have expanded
Speaker 2: opportunity and rights to some people and this is the cost,
Speaker 2: but overall society benefits from this expansion of rights and
Speaker 2: erosion of the old restrictive social model. Someone might make
Speaker 2: that case, might they not?
Speaker 6: Yes, And I mean I've thrown a couple of things. A.
Speaker 6: It is true that stay at home moms used to
Speaker 6: be a lot less happy than they are today, in
Speaker 6: large part because a lot of women were what you
Speaker 6: were describing. They didn't choose to be stay at home moms.
Speaker 6: But if they weren't, you know, top of the class,
Speaker 6: absolute a plus, they were not going to have the
Speaker 6: opportunities to stay in the workforce. So now that women
Speaker 6: who are staying at home moms basically have chosen it,
Speaker 6: they're a lot happier. But b if more education, more
Speaker 6: education for women is going to translate into a lower
Speaker 6: birth rate in most societies. But that means that we
Speaker 6: have to ask, Okay, what are the things that we
Speaker 6: are willing to change to help people have as many
Speaker 6: babies as they want and want more babies than they
Speaker 6: currently want. And for me, part of that is has
Speaker 6: to do with revitalizing neighborhoods, making parenting more fun, making
Speaker 6: housing more affordable. Housing is the affordability story. I can't
Speaker 6: afford kids, that's mostly bs. But when it comes to
Speaker 6: owning a home, I really I think the numbers really
Speaker 6: show that that is driving down the birth right that
Speaker 6: homes are getting. So there are all sorts of things
Speaker 6: where if we take some moderate amount of feminism as
Speaker 6: a given and a positive thing, we can say, Okay, hey,
Speaker 6: let's dial back some of the autonomy worshiping feminism, but
Speaker 6: b let's find all these other real world ways to
Speaker 6: promote family.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, your mention of housing is a good lead in
Speaker 3: for me wanting to go at this at the macro
Speaker 3: level instead of the neighborhood and household level we've been
Speaker 3: mostly talking about. And so you know, some of our
Speaker 3: friends sake, and we have the childcare tax credit, and
Speaker 3: a lot of our pro family friends say let's make
Speaker 3: that bigger, and our supply side friends say, no, that
Speaker 3: keeps us from lowering rates. It would be better. And
Speaker 3: then I raise my hand and point to Hungary, which,
Speaker 3: as you know, very pro family country. The third latest innovation
Speaker 3: is if you have three children or more, you are
Speaker 3: exempt from the income tax for life. That's the ultimate
Speaker 3: supply side policy.
Speaker 5: Right. It's not clear whether it has moved the needle
Speaker 5: fertility there.
Speaker 2: It's ticked up some.
Speaker 5: But the point is, is there any macro.
Speaker 3: Policies something not crazy like that, but something really out
Speaker 3: of box like that that could reinforce this and actually
Speaker 3: nudge the fertility rate up in a significant way.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm skeptical of some of what Hungary is doing.
Speaker 6: Has been great and it's working, and they've just almost
Speaker 6: setting the norm that family this is what grown ups do.
