Speaker 1: Well, you got a drink more than it's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's the middle of the day. You can do that.
Speaker 2: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
Speaker 2: what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister grbachaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 4: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Chernald C. W. Cook and
Speaker 4: Stephen Hayward, James Lylyx and today we Doctor Charles and
Speaker 4: Macawee about Pennsylvania politics and tedby Troy about money and power.
Speaker 4: So let's episodes a podcast.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I just think people should put this in perspective.
Speaker 5: They try to take different things that happen with tropical
Speaker 5: weather and act like it's something.
Speaker 1: There's nothing new under the sun.
Speaker 3: Assertions have been made that property is being confiscated. That's
Speaker 3: simply not true. They're saying people impacted by these terms
Speaker 3: were received seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash and
Speaker 3: no more. That's simply you're not true.
Speaker 4: Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number seven hundred
Speaker 4: and twelve. I'm James Lylyx here in y Appolis, Minnesota. Beautiful,
Speaker 4: absolutely beautiful autumn day and not very many Halloween decorations
Speaker 4: up yet, which is great because it grows and detestable
Speaker 4: and disgusting, the more lurid they get. Whatever whatever happened to,
Speaker 4: just put a little pump out on your front step.
Speaker 4: I'd like that. That one joined by Charles C. W.
Speaker 4: Cook and Stephen Hayward Today, gentlemen, how are you good?
Speaker 6: Good?
Speaker 1: I am great, James.
Speaker 2: And the weather is probably better there than in coastal California,
Speaker 2: believe it or not.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, we've had no rain unlike parts of the South,
Speaker 4: and what we see in the news is horrific, horrific,
Speaker 4: horrific devastation. However, Governor DeSantis came out the other day
Speaker 4: when the reporter asked him about the meteorological conditions and
Speaker 4: whether or not they were pertaining to global warming. I mean,
Speaker 4: we all know that there are more hurricanes now because
Speaker 4: somebody in North Dakota refuses to switch to an EV
Speaker 4: and he very deftly sort of cited the statistics in
Speaker 4: what they had done to plan for it. Charles, you
Speaker 4: are in Florida, and I know you're not affected by this,
Speaker 4: at least as far as I know. But is there
Speaker 4: just a general sense in Florida that this is in
Speaker 4: hand bad as it has been? Should the nation be
Speaker 4: fretting over this, or should be worrying more about what
Speaker 4: doesn't seem to be done in the places affected by Helene.
Speaker 7: You should be more worried about Helene. I think Florida
Speaker 7: is a well oiled machine when it comes to hurricanes.
Speaker 7: It was a well oiled machine before Ron DeSantis ran
Speaker 7: for governor, but he has managed to make it even
Speaker 7: more well oiled and even more machine like by pre
Speaker 7: staging linemen. So Florida was always very good at dealing
Speaker 7: with hurricanes. Now it's really good at dealing with hurricanes
Speaker 7: and getting the power back on. So I think the
Speaker 7: challenges in places that are not used to this sort
Speaker 7: of thing in the way Floridians unfortunately are well.
Speaker 4: Steve, let me ask you. Let me ask you this.
Speaker 4: I mean, the idea of prepositioning of supplies, equipment, linemen,
Speaker 4: and the rest of it seems like a no brainer.
Speaker 4: It seems like a core competency for any sort of
Speaker 4: government agency and in anything that they do. We used
Speaker 4: to believe and assume sort of that that's the way
Speaker 4: things worked. If you look at all the old movies.
Speaker 4: Whenever there's the disaster, government swings into action. The authorities
Speaker 4: are called plans are executed, Jeep's race out of garages, sirens,
Speaker 4: whaling and things. They're done. Now, we believe that when
Speaker 4: something happens, generally the government is going to be flat footed,
Speaker 4: stammering and unable to really deal with the first thing
Speaker 4: they need to do. It may not be accurate, but
Speaker 4: that seems to be the general thought abroad in the land.
Speaker 4: You're old enough to remember when we had the crisis
Speaker 4: of confidence in the seventies, where we seem to believe
Speaker 4: that the government was incapable of doing anything and it
Speaker 4: was just nothing but managed decline from here on in
Speaker 4: changed in the eighties. But do you feel that same
Speaker 4: sort of malaise when it comes to our government?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, what's the old joke or the old line
Speaker 2: that history doesn't repeat itself but at rhymes that apparently
Speaker 2: Mark Twain never said. But look, there's two things here
Speaker 2: going on. One is, uh, you know, FEMA takes five
Speaker 2: days to get anywhere, and they get and then they
Speaker 2: bigfoot everybody like the FBI does with local crime investigations.
Speaker 2: And in Florida's case, I think the subtext here is please, femous,
Speaker 2: stay away, don't come here. We've got this. And you
Speaker 2: know you mentioned the hyper confidence of Governor DeSantis. I'll
Speaker 2: share with you that I did get have one conversation
Speaker 2: with him about this subject a couple of years ago,
Speaker 2: and I brought up the fact that, you know, Miami
Speaker 2: was essentially leveled by a huge hurricane around nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 2: but nobody lived there then. And I said, so, you
Speaker 2: know what if you have a Cat five hurricane it
Speaker 2: hits Miami or Palm Beach. And he says, I don't
Speaker 2: really worry about that because the building code since then
Speaker 2: have been very robust and they're organized for it. Says,
Speaker 2: what keeps me awake at night for hurricanes is Tampa
Speaker 2: Bay and he said, it's the geography of it. The
Speaker 2: storm surger would be much larger and there's nothing we
Speaker 2: can do about that, and that would present a much
Speaker 2: bigger challenge. So you would you heard that Milton was
Speaker 2: heading straight for Tampa Bay. I thought, well, here we go.
Speaker 2: This is going to be the big challenge. Now it
Speaker 2: veered off a bit to what Sarasota, I guess, and
Speaker 2: so Tampa Bay was spared a direct hit.
Speaker 1: So we're lucky here.
Speaker 2: But then, of course, the other thing I think you
Speaker 2: mentioned is you know, gee, Governor, isn't this more proof
Speaker 2: of climate change? Well, you know, if you look at
Speaker 2: the data, Milton ranks eighteenth in the level of intensity
Speaker 2: of Florida hurricanes for which we have records going back
Speaker 2: over one hundred years eighteenth. Most of those hurricanes that
Speaker 2: ranking ahead of Milton happened before nineteen sixty, before we
Speaker 2: started having so you know, the whole climate change the
Speaker 2: story really starts around nineteen So the point is that
Speaker 2: the data doesn't back up.
Speaker 1: The panicky narrative, but that won't stop them, of course.
Speaker 4: No, No, and Charles, the panicking narrative has a variety
Speaker 4: of solutions which can be seamlessly and easily implemented to
Speaker 4: stop this from ever happening again, I guess. And it's
Speaker 4: just our mutation is to refuse to accept what we
Speaker 4: must do tomorrow. But if we have Kamala Harrison the
Speaker 4: White House, is there going to be a push for
Speaker 4: more green nude eels as they used to say, or
Speaker 4: is it just or is it just going to be
Speaker 4: part of the usual atmosphere and chattering lip service.
Speaker 7: No, the hurricanes will immediately stop if she wins. That's
Speaker 7: it was it January twentieth and augreat the new president.
Speaker 7: That's it gone, which is just as.
Speaker 2: The sea level stopped rising when Obama became president, Right,
Speaker 2: we remember that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, The Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its title, was
Speaker 7: actually a way of funneling trillion dollars to green Democratic groups,
Speaker 7: doesn't seem to have stopped hurricanes either. James May I
Speaker 7: make a broader political point about Florida that I think
Speaker 7: might be interesting to people who don't live here. There
Speaker 7: are two things about Florida politics that I've noticed in
Speaker 7: the last seven years since I lived here that I
Speaker 7: think haven't necessarily escaped the state's borders.
Speaker 6: One is that Rondo Santas is not.