Speaker 6: You grow up, you finish school, you get a job,
Speaker 6: you get married, you have kids. Like, restoring that as
Speaker 6: a norm would be good. But you know one thing
Speaker 6: they have that underminds that norm. That tax policy you're
Speaker 6: talking about, it only applies to women because they don't
Speaker 6: treat the household, the family as a tax unit. They
Speaker 6: only treat women. So our tax policy actually understands that
Speaker 6: the money I make isn't my money, It belongs to
Speaker 6: me and my wife and so like it basically gets
Speaker 6: divided by two for our tax purposes. So Hungary isn't
Speaker 6: quite doing that. I would think if if you just
Speaker 6: said I only get to use the federal government tools,
Speaker 6: and so I don't get to like pave new sidewalks
Speaker 6: or like abolished travel baseball or any of the rest
Speaker 6: of that. If I only get to use federal government tools,
Speaker 6: I would think, what can we do to promote the
Speaker 6: creation of new housing, and specifically, I think, and I'm
Speaker 6: researching this now, I think sort of that there's something
Speaker 6: between sort of large massive lots and MC mansions and
Speaker 6: massive apartment buildings where the sweet spot lies. That's pro
Speaker 6: family housing, town homes, that kind of thing, pro family
Speaker 6: more housing would be a big part of it. And
Speaker 6: I mean that would be the number one thing I
Speaker 6: would do. And then I would make sure that employers
Speaker 6: feel free to use a horrible word to discriminate, to
Speaker 6: discriminate in favor of parents and families, and they do
Speaker 6: to some extent, right Like American Enterprise in WHIT pays
Speaker 6: my health insurance most of it. What I pay for
Speaker 6: my premiums is equal to somebody who has one kid,
Speaker 6: but AI then is paying for all six of mic.
Speaker 6: So there is some pro family discrimination.
Speaker 5: Like I was glad you slip that into it. I
Speaker 5: wanted to mention that you're doing your part.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's lead with our chin and just say no
Speaker 6: employers are allowed to promote family, and there's reason for
Speaker 6: them to do it, which is that fathers, married fathers
Speaker 6: are better workers than other men. And so but yeah, really,
Speaker 6: right now, I don't know, maybe you guys have other
Speaker 6: macro proposals, and I'll tell you what I think of them,
Speaker 6: but something that would promote more family housing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a question. You think that kids are
Speaker 1: good and families are good. And you also, and we
Speaker 1: talked about this on my podcast, brought in their religious element,
Speaker 1: which you've mentioned here as well. From a completely agnostic,
Speaker 1: hash even schatological view, is this choice or do we
Speaker 1: have to do this in some form or another. Big
Speaker 1: if you look at say the federal budget, there is
Speaker 1: a catastrophic consequence of not having kids. Our system is
Speaker 1: set up, not just Social Security and Medicare and other programs,
Speaker 1: but our economy is set up atop the presumption that
Speaker 1: either we are going to have lots of kids or
Speaker 1: we're going to have lots of immigrants, and if we
Speaker 1: don't do one or both of those things, it all collapses.
Speaker 1: So is this a Tim Connie thinks or is this
Speaker 1: actually Tim Connie knows and we're now just fighting over
Speaker 1: the details.
Speaker 6: Well, so, a one of the things I try to
Speaker 6: do with my books is to paint a positive vision
Speaker 6: to inspire someone. So I start with me taking my
Speaker 6: son to little to t ball and then realizing it
Speaker 6: was a bunch of parents hanging around drinking and it
Speaker 6: was the most fun thing in the world. And this
Speaker 6: too can be yours, dear listener. But on the on
Speaker 6: the darker side, I don't think talking about social security
Speaker 6: and medicare is dark enough because, as Krugman says, the
Speaker 6: sainted Paul Krugman, we could just print more money and so,
Speaker 6: but money is really only a reflection of productive work.
Speaker 6: And so the problem isn't just that there's going to
Speaker 6: be fewer people paying into a retirement system for more retirees.
Speaker 6: It's going to be the fewer people doing productive work.
Speaker 6: And maybe Google Gemini can replace the nine to one
Speaker 6: to one dispatcher on the other end of the phone
Speaker 6: very adequately and we can get away with massively smaller workforce,
Speaker 6: but maybe not, and that's a huge gamble. So fewer
Speaker 6: people doing productive work is I think a bigger problem.
Speaker 6: And then you mentioned immigration. A our three top sources
Speaker 6: of immigration in the United States, the highest number of
Speaker 6: immigrants come from Mexico, China, and India. All three of
Speaker 6: those countries are below replacement level themselves. So if there's
Speaker 6: one country that's not having babies and it can import babies,
Speaker 6: that's fine. The global birth rate might be low replacement
Speaker 6: right now, it's right out about the replacement, right, So
Speaker 6: that's would the US win in that regard, Probably we would.
Speaker 6: We would probably keep drawing people in. But it's also
Speaker 6: not sustainable. I think Europe is more acute the civilizational
Speaker 6: problems there because they're getting they're getting Muslims in a
Speaker 6: formerly Christian world. Well, we're getting largely Christians and a
Speaker 6: still kind of Christian world. But I think that trying
Speaker 6: to replace babies with immigrants really doesn't work. The way
Speaker 6: I treat my children is not a relationship of equality, right.
Speaker 6: If we're going to treat immigrants the way adult parents
Speaker 6: treat children, that's a pretty unstable situation. I don't know
Speaker 6: what you think about that, but I think that immigrants
Speaker 6: are plus in the US. But saying as Bell saw
Speaker 6: Hill at Brookings, who she was like the hero of
Speaker 6: one of my earlier books, but I quote her as
Speaker 6: a foil, she says, we don't need babies. We don't
Speaker 6: need more babies, we just need more immigrants. Think that
Speaker 6: that is setting up that is not the formula for
Speaker 6: social peace.
Speaker 1: I certainly agree with you that I don't want you
Speaker 1: to treat me like you do your.
Speaker 2: Children versus immigrants. Children more likely to carry on the
Speaker 2: nature of the character the founding precipts of the culture
Speaker 2: into which they were born. So there's that. Then again,
Speaker 2: when it comes to the future, people may say, well,
Speaker 2: you know what, I am not exactly all that upset
Speaker 2: about the idea of elon Musk optimist robots taking care
Speaker 2: of me when when I'm in the home, singing me
Speaker 2: a nice little song and picking me up with with gentle,
Speaker 2: loving hands. So maybe you know, the automation will do
Speaker 2: the rest of it. Who knows, but that there's a.
Speaker 6: Lot of people who would prefer to not talk to
Speaker 6: another human being. So all you introvert listeners out there, like, wow,
Speaker 6: robots so much better.
Speaker 2: Than he sounds awesome, especially since by then they'll probably
Speaker 2: be on Mars as well, doing line dances for tiktoks,
Speaker 2: and you know, you'll be able to communicate with you'll
Speaker 2: be able to adopt an optimist on you do your
Speaker 2: time sharing with a robot on Mars. I mean, entirely possible.
Speaker 2: But and I like all these possibilities because I am
Speaker 2: generally bullish and optimistic about humanity and its accomplishments. But
Speaker 2: we began by talking about how there's the West has
Speaker 2: a civilizational sads. Yes, you know, in the seventies people
Speaker 2: were saying, I'm not gonna have kids because there's gonna
Speaker 2: be famine. In the eighties they were saying, I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna have kids because there was gonna be nuclear war.
Speaker 2: And then it became I'm not gonna have kids because
Speaker 2: it was climate change, which all sounded like excuses. What
Speaker 2: these people really seem to come down to is what
Speaker 2: you're saying before, is the idea not just that Western
Speaker 2: civilization is some sort of baleful influence on the planet,
Speaker 2: but that humanity in general is a gross imposition at best,
Speaker 2: and a horrible virus attack on Gaya at worse, and
Speaker 2: that we really don't deserve to have stewardship at this
Speaker 2: place because we've done nothing but mucket up. And I
Speaker 2: all of this comes from self detestation of culture. It
Speaker 2: comes from you know, what people call cultural Marxism in
Speaker 2: the rest of it. But I think you can put
Speaker 2: it all at the feet of World War One and
Speaker 2: what it did to the spirit of Europe. And if
Speaker 2: I could go back in history, I wouldn't kill baby Hitler,
Speaker 2: I'd killed baby Gobriel Princeps, because then maybe we'd have
Speaker 2: a fighting chance in the twenty first century. Tim, it's
Speaker 2: been great fun, I tell you what.