Speaker 7: Regarded in Florida as this great controversial figure in the
Speaker 7: way he is nationally. And it's very amusing to hear
Speaker 7: him discussed as such outside of Florida, because in Florida
Speaker 7: he just seems like a normal, competent governor. The second thing,
Speaker 7: and the more important thing, I think is to most
Speaker 7: voters in Florida, I think I'm right in saying hurricane
Speaker 7: response is why the government exists, and if you do
Speaker 7: it well, you are rewarded for it. Everything else is
Speaker 7: either on autopilot or is regarded as a luxury. The
Speaker 7: autopilot part of the equation just cannot be overstated. Jeb
Speaker 7: Bush was a terrific governor, turned Florida around and made
Speaker 7: modern Florida essentially what it is, and constitutionalized a lot
Speaker 7: of things people now associate with the state. No income
Speaker 7: tax and so on was already there, but he extended
Speaker 7: that to all forms of income. We now have a
Speaker 7: constitutional amendment that prevents the state from raising any form
Speaker 7: of tax or fee without two thirds majority in both
Speaker 7: houses of the legislature.
Speaker 6: That's in the constitution.
Speaker 7: There's a bunch of things like that, which means if
Speaker 7: you're a governor, yes, you have to do things, and
Speaker 7: it's very important that you have the right governor, as
Speaker 7: we saw during COVID. But the thing that you are
Speaker 7: judged on more than anything else, is not whether you're
Speaker 7: low or raise taxes because you can't, but whether you
Speaker 7: deal with the hurricanes. Probably rohonder Sands won by twenty
Speaker 7: points in twenty twenty two. I think he'd have won
Speaker 7: by ten if it weren't for his response to the
Speaker 7: hurricane that happened just before, but the fact that he
Speaker 7: did so well with that hurricane is why he won
Speaker 7: by another ten points, because independence just said, oh great.
Speaker 7: And I think that this is going to happen again
Speaker 7: this year. I think that Republicans were going to win
Speaker 7: the state legislature in Florida again, and I think Trump
Speaker 7: was going to win, and I think Rick Scott was
Speaker 7: going to win. But I really would not be surprised
Speaker 7: now if you could tackle another five, six, seven points
Speaker 7: to how Republicans do in the state, purely because two
Speaker 7: hurricanes in a row, the party in power has shown
Speaker 7: that it did what it was there for. And I
Speaker 7: think this is just underestimated when people outside talk about
Speaker 7: Florida politics, or well, how will the state vote, what
Speaker 7: do people carry out? What about this issue or that issue.
Speaker 7: It's all valid, but the hurricane response question is really
Speaker 7: what matter is more than anything else, and it's going
Speaker 7: to have a big effect in November.
Speaker 4: Well, you've just described a nightmare for most people, people
Speaker 4: on the left at least, who look at Florida and say,
Speaker 4: without the taxation system, how do you properly adjudicate what
Speaker 4: people should possess? How do you get the income from
Speaker 4: these people and get it to these people who need it?
Speaker 4: That's nightmare number one and two. If you want to
Speaker 4: take Florida a success story, I say I'm having with
Speaker 4: scare quotes here, then you're transporting a culture that bans
Speaker 4: books and infuses to allow people to say the word
Speaker 4: gay in any school situation. I mean that that is
Speaker 4: a you speak as though you don't live in one
Speaker 4: of the most oppressive, fascistic or nascently fascistic states in
Speaker 4: the kinds of stunning, stunning, stunning. Stephen, your your response
Speaker 4: before we go to our guest.
Speaker 1: Ah, I don't really have one.
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean the only you left out, James
Speaker 2: was we're only you know, ten thousand votes in a
Speaker 2: close election away from the Handmaid's Tale in Florida everywhere else, right, Yeah.
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Speaker 4: And now we go to Charles Mclawee. Do I have
Speaker 4: that pronounce correctly? I'm sure that I don't. He's the
Speaker 4: founding editor of Real Clear Pennsylvania. We're happy that is here.
Speaker 4: And Charles tell me how badly I mangled your last name.
Speaker 6: You got my name just right.
Speaker 8: It is macawee.
Speaker 4: Oh oh good for me, you know, well as somebody
Speaker 4: who goes around hearing lilix all the time instead of Lilacs,
Speaker 4: I'm keen to be good here, all right, Real Clear Politics, Pennsylvania. Well,
Speaker 4: you had a piece a couple of weeks ago titled
Speaker 4: Kamala Harris's Pennsylvania Problem. What is her problem?
Speaker 9: She has a problem among that vast expanse of working
Speaker 9: class regions in Pennsylvania. And of course we know this
Speaker 9: region as it was described inaccurately by Democrats strategists Jim
Speaker 9: Carter Alabama in the middle. But this region has changed
Speaker 9: dramatically since he first employed that term in eighty six
Speaker 9: And really it's Northeastern Pennsylvania was a Democratic bastion, one
Speaker 9: that was indistinguishable when it came to once association of
Speaker 9: the Catholic Democrats that would put Democrats over the top
Speaker 9: in elections. This is a region that is trending red.
Speaker 9: Luzern County, for example, just this past month, has a
Speaker 9: Republican voter registration majority, and that was an Obama to
Speaker 9: Trump county in twenty sixteen at Lakawana County, Biden's home
Speaker 9: turf where.
Speaker 8: He grew up.
Speaker 9: Even precincts there and Scranton are shifting red. So while
Speaker 9: there are still plenty of ancestral Democrats there who will
Speaker 9: vote Democrat in this election as well, in this critical
Speaker 9: margins fight, it's a place like northeastern Pennsylvania that will
Speaker 9: determine the electoral outcome in the state.
Speaker 2: Charles, it's Steve Hayward out in god forsake in California.
Speaker 2: And we keep hearing that Pennsylvania is not just the
Speaker 2: Keystone state, but the Keystone are the entire election.
Speaker 1: And I don't know.
Speaker 2: You can see lots of possible combinations of states where
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania could be lost by Trump or by Harris and
Speaker 2: still win.
Speaker 1: But it is true.
Speaker 2: I guess that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan tend to
Speaker 2: vote together. In other words, they're three dominoes that lean
Speaker 2: on each other. And so you mentioned north, they just
Speaker 2: say north eastern Pennsylvan northwestern Pennsylvania. I'm thinking you up
Speaker 2: around Erie and all the rest. And I don't know
Speaker 2: the geography all that well. But the first question is,
Speaker 2: you know, I know Eerie by the Lake and all that,
Speaker 2: and other parts of Pennsylvania still strongly unionized. And yet
Speaker 2: we've seen the data and the fact that the United
Speaker 2: Auto Workers and the Teamsters declined to endorse Harris, and
Speaker 2: their internal polls showing majority of their members favoring Trump.
Speaker 1: And I don't know what's your sense of all that.
Speaker 1: Do you think that while the polls show a dead ea.
Speaker 2: Do you think the polls are underestimating as they have
Speaker 2: in the past, Trump's strength, especially with those kind of voters.
Speaker 9: So I think when it comes to Pennsylvania, of that
Speaker 9: traditional blue wall when you think Wisconsin Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is
Speaker 9: the hardest to discern because it's a state of complex
Speaker 9: demography that has been fueled by post twenty sixteen changes.
Speaker 9: The map of Pennsylvania just in the past eight years
Speaker 9: is far different now than it was when Trump narrowly
Speaker 9: won the state in sixteen. When you think of that
Speaker 9: union vote in a place like Eerie, for example, Yes,
Speaker 9: there are still plenty of traditional Democrats who have that
Speaker 9: allegiance to church, party and Union who may still vote
Speaker 9: deed no matter what, but they're diminishing, diminishing in numbers.
Speaker 9: And really when you look at the state wide map,
Speaker 9: it's a non unionized sector, the warehousing and logistics sector
Speaker 9: that is booming across the state, especially on the eastern half,
Speaker 9: and Latinos are increasingly comprising the majority of that workforce.
Speaker 9: And in so many cities east of the Soft Squarehanna River,
Speaker 9: in places like Allentown, Hazelsen, Lebanon, Lancaster. They comprise the
Speaker 9: majority plurality of the population, and they're working in warehousing logistics,
Speaker 9: and they, as twenty twenty has shown, are shifting red.
Speaker 9: So if voting blocked six hundred thousand eligible voters, if
Speaker 9: they're activated in the state to vote, they could play
Speaker 9: a real pivotal role in this outcome.
Speaker 2: So and the other thing I'm sure you can tell
Speaker 2: us about is apparently Republican registration in the state of
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania has been surging. So talk about that a little
Speaker 2: bit because that seems certainly favorable for Trump.