Speaker 6: I love that theory. That's great. That should have been
Speaker 6: the opening to my book. Forget about the Tea Bault.
Speaker 2: There we go, family unfriendly, How our culture made raising
Speaker 2: kids much harder than it aids to be. The later
Speaker 2: from Tim Gurney the American Enterprise Institute, and of course
Speaker 2: you can read them, I assume in the Washington Examiner
Speaker 2: at regular intervals.
Speaker 6: Correct, Tim, absolutely, thank you for having me measure.
Speaker 2: We will talk to you later. See you then next book,
Speaker 2: if not earlier. Well, that was fun. And of course
Speaker 2: there's more things in the world to discuss, and I'm
Speaker 2: trying to think what they might be. We have and say, okay,
Speaker 2: we did redistricting. Right, we've already beaten a Sydney Sweeney
Speaker 2: story into the pulp for two weeks or something like that.
Speaker 2: What was the one to tell? Yeah, but you know
Speaker 2: there's there's there's booting and Trump going on, and there's
Speaker 2: the Ukraine War. I mean, I'm just I don't regard
Speaker 2: that stuff as being Oh, I know, I know, Israel
Speaker 2: wants to take over the entirety of Gaza. Good idea,
Speaker 2: bad idea. If Israel is going to be seen as
Speaker 2: the equivalent of Nanzi Germany, and its actions are going
Speaker 2: to be seen as the equivalent of the Nazi stormtroopers
Speaker 2: for doing what they've done thus far, there is nothing
Speaker 2: left rhetorically for their critics to accuse them of being
Speaker 2: if they take over the entirety of Gaza, striven of
Speaker 2: Hamas and do what they will, you guys, what say you?
Speaker 3: Well, I think maybe they don't have a choice. I'm
Speaker 3: sure Israel does not want to go back in and
Speaker 3: run Gaza, and there's a reason they got out twenty
Speaker 3: years ago.
Speaker 5: They were sick of the place.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, I think they're calling not
Speaker 3: exactly a bluff, but I think that we can tell
Speaker 3: that Hamas is not going to surrender. They're not going
Speaker 3: to make a deal for any hostages, and so the
Speaker 3: only thing left for Israel to do is finish the
Speaker 3: job and try and find hostages. Well, Hamas put out
Speaker 3: that gruesome video of an emaciated hostage digging his own grave.
Speaker 5: They didn't just.
Speaker 3: Put that out, you know, locally, they put it out
Speaker 3: for the whole world to see, and maybe they're taunting
Speaker 3: Israel to occupy the whole place. I don't know, but
Speaker 3: I think Israel now has to completely finish them off
Speaker 3: and root the whole place out. And it's going to
Speaker 3: be difficult, it's going to cause a big ruckus. But
Speaker 3: the status quo is not tolerable, and it may mean,
Speaker 3: I hate to say this, it may mean that the
Speaker 3: rest of the hostages are going to end up being
Speaker 3: killed because I'm not sure anybody has complete control of them.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 2: Nothing enriches am aw some more like defeat.
Speaker 1: Yes, Charles Well, I don't know the answer, because I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that there is one. I do know this
Speaker 1: that Israel is in a very difficult position because a
Speaker 1: it is surrounded still by people who want it to
Speaker 1: be annihilated, and that is an intolerable place for any
Speaker 1: country to be. I've said before that if a state
Speaker 1: were in this position that learned a nation in America,
Speaker 1: they would of course behave in the Israel Hers they
Speaker 1: wouldn't tolerate, they wouldn't put up with it. The New
Speaker 1: York Times always talks about Israel as if it's desire
Speaker 1: not to be evaporated is some foible that is unique
Speaker 1: to it. It's actually a human trait. It is a
Speaker 1: human inevitability, and so it's trying everything it can to
Speaker 1: extricate itself from that position, and it's doing it while
Speaker 1: b people are typically deranged in describing and judging it.