Speaker 9: It's a fascinating dynamic because when you look at voter
Speaker 9: registration statistics going back to nineteen ninety eight, which is
Speaker 9: the first time that the state has them on record,
Speaker 9: it's the narrownessive advantage that.
Speaker 8: The Democrats have since that time.
Speaker 9: For perspective, and two thousand and eight, when Obama won,
Speaker 9: there was a one point two million advantage for Dems
Speaker 9: and it is diminished now. And that is driven in
Speaker 9: part by those ancestral Democrats and working class regions who
Speaker 9: they have been revoting Republican, let's say, in the past
Speaker 9: twenty years, and they're just catching up with their voting patterns.
Speaker 9: But there are also plenty of people who are just
Speaker 9: disaffected with the Democrat Party. They no longer view them
Speaker 9: as defenders of their economic self interests. And these voters
Speaker 9: aren't just in those blue collar areas of the state
Speaker 9: beyond let's say Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. They're around Philadelphia too.
Speaker 9: Pockets of Delaware County Bucks County, for example, they flip
Speaker 9: to red recently, and that's driven a large part by
Speaker 9: blue collar Catholic Democrats who have gone red in the
Speaker 9: lower half of the county.
Speaker 2: So one more question before I hand over to Charlie Trump. Parisays,
Speaker 2: of course, is not the only thing to watch in
Speaker 2: the state. There's a very hot Senate race between what's
Speaker 2: his name Casey and McCormick.
Speaker 1: And lately, by the way.
Speaker 2: The last several election cycles presidential cycles, the Senate racers
Speaker 2: have tend to go with the top of the ticket.
Speaker 2: In fact, there's only one exception, I think, and that
Speaker 2: was the Susan Collins in twenty twenty in Maine. Maine
Speaker 2: went for Biden and Collins kept her seat comfortably.
Speaker 1: But what can you tell us about that race?
Speaker 2: Is it also as close as the presidential race, and
Speaker 2: what are your expectations.
Speaker 9: When you look at the real clear politics polling average,
Speaker 9: I mean the advantage that Casey has now it's about
Speaker 9: three point nine percent. That's narvous at this point and
Speaker 9: memory since he was first elected at six and really
Speaker 9: the last time that let's say, the tickets split in
Speaker 9: Pennsylvania between the Senate race and the presidential election was
Speaker 9: in two thousand and four when Carrie won the state
Speaker 9: by ar On inspector of the Republican carried.
Speaker 8: It out with the power of fancy.
Speaker 9: But this is extremely close, really the most competitive race
Speaker 9: that Casey has faced since he was first elected statewide
Speaker 9: in nineteen ninety six as art or general. So that's
Speaker 9: driven again by that complex changing demography and then unforeseen circumstances.
Speaker 9: For example, I am talking to many Jewish voters across
Speaker 9: the state, plenty outside Phildelphia and Pittsburgh who polled no
Speaker 9: love for the Republican Party. They are quite liberal in
Speaker 9: their positions, but they don't view Casey as represented. But
Speaker 9: the party's left war turn on the issue of Israel
Speaker 9: and the antend of only from McCormick.
Speaker 7: That's actually a good segue to my question. It's pretty
Speaker 7: much uniformly assumed on the right that Harris should have
Speaker 7: chosen Josh Shapiro because he's in the governor's mansion. But
Speaker 7: and it's also assumed that she didn't because he's Jewish,
Speaker 7: and that there is a constituency within the Democratic Party
Speaker 7: that would have had a problem with that given its
Speaker 7: problems with Israel.
Speaker 6: How true is that?
Speaker 7: Is that something that people on the right say because
Speaker 7: they don't like Harris or is there some substance to it.
Speaker 9: I think the decision that was made is more complex
Speaker 9: in that single issue alone. I think there's also the
Speaker 9: factor that Shapiro, in terms of his raw political talents,
Speaker 9: whether it's oratory or just campaigning, outshine Harris.
Speaker 8: And that was a factor that was taken into serious consideration.
Speaker 9: It will be fascinating to find out what we do
Speaker 9: learn in the history books about that decision, because it
Speaker 9: may prove to be quite a consequential one, because I
Speaker 9: do think that.
Speaker 8: Had Shapiro been chosen.
Speaker 9: While I think it's also over stated that if he
Speaker 9: had been chosen, Pennsylvania would have been assured for Harris,
Speaker 9: it certainly would have helped her cause in the state
Speaker 9: when considering his work in regions that have been less
Speaker 9: targeted by Democrats and recent cycles.
Speaker 7: And my second question, you just described the way the
Speaker 7: state has changed and is changing. I have a friend
Speaker 7: who said something really provocative a couple of days ago
Speaker 7: to me. He said, you know, Pennsylvania's becoming Ohio. It's
Speaker 7: moving towards where Ohio is going to become a Republican state.
Speaker 7: And I instinctively just don't believe this because I always
Speaker 7: think Republicans are going to lose.
Speaker 6: How true is that? Is there anything to that?
Speaker 9: That's flat raw because far that change is driven by
Speaker 9: there are booming suburban areas of the state.
Speaker 8: So we associate suburbia, which is greater.
Speaker 9: Philadelphia, but in reality, the fastest growing area of the
Speaker 9: state is south central Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg, Lancaster Carlisle corridor
Speaker 9: Cumberland County. The western suburb of Harrisburg is the fastest
Speaker 9: growing area of Pennsylvania, and all those west shore suburbs
Speaker 9: are going blue.
Speaker 8: And it's driven by the healthcare boom of the state.
Speaker 9: Healthcare is really the primary employer so many suburbs across Pennsylvania,
Speaker 9: and physicians once a reliable geob constituency, they have been
Speaker 9: going d.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so it's going to stay at swing state.
Speaker 8: It will stay a swing state.
Speaker 9: And part of the reason we'll stay a Swain state
Speaker 9: is because of those vastly growing suburban areas.
Speaker 4: You say physicians are going blue, but most of the
Speaker 4: physicians I've met my lifetime trend to go the other
Speaker 4: direction for a variety of reasons. Is it just that
Speaker 4: there's an installed bureaucracy. The more when you have a
Speaker 4: big healthcare bureaucracy and a lot of nurses and such
Speaker 4: that they tend to be read. I mean, if you
Speaker 4: lose the doctors, you're not going to lose a lot.
Speaker 8: But well, the sector itself has transformed.
Speaker 9: So physicians trended Republican back when they were small business
Speaker 9: owners running their own practices, but they're now employees of
Speaker 9: these massive systems, which is exactly the case of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 9: So for example, Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown recently
Speaker 9: merged with Jefferson Healthcare System in Philadelphia that is, together
Speaker 9: with that merger, the largest employer in Greater Philadelphia this fall,
Speaker 9: and so many of those nurses and physics. Really this
Speaker 9: healthcare workforce that is just exploding through alph the estate
Speaker 9: and exploding apart because people are getting sicker. Is that
Speaker 9: these are workers who have been voting Democrat. As one
Speaker 9: elected Republican in the Harrisburg area recently described it to me.
Speaker 9: He was talking about a townlike development's going up outside Harrisburg.
Speaker 9: It has gone up similar to what you see like
Speaker 9: around Metro GC of those townhouses, and the developers told
Speaker 9: him that the development itself is comprised mostly of young nurses,
Speaker 9: and we know exactly how those young nurses will defall
Speaker 9: in their voting patterns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, James, if I can stick in here and then
Speaker 2: pivot to my last question for Charles. You know, there's
Speaker 2: a big story about why the healthcare industry is trending
Speaker 2: blue as a whole. It's and that's a subject take
Speaker 2: up some other day perhaps, but it's now in my
Speaker 2: mind the parallel to the K twelve education system, which
Speaker 2: we've seen over the decades, how that has gone it's
Speaker 2: because the government now dominates the sector, by the way,
Speaker 2: so much of the growth and healthcare is administrators, just
Speaker 2: like public education, and a lot of doctors I talked to,
Speaker 2: by the way, James, they hate all this, but they
Speaker 2: may know where their bread is buttered, would say, long story.
Speaker 2: The other side of the street, of course, in Pennsylvania
Speaker 2: is the fracking story, which Harris has done a one
Speaker 2: to eighty one, and there's a case of where the
Speaker 2: people who used to work as all the pump jacks
Speaker 2: and all the other people in the industry unionize for
Speaker 2: the most part, probably habitual Democratic voters, but now they
Speaker 2: see the bureaucracy and the Democrats as their enemy. And
Speaker 2: so my last question, Charles, is you know, again from afar,
Speaker 2: it seems like this fracking reversal by Harris is a
Speaker 2: really big story. Are we right in concluding that? Is
Speaker 2: that a big story in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 9: It's a big story in a certain part of Pennsylvania,
Speaker 9: but from the state wide residents, it's more complicated. The
Speaker 9: issue of fuel costs attendant with inflation.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that matters.
Speaker 9: Living in these struggling communities where you're living in the
Speaker 9: have double.
Speaker 8: Home built before World War One and supporter community.
Speaker 9: You rely on natural gas for fuel and it's going
Speaker 9: up and up whatever. But in southwest part of southwestern Pennsylvania,
Speaker 9: where fracking has been an employer, that is a concern.
Speaker 9: But it's also an issue of pricing the industry itself.
Speaker 9: It's in flux because lost in the story, this region
Speaker 9: needs the infrastructure to transport the natural gas that has
Speaker 9: to other parts of the country, like New England's, and
Speaker 9: that infrastructure isn't there due to red.
Speaker 8: Tape issues that go to the local level. So that's
Speaker 8: where it has sailings.
Speaker 7: Charles, in your view, is Trump better placed or worse
Speaker 7: place than say, your generic Republican presidential candidate to win
Speaker 7: a state like Pennsylvania. I mean, I understand each candidate
Speaker 7: is different, but one of the arguments for him is
Speaker 7: he'll do better in Pennsylvania. Would he have done better
Speaker 7: in Pennsylvania than the Santis or a Nicky Haley or
Speaker 7: a Tim Scott do you think when.
Speaker 9: You consider the type of Trump voter in Pennsylvania? Yes,
Speaker 9: because this is the land of Obama to Trump voters.
Speaker 9: So really, all those registration gains that the Republican Party
Speaker 9: has been enjoined, they're among people who persistently voted Democrat
Speaker 9: up until twenty sixteen. They harbored no love for the
Speaker 9: Republican Party. So really the Republican Party. Trump's presidency was
Speaker 9: somewhat of a blood transfusion when it came to certain
Speaker 9: parts of the state in driving up those numbers. But nevertheless,
Speaker 9: the challenge for Republicans and one that will be testing
Speaker 9: this McCormick Casey race. McCormick's going after those suburban nites.
Speaker 9: And if McCormick pulls an upset and actually defeats Casey,
Speaker 9: it will be in part because he brought back some
Speaker 9: of those suburban voters who may have sat out twenty
Speaker 9: twenty or voted against Trump that year.
Speaker 7: Do you think Republicans can keep those voters in Pennsylvania
Speaker 7: post Trump.
Speaker 9: I think McCormick himself is showing a model for how
Speaker 9: it can be done. It's a robust campaign. He's taking
Speaker 9: trumping in positions while making inroads with the traditional Republican Party.
Speaker 9: So he has proven palatable to the emerging working class
Speaker 9: space has emerged post Trump while trying to make gains
Speaker 9: or regain the people who had voted for let's say
Speaker 9: Pat Toomey in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: Well, we will see. Thank you so much, Charles for
Speaker 4: giving us the load in Pennsylvania. I'm still just wrapping
Speaker 4: my head around the dudes for Kamala people from Pennsylvania
Speaker 4: who I guess are taking the state by storm and
Speaker 4: redefining its culture and upbanding expectations. But we'll see how
Speaker 4: that plays on an election night anyway, Real clear, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 4: The link will be on ricochet dot com. We thank
Speaker 4: you for joining us today, great being here. Thanks a lot,
Speaker 4: and now we welcome back to the podcast. Tevi Troy,
Speaker 4: Senior fellow of the White Partisan Policy Center. He's the
Speaker 4: best selling presidential historian whose latest entry on that front
Speaker 4: is The Power and the Money, The epic clashes between
Speaker 4: Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry. Welcome Tevy, Hey James,
Speaker 4: thanks for having me so. Most of us are familiar
Speaker 4: with the you know, the left right split that has
Speaker 4: the Democratic administration's reigning in big business, you know, like
Speaker 4: the statues in front of the Federal Traders Association, and
Speaker 4: then Republicans come and loosen the reins and let the
Speaker 4: entrepreneurs flourish in the thousand flowers, et cetera. What can
Speaker 4: pre coolist history tell us about how to view that
Speaker 4: particular relationship. Is it just the usual yin and yang?
Speaker 4: Is it the plebeians and the optimates? Is this a
Speaker 4: timeless tale that we cycle we simply cannot break out
Speaker 4: of well, it would be.
Speaker 5: Great if it actually did work like that. You could
Speaker 5: always count on the Republicans to loosen the reins, but
Speaker 5: they don't always do it. In my book and the
Speaker 5: Power of the Money, I go back one hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty years, and you have Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt who
Speaker 5: went hard after the corporations, including him going after John D.
Speaker 5: Rockefeller and Standard Oil, and he was looking to break
Speaker 5: up a lot of them, what he called the trusts.
Speaker 5: He was also there at the cusp of when you
Speaker 5: started to have this development of regulatory APPARATUSUS and new
Speaker 5: legislation and new regulatory bodies. And so it's been a
Speaker 5: complicated one hundred and fifty years in which Republicans sometimes
Speaker 5: are on the side of big business, but sometimes they don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hey, Tevy, it's Steve Hayward out here in god
Speaker 2: forsake in California. And just to guild your point, I mean,
Speaker 2: I think you know this that the largest regulatory expansion
Speaker 2: over business in modern times occurred under Richard Nixon right
Speaker 2: in the late sixties and early seventies, from which we've
Speaker 2: never recovered.
Speaker 1: And then you probably, I mean, I love these trivia points.
Speaker 2: You know, President Taft t our successor actually had more
Speaker 2: antitrust prosecutions than Roosevelt did in just his four years
Speaker 2: in office, whereas Roosevelt had what seven years. But you know,
Speaker 2: tr reminds me most of Trump in this way. I
Speaker 2: think you know that, you know, tr strategy was, look,
Speaker 2: you guys in big business, I'll kind of let you
Speaker 2: do what you want as long as you take orders
Speaker 2: from me. That's a slightly crude summary, but only slightly,
Speaker 2: I think, and you know Trump's pretty much that way right,
Speaker 2: It's all transactional.
Speaker 1: But how do you I mean, I think it's a
Speaker 1: good important point.
Speaker 2: The Republicans are not always pro business or pro big
Speaker 2: business anyway. But right now it seems the Democrats that
Speaker 2: the last two Democratic administrations have been trying to.
Speaker 1: Revive that the old simple narrative, haven't they.
Speaker 2: I mean, the current administration certainly is very aggressive, you know,
Speaker 2: this week proposing to break up Google.
Speaker 1: I suppose.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, what I would say is that maybe there's four quadrants,
Speaker 5: and you've got pro business and pro market and then
Speaker 5: anti business, anti market, and the Republican are often pro
Speaker 5: market and often pro business. The Democrats are always anti
Speaker 5: market and often anti business, and so you have this
Speaker 5: kind of weird mixing of the different perspectives. And what
Speaker 5: we've seen in recent years is a split within the
Speaker 5: pro market and the pro business Republicans, and then you
Speaker 5: also have a second split with the more anti business
Speaker 5: Republicans that JD. Vance is more apt to criticize corporations
Speaker 5: than some Democrats these days. So it's a complicated story
Speaker 5: and has long been.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: One other thing I haven't had a chance to get
Speaker 2: in your book yet, Tevy, but I wonder if you
Speaker 2: talk a little bit about Coolidge, who maybe is a
Speaker 2: hand's figure in some ways. You know, the old myth
Speaker 2: was always Coolidge said the business of America's business.
Speaker 1: He didn't actually say that. He said the chief.
Speaker 2: Business of America is business, and then went on for
Speaker 2: paragraph about how America's commercial character is always subordinate to
Speaker 2: its democratic character. All that gets left out. Do you
Speaker 2: dwell on this at all about Coolidge and maybe even
Speaker 2: Harding in your book?
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely have Coolidge and Harding in there, and some
Speaker 5: of their relationships with CEOs, including Henry Ford, and I
Speaker 5: do have the quote correct in my book, which I
Speaker 5: think is important.
Speaker 1: But there's another thing.