Speaker 1: There is a double standard with Israel. Some of its
Speaker 1: anti Semitism, some of it is weird progressive hierarchies in play.
Speaker 1: But Israel does anything, and like that Donald Trump meme,
Speaker 1: half the world comes in, it says wrong. And I
Speaker 1: don't know what you do when you're in this terrible
Speaker 1: situation for which there's no obvious answer, and even when
Speaker 1: you do the right things, you're told that you are
Speaker 1: the worst country that's ever existed. So I find it
Speaker 1: really hard to judge. I just can't imagine the decision
Speaker 1: making process that the cabinet is engaged in because it
Speaker 1: doesn't obtain anywhere else in the world. There simply isn't
Speaker 1: another situation like this. When I was a kid, there
Speaker 1: were two supposedly intractable global problems. And I'd say this
Speaker 1: not because I had any insight into them at all.
Speaker 1: I knew nothing about politics. But you'd hear about it.
Speaker 1: One was Israel and its neighbors, and the other was Ireland,
Speaker 1: and that one was a cause very close to me
Speaker 1: when I was ten years old. The notion that four
Speaker 1: years hence the Irish question would be resolved was laughable.
Speaker 2: That was an.
Speaker 1: Extraordinary achievement and one that no one I knew saw
Speaker 1: coming or believed would stick once it had been put
Speaker 1: into place. But the actors in Ireland were different than
Speaker 1: they are in the Middle East. They weren't twenty six,
Speaker 1: nor the islands surrounding the south. So you have a
Speaker 1: bizarre situation and it's impossible to know what's gonna happen next.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this is the latest attempt to do something
Speaker 1: about it. Will it work? I just have no idea.
Speaker 2: I just wonder what the future bringings for Israel. Says
Speaker 2: all right, this is it. You've crossed the line. Now
Speaker 2: we're going to move in. We're going to take over
Speaker 2: your entire territory. We're going to build it up. We're
Speaker 2: going to modernize the infrastructure. We're going to seal all
Speaker 2: the tunnels. We're gonna have the hospitals not be tunnels
Speaker 2: with terrorist centers. We're going to rebuild civil society, restaurants,
Speaker 2: nice beaches and the rest of it. And then and
Speaker 2: then we're going to leave. Don't make us do this,
Speaker 2: I mean, last thing before we go. We got one
Speaker 2: more interesting little pequin subject to discuss. But I want
Speaker 2: to tell you that Ricochet meetups are coming. Randy's getting
Speaker 2: a group together next weekend in Detroit August fifteenth through
Speaker 2: the eighteenth in Detroit, in Motor City, whether it's downtown
Speaker 2: amongst their new beautiful reef for sky scrappers, I don't know.
Speaker 2: You'll just have to go to Ricochet and check Granny
Speaker 2: Dude gaging interest in an upstate New York meet up
Speaker 2: in September. So if you're a Ricochet or a Ricochet
Speaker 2: as we'd like to say, up there, hop into the
Speaker 2: comments and say whether or not you'd be willing to
Speaker 2: perambulate up to there. Red Herring just posted about a
Speaker 2: Ricochet at Sea cruise meetup to tour the Caribbean this December.
Speaker 2: And again I'm just distempted because I love the cruise ships.
Speaker 2: I love going on Caribbean Johnson doing nothing but basking
Speaker 2: and eating and drinking and the rest of it. So
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe I don't know. Somebody want to
Speaker 2: somebody want to float my boat there, And of course
Speaker 2: Ricochet fantasy football is going on as well. Wait a minute,
Speaker 2: you say, I thought this was an extremely political site
Speaker 2: that was hyper focused on the issues of the day. No,
Speaker 2: there's a great community there and fantasy football in addition
Speaker 2: to the conversations about old tech and movies and radio
Speaker 2: and sports and the rest of it. It's all there
Speaker 2: at ricochet dot com, and the member feed is where
Speaker 2: you will find these things. Last point, boys, Jim Acosta
Speaker 2: had an interview with a person who no longer exists,
Speaker 2: the digital simulacrum of somebody and asking him about gun control.