Speaker 5: You were talking about in terms of Nixon and his
Speaker 5: expansion of the regulatory state with the EPA and the
Speaker 5: Philadelphia Plan. And I have a great story in the
Speaker 5: book about a young Leiah Coca, who's a Ford executive
Speaker 5: at the time, going to the Nixon White House and
Speaker 5: trying to convince them to overturn what the Department of
Speaker 5: Transportation is trying to do in imposing Natorite type regulations
Speaker 5: on the auto industry. And I thought it was really
Speaker 5: interesting that Leiohcoca starts in the book as a pro
Speaker 5: free market, pro business guy, and he morphs into less
Speaker 5: pro free market and just pro business because in the
Speaker 5: Carter years he's looking for subsidies and then in the
Speaker 5: Reagan years he's looking for tariffs. So interesting transition there.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's right, Yeah, Tevy, Which of the two cars
Speaker 10: and presidential candidates Trump and Harris do you think is
Speaker 10: most likely to be pro business as opposed to pro market?
Speaker 7: And I think we're in an interesting moment because Republicans
Speaker 7: have soured a little bit, certainly on big business, in
Speaker 7: part because big business has taken a side culturally, and
Speaker 7: the Democrats, although they like to talk about sticking.
Speaker 6: It to the man. I'm quite happy.
Speaker 7: It seems to me to recruit big business to their
Speaker 7: side when they need to. For example, Harris is all
Speaker 7: over Twitter and the stump citing the number of CEOs
Speaker 7: she says to have endorsed her. She sees this as
Speaker 7: a sign that she's a sensible one economically, for example,
Speaker 7: whereas Trump is more likely to shout at those people.
Speaker 7: So how do you see these two candidates right now
Speaker 7: with their relationship to business as opposed to markets.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I would say that Harris overstates it a
Speaker 5: little bit. There as that letter of eighty eight business
Speaker 5: leaders that signed endorsing her, But if you really look
Speaker 5: at the letter, half of them are formers, showing that
Speaker 5: they're often reluctant to make a partisan point while they're
Speaker 5: in power. Half of them are from Silicon Valley or
Speaker 5: from Hollywood, which are traditionally liberal. And then you have
Speaker 5: people like Larry Summers in there, who's a smart guy
Speaker 5: and an economists and everything, but he's not a business leader.
Speaker 5: So she is trying to make it seem like she
Speaker 5: is going to be pro business. She also has her
Speaker 5: brother in law, Tony West, who's a senior executive at
Speaker 5: Uber advising her. So I think there will be favors
Speaker 5: to businesses that play along, But I wouldn't call her
Speaker 5: pro business, and I certainly wouldn't call her pro market. Trump. Look,
Speaker 5: there's always a question of who is going to win
Speaker 5: out in all the various battles inside Trump world, but
Speaker 5: there are usually pro market people within them, and so
Speaker 5: maybe there's a chance or a hope that you will
Speaker 5: have the anti regulatory push that you saw in the
Speaker 5: last Sump administration that did help goost the economy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Tebby, you know, I get to see a scenario.
Speaker 2: Let me run a scenario by you. This is what
Speaker 2: Peter Robinson likes to do, and see what you think
Speaker 2: of it. I think you know the history of or
Speaker 2: the cliches again about the New Deal. In World War
Speaker 2: Two ended the Great Depression, we pivoted away from the
Speaker 2: New Deal. And of course the real story, as our
Speaker 2: mutual friend Arthur Hermann wrote so well about a decade ago,
Speaker 2: is that when World War two came, the government realized,
Speaker 2: the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt realized they had to
Speaker 2: take their boot off the neck of business. So they
Speaker 2: ended up being by circumstance pro business and pro market,
Speaker 2: and that's what ends the depression and sets up the
Speaker 2: prosperity of the post World War II era. So I
Speaker 2: could see a situation in which we have a president
Speaker 2: Harris saih I hope not. But we have a president
Speaker 2: Harris and you run into a serious economic problem here,
Speaker 2: you know, a year, eighteen months, two years out because
Speaker 2: of our deficits and other problems, and they decide, like
Speaker 2: Roosevelt did in nineteen forty forty one, that in fact,
Speaker 2: if we're going to get out of this, we're going
Speaker 2: to have to let business rip. By the way, the
Speaker 2: fact that the brother in law is a big executive
Speaker 2: with Uber. What's Uber's business model been. It's been to
Speaker 2: charge ahead and open new markets quicker than the interest
Speaker 2: groups can organize against them. And that has succeeded most places,
Speaker 2: but not everywhere. And so even the liberals who run
Speaker 2: Uber understand the government regulation and interest groups are their enemy.
Speaker 2: And maybe Harris and the people around her might figure
Speaker 2: that out. Am I being just completely ridiculously optimistic? Or
Speaker 2: is that a scenario that you Tevy Troy think might
Speaker 2: be possible?
Speaker 5: Well, Steve, as you know, I cut my teeth working
Speaker 5: for Ben Wannberg, who is the greatest optimist in political
Speaker 5: life of all time, and even I think that's a
Speaker 5: little optimistic.
Speaker 1: Oh me too, but I want to throw it out there.
Speaker 5: Right, But it is funny. It does race some interesting issues,
Speaker 5: including something that Bill Gates dead, which is he said
Speaker 5: back in the day when he was running Microsoft that
Speaker 5: the high tech industry is three times fast than the
Speaker 5: private sector, and the private sector is three times faster
Speaker 5: than government, which means that the high tech industry is
Speaker 5: nine times faster than government. And that's true, and that's
Speaker 5: kind of the uber approach. However, the government is big,
Speaker 5: and if they grab their hold onto your ankle, they're
Speaker 5: not letting go. And Bill Gates found that out to
Speaker 5: his misfortune.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I sure did.
Speaker 4: Charles mentioned something earlier that just in passing that one
Speaker 4: of the reasons that people on the right have fallen
Speaker 4: out with big business is because they've taken aside in
Speaker 4: cultural issues culture wars. Now, let's say again, as Stephen
Speaker 4: just did we have a Kondell Harris administration. Do you
Speaker 4: think that that is going to signal to the Democratic
Speaker 4: Party and of the Harris administration that America is in
Speaker 4: love again with all of the progressive movements that want
Speaker 4: to use to reshape various institutions in ways of thought, etc.
Speaker 4: Or are they going to realize that there actually is
Speaker 4: a backlash. There is a pushback that the companies that
Speaker 4: have been putting their thumb on the scale, the companies
Speaker 4: that have been endorsing DEI procedures and all of a
Speaker 4: sudden find themselves in the crosshairs of various internet activists
Speaker 4: and have to backtrack and cancel and the rest of it.
Speaker 4: How do you think that business embrace of progressive social
Speaker 4: agendas would unfold during the Harris administration.
Speaker 5: Well, I think they would feel a little more protected
Speaker 5: from the government side. But you have to remember, no
Speaker 5: matter who went this election, it's going to be a
Speaker 5: closely divided government and continue to be closely divided for
Speaker 5: the foreseeable future. And a lot of Republicans were alienated
Speaker 5: by the corporate embrace of DEI and EESG, and a
Speaker 5: lot of Republicans rightly in my mind, feel, hey, we've
Speaker 5: been tearing your water. We've been getting hit for being
Speaker 5: pro corporate for all these years, and you take on
Speaker 5: this DEI stuff and Thiseschief stuff. What are you doing
Speaker 5: to us? And so that's one of the reasons why
Speaker 5: Republican lawmakers have soured on big business.
Speaker 6: I mean, I have a question. How corrupt.
Speaker 5: A great start?
Speaker 7: Yeah, how corrupt was American politics one hundred and fifty
Speaker 7: years ago? I just watched this documentary on Netflix about
Speaker 7: whyatt Up, and the argument in it was the JP Morgan.
Speaker 7: I won't go into all the details because it's quite complicated,
Speaker 7: but JP Morgan in the end of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 7: in the early eighteen eighties, sort of rote checks to politicians.
Speaker 7: He was a backer of the Republicans. Then he moved
Speaker 7: to Grover Cleveland and got what he wanted because he
Speaker 7: just gave them money and there weren't even any campaign
Speaker 7: finance laws or rules at the time.
Speaker 6: How true is that? How true is.
Speaker 7: The story that we're told about Teddy Roosevelt realizing that
Speaker 7: the monopolies were corrupt and a danger to democracy?
Speaker 6: How true is all that?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 5: I think that you wonder if if it is corruption,
Speaker 5: if you do something then there's no laws against it.
Speaker 5: So when John d Ruckkeller is building his empire, he
Speaker 5: uses a lot of sharp elbow belum monopolistic techniques that
Speaker 5: I wouldn't say were nice, but they weren't against the
Speaker 5: law at the time, and you didn't have these regulatory
Speaker 5: bodies that could enforce against it. So I'm not willing
Speaker 5: to say that everything was corrupt, and in fact, in
Speaker 5: my book At the Power of the Money, I specifically
Speaker 5: tried not to choose out and out bad guy people.
Speaker 5: These all the people, all the CEOSI profile are complicated.
Speaker 5: None of them went to jail or arrested or did
Speaker 5: actually criminal things for the most part, So they were
Speaker 5: just trying to live in a complicated environment that gets
Speaker 5: more complicated when you have this government regulation in there.
Speaker 5: So I don't think it was all just a whole
Speaker 5: bunch of corruption, but they did use their influence, specifically
Speaker 5: Rockefeller and more more importantly Morgan because he engaged in
Speaker 5: politics sooner, in order to try and get what they wanted.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I'm on the side of the revisionists, like,
Speaker 2: oh gosh, the conoms of the Hillsdale College's name is
Speaker 2: blanking on me right now about the oh Burton folsome
Speaker 2: the myth of the robber barons, right So you know,
Speaker 2: it turns out that just to pick on Rockefeller, who
Speaker 2: everyone liked to pick on while he was consolidating the
Speaker 2: refining industry. The consumer price of petroleum refined products fell
Speaker 2: by what ninety percent? I mean, where was the whole
Speaker 2: revolution anti trust in modern times? Was what's the harm
Speaker 2: of the consumer?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 2: And then the other one is is I don't know
Speaker 2: if you know the famous article by the economist John McGee,
Speaker 2: but he went through the trial record.
Speaker 1: So the breakup of.
Speaker 2: Standard oil was what I think nineteen oh nine under
Speaker 2: taft or nineteen eleven, sometimes.
Speaker 5: Run nineteen eleven when the case comes down, that's.
Speaker 1: In the key.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, going through the trial record, what you find
Speaker 2: is all these people that rose that Rockefeller was buying out,
Speaker 2: they all said, we all thought we got a fair price,
Speaker 2: none of them on the stand, and the trial said,
Speaker 2: you know, we were strong armed. It was a mafia
Speaker 2: or you know, sort of illegal or you know, unethical practices.
Speaker 1: And you know, his conclusion out all of this was,
Speaker 1: if you look at this.
Speaker 2: You go, where was the legal violation even under the
Speaker 2: sort of very Okay, I can get off in the
Speaker 2: weeds here and I already have done too many already.
Speaker 2: But in other words, this is more political than it
Speaker 2: is substantely economic.
Speaker 1: That's my point. It was then. It looks to me
Speaker 1: like we're returning to that today.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I also friend, disabuse the notion of
Speaker 5: the robber barons. If you look at some of the
Speaker 5: great philanthropic and educational institutions of this country, they were
Speaker 5: funded by the robber rounds. Now, some of them, like
Speaker 5: the Rockefeller Foundation of the Fork Foundation, I think the
Speaker 5: founders would be rolling in their graves at the ridiculous
Speaker 5: things that those foundations pursue. But the truth is that
Speaker 5: they were very philanthropic. Part of it had to do
Speaker 5: with shaving income taxes, but you know that's still the
Speaker 5: case today. The part of it was also the great
Speaker 5: philanthropic impulse that they wanted to give back. Rockefeller, as
Speaker 5: I show in the book, in the thirty years after
Speaker 5: he retires, he's still in public life. He's trying to
Speaker 5: help the economy during the Great Depression, he helps out
Speaker 5: in World War One, and gets a street name for
Speaker 5: him in France. So again, people weren't all bad guys.
Speaker 5: I think the robber baron myth is a little overstated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's a lot of us.
Speaker 2: Can I shift gears forbid and ask you to talk
Speaker 2: about some general politics, because, after all, you did work
Speaker 2: in the Bush administration. You're also a fellow at the
Speaker 2: Bipartisan Policy Center. I've spent some time with BPC folks,
Speaker 2: and you know, interesting and enterprise that tries to bring
Speaker 2: people together from across the political spectrum. Maybe you don't
Speaker 2: want to comment on the election season we're looking at,
Speaker 2: but do you have any particular observations or particular things
Speaker 2: you're looking at that maybe the rest of us are missing.
Speaker 1: Do you have a hunch who's going to win? How
Speaker 1: do you size up the scene in front of us?
Speaker 5: So I think that no matter what, as I said earlier,
Speaker 5: it's going to be very close in terms of the
Speaker 5: split between Democrats and Republicans. Nobody wins knockout punches in
Speaker 5: today's politics, and I think that's an important point to
Speaker 5: be aware of. The Second thing is that I think
Speaker 5: there are some things that could have bipartisan buy in
Speaker 5: in the future. What are we going to do about Ai?
Speaker 5: What are we going to do about China? So I
Speaker 5: think after the election, maybe when rhetoric tones down a
Speaker 5: little bit, we could actually see an environment where you
Speaker 5: get some things done and things that we as conservatives
Speaker 5: may not, may not completely abhore. Now that said, if
Speaker 5: Harris wins, I won't like her policies at at though
Speaker 5: I'm not sure what they'll be because she's playing hide
Speaker 5: the ball in her campaign. And with Trump, you also
Speaker 5: don't know because there's constant wars within the Trump team
Speaker 5: about which team is going to win out. And that
Speaker 5: was my last book, Flight House. I Know you like Steve,
Speaker 5: and it talked about the reason there were so much
Speaker 5: infighting in the Trump White House is because there were
Speaker 5: three teams that could credibly claim that they represented true
Speaker 5: Trump so called globalists with Jared Kushner, the maggotypes of
Speaker 5: Steve Van and the traditional Republicans with Ryan's previous All
Speaker 5: of them could say Trump has set things that indicate
Speaker 5: he agrees with our perspective. And so I think we
Speaker 5: may see more of that in your head.
Speaker 4: I think after Trump was liked it, I remember there
Speaker 4: are a couple of tweets from prominent people who said, well,
Speaker 4: that's it for the stock market, I'm selling everything because
Speaker 4: nothing's good. And then of course there's the famous cartoon
Speaker 4: of the dinosaurs who are watching a meteor streak across
Speaker 4: the sky and one of them says it's priced in.
Speaker 4: And I think about that when we think about people
Speaker 4: saying that that the Harris administration would not be bad
Speaker 4: for the stock administer with the stock market either because
Speaker 4: it's priced in, because they're going to continue the policies,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. Who knows. I absolutely don't, But
Speaker 4: it does raise the question what do you think might
Speaker 4: be the impact of either administration on the finances of
Speaker 4: ordinary folk? Inflation is what matters the most, is what
Speaker 4: the issue that Bedevil's minds on people because they encounter
Speaker 4: it on a daily basis. We can talk about China,
Speaker 4: we can talk about AI, but people are even sensed
Speaker 4: at the price of X not Twitter. But you know,
Speaker 4: is this too micro to be concerned about? It would
Speaker 4: seem not, It would seem particularly pertinent to this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, James, first of all, I would want to
Speaker 5: make sure that I had the list of all those
Speaker 5: people who said the stock market's going to collapse, and
Speaker 5: never rely on them for financial advice.
Speaker 1: That's the first thing.
Speaker 4: By his crew. Paul Goldberger was the art the architecture
Speaker 4: critic architecture critic for The New York Times. I've just
Speaker 4: written about him that's why I think his name came
Speaker 4: to mind.
Speaker 5: Well, I already don't rely on Frigmant for political or
Speaker 5: economic advice, so that's fine. I think you can't predict
Speaker 5: these things necessarily. You don't always know which administration is
Speaker 5: going to be good for the economy, because I don't
Speaker 5: think that there is a specific correlation a certain type
Speaker 5: of politician is good for the economy, because there's all
Speaker 5: kinds of macro effects that you don't know about them.