Speaker 2: Surprisingly not the creation or demon take a choice parted
Speaker 2: back the opinions of the Konyacenti and the Acosta segment
Speaker 2: of things. What do you think about this? I'm not
Speaker 2: happy about reconstituting people via AI and having them say
Speaker 2: things from beyond the pale.
Speaker 3: Really, really, given the fact that Jim Acosta was the
Speaker 3: primary embodiment of fake news as Trump understood it, he
Speaker 3: just went out and ratified that, in fact, he is
Speaker 3: the leading avatar of fake news. I mean, I just
Speaker 3: he must really be dumb to think that this was
Speaker 3: a good idea.
Speaker 2: Girls.
Speaker 1: It is evil, It is grotesque, and the blame in
Speaker 1: my book goes to Acosta. I don't think even seven
Speaker 1: years later, you can go too hot after the parents
Speaker 1: who are still grieving. This was Macosta's responsibility to say no,
Speaker 1: but he can't help himself. And the weirdest thing about
Speaker 1: this James, is that in his descriptions and defenses of
Speaker 1: what he did, he seems earnestly to believe that he
Speaker 1: was talking to something that approximates a sentient person rather
Speaker 1: than an answering machine. And he used it to launder
Speaker 1: his own views and then got all outraged when people
Speaker 1: said that there was ugly. The judgment is so bad.
Speaker 1: It's hard to know. How could you imagine coming up
Speaker 1: with this idea at all, but running it past literally anyone,
Speaker 1: you know in the whole word, your craziest friend, your
Speaker 1: drug adult, craziest friend would go out and it has
Speaker 1: a bit much Jim, and then he went with it.
Speaker 6: How did that happen?
Speaker 2: I know? And it wasn't really very good AI at all.
Speaker 2: The delivery was so robotic that, as I said elsewhere,
Speaker 2: it made Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movie sound like
Speaker 2: Paul lind in Hollywood Squares. I mean, it.
Speaker 5: Was just bad.
Speaker 2: But you know, on the other hand, you know, people
Speaker 2: hate that, and then they will find some other little
Speaker 2: bit of AI on the internet. Donald Trump standing on
Speaker 2: the roof of the White House. Somebody made him perfectly
Speaker 2: do the speech from Monty Python Holy Grail with John
Speaker 2: Cleese taunting King Arthur. And then you say, but that's funny,
Speaker 2: But that's good. We have no unifying moral objection to AI,
Speaker 2: which is one of the reasons that we're just floundering
Speaker 2: around with it and castigating this and laughing at that.
Speaker 2: Maybe we'll fix it by next week. Maybe by next
Speaker 2: week we'll have an AI version of me to babel
Speaker 2: along and break and wonder and stumble his way out
Speaker 2: of the podcast Stumble. No, I've got two signposts that
Speaker 2: I have to tap. One of them is please do
Speaker 2: give us those five star reviews wherever you can, and
Speaker 2: two please not please. It's for your own good. Go
Speaker 2: to ricochet dot com and find the member feed. Oh gosh,
Speaker 2: you gotta pay for it, right, but it's nothing sheckls,
Speaker 2: just pennies a day, and you will find the community
Speaker 2: you've been looking for in the Internet all your days.
Speaker 2: And frankly, if you don't like what we're saying there,
Speaker 2: start your own thread, have your own meetup. It's a
Speaker 2: community as good as the people who are in it,
Speaker 2: and that's why it is different. Different. Also is Stephen
Speaker 2: and Charles two the most steadfast podcasters. Has been my
Speaker 2: pleasure to work with gentlemen again this week. I've had
Speaker 2: a great deal of find and I hope you have
Speaker 2: as well. Good weekend to everybody, and we'll see you
Speaker 2: all in the comments, said Ricochet four point oh bye bye,