Speaker 5: And we had a huge boom in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 5: not necessarily because of Bill Clinton, although he I did
Speaker 5: like some of the things that he did in conjunction
Speaker 5: with the Republican Congress, but because we had this massive
Speaker 5: tech revolution and that helped increasing efficiency in the economy.
Speaker 5: So there are other factors at play. And it's not
Speaker 5: just as simple as Republican pushes a ghost switch for
Speaker 5: the economy and Democrats push a stop switch.
Speaker 4: That's true, but you can say this the more you
Speaker 4: have if you have a candidate who is more who
Speaker 4: is interested in less regulation, less government, powerless government expansion,
Speaker 4: et cetera, which seems to generally be on the right
Speaker 4: side of where if we're lucky then you have down
Speaker 4: the road less of an installed base, of a bureaucracy
Speaker 4: that will thwart, that will suck up resources, that will
Speaker 4: vote in a certain way in order to perpetuate their physicians.
Speaker 4: So I mean yes on an immediate effect. No, it's
Speaker 4: not like Trump gets in and all of a sudden
Speaker 4: the price of eggs goes down to a dollar ninety nine.
Speaker 4: But a general idea pervading the way the administration behaves
Speaker 4: and the loosening of things, the disinclination to create something
Speaker 4: that will be sclerotic and intrusive in the future, that matters.
Speaker 4: And I'm just stating the obvious.
Speaker 5: I'm so yah of course. Look, less regulation is better
Speaker 5: for the economy, and we all know that as conservatives
Speaker 5: on this podcast. So that is what I would like
Speaker 5: to see. But the effects of whatever one administration does
Speaker 5: are not necessarily seen immediately in that time. So yes,
Speaker 5: less regulation is better. Less government spending, and certainly government
Speaker 5: debt is a good thing. And I think the overspending
Speaker 5: of the Bide administration contributed to this very problematic inflation
Speaker 5: we're dealing with. But again there's a lot of factors involved.
Speaker 4: Indeed, power, money, there's a lot of factors, and it
Speaker 4: is what makes the world we're on, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. Listen, folks, Power and the Money is the
Speaker 4: book that Debbie Troy wrote, the epic clashes between Commanders
Speaker 4: in Chief and titans of industry, relevance today and relevant
Speaker 4: a year and ten from now. Whoever happens to get
Speaker 4: into the office. Debbie, thanks for joining us and doc
Speaker 4: to you down the road.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me. I love the podcast.
Speaker 4: Oh what a pleasure. Well he's talking about Stephen and
Speaker 4: Peter and and the rest of it. See you later
Speaker 4: before we go, gentlemen, A couple of things amazing here,
Speaker 4: isn't it? We were going to up in under an
Speaker 4: hour with two guests, I mean, and I mean that's
Speaker 4: that's a swift, brisk, efficient bit of podcasting. Why it's
Speaker 4: almost as if we're trying to keep ourselves and being
Speaker 4: replaced by AI. There's a new there's a new program
Speaker 4: out of which I haven't yet tried, and I'm terrified
Speaker 4: to do so, frankly, where you can take an article,
Speaker 4: any article, and you can drop it into this AI
Speaker 4: program and it will generate two hosts, male and female,
Speaker 4: who will discuss the article, tear it apart, tell a
Speaker 4: little anecdotes on and on, laugh and the rest of it,
Speaker 4: and apparently is it is frighteningly accurate to the subject material.
Speaker 4: But more than that, it's actually enjoyable. So this is
Speaker 4: the sort of thing that unless we can come up
Speaker 4: with some quirks that cannot be predicted or replicated by AI,
Speaker 4: we are ours. Well. I was going to say, a
Speaker 4: you're from being rendered moot, but maybe by the time
Speaker 4: we finished the podcast, they already will have come up
Speaker 4: with Charlie Bottens even bought and and me and the
Speaker 4: rest of it. And why would people then say, oh,
Speaker 4: I have to sit through these people asking these questions
Speaker 4: aren't really questions and speeches and hum the humming in
Speaker 4: the eye. Why would I do that when I can
Speaker 4: just take the entire text of Chevy's book, dump it
Speaker 4: into AI and get a five part series on exactly
Speaker 4: what it's about.
Speaker 2: You know, James, if I was a science fiction writer,
Speaker 2: I may used to read a lot of science fiction
Speaker 2: when I was a teenager, and I don't much anymore.
Speaker 2: But if I were one today, I think I'd write
Speaker 2: a short story and it would be about the alien civilization,
Speaker 2: you know, two hundred light years from us, who discovers
Speaker 2: that we exist on Earth and they send an expedition
Speaker 2: out and they get here, and what they discover the punchline,
Speaker 2: the twist ending would be, you can see it coming,
Speaker 2: is that the human species have long gone extinct, hundreds
Speaker 2: or thousands of years before, and what they're picking up
Speaker 2: and what exists on the planet are only robots and
Speaker 2: AI robots carrying on discussions, podcast news, elections even right.
Speaker 2: And that's the sort of the frightening sci fi take
Speaker 2: on where this might be going.
Speaker 4: That's a Bradbury story, and it's interesting. We get skyne It,
Speaker 4: but instead of skyne It coming down and terminating everybody,
Speaker 4: it's just it's skyne plus matrix with actual with with
Speaker 4: with no thought, with no consciousness, just absolute generated jabber
Speaker 4: forever and ever and ever.
Speaker 6: You know, I'm not worried about it depressing.
Speaker 7: Why because I think I would listen to this for
Speaker 7: a little bit, and then, as I do when I
Speaker 7: listen to anything, because I'm argumentative, I would disagree with it.
Speaker 7: I'd be annoyed by it.
Speaker 6: And so instead of saying, do you know, I just
Speaker 6: read this thing in Slayton. It really annoyed me. And
Speaker 6: here's why it's wrong, which is my job.
Speaker 7: I would end up saying, I just heard this stupid
Speaker 7: AI chat bot and it's ridiculous interpretation of Tevy Troy's book.
Speaker 7: And here's why it's wrong, because it's just no way
Speaker 7: that it could possibly with two people encompass every opinion
Speaker 7: on the spectrum. So I think it might lead to more,
Speaker 7: not replace James Lylax, but lead to more James Lylyax
Speaker 7: to argue with, will facilitate the different views that had
Speaker 7: been expressed.
Speaker 4: Well, that's heartening, I'd like to think. But then again,
Speaker 4: it gets to the point where a large language model
Speaker 4: can can assume and predict every objection that you might have,
Speaker 4: and that Stephen's dystopian future comes true because not only
Speaker 4: do we have the radio hosts jabbering, but we have
Speaker 4: the call, We have the callers who are generated by
Speaker 4: AI and the crazy call. The question is how much
Speaker 4: imagination does it? Inevitably will it have and it will
Speaker 4: have just enough simulacrum of intelligence and imagination that we
Speaker 4: will accept it to be real. Mean, I work with
Speaker 4: an awful lot right now, with an awful lot of
Speaker 4: AI generated art for a project that I'm doing, and
Speaker 4: I'm still it's still in this sort of charming phase
Speaker 4: where it just simply cannot generate text and as such
Speaker 4: comes up with the most fascinating words. It's like having
Speaker 4: a broke in Dutch. When I look at some of
Speaker 4: this stuff, it's just great. I asked you to do
Speaker 4: English ads for British ads for English muffins in the
Speaker 4: nineteen twenties, and it will come up with these these
Speaker 4: ways that are almost right. It's it's an earnestness of
Speaker 4: saying do I have it yet? Have I got it?
Speaker 4: And you say no, you don't. Really an ad would
Speaker 4: not say English muffin? Are you lating muffin? It just wouldn't,
Speaker 4: And let me tell you why. So right now there
Speaker 4: are enough tells, the fingers, the eyes, the rest of
Speaker 4: it there. But at the same time, you know this
Speaker 4: is temporary and it's going to be fixed in a
Speaker 4: trice flux one point one or at one point five,
Speaker 4: whatever the latest is. Apparently it's really good at text,
Speaker 4: so we're not going to have to worry about that.
Speaker 4: So it's improving at an extraordinary rate, and you know
Speaker 4: we're going to look back, I think with little nostalgia
Speaker 4: at the time when we could actually be reasonably certain
Speaker 4: that something was a bot or something was AI generated.
Speaker 7: James, Oh God, I say, have you ever seen any
Speaker 7: AI attempts to do four panel cartoons? Because it has
Speaker 7: the tone and the setup, but it doesn't understand how
Speaker 7: to write jokes. So it's always some guy at a desk,
Speaker 7: and then in the second one he's like, Wow, a
Speaker 7: coffee would be nice, And then on the fourth panel
Speaker 7: he's got his eyes wide open and it just says
Speaker 7: something like.
Speaker 6: Are you suckling?
Speaker 4: Yah?
Speaker 7: I know he's supposed to be emphatic and funny, but
Speaker 7: it's not.
Speaker 2: Can I ask a question or introduce a complication, because
Speaker 2: I'll bet I don't know the answer to this, James,
Speaker 2: you use a key phrase, which is we call these
Speaker 2: large language models, and I think they're mostly being done
Speaker 2: in English because English is, by the way, a large language, right.
Speaker 2: It has a much bigger vocabulary than most other languages.
Speaker 2: I wonder there are other languages that are more complicated,
Speaker 2: you know, French or regular verbs and Hungarian for goodness sake.
Speaker 2: I wonder if it works as well with those languages,
Speaker 2: or whether English is going to be going to dominate it.
Speaker 2: And why this is a serious question is, let's see
Speaker 2: if I can do this in twenty seconds. You know,
Speaker 2: I do read about linguistics now and then, and you
Speaker 2: know this is there's something serious about how you know,
Speaker 2: human beings just start talking by age.
Speaker 1: Three without any special instruction. They just we just do it.
Speaker 2: That's what makes us different from any other species. You know, monkeys,
Speaker 2: we can teach them a vocabulary of fifty words, but
Speaker 2: only with a lot of effort.
Speaker 1: And there's no deliberation there.
Speaker 2: You know, Bobo may say Bobo want banana, but Bobo
Speaker 2: never says Bobo wants justice. Right, So that's where I
Speaker 2: think it starts to break down. And I wonder if
Speaker 2: you know one war our point on this. You know,
Speaker 2: Norm Chomsky's most famous serious contribution to linguistics was there's
Speaker 2: a universal grammar, And apparently that is very controversial among
Speaker 2: the super linguistics and the semiodsis of the world. I
Speaker 2: don't know, it's all over my head, but I think
Speaker 2: there's something to all that that probably bears on this
Speaker 2: whole thing. And so I'm wondering, is this really going
Speaker 2: to be just an English language thing, which is not insignificant,
Speaker 2: but it may also be its limitation.
Speaker 4: I think it will because the expandability adaptibil, the syncretic
Speaker 4: nature of English. It just will. And as far as
Speaker 4: Cholms get thing, you know, Leonar Bernstein picked this up
Speaker 4: too and thought that there was an inherent musical templace
Speaker 4: that was shared by all humans, where children in every
Speaker 4: culture or something like that. And he built this into
Speaker 4: ten episodes and in a book and the rest of it.
Speaker 4: It was impressive at the time, back when we had
Speaker 4: public intellectuals. But mentioning, you know, Lenny, it reminds you
Speaker 4: that there are already AI generators of music, and they
Speaker 4: can range from the quite comic and hilarious to convincing
Speaker 4: enough you know, slop that it'll do for a commercial
Speaker 4: or a podcast bit or something like that. Why worry
Speaker 4: about copyright when you can just simply type in a
Speaker 4: few things and have a have generated for you. Something
Speaker 4: that's all yours is not going to get takedown notice
Speaker 4: and the rest of it. So music then gets taken
Speaker 4: out of the hands of the individuals. Again, we're going
Speaker 4: to get to the point where the artisantal, the handmade,
Speaker 4: the definably human, the stuff that actually has the stamp
Speaker 4: of human is going to be the most prized thing.
Speaker 4: And in a way that's great because we're going to
Speaker 4: go from an era in which we have this explosion
Speaker 4: of content generated by human beings, most of which is
Speaker 4: dreadful and meritriitious, to actually sort of living in a
Speaker 4: warm bath a fairly competent, very good AI generated stuff.
Speaker 4: But the real real top of everything will be that
Speaker 4: crafted by humans. What do you think, you know, James?
Speaker 7: I did a whole episode of my podcast, the Charles C. W.
Speaker 7: Cook Podcast on an AI generated opera that I worked
Speaker 7: on to annoy one of my trolls who lead comments
Speaker 7: to listen to that live through comments under my episodes,
Speaker 7: and so I wrote a whole opera using AI about him,
Speaker 7: called The Saga of Oiling Raga al Saga the tippetto Valente.
Speaker 7: And it's really astonishingly accurate the way that the AI works.
Speaker 7: But the only thing it can do, and it does
Speaker 7: this in a way that I was absolutely blown away by,
Speaker 7: is look at existing musical styles and hate them. And
Speaker 7: so what the challenge was, ultimately it was to say no,
Speaker 7: make it more like late Italian mozart or no please
Speaker 7: add in an overture that is more like Verdi or no,
Speaker 7: please put this in a minor key in the way
Speaker 7: that Tchaikovsky would have. And the technology that resulted was incredible,
Speaker 7: but it was entirely and necessarily derivative. And that's the
Speaker 7: one thing that I think is often missed. What I
Speaker 7: think is very likely to happen is obviously this won't
Speaker 7: be sanctioned necessarily, but we are going to get new
Speaker 7: Mozart operas. I mean, listening to this in its early stages,
Speaker 7: you could see we are going to get another Don
Speaker 7: Giovanni era Mozart opera, and we are going to get
Speaker 7: another late Beatles album. Yes, that's going to happen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, can you give me? Can you give me two
Speaker 4: more Elvis Costello albums from the period of nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: nine to nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 6: That's absolutely going to happen.
Speaker 7: And the disturbing and distressing part of it is that
Speaker 7: some of them are actually going to be good. Because
Speaker 7: this operas, the operas that the opera that I made
Speaker 7: up with AI it was actually stuck in my head
Speaker 7: for days. Some of these original melodies that it came
Speaker 7: up with were really good. But what it can't do
Speaker 7: I can't see it means by which it could do,
Speaker 7: at least not yet. What it can't do is do
Speaker 7: what Sergeant Pepper or the White Album did, which is
Speaker 7: synthesized what came before and come up with something completely new.
Speaker 7: What it can't do is what Beta Oven dated Beethaven's
Speaker 7: fifth or ninth. And I think that that's going to
Speaker 7: be the great challenge. If that rubicon has crossed, then
Speaker 7: all bets off. But until then it is still ultimately
Speaker 7: an impersonation machine.
Speaker 2: You know what I want to see just quickly, is
Speaker 2: I want to see an AI version or update of
Speaker 2: John Cage's five Minutes of Silence that might break the action.
Speaker 4: Well, just tell it to do it in another key.
Speaker 4: That's all you have to do. I mean, I've heard
Speaker 4: people fake that in a major key and it's just hilarious. No,
Speaker 4: you're absolutely right. I mean you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 4: walk up to the machine and say finish fon Schuber's
Speaker 4: eight Symphony. And it will for us. But again, as
Speaker 4: much as I love what Charles said, and as much
Speaker 4: as I believe in the look, the indescribable essence, the
Speaker 4: ineffable human quality that gives these things merit and meaning.
Speaker 4: I am now one of those guys who says, you know,
Speaker 4: it's a rubicon, it it won't be crossed. It's if
Speaker 4: you look at the rubicon, it wasn't that wide, and
Speaker 4: it wasn't that deep. It wasn't that deep at all. Gentlemen,
Speaker 4: we have had fun and you know what we got to.
Speaker 4: I would love to clear the decks and have an
Speaker 4: all AI podcast with you guys and take it into
Speaker 4: every single facet from writing to art to painting and
Speaker 4: the rest of it, and do so without prejudice, and
Speaker 4: do so without fear, because this is where the things
Speaker 4: the art the world are going. You the listener in
Speaker 4: the meantime, are going to Apple Podcasts to give us
Speaker 4: five stars. We really appreciated that. And you are going
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Speaker 4: sign up if you haven't yet, because the member feed
Speaker 4: is where you will find a community that you've been
Speaker 4: looking for all your days on the internet. The same
Speaker 4: civil mostly satur right conversation Charles it's been fun, Steven.
Speaker 4: Good to have you with us, and we'll see all
Speaker 4: of you in the comments, said Ricochet. Four point ricochets
Speaker 4: join the conversation.